Jolt Country

Hey, remember when the original Grand Theft Auto III came out for the PC with the inexplicable absence of the "save anywhere feature" that had been present in just about every PC game of note since 1990? Remember that?

Well, apparently the GTA serious is out to prove the old "damned to repeat it" phrase by making yet another foolish, anachronistic, and wholly ill-advised design choice: PC Hunger!!

Gamespot wrote:The first feature we'll be looking at is San Andreas' food mechanic, which will require you to keep your virtual alter ego, CJ, in good physical condition by tracking down some choice grub. The basics of the mechanic are simple: When CJ is hungry, a message will appear onscreen alerting you to his need for some chow. If you choose to ignore this missive, his energy level will start to decrease, and a host of other bad things will begin to happen. Superficially, your boy will get skinny and look generally emaciated, resulting in the ill-fitting of his clothes, which is hardly the look you want to have when trying to earn respect on the streets.

As if this wasn't bad enough, you won't just look weak. Your skinny butt will be unable to lift boxes or punch with any kind of force, thus ensuring many a beat-down in hand-to-hand fights. Along the same lines, you can say goodbye to speed and stamina, which will affect your performance as you swim, cycle, or run through the game.

Is there any game anywhere ever where the introduction of the hunger mechanic didn't absolutely ruin it? Because, yeah the thing I want to do is not actually play the game, but instead chase all over the state of <s>California</s> San Andreas in search of a Sub Shack. Word has it the big improvement for the next GTA iteration: Mazes!! Or maybe they can introduce a mechanic that has a one in three chance of killing you automatically three hours into the game, ala Zork (the game that did that was Zork, right?).

But wait, there's more!!

Now, while it's clear Rockstar wants you to keep CJ fed in the game, just chowing down on anything and everything isn't going to do you any favors either. You obviously don't want CJ getting freakishly skinny and weak, but, at the same time, you don't need his morbidly obese butt rolling down the streets either. Each of the menu items we've mentioned has a specific caloric value that will affect how much CJ's energy and fat levels will increase. Finding the right balance between the two is a must, because eating too much can have some unpleasant results.

This is mind-boggling. Who thought people wanted to play a badass gangster on fucking Atkins? I mean, I don't even have a joke there because any exagerrated joke I could make along these lines would not in any way be decisively worse than a calorie counting mechanic. Especially in a game series whose primary raison dietre` is to expose the player to a massive, vaguely realistic yet - most importantly - consequence free environment. Oh, I've got one: Maybe getting it on with a hooker could result in getting VD! Or HIV!!

Wouldn't that be awesome? You could still play but your avatar would get skinner and paler and weaker. And over time you'd have to commit bigger and bigger robberies to fund your mounting hospital bill? And then after you get busted and go on death row, Hollywood could dramatise your murderous crime spree as an inspiring story of overcoming illness!

Okay, actually, that would be kind of cool. Forget I said anything.

Debaser wrote:Hey, remember when the original Grand Theft Auto III came out for the PC with the inexplicable absence of the "save anywhere feature" that had been present in just about every PC game of note since 1990? Remember that?

I remember breaking the forum tables over pinback's forum head, in fact. Ha ha ha!

Well, apparently the GTA serious is out to prove the old "damned to repeat it" phrase by making yet another foolish, anachronistic, and wholly ill-advised design choice: PC Hunger!!

This is hilariously awful. What the fuck is wrong with these people? I don't think this was actually designed by someone older than 13.

As if this wasn't bad enough, you won't just look weak. Or maybe they can introduce a mechanic that has a one in three chance of killing you automatically three hours into the game, ala Zork (the game that did that was Zork, right?).

Your lantern went dead in Zork -- I do remember that you died a certain number of moves into Borrowed Time unless the game thought you were making good progress. Which rendered all your save games up to that point a waste of time.

Wouldn't that be awesome? You could still play but your avatar would get skinner and paler and weaker. And over time you'd have to commit bigger and bigger robberies to fund your mounting hospital bill? And then after you get busted and go on death row, Hollywood could dramatise your murderous crime spree as an inspiring story of overcoming illness!

This would be pretty good. Consequence-free environs are the sort of environs I want to pretend to be in.

Your arch nemesis could be a guy with AIDS as well, except Canadian so his socialist medicine program does not cause him to have to spend as many resources getting his inhbitor pills.

That's a shame, they really made this one seem like they were going to add something to it other than the GTA gameplay that's been boring me since the cars were sprites. I mean with removing the auto-death waters they had to add some sort of idiocy to even it out right?

Zork? ITYM Planetfall.

Bruce

bruce wrote:Zork? ITYM Planetfall.

Bruce

Planetfall's scifi, right? I think I'm thinking of a cave adventure. What was the one that "rolled for cave in" on like the first turn, but you couldn't know if you were actually going to get the fatal cave in until it happened and killed you. Was it Adventure? Collossal Cave? Another of Debaser's Malaria-Induced Fever Dreams?

Debaser wrote: I think I'm thinking of a cave adventure. What was the one that "rolled for cave in" on like the first turn, but you couldn't know if you were actually going to get the fatal cave in until it happened and killed you. Was it Adventure? Collossal Cave?

The only cave-in I remember was in Zork III; it closes the route through the Grue Room but opens up the Royal Puzzle, as I recall. If you don't head over the aqueduct before the cave-in, you're screwed, and there's no warning. But I don't remember that being, really, any worse than, uh, all the other Zork games, in terms of unfair leave-the-game-unwinnable puzzles.

I think you can dynamite yourself in Colossal Cave, but that's not what you're thinking of. And, yeah, you can collapse the caves on yourself with the plastic explosive in Zork II, but again, you know it pretty quick.

As far as hunger daemons go, Planetfall's was the worst. Although hop-clap-kweepa in LGOP was, far and away, the most annoying timed-sequence puzzle ever. Well, except for those Topologika games where it, honest to God, is like being in the movie <i>Cube</i>. The maze in Sangraal continually reconfigures itself according to some fiendish algorithm, so it's like trying to solve a Rubik's cube that you're trapped inside.

Sangraal has the Rotating Maze, but, to get back to your initial question, sort of, Hamil has a maze in which you need something from every room, but the ceiling of each room collapses as you leave it, so you not only need to map the maze, you have to figure out the path that hits each room exactly once *through* the maze.

I fucking hate mazes.

Bruce

I think Crobe was the one with the cave-in maze, as that's the point where I stopped playing the game.