What are your favorite/most hated Adventure Game Puzzles

[MoodyBlues]

I can't think of a favorite puzzle at the moment. 

A puzzle that I absolutely hate, though, is the maze in King's Quest V.  It's terrible for at least three reasons:

1)  It's, well, a maze.  With a few exceptions, placing mazes in adventure games is just a lazy way of making them longer.

2)  No matter which way you exit a room, you always enter the next room from the bottom.  This happens nowhere else in KQ5, so it'll take you a while to figure out what you're doing.  Simple navigation should not be that difficult.

3)  You have to wander around in search of items that you wouldn't expect to find in an underground dungeon.  (A monster that drops a hairpin when he dances?  C'mon.)

[mouthuvmine]

My all time favorite was getting the rasp on Sam n Max. It was just funny to me cause it happened like 10 times and I didn't get what I was doing, then I got tired and left after sending Max to the crapper one last time. Just foung it funny I had to give up and the game gave it to me.

Worst ever...The final machine you have to fix in The Dig. If there was a system or pattern, I still don't see it. Five days of trial and error.

Close second...Having to inflate the gloves and balloon to use the elevator at the end of MI2. I keep sucking the air in thinking it'd make ME lighter. Oops.

[bspeers]

There's one puzzle in my game that I love because it is so hard and so easy at the same time.

There's a character that seems to have no purpose in the game and virtually nothing you can do with "it."  Every time I go back to test after a long absence I'm completely lost.  I think there must be an error because I can't find this one key item.  Then, at random I use the one item in the game this one character might want, and instantly the problem is solved.

It's like I can't figure out the solution if I think about it.  If I turn off my brain and just do the most obvious thing in the world though, the puzzle is solved.  I can't even complain that the thing to do is too obscure because it's so obvious from the get-go.

The thing I hate most in puzzles are items you must arbitrarily pick up.  In Teen Agent there's a stone that you must pick up, but you can't pick up any other stone.  There isn't even a clue that this one stone is useful.  Similarly, Wizard and the Princess has the stones and scorpions puzzle--the only way to find a safe stone is to go through a desert maze.  Also, Grim Fandango had 2 or three "randomly use x on y" puzzles that were virtually impossible to solve.  All puzzles should have an underlying motivation.

[Recluse]

The hedge maze in Hugo 2...

I think it's 2...

OH, and the Roller Coaster maze in Myst sucked as well.... quite possibly more than the Huge maze, because it was more difficult to figure out.

[TerranRich]

A puzzle that I absolutely hate, though, is the maze in King's Quest V.  It's terrible for at least three reasons:

...

2)  No matter which way you exit a room, you always enter the next room from the bottom.  This happens nowhere else in KQ5, so it'll take you a while to figure out what you're doing.  Simple navigation should not be that difficult.

You're supposed to figure out that the room turns in the direction that you're facing. I couldn't figure it out, but after reading about it, I thought it was genius...it broke the rules of rooms always following the same direction every time you enter it.

[Caesi]

Best puzzle: Registering for this forum

Worst: Stan in Monkey Island goood I hated it AND Police Quest 3 - I never found the damn car crash..

[radiowaves]

Ok, today, while playing "Duty and Beyond" (By Mordalles), I got completely stuck. Had to open a safe, but one number was missing. I logically thought (according to in-game leads) that I have to count the number of some books. But heck, books are so small and colours are messed up (you know one bright colour near other colour messes it up). So counting the certain colour of books was a definite pain in the ass which should not be! Eventually I opened up a walkthrough just now when I got my Internet connection back...

[Cunny]

Not sure about my favourite - Maybe the Insult Swordfighting in COMI or the whole Four Map Pieces episode in MI2.


As for the worst... How has nobody mentioned Discworld? A lot of those puzzles were ridiculous. There were some that you didn't even know were puzzles, and the ones that were gave you minimal help. Woe betide you if you left the game behind and forgot an ambiguous piece of throwaway dialogue.

It's also responsible for one of the crimes mentioned above - "That doesn't work!" But why not? Would would help?

Oh, and the Boar puzzle in Broken Sword 2. How many people saved after doing that puzzle the wrong way and were stuck being unable to finish the game?

[Galen]

Anything that requires you to repeatedly interact with something or someone. It makes me feel violated.

[DanielH]

Bit of a problem here. Both my most hated puzzle, and my favourite are the same puzzle, basically encompassing the whole of MI2, but mostly the ending with LeChuck in the pipes. It was so frustrating, but I think that's why It's my favourite aswell. Puzzles that encompass pixel hunting and mazes just annoy the hell out of me.

[Galen]

Attempting to get Toonstruck to run fullscreen with playable graphical quality. I never did find the solution.

[OneDollar]

Attempting to get Toonstruck to run fullscreen with playable graphical quality. I never did find the solution.

Download Virtual PC and get a copy of Windows 95. That's what I did

[Galen]

If I hadn't sold it years ago (it was newish when I got it, the PC must not have been good enough to run it properly in 800x600).

[OneDollar]

Shame, its a brilliant game

[Buckethead]

can't think of any favorite. But my most hated is the one at the end of META. Those questions are just hard and anoing. Especially the 2nd one.

[Emerald]

Hated puzzles:

In The Longest Journey - The weird 'fishing rod' you're expected to know how to make out of a rope, an inflatable rubber ducky, and a magnet, or something like that. I still don't get it...

The Dig - the part where you have to reconstruct a turtle's skeleton (took me AGES), and bring it back to life, only to have it chewed up and mangled AGAIN. (Damn you giant sea monster...)

Myst... so many puzzles in Myst pissed me off. I just don't think like that...

The end of Trilby's Notes, where you have to

Spoiler

let yourself die

[close]

, but only after a very specific point... (it seemed like an odd thing to do anyway, regardless I tried plenty of times before I was supposed to, and gave up by then)

[stajp]

Favorite : insult sword fightin in MI1

Most hated: hiding behind a pillar in FT, just before climbing up a water tower. Whatever I clicked, I couldn't go forward, until a friend came and said: "Hide behind a Super Dickmans". And voila, it worked.

Most memorable: age test in LSL - "Where can you find virgins?" To a 10 year old which knew, like - 10 english words, it was the worst puzzle of them all.

[LuciferSam86]

My most hated puzzle is the alien turtle of "The Dig"  (DOH!)
I don't have a favorite puzzle  8)

[yukonhorror]

Not a puzzle per say, but I hate how you have to get down the mountain in the original KQIII in very limited time.  I kept falling off the damn edge. 

In general, any adventure game you have to type in a command, but can't figure out what the game wants.  I.e. I think it was KQII, but you had to jump onto these mounds of grass in a swamp to get to a super critical item (there was a snake too I think).  But what the hell were those mounds called.  I finally got it, but just because my vocabulary is minimal, doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to traverse through a puzzle.

I also hated getting into the temple in the desert in KQV.  It was the key thing preventing me from going into the mountains.  It wasn't till a friend of mine told me what I need to do, that the rest of the game fell into place. 

Other than the maze, I like all of the puzzles on the last island in KQV. 

[JuuJuu]

I LOVED the "....Days A...." series! (including Tribly Notes) Each game has made me jump at least once. (I jumped most at Tribly notes and 6 days a Sacrifice)