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Commander Keen Corner  "Recharge your Neural Stunner and get aboard the Bean-with-Bacon."

#121

View PostNinety-Six, on 27 August 2020 - 10:21 PM, said:

Believe it or not I actually have played a few of those older games already. A few years back I wanted to look at id's proto-Wolfenstein engine games, since I had just finished Wolf, Spear, and its expansions.

This also meant playing the original Catacomb games too. My verdicts are gonna be in spoilers since this is slightly off-topic:

Spoiler



I actually have a quite recent memory of everything, well, the FPS, haven't touched the top-down ones in a long time.

Spoiler

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User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#122

Spoiler


View PostMorpheus Kitami, on 28 August 2020 - 02:28 PM, said:

Have you given the Dangerous Dave games a shot? They worked better with Keen's awkward jumping and one-hit deaths.


I haven't actually. To be honest I didn't even know he was a real thing until sometime after I played these other ones. I had only heard of him because of the tech demo id showed to Nintendo. I legitimately thought he was just a throwaway character until I randomly saw footage of it in an unrelated video, crediting the source to one of the actual Dangerous Dave games.
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User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#123

I decided I would just try out Keen Dreams. Found a download of it to see if it lives up to the reputation most posters here have given it.


And uh....yeah, so far it's not very promising. It seems to really love blind jumps. I notice keen has a looking up animation that does literally nothing (so why even have it if it doesn't scroll the screen?), and likewise he can't lower the camera to see what's below him. I played for about half an hour and died almost as many times as I did in the whole vorticon trilogy. About 85% were from falling onto an enemy or a pit I couldn't see until I was already dead.

I probably won't stick to this but I at least wanted to see for myself. Because I guess I just felt like torturing myself today.
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User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#124

Eh, you know what I'll retract some of that. I ended up getting into a groove and reached the castle numerous times.

While my death counter is still extremely high, I'll admit I'm significantly less frustrated than I was with the vorticon trilogy. I think a large part of that is that there are significantly less RNG gates. The game is a lot more consistent. The levels also feel a lot faster despite I think being larger? It's hard to tell with the increased sprite sizes.

That being said there are still a lot of really dumb moments. Whoever designed the swamp level is a jackass (I'm guessing probably Romero). Starting off literally unable to see where you are, and right in front of you is one of those yellow egpglant things or whatever they are. Which you also can't see. 100% guaranteed death on your first try. And then the two asparagus things guarding the bombs, one of them doesn't spawn until you're already on the platform.

The mines level can also sod off. Again those asparagus things can show up so fast it's pretty much impossible to react (and definitely can't hit them with the seeds).

In fact the asparagus things are probably my second least favorite thing in this game. Beaten only by the french fries which can hit you from barely offscreen which is always nice.

I'm also no fan of the "weapon" in this game. It being a temporary stun thing I can live with. It going in an arc that has a fondness for flying over the heads of enemies right in front of you, that's a different matter. That is the one time you need a weapon.

And of course there is still the affinity for blind jumps that just so happen to have hazards out of sight for you to land squarely on top of.


All that said, yeah I don't hate this as much as Keen 2 or 3. The general game design is better even if the level design remains questionable. But it is still solvable with trial and error, which again I absolutely despise but between that or relying on luck that you won't get screwed over this attempt, I'll pick the memorization option. At least it can stop being a problem afterwards, while RNG gates are always RNG gates no matter how many times you play.

It also helps that Dreams actually seems finished, unlike 3. I don't have to rely on saves to get through the game because of otherwise unwinnable situations.

This post has been edited by Ninety-Six: 05 September 2020 - 07:56 AM

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User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#125

Unfortunately not off to a great start on Keen 4. Skypests are probably one of the worst enemies to ever be put into a game, and probably the worst or second worst id game enemy, competing solely with Quake's spawns. I have been killed literally a dozen times because one of them flew down while I was jumping (because the screen doesn't scroll up until you land, and looking up beforehand doesn't help), or because I was on an elevator and they came from the side that was not a wall, or I got caught between two of them at once.

Not even knowing how to kill them really helps, since where they go or when they land is entirely up to luck.


I'm also not a fan of Crystalus. At all. Not only does it have two skypests that can go anywhere and disappear into the rest of the level, only resurfacing at the exact wrong time, it's also a stupid long level at the end of which is a licker that I'm not even sure can be reliably killed in any safe way.

This post has been edited by Ninety-Six: 20 September 2020 - 01:55 AM

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User is offline   K1n9_Duk3 

#126

You can shoot the Skypests to make them temporarily bounce away from you. Assuming you can hit them, that is.

As for the lick(s) at the end of Crystalus, the safest way to kill them is to lure them to the left, jumping over them and shooting down at them. If you do it right, you should even be able to safely land on that wall again or at least grab onto the edge and pull yourself up without being roasted by the second lick (only present on hard mode).
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#127

To kill a Skypests you have to jump on them with the Pogo while they are landed on the ground, where they are often busy to lick their lips. It's also the only enemy killable in this way. Using the zapper is just more unnecessarily difficult and a waste of ammo.

This post has been edited by Fantinaikos: 20 September 2020 - 01:48 PM

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User is offline   K1n9_Duk3 

#128

I think Ninety-Six already knew how to squish a Skypest (as did I). The point was that even if you know how to defeat them, you cannot predict when they are going to land and become vulnerable. I only mentioned that you can shoot at the Skypests because that's pretty much the only option you have when they come flying towards you and there is no room to dodge them. Yes, its difficult and it costs some ammo and it doesn't kill the Skypest, but at least you have a chance of surviving.

This post has been edited by K1n9_Duk3: 20 September 2020 - 02:47 PM

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User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#129

View PostK1n9_Duk3, on 20 September 2020 - 12:44 PM, said:

You can shoot the Skypests to make them temporarily bounce away from you. Assuming you can hit them, that is.

As for the lick(s) at the end of Crystalus, the safest way to kill them is to lure them to the left, jumping over them and shooting down at them. If you do it right, you should even be able to safely land on that wall again or at least grab onto the edge and pull yourself up without being roasted by the second lick (only present on hard mode).


Yeah, I managed to sort of figure it out. I realize that part of the problem is that, due to various reasons not worth getting into, I'm stuck using an analog stick for digital input vs. a dpad or the cursor keys. As a result those sorts of fine maneuvers are a bit trickier to pull off. Of course that's a problem on my end. It didn't help that I was already significantly frustrated by the sky pests.

View PostK1n9_Duk3, on 20 September 2020 - 02:45 PM, said:

I think Ninety-Six already knew how to squish a Skypest (as did I). The point was that even if you know how to defeat them, you cannot predict when they are going to land and become vulnerable. I only mentioned that you can shoot at the Skypests because that's pretty much the only option you have when they come flying towards you and there is no room to dodge them. Yes, its difficult and it costs some ammo and it doesn't kill the Skypest, but at least you have a chance of surviving.


I did know about squishing them, yeah. Though I did not know that you could shoot them to bounce them away. Of course I tried shooting them but it looked like either my shots were passing harmlessly through them, or missing entirely. If I landed a shot it's quite possible I ascribed the bouncing as just part of their random flight pattern. That the in-game help doesn't even hint towards this didn't help either.


Still, it's useful advice. So thank you.


Currently, I've found a second thing that has become as irritating as the skypests. That being the isometric/psuedo-2.5D angle. Sure, it looks cool, but it is extremely difficult to tell where a platform starts or ends, at least on the right side. Even moreso if the platform is moving. This was a problem in Dreams too but ironically despite its reputation there was nowhere near as many sections where you precariously platform above death pits.



Progress wise I just completed the secret pyramid which was....that was certainly something. Truth be told I wouldn't have known about it unless I looked at the wiki, which I didn't do to look for the secret level; I didn't see the exit door in the moon pyramid before I saw the other gem door on the bottom level, and was entirely stuck as a result. I wanted to see if it was a glitch or if there was a way out, to which I learned about the secret exit. At that point it was literally the only way to escape the level.


I seem to have a knack for accidentally stumbling my way into Keen's secret levels. In Keen 1 it was literal. In Keen 3, much like here I was looking up something different which then led me to discovering the secret level there.

This post has been edited by Ninety-Six: 21 September 2020 - 01:00 PM

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#130

I don't remember the skypests (had to look that up, didn't remember the names) being that difficult to deal with. I do remember the runners and the perspective being a pain to deal with. I also remember having trouble with that one level you have to jump up a bunch of ledges on. It was one with a sky background IIRC.
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User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#131

Isle of Tar and Isle of Flames were...very unpleasant. Lots of blind jumps even with being able to look down (which especially the flame level likes to take from you anyway), enemies in pretty unfair locations that guarantee a death your first time...

I also discovered quirk of this engine. Apparently if you jump onto a platform, you have a higher chance of falling through it, versus if you fall onto it. That made the Isle of Tar especially fun.

The famous Well of Wishes was probably not as bad but I was already fairly tilted after those two so it's hard to tell how much was genuine anger at the level and how much was residuals from those two hell pits. That being said, that Keen turns into a dump truck in that level really doesn't help. I know the game is primitive so a hitbox that shifts around as you move might have been asking too much, but they could have maybe opened those passageways a little bit wider. I figure even they knew it was a bit rough, and that's why there's a completely free unchallenged life right near the start for infinite retries.
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User is offline   MrFlibble 

#132

Are these games really that hardcore? Recently I watched [Civvie11's feature on Bio Menace and thought wow. I never played it past the first shareware level myself (which was actually pretty nice as I remember it). And now there's all this talk about Keen games. Is the balance really this quirky? I grew up playing Prince of Persia as pretty much the only platform game that I knew/played, which was, while hard (especially before I learned that I could save my progress), pretty manageable and elegant. As a matter of fact, it's a fine example of the retry-until-you-master type of progression design where you need to develop a certain skill to complete a level, and after that future situations of the same kind become a staple in more complex situations etc.
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User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#133

To be honest I'm still not entirely sure why I enjoyed Bio-Menace so much, nor why I got way less frustrated at that vs. Galaxy up to this point. It's a mystery to me, since I really don't really tend to like trial-and-error design outside certain exceptions (especially since I try to play saveless, which meant relying on lives for both BM and CK). I can at least say that BM is more consistent, in that you don't have to time obstacles that are 100% offscreen as much as in Keen, and BM employs a much more traditional 2D side-on view, vs. Galaxy's attempted 2.5D-ish look (the consequence being that I have a much clearer idea of where edges are in BM). There also aren't any skypest like enemies to ruin your day.

That being said, BM is much more intentionally user-hostile, with a lot of the cheaper parts of the levels seeming to be completely intentional. I generally tend to consider that a much greater sin vs. oversights or unintended side effects. Keen is sort of in a grey area (both Galaxy and Vorticon) where a lot of the cheap aspects could be seen as either way. id had a tendency to over-rely on RNG in their pre-Quake days, both in terms of game and enemy design plus level design. This led to a fair amount of damage being taken unfairly either because something didn't die when it really absolutely needed to, did way more damage than seemed justified (or the opposite), or in the case of Keen since there is no health bar, a lot of unfair deaths.

I love a good challenge but I hate being screwed over. And maybe that's what is making the difference. It doesn't account for why I kept playing Bio-Menace, but it probably explains why I wasn't as angry. In Keen, even if you know what's coming it doesn't really help if success boils down to good luck or failure boils to bad. I can be amazingly composed and calm even if I die a hundred times, so long as I understand exactly what went wrong.

Case in point, 4's brutally hard secret level. The first room, minus the surprise lickers the first time, is incredibly difficult, but absolutely fair. It asks a lot from you, a lot of very precise moves and absolutely perfect timing, but it can be surmounted so long as you're good enough. Really the only frustrating aspect is that the dart shooters are lethal to the touch even when they're not firing, which made one particular jump kind of annoying since, thanks to the aforementioned perspective skew, it wasn't always clear exactly where its hitbox ended. Point is though, I spent a very long time in this room alone, before ever seeing the second, and I didn't really get upset. I was fine, since I knew what I had to do, I knew what I was doing wrong, and was learning how I could be better. Skills were being sharpened.

The second room then turns into sort of a luckfest with the swarm of skypests, especially the first few times. Later you can figure out a way to slowly lure them out to be crushed, but it isn't absolutely luckrpoof. And even in a successful run, it can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes of just sitting there and waiting for them to bounce in the one direction you can hit them on.

The third room is mostly fair, minus one of the spears that stabs down right above the tar that a hovering platform takes you under. From the starting platform you can't see it at all, and even if you know the timing of the spears, that doesn't help if you can't see the distance to it. So once again it just kinda boils down to luck when you board the platform if that spear will kill you or not.

The fourth room is the most infuriating of all. You have to make a very difficult series of absolutely precise jumps above a tar pit that you can't ever stop moving across once you start. This itself is not a bad thing. The problem is taking the riding platforms back the other way, because they're guarded by two skypests. At that point it becomes basically a slot machine, except instead of getting money you can just finish the room. You need the skypests to either fly in such a way that you can get past them, or pray they fly so low the engine switches their AI off.

And the thing is, for these very obvious RNG gates, both in this level, the rest of the game, and other games, I will make use of the save system since they're kind enough to keep track of your position. But at that point it stops being an actual challenge to get across, and just becomes either a very short or a very lengthy waste of time outside your control.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, RNG is doing the same thing over and over again and actually getting a different result. There's no strategy, no mechanic to master; just keep throwing yourself at it until the game simply decides to let you through.


That's probably why I didn't get as angry at Menace. Again, still not sure why I kept playing, but besides the bosses once you got past a dick move you were probably not going to fall for it again. Kinda like Dreams, which is ironic since that appeared to be the less-favored game between it and GG.



All that being said, I still at least intend to see Galaxy through. Because I a stubborn bastard that just doesn't know when to quit, apparently. That and the game does have a lot of genuine charm, and I want to like it even if it's trying its hardest to make me not do that.

This post has been edited by Ninety-Six: 25 September 2020 - 01:08 PM

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User is offline   K1n9_Duk3 

#134

I think that Keen 4-6 and Keen Dreams were designed around the fact that they allowed the player to save and load the game at any point in any level. This also applies to BioMenace to some degree, since the beta version still had the same mid-level saving functionality as the later Keen games and the levels in the beta are mostly identical to what was eventually released as Episode 2, at least as far as the general layout and the enemy placement is concerned.

Keen 1-3 at least allowed the player to save the progress on the world map, which had already been a huge improvement compared to Dangerous Dave and Catacomb. I have never played any of the games Carmack and Romero wrote before Dangerous Dave and Catacomb, so I don't know if those had any kind of save feature. But based on the games from the Gamer's Edge sampler disk, I would assume they didn't. Since some Apogee-published games already had a save feature (some Kroz games, Caves of Thor) before Keen 1 was released, it seems reasonable to assume that such a feature might have been requested by Apogee. But that's really just my speculation.

I can't think of any other action game on the PC prior to Keen Dreams / Keen 4 that allowed the player to save at any point in any level and restore the game to the exact same state after loading that saved game. The only games I know that had a similar save feature would be adventure games. And I would argue that the vast majority of adventure games of that era - especially the ones created by Sierra - were also designed around that feature. Back then, "savescumming" wasn't considered a problem, it was widely expected. If you disagree with me on this statement, go play the original Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (AGI version, 1987) and try to finish that game without saving. It doesn't even matter if you use a walkthrough or not.

The way I see it, the mechanics in the (later) Keen games are as follows:
  • dying and losing a life is the punishment for not saving your game (and also for getting hit in the first place)
  • punishment for getting hit is that you need to load the most recent savegame and losing some of your progress, instead of having to find a health powerup (or waiting for a red screen to fade or whatever nonsense the modern gaming industry might come up with)
  • deciding when to save is a trade-off between how much progress you might lose if you get hit and how much time you spend saving the game instead of actually playing the game
  • trying to complete a level without saving in-level is a self-imposed challenge and if you fail at it, that's not the game's fault
  • same goes for trying to complete the whole game without saving at all

Some of this also applies to later id games like Wolf3D and Doom, except that there aren't any lives to lose in Doom, you just lose your weapons and ammo. But Wolf3D also introduced quicksaving, so that saving the game only required the user to hit a key instead of having to navigate the menu to save manually, thus greatly reducing the amount of time it takes to save the game. If the developer's didn't want you to save your game frequently, why would they go through the trouble of implementing a shortcut that makes saving the game faster and easier?

Edit: Now that I think about it, Caves of Thor actually did have a full mid-level saving feature. I guess you could call it an action game.

This post has been edited by K1n9_Duk3: 25 September 2020 - 03:40 PM

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User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#135

I see your logic, but I will have to disagree.

The same sort of "if it was in the game, why wouldn't it be expected to be used" argument can likewise apply for the lives system. Losing a life for failing to save doesn't make much sense, especially in regards to the very concept of a game over. Why bother programming in a game over if the player was expected to just reload the last save?

Even in the case of Doom, where the punishment for death is a pistol start... the logic also doesn't quite hold up. If you die, and your consequence is going back to the very start of the level with nothing or very possibly just going back 5 minutes and still have all your guns, which is the more sensible option?

And yet, not only are pistol starts in Doom, every individual map was designed with precisely zero concept of the player coming in with the armaments from even a single level before. Once again, if the intended play method was purely continuous, why was every map designed to be pistol started, to the point where one of the developers thought it was a mistake and made the game too easy as a result? Certainly, cheating or using the level warp command would also force a pistol start, but that seems like a lot of effort for the not-the-main-way-the-game-is-intended-to-be-played method.

Granted, I seem to recall I think Romero saying at one point that they took out the lives from Wolfenstein, because "just losing your guns would be punishment enough." You could argue that the pistol start was just a holdover from Wolfenstein. Nonetheless, he specifically said punishment. Once more, what's the point of a punishment if it isn't intended to stick? But they obviously didn't want dying to make the game unbeatable, either. Still, that is a lot of effort for a punishment that wouldn't affect more than half the playerbase.


No, I think on-the-point saving and quicksaving were more meant for sections the player was having trouble with or for experimentation (i.e. "is there a secret if I jump down this pit?"), with lives or pistol starts meant as the real punishments, but not to the point of being unwinnable (sans Keen 3 which was very clearly unfinished). With this frame, the existence of saving and the existence of lives and pistol starts don't seem to be at odds as much.

It isn't unheard of for developers to be on different pages than their eventual players. It wasn't really a new thing back then, either. People most often take the path of least resistance and developers sometimes trust their players to not abuse something more than they probably should. Similarly, and though I have no evidence for it, I have trouble imagining the id guys (especially Romero) saying that going through their game without more than a slap on the wrist was how they intended it to be played. By the same token, I can also imagine the id guys (again, especially Romero) looking at some of their cheaply designed and luck-based sections and going "yeah it's supposed to be hard, dude!"

This post has been edited by Ninety-Six: 25 September 2020 - 07:20 PM

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User is offline   MrFlibble 

#136

From what I gather, mid-level saves and quicksaves were pretty much a new thing in games in the early 90s, including to the very people who developed them -- all of them grew up and/or were accustomed to games where losing a life and going back to the start/latest checkpoint was the norm and likely the only way of saving your progress. It is also likely that the implementation of mid-level saves and quicksaves was accomplished by one person (Carmack I guess?) while the level design with the traditional life-based progression/level reset was at the hands of other people like Romero. It's just that the games we discuss here are from a transitional period where one model slowly replaced an earlier one.

That said, of course the devs realised how mid-level saves affected gameplay difficulty. Aren't there games where the highest difficulty will turn off saving, or there's an option to do so if you want Ironman style playing?
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User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#137

View PostMrFlibble, on 26 September 2020 - 06:14 AM, said:

That said, of course the devs realised how mid-level saves affected gameplay difficulty. Aren't there games where the highest difficulty will turn off saving, or there's an option to do so if you want Ironman style playing?


Some yes, but more modern ones as far as I'm aware. That being said, I'm aware that there are games from around the same time, such as the King's Quest series as King pointed out, where saving (multiple times in different slots) seems to be part of the design. I'm mostly arguing insofar as the original id games from the early to mid 90s.


Carmack adding features is also hardly unheard of. I seem to recall the secrets in Wolf3D were strongly pressed for by the rest of id but continually met with carmack's resistance. Right up until he gave in at the last minute and then added them in. I don't know if the secret locations were already laid out by the rest of id, but if they weren't it might explain how impossible it was to tell them apart from normal walls.

Then again episodes 4 and 6 were a thing where they started hiding essential keys in secrets so maybe it wouldn't have made a difference either way (I'm assuming 4-6 were created after 1-3).
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User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#138

View PostNinety-Six, on 26 September 2020 - 09:38 AM, said:

That being said, I'm aware that there are games from around the same time, such as the King's Quest series as King pointed out, where saving (multiple times in different slots) seems to be part of the design.


"Save early, save often!"
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User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#139

Well I'm a fair few levels into episode 5 now, and it's giving me sort of a Bio Menace effect so far.

That is to say, I'm actually really enjoying it and I don't know why. Now, at least until now I haven't run into any bullshit and that's certainly a big plus, but there's something else. Something about the level design just feels a lot better. Again, so far. Both of these points can change real quick and to be honest at this point I expect them to.

Nonetheless, this is probably the best Keen out of all the ones I've played, or at least this set of levels are. 99% of the deaths have entirely felt like me playing bad (the one 1% being a death to one of those lethal spinning fire bar things, where I could have sworn I was miles to the left of it. It is quite possible I'm wrong, or that Dosbox stuttered at that point. Wouldn't be the first time in the case of the latter; for some reason Keen 4 and 5 run like crap off of Steam. Still, even being uncertain is an improvement).

I do wish I could pinpoint what exactly about the level design I find enjoyable, besides the obvious. Because there is definitely more going on here; I'm just not sure what. It could be related to flow, which I'm coming to learn I seem to value a lot, perhaps even second to fairness. Unfortunately what exactly flow means to be is nebulous at best, so it's more of a know it when I play it deal which makes it difficult to put into words.

This episode has also been quite difficult and I have been walled numerous times over several from-scratch playthroughs. But one last time, it has been a very fair challenge up until now so I've been quite content on that front.


I certainly hope the rest of the episode maintains this high quality. That would make everything I've gone through worth it.
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User is offline   K1n9_Duk3 

#140

View PostNinety-Six, on 25 September 2020 - 04:46 PM, said:

The same sort of "if it was in the game, why wouldn't it be expected to be used" argument can likewise apply for the lives system. Losing a life for failing to save doesn't make much sense, especially in regards to the very concept of a game over. Why bother programming in a game over if the player was expected to just reload the last save?

My theory is that the extra lives are a currency that you can trade in for other things in the Keen games, specifically points and ammo. If you die in a level, the whole level resets and all the pickups respawn, but you keep the points and the ammo you had when you died. I have seen some people fill up on ammo at the start of certain levels by collecting nearby ammo pickups and then dying on purpose. And while most people don't really care about high scores nowadays, I guess that might have been different for the people growing up with coin-operated arcade machines, i.e. the target audience in 1990/1991. Having a limited amount of lives is practiaclly the only thing that prevents you from getting an infinitely high score in these games. Well, that, the 32 bit integer limit, and the amount of time you're willing to invest in replaying the same levels over and over. I also think that high scores, extra lives and game overs were just such a central part of the arcade game experience that nobody really questioned their relevance as the games moved over to home computers. Id would eventually do that and remove all of these arcade holdovers in Doom, but they just hadn't gotten to that point yet when they created the Keen games.

Another thing that might explain some of the questionable design decisions in the Keen games is that they had a short and sometimes rushed development cycle. Keen 1-3 were created as a side project while the founders of id were still employed at Softdisk. And 1991 saw the release of several games written by the id guys.
  • Catacomb 2 (a.k.a. The Catacomb)
  • Slordax
  • Rescue Rover
  • Shadow Knights
  • Dangerous Dave 2 (Haunted Mansion)
  • Hovertank
  • Keen Dreams
  • Rescue Rover 2
  • Catacomb 3-D
  • Keen 4-6

Romero claimed they did 12 games in 12 months, mostly working on two games at the same time, so each game was in development for about two months. They simply didn't have the time to playtest the levels (or let other people playtest) and improve the design where necessary. Tom Hall stated that Keen 5 took them only one month, which might explain why version 1.0 of Keen 5 was shipped with a bug that made it impossible to play the secret level on easy difficulty, meaning that the player was stuck in a dead end and had to restart the game or load an earlier savegame (or use the debug cheats to noclip past that level on the world map). I guess id could get away with their sometimes questionable game design decisions and lack of polish in some areas because of how technically impressive the Keen games were when they were first released.

Keen 4-6 and Catacomb 3-D were created at about the same time (they share the same engine down to the look of the menu interface) and id's next game, Wolfenstein 3-D, would be released about 5 months after Keen 4-6, meaning that Wolf3D had a longer dev cycle than the previous games. And dev cycles got even longer for Doom and Quake. I know that longer dev cycles don't automatically mean that the final product has been tested thoroughly, but I think it gave them more time to question their design decisions and learn from the mistakes they made in the past games.

By the way:

Tom Hall said:

We did Keen 4, then Keen 6 (Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter), and then Keen 5. We did Keen 5 in one month. That was an amazing amount of work, but it's probably my favorite Keen, even though it doesn't have a Dopefish!

The fact that Keen 5 was made after 4 and 6 could mean that they learned from the design mistakes they made in the previous games and that's why some people prefer it over the other games. But I do remember at least one section near the end that will almost certainly be a pain in the ass if you're playing on hard.

If you want to get rid of the graphics glitches, you can try this patch I created. You'll need to use CKPATCH (found on NY00123's website) or my patching utility to apply these patches. The patch scripts are set up for use with CKPATCH. If you want to use my patching utility, you'll have to edit them and uncomment the %exefile command.


Regarding Doom: The fact that it is possible to finish (almost?) every single level even with a pistol start doesn't really convince me that they didn't expect the player to save the game frequently. I see this more as a necessity to prevent the player from getting stuck. What's the point of removing extra lives and the associated game overs if getting killed meant that you couldn't beat the current level anymore and had to restart the entire game from the beginning? The only alternative to a pistol start would be to create an autosave at the beginning of every level and load that autosave when the player dies. But that could make it even less likely for the player to be able to finish the level, since the player might have left the previous level with no ammo and/or barely any health left. So even if the player doesn't die in the level, you would still have to design the level so that the player can find (or is automatically given) all the resources necessary to complete the level. And this includes accounting for situations where the player started the level with basically no ammo at all. Sure, this means that some players find "too much" ammo. But if the alternative is making the level unbeatable for other players, then having more ammo in the level is the way to go.

View PostNinety-Six, on 25 September 2020 - 04:46 PM, said:

Even in the case of Doom, where the punishment for death is a pistol start... the logic also doesn't quite hold up. If you die, and your consequence is going back to the very start of the level with nothing or very possibly just going back 5 minutes and still have all your guns, which is the more sensible option?

I don't really get your point. Are you saying that since the game gives you the quicksave/quickload option, programming in a pistol start is pointless? That's not true, as I have just elaborated on. Also, you seem to be implying that the more sensible option is loading a saved game. Isn't that exactly what I initially wrote about losing a life (or losing your guns and ammo in Doom's case) being the punishment for not saving your game?


And regarding "savescumming" in adventure games, I wasn't even talking about the cheap deaths and "walking dead" situations in Sierra's adventure games. In Larry 1, the only way to gain money is gambling. You have to win at blackjack or at the slot machine and if you lose all of your money, you basically die in the game. Space Quest 1 also had a slot machine that you had to use to gain money, which literally kills the player character if you lose all of your money. These games had mandatory sections that relied entirely on RNG and where the player had absolutely zero influence on the outcome. Okay, the player does have some influence on the outcome in blackjack, but the RNG can still screw you over in the end. Saving your game and reloading each time you lose money is pretty much the only way to get past these sections reliably.

I'm not saying that this was good game design, but it was released as a commercial product by a relatively big publisher, while Keen was a shareware title by a relatively small indie studio. I think they (id) can be forgiven for creating games/levels that rely perhaps a little too much on their save feature.
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User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#141

View PostK1n9_Duk3, on 26 September 2020 - 05:04 PM, said:

Romero claimed they did 12 games in 12 months, mostly working on two games at the same time, so each game was in development for about two months. They simply didn't have the time to playtest the levels (or let other people playtest) and improve the design where necessary. Tom Hall stated that Keen 5 took them only one month, which might explain why version 1.0 of Keen 5 was shipped with a bug that made it impossible to play the secret level on easy difficulty, meaning that the player was stuck in a dead end and had to restart the game or load an earlier savegame (or use the debug cheats to noclip past that level on the world map). I guess id could get away with their sometimes questionable game design decisions and lack of polish in some areas because of how technically impressive the Keen games were when they were first released.


I could tell that Vorticon was rushed; the sorry state of episode 3 made that pretty clear. However, I was not aware that nearly all of id's pre-Wolfenstein games were made on such a tight schedule. That certainly does explain a lot. I thought Cat3D had an odd menu when I first played it, and when I was going through Keen 4 one of the songs sounded really familiar until I remembered I first heard it in cat3D. Certainly explains why it had Paddle War and only one song that was inherited from Keen (at least I assume that's the order of events).

I was also not aware Keen 5 was made after 6, and perhaps that's why I'm having a much better time with it so far.

View PostK1n9_Duk3, on 26 September 2020 - 05:04 PM, said:

I don't really get your point. Are you saying that since the game gives you the quicksave/quickload option, programming in a pistol start is pointless? That's not true, as I have just elaborated on. Also, you seem to be implying that the more sensible option is loading a saved game. Isn't that exactly what I initially wrote about losing a life (or losing your guns and ammo in Doom's case) being the punishment for not saving your game?


Not that it was programmed, but more that it was exclusively playtested on p-starts alone. To me, that communicates that savescumming was not the intended method. Making sure the level was possible is one thing; completely disregarding the overall game balance as opposed to per-level is another. It's perfectly possible to do both; Duke 3D proved that much (albeit 100% secrets wasn't always possible).

To put it simply, if you don't die, your reward is keeping your guns and having an easier time on later levels. If you die, your punishment is starting from scratch with just a pea-shooter. It's possible to beat the level from a pistol start, just harder and most importantly: a lot more tedious. This sort of reward/punishment simply doesn't exist if savescumming was intended, and if it was it makes the sole balancing around pistol starts completely nonsensical. If it's the non-intended way to play the game, why exclusively balance around it?


I'll admit rewarding the more skilled/luckier players with an easier time while punishing the less skilled/unluckier players with a harder time seems counterintuitive. That being said, it's not like Doom or Wolfenstein would be unique in this regard. A lot of games around the time struggled with that sort of concept, and to be perfectly honest even modern games don't have a great solution to it either. Nonetheless, I don't think that implies it wasn't still intended. Despite my ranting, I do still have a bit more faith in id's level design abilities than to make their levels a series of IWBTG death traps.

Moreover, today and even back then, risk and reward was a core pillar of game design and level design both. It's why you typically find better stuff the more difficult something is. It's why the good weapons or higher point items are hidden behind a more challenging part of the level. It all comes down to choice; to making the player have to decide between playing it safe or risking it for greater reward.

Simply put, without a fear of death there really isn't risk besides losing time, for it can be repeated infinitely. And if a player chooses to use that ability then so be it. However, in terms of level design, it fails to make any sense to create risk/reward situations if you intend the player to bypass the risk. It's why savescumming is discouraged in the modern era.

However it's because of that central component to almost all game/level design that I think it's perfectly reasonable for id to not expect their players to abuse that power. Their own experience in making games blinded them, assuming everyone else would be on the same page as them. It's something we saw back then, and it's something we still see developers wrestle with today. Sometimes emergent gameplay is a good thing; other, more common times players find a mechanic and learn to exploit it. A mechanic the developers put into the game for one purpose gets misused and destroys a game's challenge and/or pacing. It's not uncommon today, and it wasn't uncommon back then. Thus, believing id was a bit naive with the save system is hardly a stretch of logic.



Nonetheless, we're probably just going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I don't see either of us budging on this particular point. Short of one of id's original members dropping a post explaining it themselves, all we can really do is interpret. You have yours and I have mine.



I will be looking into those patches, so thank you for those.

This post has been edited by Ninety-Six: 26 September 2020 - 06:13 PM

0

User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#142

Welp, found the bullshit. Those dogs should be considered the video game equivalent of a war crime.

It seems like a law that every id game needs one of these. The vorticon youths, the spawns, the mutants, the skypests...and now, the shockhunds.

This post has been edited by Ninety-Six: 29 September 2020 - 06:13 PM

0

User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#143

I made the mistake of trying to play keen 4 on hard. I literally spent 20 minutes on Crystalus alone, saving and reloading waiting for all the goddamned skypests to actually make progress possible.

Then I enter the cave of the descendants and literally the first thing that happens is I die to an offscreen skypest I had no way of knowing would be there because not only was it not there on normal, no skypests were there on normal, anywhere in the level.


Yeah so screw this. I understand these were made on a tight schedule but christ.

This post has been edited by Ninety-Six: 08 October 2020 - 08:38 AM

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#144

Wish they still made games like the CK series.
0

User is offline   NY00123 

#145

So, remember when there was a port of Keen Dreams available from Steam, before eventually becoming unavailable?

It was initially started as an unofficial port made by David Gow, partially using code from Omnispeak (Keen 4-6 reverse-engineering project) as a base.
It later got picked up to be used as a basis for an official port, which was available for some time from Steam (and beforehand, from itch.io). It also received code contributions from Emma Kranz and Braden Obrzut.

Some time after the game got de-listed, it was temporarily available for another time period from Steam. This incarnation was handled by Nightdive Studios, and Ryan C. Gordon was updating the port.

While the port itself isn't available anymore, it turns out that David Gow pushed a snapshot of the Steam port's source port, presumably last month.
It doesn't include any of the changes made after Nightdive Studios took over as a publisher, and any code related to Steam integration was replaced with mostly empty stubs.

https://github.com/s...1f23230e5718b96
1

User is online   ck3D 

#146

Maybe that's a known link but I just ran into it, someone made a (somewhat) detailed 'technical manual' for the Bean-With-Bacon Megarocket which I think is kind of cool: http://dosclassics.com/old/bwbmtm/

Could have used more focus on the vacuum cleaner, soup can and alcohol parts but it looks like the page was abandoned whilst in WIP. Still though, someone tried!

This post has been edited by ck3D: 16 June 2021 - 05:45 AM

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#147

Has anyone here played any Keen mods? Recently, I was playing through the series again for my blog, and after Keen Dreams I decided to take a look at Keen Meets the Meats the at one point theoretical sequel to Keen Dreams. It's very good. Still indulges in a bit of the bullshit Keen Dreams does, but softens the worst of it. For instance, if you play on easy the weapon, instead of temporarily stunning enemies, actually takes them out permanently. Enemies also don't quite rush up on you like they could in Dreams. That said, the ranged enemies that are around have considerably ramped up attacks, and level design still indulges in a bit of that Keen surprise attack bullshit. And it's very prone to crashing/
That said, I feel like the level design is pretty top notch. Open-ended, full of secrets, I even found myself going after the odd out of the way point item. At times it feels like it was made for a top level Keen player, but at others it felt better balanced than most of the official games. It's surprisingly generous with items too, I think it has something like 30 spare lives floating around and I didn't find anywhere close to all of them.
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