Wall_Axe wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2017 3:57 am
So do you think just going into the hobbit without a walkthru is too frustrating and obscure?
Try it first without a walk through, when you hit the wall, then consult the hint book/strategy guide.
http://www.mocagh.org/tolkien/hobbit-hintbook.pdf
You get the help and hints, but if you want the straight answer they have encoded it in the guide so not to spoil it with casual reading. It is a nice book, and I wish I had this when I was playing as a kid it would have saved a lot of time.
If you still can't get over a problem then take a look at the walk through/the coded answers in the strategy guide.
Make a map, (or there are now some excellent maps of the hobbit on line but I think its better to make your own...) keep a note book for the game so you can record your strategy, ideas. That was a big part of the fun of doing those sort of games back in the day was mapping and working out how the thing worked.
Hobbit is a great game, it has its share of bugs and weirdness but it adds to the charm.
Looking back its a fairly small game world, but what they managed to put into it is stunning for the time. The programming skills that went into that were on another level for the time.
But part of the fun of playing text adventures is playing them how they were intended to be experienced - well, it is like a context thing. At the time the graphics were stunning, the way that the various NPCs would seemingly behave in a non-scripted way. So even if you had a system - you sometimes had situations where Gandalf or Thorin would do something totally mental/infuriating that borks the game.
Considering how much the game cost at launch people expected to spend a significant amount of time to get bang for the buck. With a walk through you can complete the whole game in one sitting. Part of the fun is figuring out how to overcome the puzzles on your jim jones.
What I am trying to say is if you want to play it as it was intended then don't use the walk through until your contemplating calling the Samaritans listening to U2 in a bathtub. There again, if you are limited for time to invest in a text adventure from the early 80s no harm from using the walk through.
Infocom games were much harsher and cryptic by comparison, there was no way I could have finished all but the easiest of them without the hint book.