> In article <45e3bt$g5r@bud.peinet.pe.ca>
> tbarrie@cycor.ca (Trevor Barrie) writes:
>
> > And, of course, if you must include a time limit, it should be a
> > reasonably long one. I wasn't paying attention to the game clock,
> > but it _felt_ like on the order of five minutes or so before the
> > explosion. If the time limit had rougly coincided with the 2-hour
> > time limit of the contest, I wouldn't have any complaint.
>
> By that reasoning, you'd only be able to play the game once (In which
> case if you had to do something before a certain time, you'd only get
> one chance.
>
> (BTW, I think you get about 4 and a half hours, with a plot about 1/2
> the size of the infocom mysteries.)
>
The real problem with having a time limit that is keyed to the move
count is that it's bound to feel unrealistic in some cases because every
move takes a different amount of time, and circumstances might change.
For instance: suppose I'm at one end of the game and want to go to the
other. Now, if this was RL, I could run or walk straight through, and
that would take less time that it would if I was to go through and look
around at every place I went past. But, of course, because a room
description is always shown, in an I-F game you *always* look around
at every place you go past (even if you don't take any notice of the
description). Even then, things aren't so obvious - if your character
was to stand around thinking for 4 hours you'd probably run out of time,
but you can easily leave a time-limited game to stand for as long as you
like.
So the "turn time" you get might be fixed, but the "percieved time" you
feel you get varies with what you do. If, for instance, in "Weather" I
spend time wandering around exploring (ie, first attempt), it seems like
the bridge falls a lot sooner than if I go around solving a few puzzles (and
NOT solving any of the puzzles that forestall the destruction of the bridge
;) ). By the way, how DO you get the blasted shed open, and what is the
syntax the game wants for me to "look at the same thing that the fox is
looking at"?
Mg
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