Yeah...I was with the finger on the buy button already, but after the TA's review i'm a little bit more cautious.
To be quite honest, this is about exactly what I expected given the relatively short amount of time between the announcement and the release. However, considering that I fall firmly into the first category of people you discussed, I'll be buying this the second it hits the store and still can't wait. Though the problems with looping music is a bit disheartening. The music in this game rules. Hope that can be fixed with a patch. EDIT: The other thing I'm interested to know is I'm hearing early reports of the movement scenes (walking from point A to B in the mansion) playing at double speed. Can anyone that's already had a chance to play it confirm or deny? To be fair, that might be a design choice. Hope it's not true though, the slow movement had a really nice creepy atmosphere to it.
Excellent job at bringing this to iOS. The game is every bit as fun as I remember. Yes, moving around the mansion is faster than I remember it being back when the game originally came out, but that is a good thing. I like this speed. And if you make it too slow, I think you'll turn off a lot of younger gamers who didn't grow up on the games we did. Of course, it's possible that the movement is faster for some reason on other iDevices and thus I'm not experiencing the same extreme speed that others are complaining about, but on the device I'm using at the moment (iPod Touch 4), it's just right.
Picked this up about half an hour ago. I played the original on PC and am a huge fan of this game so was excited when I heard it was coming to iPhone. Initial impressions are a bit mixed at the moment. Loved the intro and overall feel is very true to the original. The movement within the mansion is definitely a lot quicker but this is not necessarily a bad thing, simply means that your not left waiting on an animation. Great feeling of nostalgia when playing but just played the first puzzle, the one with the cake and thus came my first gripe. In the effort to keep the game true to the original nothing has really changed so the cake still has the same viewing angle it had on the PC (about 3 quarters top down). This makes the squares at the back quite fiddly to touch and so you can end up deselecting squares you have already selected. I think it wouldve been better if the cake had changed to be fully top down to really take advantage of the touch screen. Will post more impressions after I've had a chance to play a bit more!
Why the ipad version cost more than double the price?, i feel ripped. i'm tired of this, i'll start supporting universal apps and buy Broken Sword II instead.
Yeah, at first I thought maybe this was an intentional choice to speed up the pacing of the game, but the more I play of it, the less I think so. It honestly seems like it's a debug flag that somebody forgot to turn off (ie, they sped it up to beta test more efficiently and forgot to slow it back down). Making the transitions between point A and point B faster isn't necessarily bad per-se (though in my opinion the atmosphere of the game does take a hit because of it - you don't really feel like you're walking through a haunted mansion... more like zooming around on a hoverboard or something). The biggest problem is the environmental scares that are part of the animation (ie when the window in the library distorts or the hands come out of the painting on the second level). These also play at double speed, while the sound plays at normal speed, so after barely seeing a flicker of 2 hands shoot out of a painting for less than a second, you listen to 10 seconds of creepy event-specific music while staring at a wall unable to move. That couldn't have been intentional.
they really need to let us skip the scenes if we want to, I have to wait for them every single ****ing time I think I've spent more time waiting for them to finish than actually playing it's pissing me off
Try tapping and holding with 2 fingers. Though personally, I've seen em a thousand times and still like watching em. The only one that annoys the heck out of me is that floating Stauf head with the rhyme in the library. For some reason (on both PC and iOS), I mistakenly click the bookshelf to trigger that scene far too often.
Currently it's not working on iPhone 3g/2nd gen touches, only 3gs and up. Not sure if they're planning to support older devices down the road or not.
OK so after playing a bit more of the game I am becoming more and more disappointed. I may actually stop playing this as it is ruining the memories I had of the game. Im starting to think that porting this over to iOS was a really bad idea. They wouldve been much better skipping the port and reworking the entire game to suit the smaller touch screen. The fact that it is a faithful port has actually taken the fun out of the game for me. My complaint yesterday about the cake puzzle is nothing compared to the word puzzle which sits on the bed upstairs. The board is absolutely tiny and the letters are almost impossible to read. I remembered the solution to this puzzle from playing back in the day for some reason and thank god I did, otherwise I doubt I couldve worked through this. Far too small and fiddly and overall not a great experience thus far.
Is it this game broken? I cannot activate either the piano puzzle or the microscope puzzle. I've done everything else, running back and forth for hours, trying everything. The brain icon indicating a puzzle still wont show up on those two. Can't complete the game this way
The piano puzzle and the microscope puzzle were both cut from the iPhone port of the game (as was the attic door/pentagram puzzle). You don't need to complete them to finish this version of the game.
I'm playing on an iPhone as well and I couldn't disagree more. The "hold to move cursor, release to click" slowed me down for the first 15 minutes I spent with the game, but it's second nature to me now. I didn't have any problems clicking on specific parts of any of the puzzles and I think the mouse pointer mechanic (moving the tip of the pyramid over what you want to click) works far better than any kind of touch mechanic would; unless, as you say, they totally recoded and rebalanced the puzzles in order to use a touchscreen as the primary input device. In terms of re-working the game vs. a faithful port, I for one am on the "faithful port" side of the argument. A lot of the appeal of the 7th Guest for me is nostalgic, and I had a blast playing through it again. I don't think a "reworked" or "remade" version would have the same appeal to me (especially as I'm generally not a fan of puzzle games; 7th Guest, 11th Hour, and the Shivers games are the only ones I've ever enjoyed enough to play to completion). In fact, the only complaints I have about the game are some of the issues that keep it from being a totally faithful port (ie the movement/animation speed and the looping music not working properly). That being said, I absolutely wouldn't hesitate to recommend this game to fans of the original, or even people that have never played the original but are fans of puzzle games in general.
