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General discussionDo you have pen(cil) and paper handy while playing games? Do you use it?(66 posts)(66 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted July 12, 2016
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Breja: Well, I don't intentionally prepare it when starting a game, but there's alaways something on my desk, and sometimes, though rarely, it comes in handy while playing. In RPGs for writing down some clues, or something that might be a clue, but I have no idea right now what it is, and in some point & click adventure games it's helpful to write don what I need to do, what some NPCs want, to sort of "map out" what I think I need to get, what to do with it, and what that will accomplish. It's especially helpful if I have to take a break from the game for a few days.

I do not, never did, and never will draw my own maps. I'm absolutely hopeless for stuff like that, both in real world and in games. I can easily get lost even with an auto map, survivng without one or making my own one is out of the question. My sense of direction is terrible. A bad map in a game can easily become my worst enemy, more so thant bad controls or camera or anything.
Lol, stay away from the first Thief game then :) Huge maps with confusing layouts and difficult to read maps. I still have nasty flashbacks of that god damn sewer level :P
Don't think I'll ever finish the game. I'm just going to skip right to 2.
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morolf: Depends on the game. I think I've never written down some plan for leveling up as you did...but if a game requires you taking notes for riddles (and if there's no in-game function for it), I've done so.
Most recent example I can think of was Planescape Torment which I re-played a few months ago. There's a certain section (the Modron Maze) which is very confusing, with dozens of rooms...I ended up mapping the whole dungeon on the cardboard of a notepad.
Hated that maze part. It was the only bit of the otherwise excellent experience that I didn't enjoy one bit.
Post edited July 12, 2016 by Matewis
Posted July 12, 2016
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Matewis: Lol, stay away from the first Thief game then :) Huge maps with confusing layouts and difficult to read maps. I still have nasty flashbacks of that god damn sewer level :P
Don't think I'll ever finish the game. I'm just going to skip right to 2.
I never finished SWAT 3 because of the sewer level. I don't know if I could navigate that labirynth even if there were no enemies there. Getting shot from around the corner and having to start over and over again? It turned from a swat sim to a simulation of suffering some eternal punishment in Hades along with Tantalus and Sisyphus.
Posted July 12, 2016
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Matewis: Lol, stay away from the first Thief game then :) Huge maps with confusing layouts and difficult to read maps. I still have nasty flashbacks of that god damn sewer level :P
Don't think I'll ever finish the game. I'm just going to skip right to 2.
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Breja: I never finished SWAT 3 because of the sewer level. I don't know if I could navigate that labirynth even if there were no enemies there. Getting shot from around the corner and having to start over and over again? It turned from a swat sim to a simulation of suffering some eternal punishment in Hades along with Tantalus and Sisyphus.
Now that's a difficult game :P Got to final mission and gave up. Suppose I should give it another go some day.
Posted July 12, 2016
I never finished SWAT 3 because I fucking hated it so much. :P
Posted July 12, 2016
Dungeons of Dredmore has passwords that take you to random extra locations. Have to write those down. one-use, not per game just period.

I tried to do a serious play with writing notes down for Might & Magic 6... it soon became way too cumbersome. I had notes of where the various people were in town, what skills they offered, quests I was doing, just tons of stuff. Then I watched someone playing a 1 Paladin character game and doing more in 2 hours than I did in 2 weeks.

Other games I made notes for... Hmmm... I don't know. There was the Morrowind stat thing, but eventually you just use a mod to force +5 on all stats regardless, since you do so many stat increases rather than carefully managing every single point.
Posted July 12, 2016
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tritone: Wow, hadn't thought about this in a LONG long time! I used to make many notes while playing adventure and RPG games. I mapped all of Buck Rogers Countdown back in the day, and still have reams of notes from that one. That's probably the last time I did that.

Somewhere back in the (90s?) I ran across a PC program called Tornado Notes. It was a DOS (ASCII text only) product for quickly creating and finding notes. It was kinda like creating "PostIt(tm) notes" on your computer, and you would create "stacks" of these notes. To find any previous old note, you type "G" for Get, and then start typing the word you looked for. As you typed more letters, the program would continually scan through the notes looking for that combination of letters in sequence, and show you "graphically" how many "hits" you had so far. At any point, with sufficiently few hits gathered, you could hit Enter and use the arrow keys to scroll through the results. It was kinda like the "predictive suggestions" you see in your browser when you search for something in Google, and it tries to "predict" what you're going to ask. Only this was like 25 years ago, but only for stuff you personally stored.

Anywho... I remember using Tornado Notes with Ultima 6 to take notes. In fact, I also remember another program I had called Software Carousel. SC was a "multitasking" program (really just a "manual task switcher") that at the touch of a keystroke would swap the current program out of RAM to disk, and swapping IN to RAM whatever the next program "on the carousel" was. I could switch between U6 and TN, back and forth, to take notes for the entire game! That's the only game I ever did that with, but I really loved that Tornado Notes DOS program. I believe the company was something like "InfoLogic" and they eventually created a windows version called "Info Select", and they may even be out of business by now (I'm guessing).

Of course, these days you only need to bring up ANY text editor in a window beside your game, or just Alt-Tab between programs with ease (sometimes). Or use a pen and paper! 8)
0.0 You had to manually swap the game you were playing and the notes program in and out of the ram to use either? Wow, that's otherworldly... It's great hearing stories like this :) It really puts things into perspective.
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tinyE: I never finished SWAT 3 because I fucking hated it so much. :P
Yeah, I don't know what they were thinking making every single enemy into an evil Lucky Luke :P Come to think of it, they did that in Rainbow 6 as well.
Post edited July 12, 2016 by Matewis
Posted July 12, 2016
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tinyE: I never finished SWAT 3 because I fucking hated it so much. :P
Well, it's no SWAT 4, but it's not that bad. The controls take some getting used to, and the friendly AI is probably the biggest fault. Stairs seem to be something entirely out of the SWAT officers' grasp. I've seen the team so confused by how to move up or down a staircase, I've become convinced that even without terrorists waiting for them they would probably manage to get themselves killed trying to reach another floor :P

Still, I had a lot of fun with it until that sewer level. For all it's fault and frustrations I always felt like playing another mission.
Post edited July 12, 2016 by Breja
Posted July 12, 2016
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tinyE: I never finished SWAT 3 because I fucking hated it so much. :P
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Breja: Well, it's no SWAT 4, but it's not that bad. The controls take some getting used to, and the friendly AI is probably the biggest fault. Stairs seem to be something entirely out of the SWAT officers' grasp. I've seen the team so confused by how to move up or down a staircase, I've become convinced that even without terrorists waiting for them they would probably manage to get themselves killed trying to reach another floor :P

Still, I had a lot of fun with it until that sewer level. For all it's fault and frustrations I always felt like playing another mission.
I don't really like any of the SWAT games. I don't lead very well and I coordinate even worse.
Posted July 12, 2016
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Breja: Well, it's no SWAT 4, but it's not that bad. The controls take some getting used to, and the friendly AI is probably the biggest fault. Stairs seem to be something entirely out of the SWAT officers' grasp. I've seen the team so confused by how to move up or down a staircase, I've become convinced that even without terrorists waiting for them they would probably manage to get themselves killed trying to reach another floor :P

Still, I had a lot of fun with it until that sewer level. For all it's fault and frustrations I always felt like playing another mission.
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tinyE: I don't really like any of the SWAT games. I don't lead very well and I coordinate even worse.
Really? I seem to remember you mentioning you liked Republic Commando? Ok, it's far lighter on the squad tactics, but still.

Anyway, this thread is turning into a fun way of discovering what aspects of games some of us fail at :D What we need now is someone who can't make a create a decent character in an RPG to save their life and someone with reflexes so bad they fail even at turn based strategies :D
Posted July 12, 2016
Yes.

But I also use "more advanced" techniques, like notepad or even excel. :o
Posted July 12, 2016
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tinyE: I don't really like any of the SWAT games. I don't lead very well and I coordinate even worse.
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Breja: Really? I seem to remember you mentioning you liked Republic Commando? Ok, it's far lighter on the squad tactics, but still.

Anyway, this thread is turning into a fun way of discovering what aspects of games some of us fail at :D What we need now is someone who can't make a create a decent character in an RPG to save their life and someone with reflexes so bad they fail even at turn based strategies :D
That is no comparison! XD RC is a joke in terms of coordination. There are only certain places you can put people and THATS all you have to do. There are no aggression or fire settings and even if there were, it's only you and three other guys. Plus in RC you are always more or less together in one room; no back entrances or team separation; no set up so that you come in one way, and your mates come in three other different ways.
Posted July 12, 2016
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Breja: I mean look at this! This is just one level of one cave, in a huge world full of dungeons, caves, labyrinths and gods know what else.
And I also see a lot dead ends which, in case there wasn't an automap, i guess would have been very frustrating. As for Grimrock, I finished the first one without any major problems (not on Old School Mode) but it was the second one that drove me crazy; I caught myself walking in circles searching for clues/stuff/whatever which eventually lead me to quit. Not forever as I loved the game but it was too much for me when I played it several months ago. I'll get back to it the coming winter. ^_^
Posted July 12, 2016
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Matewis:
It depends on the game really. Ultimately I prefer to not keep notes with games unless they provide value to me. If notes are necessary or provide benefits then I may make them. I'll use binder paper for general text, graph paper for maps and other geometry related things, but I may also use a secondary computer with a text file, Wiki page, spreadsheet, drawing program or other data entry/display application depending on what I think is useful.

When I played Mount & Blade after a while I got lost with what products were the best prices in which city as well as various other factors about the game, so I made a bunch of paper notes and spreadsheets to keep track of it all. It was very useful.
Posted July 12, 2016
I have the materials on my desk, but it's generally buried under so much other crap that I can't find it when I want it. But, since I have two PCs networked, I usually just open Notepad on the second one if I want to take notes. If it's a mapping issue that's vexing me, I'll do an on-line search for a map and have done with it.
Posted July 12, 2016
(re: Software Carousel)

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Matewis: 0.0 You had to manually swap the game you were playing and the notes program in and out of the ram to use either? Wow, that's otherworldly... It's great hearing stories like this :) It really puts things into perspective.
Software Carousel came out about 1986 (I googled it!) and was very popular at the time, until Microsoft Windows 3 anyway. I believe the way it worked was... you would load your first program (like Ultima 6) and when you wanted to use the text editor, you would hit the "swap out" button to cause Ultima 6 to be "frozen" and stored on your harddrive, and RAM was cleared. Now you could manually load your text editor, and it had full control of the computer. Remember, you only had go through this manual setup the first time you loaded a new program. Now to get back to U6, you just hit a hotkey and you're whisked back to the game as fast as the computer could swap OUT the editor to disk, and swap BACK IN your game. Hit another hotkey, and you're whisked back to your text editor. Back and forth NOW was just a keystroke away!

Yeah, sounds cool, but I don't miss it. :) But it was all the rage back in the day. Today, I guess you would just run your DOS game in DOSBOX in a window, and just run Notepad in a different window. Magic! :)
Post edited July 12, 2016 by tritone
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionDo you have pen(cil) and paper handy while playing games? Do you use it?(66 posts)(66 posts)
(66 posts)