I might be 32 years old with arthritis biting through every finger, but I read the reviews of people who say this game is unfair and tough, and I laugh. Not because I find this game is easy. It's not. It is, according to my game-ometer, "quite difficult". I laugh because this game is a classic atypical platformer and as such necessitates such a difficulty. It requires skill, reflexes and intelligence to master. Skills I had developed decades ago on 8-bit computers, but lost in the recent generation of 32 bit, "save where you want" gaming. Skills I once again found whilst playing these gems. If you want to understand the platforming genre and realise why the older generation of gamer is so much better than you, if you want to develop skills of self control and tolerance, if you want to play a game with warmth and humour, then these are that game you need to play.
Despite being over 10 years old, this game still ranks as one of the most involving and atmospheric experiences ever created. Even today the freedom, creativity and ability shown by this game has rarely been beaten and is one of those few games where you could play it several times over and still not experience everything the game has to offer. It is rare to find a game which makes you think about the consequences of your actions. It is rarer to find a game that makes you think about the sort of character that makes those actions. But then there's Fallout. Fallout makes you think about the person controlling the character in the first place.
Whilst it can be hard to define when exactly an era ends, you can, with hindsight, show how the end came about. And so it is, with the 3rd installment of Simon the Sorcerer, we can see the reasons for the endemic failure of the Adventure Game industry as a whole. An adventure game, like a good book, should have interesting locations, realistic characters (for the setting) and an enigmatic storyline that keeps you wanting more. Unfortunately, despite the promise shown in Simon 1 and 2, the 3rd installment fails in all these categories. The underlying reason for this failure lies in the 3D. This extra dimension does not offer anything to this genre and in fact given the sparseness of the locations, contributes to the empty, desolate feel of the game as whole and proves that 3 dimensions don't always have depth. I wanted to like this game as I did its predecessors, but couldn't so in the words of George Orwell - "2D good, 3D bad".
