Simon The Sorcerer 3D - finished
Through copious amounts of saving, I slowly managed with the incessant crashing. The worst times was when there were longish cutscenes, because the game has no sceneskip. Typically, it took the whole PC down during the credits, so I looked up the rest of those on youtube rather than kicking off the ending sequence again in case there was anything entertaining in what was left (
there wasn't).
In opposition to my earlier complaints about needing to be positioned precisely to talk to people early on, later on there are a lot of people you can talk to from any direction (including at least one where you're actually required to do so to solve a puzzle). Then you've still got people like Calypso who you have to speak to from across a table and can't speak to from next to him. The heck is your problem, game.
Another thing that's quite annoying - the game keeps re-ordering your inventory for no apparent reason. So you can either (forwards-only) scroll through your inventory and probably miss the thing you're looking for because it's not in a consistent place, or you can fall back on going to the subscreen all the time. In theory you can use the mouse in the subscreen, but in practice you can't (unless you only have a single monitor) because the game firstly doesn't trap the mouse pointer within itself, and secondly runs the mouse at a different 'resolution' than the one Windows does so by the time you've moved the in-game mouse pointer 2/3s across the screen the Windows cursor is outside the game, and clicking will consequently swap you out of it. Terrible.
Anyway, the ending is easily worse than the ending for Simon 2, mainly because there's no closure for the established villain and a new villain is introduced out of nowhere then the game immediately ends on cliffhanger. Specifically:
Sordid escapes the collapse of the world (a problem you had nothing to do with, essentially you just showed up as he was inflicting it on himself while trying to take control of it)... somehow, given that there doesn't seem to be anywhere to escape to. You put the boot disc in the computer and then an evil version of yourself jumps out (of the computer) and cackles about how you now have control of the universe. THE END.A puzzle near the end of the game requires you to open the CD drive on your computer because 4th wall puzzles are just the best things ever, right, especially for anyone who had to remove their CD drive after installing the game or something (I don't know if the original release required the CD in the drive or not). Typically, actually opening the BR drive doesn't actually work. I mounted an ISO in a virtual CD drive and that didn't work either. Then it inexplicably worked when I unmounted it.
Back to dumb things the plot does, in Chapter 5 you're tasked with acquiring the services of 4 heroes. After doing this, two of these heroes disappear from the game after doing literally nothing, and a third of them doesn't disappear from the game but doesn't actually do anything either. Well that was completely worth everyone's time then. Also, it eventually turns out that
the Melissa Leg you see in the early parts of the game is actually Runt in disguise, which does explain how
she retrieved Simon's body from Sordid at least, but it also turns out that
Calypso knew all along that she was Runt and he just had you go along with what she wanted you to do despite the fact it was playing into Sordid's hands. Who even wrote this. (Probably one of the Woodroffes, I wasn't paying attention during the credits.)
In conclusion,
monopoly.
I assume it's possible to find the english versions of Simon 4 and 5 around somewhere despite the companies which sold them having gone under, but I'm not going to bother with that for some time.
