Sequels

[Mike]

#4613

Are any of the sequels worth playing? I think I heard the second game is ok, I’ve never heard anything good about the 3rd game, and I haven’t heard anything at all about the 4th and 5th games.

It also looks like there were a few spinoff games and a 6th game was planned but never got released.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_the_Sorcerer_(series)

[rnlf]

#4614

I wasn’t even aware of the 4th and 5th game. I’ll definitely give StS2 a spin, don’t think I’ll try anything beyond that.

[dr_st]

#4615

The second game (The Lion, The Wizard and the Wardrobe) is a lot like the first. Same engine, same gameplay, same humor.

I found the puzzles to be slightly less intuitive in the second one, but overall it still works.

The third game (Simon 3D) suffered from all the problems of early 3D conversions – ugly blocky graphics, unpolished controls and gameplay.

The fourth one (Chaos Happens) I know very little of, but my wife has played it and said it was OK. More like the first two, but with 3D graphics (way better than in Simon 3D). I think she claimed it felt rather short.

[Pix]

#4627

2 is definitely worth playing. Simon is a little meaner which put some people off, but didn’t bother me. It ditches all the empty screens from part 1 which is an improvement.

3 was intended to be more of the same but every publisher turned it down because it was in 2D (this is a big part of why adventure games died out for a while around the end of the 90s). It got re-designed in 3D which took ages and it looked extremely dated already by the time it got a release in 2002. The humour is still in there but the gameworld is unnecessarily huge so there is tons of back and forth. It’s not as bad as it’s reputation though and the game is massive. I could only recommend it for the patient and it’s still probably best played with a walkthrough to hand.

Never played the others after that. They were done by a team in Germany I seem to recall and they made Simon American for some reason.

[Shattered]

#4749

I’ve actually gotten sucked into the 2nd game and I’ll say I’m actually enjoying it a bit more than the first. While some of the puzzle solutions might be a bit crazier than the first game, I think the sequel does a better job of directing your focus. This means that you’re trying every combination of items on one screen instead of all of them which greatly decreases the permutations! 🙂

I don’t think the series so far has the charm or as interesting plot as something like Monkey Island so I don’t foresee continuing with 3, 4, or 5. I think I’d rather give Monkey Island 3 & 4 a shot and then onto their Telltale episodes, but I’ll keep them in mind if I ever clear out my game backlog (yea right). I’m glad we picked this game though so I’m aware of them and can discuss them with you all.