[Prophet]

Is it just me or has the mankind lost the need to seek challenges of the mind? I recall, before the days of glorified graphics, a time when games sought to challenge us by making us think.
How many of you recall spending hours on end pounding your head against your keyboard trying to solve an old Infocom puzzle? Or spent roaming the depths of an old 2D DOS dungeon looking for clues to open the lock you remembered passing by two months ago.
Or even better still, long and hard would you search within the game and then realize that if you had taken the time to read the manual first, not only would the puzzle made more sense... but the game became more enjoyable due to the extensive background info included. IE Kings Quest, or again Infocom. They had the greatest packaging around.
Now you're lucky most of the time to get anything more than an intro to the main characters (which I shouldn't know till I meet them anyway) and how to work the interface and hotkeys.

Maybe its just me but there's no challenge in games anymore. (with a few exceptions.... Alundra etc) I play thru most games without ever pausing to think. I just react, read story and watch FMVs.

When was the last time a game stumped you? I mean really fried your brain to where you couldn't advance the story for hours, or even days. Usually when I do find something that is hard; its to get some stupid Uber-Item or some such. Which is pointless to me because I try to play the game along the story they wrote. If you constantly tell me... "We have to hurry the king is dying!" or "We must beat the villians army to the pass or all is lost!" etc... I'm going to rush to get there. Not spend three months: "leveling" (which my characters don't even know what that means), sleeping at inns, exploring the cave I passed earlier, or trying to upgrade my armor. It just kills the immersion of the game.

Anyway, I'm ranting again.... If you have come across some mentally challenging games recently though, please list them so I can try out some stuff that isn't so old I need MoSlo to run it ;)
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~We are the creatures of modern folklore~

[Mobius]

just wait for my rpg to come out then you'll be challenged

hehe
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It is best not to meddel in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with a varity of condoments.

[Bjorn]

If you mean a challenge for the mind... I think the last games of that type that I enjoyed very much where the Lucas Arts adventures Monkey Island III and IV.

[XMark]

The last things that really stumped me were King's Quest V and The Seventh Guest. I never got past where I got stuck in King's Quest V. I just deleted it in a rage. The seventh guest's puzzle that stumped me was that stupid can thing, where you had to arrange the cans to form a sentence. However, that was a case of being too smart for my own good. The only vowels present were Y's, and they were arranged at the beginning, out of alphabetical order with the rest of the cans, so I assumed that the "Y" cans were meant to be general vowels. As it turned out (when I found a walkthrough book for it at the library, heh) the "Y"s were actually supposed to be the letter Y and the answer was "Shy gypsy slyly tryst by my crypt" or something like that. The rest of the puzzles weren't too bad though.
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Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[Mandrake]

yeah, most of the time when "challenge the mind" and video games come into the same sentance, it's dealing with adventure games and not RPG's. Allthough, it seems more and more puzzles are being put into RPG's, as well as plot and etc...they just might be moving mroe towards RPG+Adventure game hybrids....

it seems to me though, is everyone is talking about the future of RPG's in some aspect or another, and improving it in some way or another. But really, each improvement seems to be moving towards just mixing genres....which really doesn't change anything but your target audience.

Maybe I'm too cynical for my own good....i mean, i beleive people should stop saying "you know what would make RPG's better? THIS." and just shut up and work towards finishing a game already.

boy, i've had a rough week. It's really turning me into an asshole.

[entivore]

I think video games are used by a lot of younger people as an escape from the difficulty of harsh reality, rather than a purely recreational thing. As such, video games that aren't challenging to their minds, that you can just focus into and lose track of time with are popular. A difficult puzzle is frustrating to your typical unassured person.

Still, I agree that games nowadays are too obvious. In "Golden Sun", a GBA rpg I have, they tell you where to go constantly, even when they dropped hints early on. It's kinda lame to figure out in advance where to go, only to have them flat out tell you, thus rendering your insight pointless.

Maybe there should be a difficulty mode for the mental challenge aspect, like they sometimes have for the combat aspect.
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*Only in darkness can one truely shine*

[janus]

I got stuck for about 2 hours in Final Fantasy 8, because I couldn't find the 6 pixels for an exit on the screen. I went wandering around, and was bored out of my mind because there were no monsters in that area. I had that problem later and was stuck for another hour or two again as well, because they somehow hid a ladder behind something and I had no idea it was there. :) That game sucked.

As for challenging mind games... the last good one I played would have to be King's Quest 5. Good game, one of the best adventure games I've played. I'm the type of person who doesn't finish many games - I've never finished half life, never finished any of the final fantasy games (for shame!), etc. Most games just don't interest me enough to finish them. Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and King's Quest 5 are all games that interested me enough to keep me playing till the end (and possibly after).

[grenideer]

well, first of all, you gotta look at the game you're playing and its target audience. Nintendi in general is aimed more at kids. Game Boy games are going to spell out exactly where to go all the time. You can't avoid that.

But I do agree rpgs are getting easier. Maybe it's because we've all had a lot of practice with them by now and can recognize all their tricks.

Umm, Vagrant Story had some pretty hard block puzzles in it (mixed in with easy ones). It also had a lot of secrets scattered everywhere so you can 'remember where old locks were', without requiring you to. And a great story.
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Diver Down

[XMark]

Anachronox had some really good puzzles in it. My favourite was the one in the comic book-style spaceship level where you had to identify a pattern of 3-D thingies to unlock a door. Just complicated enough to be a challenge without being stupidly hard like King's Quest 5.
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Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[Prophet]

Agreed on KQ V,
definately one of the more challenging I have played.
All information given will be assimilated. I'm trying to figure out how to go about the design of my project. Its still in the planning stages right now. (IE I'm mostly trying to figure out the best method to convert the stack of 3 ring binders worth of story, history, world info etc.. into the best possible format for a computer game)
thanks for the game suggestions for brain recreation
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~We are the creatures of modern folklore~