MouseAdventure

[innerSpaceman]

I will not be playing the Invitational again. I don't like the concept at all. First of all, I despise the Mad Scramble format of all or nothing, either you have this one particular skill or you lose. I think, frankly, the whole thing is devised to make the scoring easier on the staff, and I call shenanigans on that for making it less fun for the participants (imo).

As for the Invitational in particular ... I think the object of making it more difficult is poorly executed. More difficult in terms of puzzlier puzzles, constant puzzles for every frelling little thing, even poorer instructions than usual or none at all .... It's all a reliance on puzzle excellence and not - as I would think more appropriate - - a reliance on DISNEYLAND excellence.


I simply prefer the stuff that tests and expands your knowledge of the parks and the resort, attention to beautiful detail - - and, most important, discovery of detail and use of the Parks for expanded levels of playfulness.

I applaud the Invitational scheme for requiring players to experience actual attractions ... but otherwise I felt it was too short on the elements that made me a mouseadventure fanatic.


Plus, I'll have to admit ... maybe I'm even a little burnt out. (although, the last game ... a Mad Scramble at that ... was intensely fun. So I think I'm perfectly capable of thoroughly enjoying a game that has my desired playfulness and discovery aspects.)


I'm going into semi retirement. I won't be playing any future Invitationals or Mad Scrambles, but I'll happily participate in good old MouseAdventure Classic when and if it happens to come around.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

although, the last game ... a Mad Scramble at that ... was intensely fun.
<snip>
I won't be playing any future Invitationals or Mad Scrambles...

Huh? I know you love saying "bah", but this seems a bit contradictory, at best.

I have to admit, this was not a fun game for us for one big portion of it. The first quest on Main Street we simply couldn't get right, and we're still not sure what we had wrong, as we just fudged an answer. This lead to the second quest's answers so we were stuck there too for a while till we could make some sense of the chart and make a guess. Then we hit the Buzz quest which was fun to begin with but ended up our downfall...

Since we never use the lockers on Main Street we were absolutely stuck, to the point of taking 1 hour in penalties, not to mention all the time we spent wandering around trying to find it. That was not fun - it was totally demoralizing to have to go first ask for advice and then simply give up and get a pass - both of which we never, ever do. And then, of course, it's obvious, right in front of our faces, but we never would have thought of it.

Thankfully, we were able to shake off the blues enough to enjoy the rest of the nifty quests, many of which were in DCA. I know the compass caused others some pain but for us it wasn't bad and allowed us to actually use good park knowledge, such as using the park map to find phones, and my immediate recall of the Nescafe billboard. The ears puzzle had us puzzled a while which was a bit of a downer until I finally went "Lend me your ears! YOUR EARS!!" as I grabbed GD's mouseeared head. On the Sun Wheel GD had that great A-ha while noticing the umbrella blooms. I love those golden MA moments and there were plenty of those to go around.

It seemed everyone was spread out so thin it was very hard to figure out where we stood. Of course when we did poorly we thought everyone was ahead of us, and something about the layout of the game made it hard to tell when we passed people. In any case, after our stumble on Main Street we barely saw anyone.

At the very end we handed in our clock times and decided to give it the ol' gas to get to the last station (after not really rushing due to feeling like we were totally out of contention) and in doing so we passed a team to the finish, as they had to stop and get a park map, having lost theirs. THAT felt good. Though I think they got 2nd place anyway....

We didn't stick around long enough to get scores so we'll have to wait until Wednesday. In the end I'm an MA addict and I just love too much about the game to get bummed by the tough parts. And we finished!!! We'll be back, always.

I'd love to hear what people thought of the Open, it was fun to test.