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File: The Great Adventure 2.hold (242.1 KB)
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Some strange places different from a normal hold

Chaco
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3648
Registered: 10-06-2005
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This hold is of medium quality.

While playing this hold, you will kill a lot of monsters in various settings. Many rooms are straightforward, but in others you might have to at least come up with some sort of a strategy or order of attack.

Darkness and lighting are used, and sometimes abused to hide secrets.

The plot is extremely bare and consists of only a few conversations.

However, this hold is not really terrible or a waste of time either. This is good smiting practice and should contain many interesting challenges for beginners and optimizers alike.

I would rate this a five for quality and a five for difficulty, since I think this hold is about middle-of-the-road. With some polish in aesthetics, level design and layout, and room difficulty or puzzle, this hold could have been better. I'll look out for any other adventures from this author.

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DyRsOfDh14
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 58
Registered: 12-01-2007
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deftriver wrote:
For instance, level 2 7N2W, it's asks how you can avoid trapping the queen. It doesn't matter if you trap the queen, you can kill it on the diagonal arrow and there will be no spawns.

Sorry...
What?!

deftriver
Level: Delver

Rank Points: 77
Registered: 07-11-2007
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Sorry, I was looking at the wrong hold!

mxvladi
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 2505
Registered: 02-11-2008
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Can architect please mark Top: entrance unscorable? Since guard is unkillable nobody will be able to get scores there,

Go to your profile -> "My holds" -> "The Great Adventure 2" -> "Highscorable rooms". Find Top: entrance there and mark it unscorable.

Oh, and WARNING: if you want to mark anything except that room unscorable(so people with caravelnet membership won't be able to upload scores for that room) make sure there are no scores for that room already.

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[Last edited by mxvladi at 07-20-2010 11:56 AM]

noma
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1594
Registered: 11-22-2006
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So how exactly does one pass thru The King's Castle: 1E? The scripting triggers the orb to open the gates as I approach the king, but then--no matter what I try--on the next turn the orb is triggered again and the gates shut. Never mind. For others who might get stuck: solve the room, listen to the king, exit and come back.

Also, unless there is still unexplained scripting in The Rock Valley 4N (which jbluestein referred to on the Architecture thread and which I can't figure out) that room should also be marked unscoreable.

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[Last edited by noma at 07-20-2010 05:59 PM]

jbluestein
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1670
Registered: 12-23-2005
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noma wrote:
So how exactly does one pass thru The King's Castle: 1E? The scripting triggers the orb to open the gates as I approach the king, but then--no matter what I try--on the next turn the orb is triggered again and the gates shut. Never mind. For others who might get stuck: solve the room, listen to the king, exit and come back.

Also, unless there is still unexplained scripting in The Rock Valley 4N (which jbluestein referred to on the Architecture thread and which I can't figure out) that room should also be marked unscoreable.

Unexplained scripting, we has it. The room in question, nominally a secret room, is indeed solvable. (Don't look too hard around here for the entrance. It's elsewhere.)

Josh

____________________________
"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck

jbluestein
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1670
Registered: 12-23-2005
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Probably time for me to weigh in on this one, since I did a lot of early testing on it.

This hold demonstrates that the architect has some skill in puzzle design. There are a few fairly good puzzles in here.

Unfortunately, the hold as a whole is tedious -- individual rooms have overlong and unnecessary solutions, and the hold in general has a lot of rooms that feel the same. This gets rounded out by scripting which is at its best clunky and at its worst completely unpredictable.

I give this hold a 4 for fun (rounding up from 3.5) and 3 brains of difficulty.

Josh

____________________________
"Rings and knots of joy and grief, all interlaced and locking." --William Buck

martz
Level: Smiter
Rank Points: 416
Registered: 08-19-2005
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I've just finished this hold. I understand it's a sequel of sorts, and although I've played The Great Adventure previously, I don't remember much about it.

This is a fairly long, linear (by TCB standards) hold. On the whole, this hold stacks up quite well for a medium difficulty hold - despite the size there isn't much in the way of room duplication. Some of the rooms are overly long - particularly in the first level which could put off some of the less experienced players. The story is fairly forgettable, contains some spelling/punctuation issues and contains an (in my opinion) unnecessary profanity. Some of the scripting is just plain broken (as mentioned above) but it shouldn't affect the completion of this hold. There are a few rooms which seem to be a case of "chuck a load of monsters in and see what happens". I must make a special mention to The King's Castle: 2N1E - not only did the tar and tile combination give me a headache but the thought of clearing all the tar nearly made me give up.

I know this seems a fairly negative review but there are definately signs here that the architect can improve and produce some better quality holds in the future - this hold might have been better by trimming out some of the rooms and making it half the size - I know there seems to be a lot of instances of new architects wanting to create some massive hold when a smaller more tight-knit hold would be better.

I would rate this hold as follows:

Difficulty: 4
Fun: 4



____________________________
Without struggle, there is no progress, so get up, get out, and go make the rest of your life the best of your life; you deserve to live the life that YOU want to live...

Progress - Gavin G

bomber50
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 872
Registered: 09-18-2006
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I more or less agree with everything martz said above, but I'll add a few things in myself.

This hold is tedious. Incredibly tedious. There are many rooms where you have to wade through massive waves of tarstuff. There are many rooms with tons of roach queens where you'll be spending lots of time slowly clearing wave after wave until you finally can get to the queens. Many rooms tend to be very long, annoying and/or frustrating. This is not good. It took a lot of enjoyment away from the hold overall.

Despite the many poor rooms of this hold, there were a couple good ones. Tiki Island 1S3W is an interesting sort of mimic puzzle that I've never seen before. The Rock Valley 2N and 3N are nice manipulation puzzles that require some thought. But most people are likely to quit after the first level, so they will never get to see these.

Ultimately, the rooms just needed some downsizing. Unless you are going for high scores, enjoy tedium or feel like playing a very bad hold, you should never even bother with this one.