DQ9, Professor Layton, and Sam and Max

· 285 words · 2 minute read

My last 2 weeks have been utterly consumed by DQ9. I completely forgot about all other games for the entire time since that has been released. Forgot about blogging too…

Of course, Sam and Max 304 came out today, which punctured by DQ9 balloon slightly. I’ve already finished the episode though, so I’ll probably go back to DQ9 soon.

I figured though… While I was at it I should take a small break from DQ9 and try something else different. Thus, I spent a bit more time on Professor Layton.

I don’t know if it’s translation errors, but this game has the same problem as many other logic puzzles/lateral thinking problems I’ve encountered before. Practical holes that seem perfectly reasonable to follow. In this case, a typical liars problem where a completely eaten fish, where only 1 of the 3 characters involved is a liar. The first says he ate the fish, the second says he SAW the first eat the fish, and the third saying that the second and third did not eat the fish. The fact that the second one said “Saw” left a perfectly good loophole that I thought was the solution. B could be lying because he could have just not observed A eating the fish at all, while A actually did eat the fish. Their loophole was instead to say that the fish was eaten by all 3, and that the third one was lying. I wish they would look through puzzles for alternate solutions… Of course, they did the standard barber in a remote town bit, but at least they qualified it sufficiently that the typical problem didn’t exist. (The questions rarely state that the barber must be clean-shaven…)