> While I'm at it, why don't these games have a Help button that tells you what you should be doing next? It's very frustrating when playing these games and you don't know what you are supposed to be doing. Clicking HELP would analyze your position in the game and tell you what you need to do to advance further (for example, the Help system might say, "Go to the forest area - you need to find a larger weapon"). This narrows down what you need to do.

That'd probably be a fairly simple task for the smaller AGL games, but even if it came for free, I don't think it would be worth it. Making a universal "help" button (or more likely, a constant option provided in each game) would be like giving every player a walkthrough, minus the chances of looking too far ahead and getting spoiled, I suppose. Making it *potentially* easy for any player to finish any game would, I think, take away the distinction of getting your name into the Halls of Fame.

Also, putting the sources of hints in-game would probably kill most activity on the Hints Board. Over the years I have rather enjoyed reading all the interaction there.

All of that is not to say that I think the idea is without merit, though. In fact, I had already planned to implement such an analytic feature into my current work-in-progress, but for administrators to use, not players. A player asks for some help on the Hints Board, and the situation is too murky for other people to figure it out, so an administrator uses the feature and provides some hints almost immediately.