The clown in the pool room, with his REEEEEEEEEED BALLOOOOOOOOON.
The woman who occasionally beckons you down a hallway.
In one part of The 11th Hour, Ed Knox gives you a warning. Then his head randomly explodes.
Who expected the random appearance of "Let's Make a Real Deal!" at the end of The 11th Hour? Carl is just as confused.
When you head towards the telescope in The 7th Guest, a rush of wind threatens to blow open the doors leading outside.
Padding: The 11th Hour is practically one Fetch Quest after another, only they're split up by puzzles.
Polished Port: The iOS port of 7th Guest eliminates the most annoying part of the original game by speeding up the transitions and load times. This is averted by hotspots that are often too small for the tiny iPhone screen. Some puzzles were also ommitted entirely, including the Microscope puzzle (see the Trivia section for the explanation behind that omission).
Porting Disaster: The CD-i version—and yes, such a thing did exist. On the one hand, the transition scenes are much smoother and the sound quality is excellent; on the other hand, the joystick interface is very clumsy, some scenes are missing their background music, and the loading times are both irritatingly common and inexcusably long (with one puzzle taking almost twenty minutes to solve with the lowest number of moves). Some of the puzzles are also missing, including the infamous soup can puzzle, which may push the port into Porting Distillationterritory for some.
Special Effects Failure: The scene of Robin walking towards Dr. Thorton's office blatantly shows the set's bluescreen soundstage down the hall.
The 7th Guest has the Microscope puzzle, which is a game of Ataxx against the AI. The AI's intelligence is based on how fast a computer's processor can figure out the best possible set of moves in a set amount of time. It was far more possible to beat the game back in 1993; nowadays, you need to lock the available processor speed via an emulator if you want to beat it.
The 11th Hour has the Beehive puzzle, which is pretty much the same puzzle played out on a hexagonal board.
The 11th Hour's concluding game of Pente counts. In order to see all three endings, you need to beat the game three separate times. The first time around, the player gets the first move. On the second playthrough, Stauf gets the first move (which is a hefty advantage all on its own). For the third go-round, Stauf gets the first move and gets to look at least five moves ahead. As with the Microscope puzzle, processing speeds have made this game much harder to defeat.
Uncanny Valley: By today's standards, the low-res full motion video and the blocky CG backgrounds can seem creepier than what they're meant to represent.