Jake

You should be able to look at the paper to see what the different symptoms are. For instance

I hope Apple just hires that guy and pays him a shitload to develop MacOS 11 or whatever they'd call it.

Once you've given the form to Sybil and it's sitting on her desk, ask sybil to psychoanalyse you. And Toblix, yeah all six episodes will definitely come out. Three is already done, four is being finished up in the next couple of weeks, the environment modelers are already well into five, and the writers are working on plotting out six.

Wow I forgot about that thread. That's beautiful.

It's .... moronic to not back stuff up. I was one who was always in the "I know, I know, yeah yeah" camp for ages, but at one point at college the computers I used to do the school newspaper crapped out and we lost all our templates... and then I wanted to kill myself. And now I always use a computer with a DVD-R and back up my Projects folder onto a few disks at least two or three times a year. I should probably do it more often than that, but who can be bothered?

My garage smells like Halloween! It's a good smell to have around. Also sometimes I'm walking somewhere and it smells like the inside of Pirates of the Carribbean. Also airplanes smell and taste like plastic and barf, regardless of how clean the air allegedly is in those things. There was a drinking fountain in my elementary school which tasted like airplanes.

if you need thumb or Mojo things I can provide. Your computer explodes too often.

Seeing the UI on the iPhone made me wish that real computers could work that way, at least some of the time. The way you can zoom in on photos by just moving two fingers apart apart (in fact using a mimicry of the exact gesture people do in the air to describe zooming in on a shot when they're talking about a movie with a friend), or flip through a series of album covers in a way representational of how you do that in a record store, or on your shelf at home (only without having to actually deal with a shelf) is so awesome. I wouldn't want to give up my mouse and keyboard for some tasks (rapid tactile typing, pixel precise image manipulation), but it would be so nice if you could move a window out of the way by just touching it on your screen with your finger, and throwing it off to the side. Or if you could re-sort a list, or drag a clip in a video editor by just ... dragging it. Getting rid of one or two layers of abstraction - input devices and UI and other go-betweens - that sit between your brain and your work would be so appealing. Our natural instinct, if you want to move a piece of paper off your desk, is to just pick it up and move it. It's also a lot quicker than to find its title bar, click, drag, and let go (or to deal with minimizing to a task bar or dock, then hunting it down later). Then a friend of mine sent me this article about a guy who has prototyped an amazingly elaborate demo of a system similar to the iPhone's "Multi-touch" thing, but this guy has extrapolated a zillion amazing UI possibilities. Check out the amazing video.From crazy showy things like flying around a 3d earth to more practical (and, to me, more amazing) things like database searches, sorting through a collection of video and images, and just browsing around in a windowed interface between a web browser and some files, he covers a lot of stuff. I hope that something like this is the near future of computers. Maybe Apple will bring some of their user interface concepts from the iPhone to future Mac models, or maybe this guy will hook up with Google or someone, or maybe something totally different will happen... but I want a computer that will let me interact with my data like in that video. I know at first glance it looks like another geek out over the computer from Minority Report, but this guy's - and the iPhone's - approaches to how a user could interact with their data via touch actually seem like they would save you time, and be more accessible to everyday people than a standard Mac/Win9x-style mouse-driven desktop-metaphor UI. Also, yes I know this has been circling the web for a week or so now so you probably saw it already. But it's awesome!

I don't quite understand why some people think that Telltale employees are all sitting on thrones made from spare Wii dev kits and pulishing contracts.

That will eventually appear as well. It's a matter of spending a lot of money versus spending some money.

Happy irthday, Marek! Hope getting older worked out for you!

Wooo happy birthday Lawrence! I hear Chris is flying over just to attend your party.

Microphones and speakers are pretty similar in construction... Maybe the Wii goes both ways, so to speak. I played a few rounds of WarioWare today at work and wasn't disappointed. It looks like Smooth Moves will be my first non-Zelda Wii acquisition.

Hey guys!

You would spend about 5 times longer on front-loading content than a TV show production team does, and pray 30 times harder that it's a hit. Also, your ratings would die in the third season, when the audience began to fragment and lose the plot, and wonder if the writers really knew how to end it.

Also the rumor of Apple not releasing any APIs / SDKs / What-have-you's for the iPhone are also true. They're taking the same approach to 3rd party iPhone software as they do to 3rd party games on iPods, and pretty much all content sold through the iTunes store: You can't, unless we let you. From some iPhone-related interviews with Steve Jobs it sounds like Apple will be keeping a very tight lid on what gets made and released software-wise for the iPhone, because they don't want people mucking stuff up.

Saw the iPhone at Macworld today. It looked like the iPhone. Awesome.

I've had two iPods, and both have become fairly beat up from living in my pocket... but hey guess what... it's an iPod. I use it all the time. It's not going to look like it came out of the box forever... that's not the point. Both iPods looked great for the first year, then got a bit scuffed, then maybe a huge gash appeared, but they both still work (my original one's headphone jack is finally starting to chip beyond use, after 5 years of ownership, the first 4 years of which it was being used for hours a day). If you're worried about things you use getting scuffed, the simple solution is to either not buy them or not use them. Scary "it has to stay mint" tech fetishes have to end. An iPhone is not a collectible, it's a tool.

You've just proven why, in my opinion, there shouldn't be a "Mega Monkey" mode. These games aren't made with employees pocket change in their spare time, they're made on a very regimented budget that can't slip in any direction. That means that every penny spent has to show up on screen. Why would money be - effectively - wasted making content deliberately designed just for one pocket of our overall audience. If you, a pretty heavy gamer, are admitting that you wouldn't play the harder version (and therefore wouldn't see a bunch of content that we spent money building), why bother spending the budget on that? Also, this probably makes me a bastard, but if it comes to a point where you're going to lose someone no matter what decision you reach, I think the group who would flat out refuse to play the game because they thought it was too easy would in fact be much smaller than the group who enjoyed the interactivity, humor, and storytelling and couldn't be bothered one way or the other about hwo much head scratching was involved because they were simply enjoying themselves playing it, and therefore the people who demand "difficulty or I'm not playing" would be the first to go. I'm speaking wholly for myself here and not for Telltale in any way, because I have no idea what the rest of the company thinks. That's just my totally unresearched, hypothetical breakdown of audience size and relevance to the continued success of a series like Sam & Max.

No need to be too condescending here, man! I was just joking around.

If is, in fact, also called E here.

hint:

Theres a very good chance that when all six episodes are done and Telltale can actually spend time maintaining a bunch of patches and addons (instead of, you know, releasing the games), there will likely be higher quality voice files available, either on the season CD or as a downloadable add-on or both. But also I agree with Met. And I did the UI design but I don't control what resolutions the game runs at. Widescreen isn't supported right now because our camera system -not to mention all the shot compositions both in cutscenes and during gameplay - are all based around 4:3 aspect ratio. Its obviously totally doable to support widescreen if we wanted/needed to, but it would be a lot of work to suddenly start doing in the middle of full production, when the current already tight schedule doesnt allow for anyone dealing with two aspect ratios for every shot. So yeah, for right now anything outside of 4:3 aspect ratio (including 1280x1024, which is slightly taller than 4:3) is out.

I helped make the site and now sometimes stop by.