Jake

Correct.

No no, as all the kids are leaving camp during the closing cutscene you can see Dart peek out of the outhouse.

LISTEN YOU :( :( :( :( I would like to revise my statement: "Walmart sells Doom 3 Doom games? Heh. I guess it hasn't got a boob in it anywhere, just violently dismembered soldiers, and hell."

Walmart sells Doom 3? Heh. I guess it hasn't got a boob in it anywhere, just violently dismembered soldiers, and hell.

If you can't find doom 2 for free on your own, you should probably just buy it direct from the developer. It would make you awesome instead of lame.

Reminds me quite a bit of the Simpsons and TMNT arcade games...

Think of all the discreet at-work porn browsing you could do with that thing! "Do not look near my hands - either of them!"

Nein.

Happy birthday!

Hot.

Still good but nowhere near as awesome as the original's intro. I like the dancing king and queen though.

I can't wait to get home and download this...

Get your own damn computer

I'd love one of those for final cut pro, which has a ridiculously extreme keyboard layout that I still don't know, but it would be far cheaper to just get one of these for instance.

http://www.chap-o.com/page5.html Best!

The gameplay in the basic braining level is the most simplistic of the entire game. The further you get the more inventive things get. Possibly they should have started you off with something more amazing? They didn't unfortunately, but the game gets increasingly awesome (until the last level, which is more of a step down than up, but ignore that for now).

Heh Steve you joke but I think Psychonauts really would have done better if the commercials were entirely about how you had the ability to burn everything and punch everything, blast things with your crazy laser beam, "see through the eyes of your enemy" (not actually relevant but sounds compelling) and climb buildings and beat up monsters and stuff. I believe that's part of the reason Tim and Double Fine made the game have all that stuff anyway - so it would be more approachable to a regular everyday gamer. The thing is, it seems both DF and Majesco forgot any of that was in the game by the time they got around to selling it.

Thanks Chris I'll think about that and try to respond if I can. I may fail to. I don't want to post anything that's more half-cooked than what I've already written, as you would leap on it and mutilate it before I had a chance to make anything resembling a point But for the record I agree with you, though I think I'm slightly more right than you're implying I am. I think the attitude I described is present throughout the whole scene, just to very varying degrees, and for different reasons from person to person or group to group. I meant to write about the fucked up side of "the mainstream" too but I couldn't be bothered in part because I figured everyone already thought about that plenty.

If I was Walter I would have deleted this thread by now.

The existence of "the indie scene" has a tendency to piss me off. Heavy proponents of "the indie scene" are fucking saboteurs. You know who I mean - the people who hate something the moment it becomes popular, who deliberately try to keep things from the mainstream or act generally snobby about them because they think that for some reason they're too good for "the public" who will inevitably ruin them? I don't personally see how people who strive to keep brilliant pieces of "the indie scene" out of public hands are any better than the guided-by-fear Marketdroids who stifle creative projects and refuse to fund things that they think the public won't understand. I can understand wanting to hold something back, to keep it personal because ideas and creations need to gestate and congeal, be fully realized, before they get tossed to the masses for consumption, but it really turns me off that "keep it in the group and away from everyone else" is a carved-in-stone mantra of a very large group of creative people and a larger group of aficionados of their work in our culture. Yeah, some things will probably be ruined by exposure to the public, but isn't it better to have loved and lost than to never loved at all? In the making of an omlette hasn't one got to break a few eggs? Live and learn? Back to the drawing board? You can't "see what sticks" if you never "throw things against the wall." It all feels painfully selfish and backwards to me. It makes me want to stab people.* I realize that this is completely ignoring the fact that a lot of brilliant work is never given the chance to get mass exposure, which is something I haven't really spent enough time thinking about to successfully rant about for hundreds of words so that will be saved for another time. That said, basically I am disappointed that some peoples response to the inability to get things published in the mass market is to come to the conclusion that "it's better that way, they don't deserve it, they wouldn't get it anyway." So, I think marketing and shareholders and the like are a huge virus in the creative process, severely inhibit mainstream culture's ability to be good, and therefore significantly inhibit its slow betterment of society. That came out sounding way more extreme than I meant it. I am generally an optimist. I think despite a lot of minor and major setbacks, society and "the human race" are generally progressing forward. I sort of picture it like a bubbling eruption on its way up a volcano. I don't necesarilly mean that we're heading for the top where we'll explode in a liquid hot shower of enlightenment - I'm more talking about the churning and stuff on the way up. Watching videos of lava shooting up through a volcano (or more commonly, well animated cartoons depicting it), you see that everything is going up on average, but occasionally little bits jut ahead of everything else, and then the rest of it catches up. That's a really simple and stupid analogy, but in my mind that's sort of how it works. Someone like Douglas Adams comes along (sorry to keep using him as an example, I'm just in the middle of one of his books which happens to be one of my favorite books) and manages to jut forward a little bit - a little prick standing above the rest of the flow, sort of paving the way, if you know what i mean, for everyone else to follow and catch up with. I think if we had less people holding back creative ideas that get to "the truth" for various reasons (see: marketdroids, culture snobs), we'd have a lot more little blips showing us the way and we'd move a lot faster. I am very optimistic about life, and about culture, and I am tired of idiots and haters putting it down, writing it off as stupid, or sabotaging the potential benefits out of selfishness, idiocy, or fear. I am apparently majorly hippying out, except minus weird eastern enlightenment and pot, and instead with the internet. Sorry about that. It all makes sense and sounds less stupid in my head, and there's more to what I'm trying to say than what I've figured out how to mumble out onto this page, but maybe that just means I'm insane and/or mentally retarded. Anyway thanks for reading this, or, thanks for scrolling down to the end to see how long it is! Also I don't think I managed to ever get to the "human condition" or "nature of comedy" parts, in any direct way. There was some stuff from "The Road to Mars" by Eric Idle that I meant to mention that sort of tied it all together but I couldn't work it in, in part because I don't have that book anymore and can't find the quote on the internet. It was about a robot butler who was trying to discern the mathematical formula for comedy and somehow decided that comedy was a huge essential force in the universe which held it all together a bit like gravity, except since it was Levity it was the opposite of Gravity. Erm it makes sense in the book. The quote "Levity is the soul of wit" appears at some point. Errrrrrmm... Failure! My apologies. Thanks you've all been lovely.

Answer: THE INTERNET

It doesn't matter how much money you spend on advertising if you're not spending it to send out a compelling message that actually gets people interested in the game.

Muaha! C^2!!! Amazing. I still don't know how I was bothered to do half of the goofy "texture" things I did in that site design... Web Archive miraculously has a version of the site with some images intact.

www.chud.com - a decent site, but their format is weird - the feature on their index page isn't always the newest one so you have to always check the sidebar for updates www.darkhorizons.com - i used to read this site regularly but they redesigned and it got annoying www.comingsoon.net - people swear by this site but I can't get into it and erm of course the news page on www.rottentomatoes.com is occasionally interesting, as well as the rest of the site if you're into that. www.defamer.com is a frequently entertaining movie/hollywood blog but it's not very upcoming movie news centric

That concept is odd, but the game is very compelling, well made, and enjoyed by most people who play it once they can get over the fact that its premise and visual style are non-standard. Combine all that information and you should arrive at the conclusion that Majesco's #1 job when marketing the game was to figure out how to get people over that hump and make them willing to accept that crazy concept before they had to sheel out the 50 bucks and see for themselves that it was actually enjoyable. Majesco failed to do that.