Jake

Whats Mafia got to do with Halo? Yes, a sick and twisted world where some games that I like get cancelled (while others don't), and some games I dislike don't get cancelled (while others do!)! Arrgh!! Damn this existence!!!!!

Hot damn! Really! Well ... it's a pretty extreme amount of assets to give out. Doesn't seem DF's style or Majesco's or Microsofts really... maybe they were unleashed at the same time all those screenshots came out unintentionally but Gamespot and IGN just weren't interested in 3000 pieces of concept art...

The hell did you get these from? Beware that that link Moos is providing you with is Psychonauts Spoiler City. Most all major characters and locations are seen, and labeled and whatnot in the concept art and screens.

A friend of mine bought one of those and used it regularly but I suspect he owned it only because he liked owning crazy gadgets. It didn't seem to impair his game at all though.

It seems like as good an approximation of "true AI" or whatever as you're going to get in a game. Is all the dialogue in fable spoken by voice actors? I know that's unikely, but if so you're going to have to do it with a complex table of checkboxes which trigger pre-recorded sentence fragments, instead of writing the characters to somehow think for themselves... That is, unless you're going to ship human clones of the entire vioce acting cast along with every purchased copy to speak dialogue constructed on the fly

One gets the feeling that they were developing this show before Family Guy got picked up again, and then once Family Guy came back out of the blue they just decided to go with both of them. Kinda weird though. It's not as if The Simpsons invented the family sitcom, or even the animated one (there is a rather crap old Hanna Barbara animated family sitcom set in subibria called "just wait till your father gets home," which looked far more Family Guy than The Simpsons, for instance and you can't forget... The Flintstones). Family Guy probably owes its existence to The Simpsons (and possibly Ren & Stimpy) because The Simpsons re-paved the way for evening cartoon shows, but it's not some blatant ripoff if you watch one and then watch the other.

1 years?

I'm at work and feeling super bored. I challenge you lot to find me something interesting to read. Please?

Yeah yeah... How to keep an idiot busy for hours: Click here for more.

For the curious, there's the soundtrack. That said, you suck if you don't just pay for a copy of the game sometime.

I've heard a few times that George likes Sam & Max a decent amount. Apparently he was the first one to ask why the heck they didn't appear in the 20th anniversary logo movie, and he was also apparently not pleased to discover that the new game got canned, but that latter rumor I would definiely classify as extremely shaky (seems odd that George himself wouldn't know they were planning on cutting the game, even though the whole cancellation decision reeks of "middle management takes the reigns!")

What? I'm very confused.

Because his blog consists of good entries followed by all of us choking his comments pages with our own piss. Especially when we're commenting on things we've already commented on both here and AG ¬ ¬ Oh well, maybe he likes it.

I suspect there are some other Wes Anderson (Rushmore, Bottle Rocket, and The Royal Tenenbaums ... yes that guy) fans in here besides myself. I know at least Spaff is one. Anyway his current film is called "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and stars Bull Murray as an undersea documentary filmmaker ala Jacques Cousteau, except he's Bill Murray. It also seems to star Jeff Goldblum as the competing undersea documentary filmmaker. All the undersea creatures are stop-motion by the studio that did Nightmare Before Christmas for Burton and James and the Giant Peach for Disney. It looks like it good be good... A trailer for it came out yesterday in fact, which is why I'm posting this thread. From the trailer its obvious that Wes Anderson's usual visual style is firmly intact... and is not going to change. But that's probably a good thing. Good QuickTime Version Here (Inferior streaming Real and WMV versions available here.)

We're going to have to agree to disagree clearly. And as an aside, I think it's funny that in this conversation I've somehow assumed the role of "you play adventures for the puzzles," which is an outlook that I've argued very loudly against over at Adventure Gamers I'm not saying you play them for the puzzles, but I am saying that the puzzles are challenging. If the puzzles are a walk in the park, the game is really not very fun. It's not even a game. A good adventure should have challenging obstacles that take time for the player to solve, but also serve to further the story, and fit the characters. Puzzles as obstacles isn't what I mean. Oh fuck it Nevermind

That's true, but people who played Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 2 are going to be better at Grim Fandango than someone who sits down at it having never played an adventure game before. The puzzles are in the game for a reason - to challenge you. Some people are better at this than others, and it often comes down to experience playing games in the genre. Edit: "A book... and chess?" You're basically saying "a game" and "a movie." Adventure games aren't movies. Yes, "experiencing" them is a huge allure to the genre, a key facet for sure, but to deny that they have any gameplay is a little silly. BTW I'm not saying I don't partially agree with you -- I've written about this from something closer to your point of view before -- I just think you've taken this a little overboard.

How do you explain that people get better at adventure games with time then? Adventure games have a set of gameplay constraints and rules that hold true to every game in the genre, and people who really love them and spend time on them learn how to deftly manuver through just like any other type of game, and they get better at it with practice. One of the most simple techniques, an obvious one, developed by adventure gamers is "pick up everything you see." If you've played adventure games you probably know that one. If you haven't you have to learn it to suceed with any amount of efficiency. That's a very simple obvious example, but the fact that a strategy exists at all means something. Adventure games, and some other off beat genres, are just presented in a way thats pretty unlike most games, possibly due to the fact that in the case of adventure games, they try to strive for visual and narrative variety from game to game so you're tricked into thinking you're getting a different experience each time. There's not always a car in the middle of a screen surrounded by road, like there is for every racing game. In each new game there are always new gimmicks and twists you have to overcome and learn to manage with your existing rules of the genre that all players are familiar with, but that's how "new gameplay" or "unique features" works in basically any other game genre. I think your definition of "gameplay" is just too narrow. And that you probably need to play more adventure games.

I think BG&E is really close to an adventure game, and in some ways out-adventure-games many other recent adventures, but since they seemed to come at it from an action stance first and wove in the adventuring stuff on top of that I would be hesitant to label it strictly an adventure game. That was a poorly constructed sentence. Sorry about that. As Kingz said to me on IM the other day, and I think many will agree, BG&E's basic gameplay mechanics are basically where adventures should have been five years ago. I don't know if I agree when it comes to the parts of the game where you're exploring caves, finding door keys in mazes, sneaking past guards by kicking them over and over in the back of their suit, and fighting off random monsters with your staff, but for a lot of the rest of the game, yeah.

Its like Ecco the Dolphin... but evil.

Adventure games are a genre. If you don't believe me, ask any adventure game developer. However, if you're an editor for a console gaming news mag you might say that Adventure is more of a style, but they're operating from a completely different definition of the word. Lots of time has been wasted because of the two different meanings. And, just because most adventures don't happen in real time like most any other genre (except turn-based RPG and strategy) doesn't mean there's "no gameplay." Many turn based RPG's, or at least early ones like Dragon Warrior (one of the few I played through and am familiar with) are completely abstracted from anything resembling fighting or exploring or anything, it's just an icon moving about on a map and a lot of menu items, but those games still allegedly have "gameplay." What is so much more "gamey" about that than about controlling a picture of a guy who moves about in a picture of a town and picks up odd spools of thread, food, and small animals and combines them to use them on other obscure items in the picture of the town?

Take it outside you two.

:shifty: :shifty: :shifty:

There it is... don't know why its priced at $22 when games like Monkey Island 3 and Grim Fandango go for $10, but yeah. If you can stomach vintage FPS gameplay and graphics you'll probably like outlaws. It has an enjoyable story, hand animated cutscenes, and probably Clint Bajakian's best musical score. Just be sure to turn mouselook on before you play.

Right, it would be a bit retarded to not allow you to play the game unless you had an internet connection, but will anything beyond 1.0 be available to you without it, etc? Eg the 1.1 patch that fixes the last minute bug that slipped in which crippled the save/load feature and also accidentally removed all monsters from the levels due to a corrupt datafile.

My guess is that even if you buy the boxed copy, it's going to demand you connect to the internet via Steam for anything and everything anyway, it's not going to be like picking up a copy of HL1 now where if you really want you can avoid Steam if you steer clear of multiplayer.