Marek

That's a fairly hilarious game title.

I dunno. Seems like a game that could sell really well if it properly rides off the critical acclaim that ICO had. Now it's all "it's the sequel to ICO!!!" and tons of people will actually be virally promoting it when it comes out to make it a potential hit, instead of with ICO where people gradually found out about it over a long period of time because it didn't sell enough in the first month.

What? You think the best thing about Edge are its columns? Your opinion sucks. Clearly Edge's columns are all horrible and should be skipped, except for the excellent BiffoVision. Their reviews are great and anyone who disagrees with that probably does so because at one time Edge has given that person's favorite game a 3/10, as they sometimes do. But that doesn't make them bad reviewers. ¬ OK I'm done.

Looks like MS wants the Xbox 2 to appeal more to the Japanese audience. They also signed that former Square guy a few days ago. (The man with the really wrong moustache.)

It's as fun as any physics simulation, really. There's quite a few weird possibilities in the game. I couldn't care less about the JFK theme, though.

I think EDGE was hated during 2002-2004 because it didn't seem to enjoy games much during that period, and hence became a bit whiny and elitist-sounding. Of course, it's hard to blame them, cause those were particularly bad years for gaming. Now they're awesome again, but the hatred has lingered. EDGE is probably the best mag around. You'll either hate or love the new layout (I love it), but the content is undeniably solid. I enjoy the magazine most for its special features, such as their interviews and Time Extend (an elaborate look back at a game that's a couple years old). The BiffoVision column, in its new format, is the most hilarious thing ever. Like once they had a really funny excerpt from a supposed Half-Life 2: The Movie screenplay, and in the current issue there's a colorful "Is your boyfriend a Video game addict?" test from a fictional magazine called Girl Talk. Great stuff. I've heard the youngsters these days prefer Games[tm] though. I still haven't bothered reading that mag, as anyone who reads it is clearly wrong and communist.

I suppose Wanda's Wrath wasn't an option?

I was just browsing through some of my old stuff and found some Psychonauts pictures I forgot about. You might know from interviews that Tim Schafer defined the characters of the different kids on the Psychonauts campground using Friendster profiles and posting messages "in character". I dug up a couple of pics from Dogen's character profile. He briefly appears in the trailer. I didn't ask permission to post these but they're almost a year old, so I'm assuming that no one minds. Look away if you don't want to see any spoilers, though given that this is from the game's character bible probably only a few percent of this stuff (if any at all) made it into the actual game. This was just Tim's way to describe some of the different personalities. Also keep in mind these pages were intended for Tim's own use, so they obviously might not be as awesomely written as a Double Fine Action News post or actual dialog from the game.

Whoops, there's two broken images. I fixed one just now. The other I will fix later.

I gave up on Final Fantasy 7 after the first one and a half hours. What a snoozefest. Monopoly is also way overrated. Almost everything is decided at the start. Worst gameplay ever.

Commander Keen 7 - 9 :(:(

Does Trip Hawkins know what he's saying? I know very little about the guy, but I do know that he's universally seen, by pretty much all of the industry, as a monolithic idiot who is best avoided. A good impression is this e-mail, which he wrote on a bad day. (The comments on that page are similar to what I've seen elsewhere.)

I have just rented a new apartment. It is big. I have no furniture. ¬

"Although you might think these faces are familiar, trust me: this is a whole new world." So, really, they could have just made an actual new world then?

If they sliced those up into 60 levels of an equal total length, would you approve of it more? The number of levels doesn't say anything about the size of the game... ¬

Despite having seen Psychonauts several times, watching the footage of Coach' Basic Braining level re-blew me away. Take note of the background especially. Holy crap. Those clouds and things are awesome. And the horizon is lit kind of like how the background of a stage play might be lit. It's hard to explain. But hot damn, this game is pretty and awesomely polished.

I tend to use sites like GameSpot like a giant database. When someone tells me about some game I look it up at GameSpot and ta-da, I have all the information I'll ever need. I don't exactly "read" GameSpot et al at all (har!). Except maybe the news section, but I don't think the majority of GameSpot readers follow their news from day to day, given that a lot of it is industry/business-oriented. A magazine I can read wherever I want, and it's quicker and easier to browse, so I often see things I'd never have clicked on a website. Magazines have a chance to do things a lot more in-depth than websites. If magazines were to ditch their news sections entirely, and stop trying to have the "world exclusive review!", and re-focus on doing feature articles, background pieces, and mix up their reviews a lot, they would benefit in the long run. They could make a reputation for themselves. (By "mix up their reviews" I mean "make them interesting". In music or film mags they sometimes sit down with a certain expert to rate 3 things, or have a panel, or some interesting sidebar with factoids, a custom layout, or generally make their reviews more of an insightful story.) Some magazines are really trying, such as Edge and alledgedly GamesTM (still haven't checked it out yet, because its layout is chaos and extremely deceiving).

It appears game developers themselves don't necesserily have more taste than gamers or game journalists.

You're using that smiley too much. Stop it. :\

Nice animation, Rodi And hi FGM!

This thread is just for those who have finished Half-Life 2, and want to discuss their general impressions after finishing it, and perhaps discuss what the fuck it was all about. Let's keep things inside spoiler tags, but those who have not played or finished Half-Life 2 are hereby extra warned to close this window immediately. You really don't want any spoilers. HL2 has many memorable moments that you need to see unspoiled. That said... let's discuss...

Congrats dude!! Ben: :clap::clap::clap::clap::clap:

I think Syberia is the opposite of many other adventure games today in that it had a concept first and a game second. Syberia had a unified creative direction led by Benoit Sokal, who drew concept art for everything that went into the game. That's led to a strong visual identity, and (the potential for-) a really good atmosphere. Syberia definitely has a soul somewhere in there. The trouble is, of course, that Syberia lacked good gameplay and little things that keep the player interested. So I think the first step in its development was done really really well (developing the world and the concept) but the second step was done not so well at all. I think 95% of the games get step 1 all wrong. Some of them also get step 2 wrong. But few games get step 1 right, which is why Syberia stands out even though it's not really all that great. I enjoyed Syberia though, despite its flaws and I hope that on his next two games (Lost Paradise and Aquarica) Sokal will work collaborate with a gameplay designer.

Note: this post was not supposed to be this long when I started out. Whoops. I think the decline in high-quality adventure games is relative to the decline of the adventure genre as a whole. The genre stabilized in recent years, but there definitely was a huge plunge after about 1997, but I think we still have as much stinkers as we had in Ye Olde Days. That said, there's now so few adventure games (about 20 to 25 commercial titles a year) that comparitively few landmark titles come out that set good examples that other games can follow. There's been a huge brain drain; the creative people at Sierra, LucasArts (and studios that wanted to be like them) have moved on to doing IT work, concept work at Pixar, making platform games, writing books, or running joke-of-the-day mailinglists. They weren't fixated on adventure games as a form, they just used it as an interesting medium to do their thing. It's a medium with its own set of advantages and shortcomings that can either be played to its strengths or... not. In my view, the current generation of adv game developers is trying hard to copy off the templates they made, but they usually only get as far as copying the outer shell - the superficial appearances of the classic point-and-click adventure - and not arriving at a deeper understanding of the delicate structure and creative possibilities of the adventure game. I'm not even talking about gameplay here. This is really all about "what things of your own are you going to pour into this existing mold?" I mean, sure, I think most adventure game devs today start out wanting to make games like the Big Ones of the past (e.g. Myst, Indiana Jones, Gabriel Knight, whatever) but then they drum up features, characters and settings that fit into what we're used to as labeling an adventure game. I don't think enough adventure game developers think along the lines of "hey, wouldn't it be great to make a narrative game about this guy who works in this diner and then one day blah blah blah", or "let's make a game about roaches!" or "let's make a game where you play a day in the life of a street-cop and, you know, each morning you talk to your buddies and have donuts and then WHOOM a murder". They're thinking: we need a p-n-c adventure, so let's get the List of Ingredients... female heroine, check. Gloomy, faux-mysterious or surreal (in a 3D Studio Max checkerboards-and-crystal-spheres surreal kind of way) atmosphere? Check. Boring interiors? Check. Something about atlantis/pyramids/templar knights/mayan mythology/jules verne? Checketycheckcheck triple check combo. Before DOTT came out no one had ever really done an animated cartoon game like that. They would've probably never done DOTT if they had thought of it as an adventure game first and everything else second. The same goes for Beneath A Steel Sky and its gritty comic-book feel (this is just another arbitrary example). Revolution would never have done that game if they thought of Lure of the Temptress as the only visual or conceptual form that adventure games could take. I think some adventure game developers need to in fact forget that they are making adventure games. For the first couple of months of development maybe they should think of what they're doing as making a movie, or a short story, or a play, or a comic strip, or just something you can tell their friends about and get them excited about the idea before even showing any artwork. Whatever works for them to get them to let go. Then they can go to their adventure game engine and use it to construct something that can proudly stand on it's own. There's too much focus on the form of the genre and not enough focus on creating a coherent and well-realized world people want to explore or play in as a character. We need those kind of games to take the helm of the genre. Right now it's at drift, releasing the same crap over and over again -- crap that isn't inherently crap but just ill-conceived design-wise and badly written. I'm sick of the games that get 2,5, 3 or 3,5 stars at Adventure Gamers, when with a more confident and self-contained approach they could have been 4 or 4,5 star games. I feel that something is definitely bubbling out there waiting to get out... oops no, not that -- I'm talking about some kind of awareness in the adventure game community (both amongst players and designers) that we're close to getting back where we left the genre off, but this vague awareness is only noticable if you're really really close to the genre and its community. I just hope it will manifest itself in better games a year or two down the line. I think TMOS might be a prelude to something even greater, and Martin seems to be amongst the people who get it (hi there Martin), but it's a very slow and delicate development that still needs further encouragement. I'm getting a little bit optimistic but I'm also very impatient. Wow, another one of these rants and I'll probably break out in maniacal laughter. Sorry for the giant post.