toblix

Oh, no! It seems that when they were admitting mistake, they weren't talking about Commandos 3, which I've played and hated, but Commandos: Strike Force, which I haven't played. Oh, wait, he's still saying it'll be closer to Commandos 2, which is great, since it's an one of the best playing, best looking games ever. Oh, and I loved Desperados too. Especially the action-queuing was neat, where you could queue an action for each character and then trigger them all at once. Both Desperados and Commandos 2 (more so than Commandos, I thought) had absolutely awesome levels.

Could it be that they're standing in the same direction at first, so when you shout "behind you", both turn 180 degrees, so one is still looking at the chest. However, if you first make them stare at each other, they're both facing the chest, so when you tell them to turn 180 degrees ("behind you") they're both facing away from the chest? If so, that's stupid. edit: Not stupid, but awesome and badly implemented/explained.

Awesome pic again. Why are you able to take awesome pictures of yourself next to cool game people? I mean, that's Kane!

Aweome! Also, is that an Gay Theft Auto shirt you're wearing?

Based on Shadow Complex's's "story" so far, why in the hell did they have to "create a universe"? The story's genericness is akin to that of Persian Gulf Inferno on the Amiga. Basically, "there's a guy who has to kill a bunch of bad guys in a underground base". Maybe there's a bunch of story sequences later on in the game, but so far it's not exactly Lord of the Rings.

What reports? Also, that some of the developers are republican is probably hard to avoid with any game.

I finished the last book in The Dark Tower (just mistyped that as The Dark Downer) last night (or this morning, more like) and I'm still not sure what I think. I read Jake's comment about not reading the ending ending, but I, page muncher and resolution-wanter that I am, read that too. I started "reading" the series as audio books quite a while back, as I had an hour walk to and from school every day. I got as far as half-way into the fourth book (Wizard and Glass) when I stopped for some reason. I thought it was amazing, and loved the story and the fantasy world with its unexplained bits of modern crap in it. Some months ago I started again, and read the whole series from the start. I finished Wizard and Glass still loving it, but it's like something changed between that and the next book (Wolves of the Calla) Ah, just noticed the three last books were published in 2003, 2004 and, again, 2004. The metafiction stuff (which he sort of tries to "defend" in the ending ending, I don't know... It felt sort of wanky, but if that's really how he saw the story going (him claiming everything just "comes to him"), that's the way it is, but it felt like he was rushing to tie everything (everything) together by the end. I'm a sucker for that sort of thing, connections between books, and I loved that there's a lot of hinting at the tower series in his other, unrelated, books, but towards the end he was just (seemingly) grabbing shit left and right and pulling them into the "main story". Especially the last character came from fucking nowhere (unless I missed some important point earlier). It was really disappointing to have it end like this. It's almost as if it'd been better if I had just stopped when I did, and not read the last three books. Alas! I always crave endings and explanations, and had to know what happened, and I guess I got what I deserved, even though King berated me for it right before giving it to me. I don't know if the last half was a rush job, just to rid himself of having this unfinished tale lying around, or if he just ran out of juice at that point, but I guess it doesn't matter. Luckily his "connections" are one-way, so I'm still able to enjoy IT and The Stand, which both are both awesome and great, as separate works.

I don't know if anything has been said with regards to sequels or DLC, but my guess is that, with these two facts: People don't necessarily want to play a game with Card's name on it, anywhere. I've never started an Xbox 360 game, and seen that the five other people online are all playing that same game before ... they'll be making an awesome sequel that's not related to Card's fiction in any way. My guess is the connection is more of a marketing thing than a real story connection anyway, and with the amazing response Shadow Complex has gotten, I don't think they need that anymore.

It seems to me you can get a level of quality and detail in both the characters and animations when doing a game in 2D that I haven't seen in any 3D game. The best looking adventure games I know of are the 2D ones made right before the shift to 3D was made (CMI, the Broken Sword games). I also think all the VGA adventure games still look awesome -- Monkey Island, Legend of Kyrandia, Beneath a Steel Sky, Simon the Sorceror, you name it -- but I can totally see why that's not a viable option for anything but niche games today. It's no secret that the graphic style of the TellTale games goes hand in hand with low poly count. I'm not saying it looks bad, because it doesn't -- it's gorgeous and sweet-looking, but take a look at people's sleeves, look at the environment. Everything's blocky and the level of detail of things is generally very low. Then play Broken Sword 2 and tell me it doesn't look better than any 3D adventure game in existence. I don't know if there's a big market for an adventure game with high-resolution hand-drawn graphics. I know it would have even lower system requirements than any 3D adventure game, I know it could look amazing, with native 1920x1200 hand-painted, hand-animated graphics, and I know I'd buy it at once. There could very well not be a market at all. TellTale could, for all I know, have market researched the hell out of this and have all the numbers. Also, of course there's a bunch of stuff you simply can't do with 2D graphics, which is a perfectly good reason to go 3D. I'm not saying 3D is wrong, I'm just saying I prefer the look and feel of every 2D adventure game I've played over that of any 3D adventure game I've played.

I would also prefer a 2D art style like the first games, but I think that for some reason 2D adventure games are harder to sell. It could be the same thinking that caused all game series to "go 3D" back in the day, still in effect, a belief that people only want 3D and will only pay for 3D, and that 2D adventures are only for indie developers that would've done 3D if they could. I wonder if TellTale would make a 2D adventure game if they knew it would sell (as well as 3D). I mean, do they themselves prefer 3D to 2D, or is it purely a market decision?

Just finished it, and it was great, although I still liked the first one better. Jesus, they're still using that sound compression. We've been over this before with the S&M games, and I don't get why they're doing it. The female characters' s-es sound really horrible. They could probably fix this by increasing the game size by a couple of hundred kBs. I liked the Flotsam Island environment better than the fish island. There's just something about the theme/palette (glowy purple cave) and layout... it felt less "populated" than Flotsam, although that's probably a result of there being loads of other islands this time around. Some of the quests felt really unfinished... The one where you have to get the guys to turn around... I still don't know why I solved it. I think it had something to do with getting them to turn around some other direction, I dunno. The helping LeChuck adventure thing felt like the beginning of a puzzle, but it was only a matter of doing the completely obvious. This was really just a joke that should've been more of a puzzle. Hopefully they'll return to this in a more fleshed-out form later, because the concept is awesome. The transitions were fucking amazing. The one where you return to the ship after being on a small island is probably the best transition I've seen in a game ever. It just feels so... right. I miss the epic final puzzles I (think I) remember from the S&M games, and that also Time Gentlemen, Please had. I'm interested in why Spaff and Marek are in the credits. Playtesting, perhaps? The map thing with the ship guy was hilarious and awesome. I was pretty stuck for a long time while playing, and Guybrush kept on hinting "I should look around for more stuff to plunder" or something. That didn't help at all. Also, I totally thought I was supposed to do something with the coconut for a while. Anyway, can't wait for the next game. The final moment was pretty awesome. I really felt the scale of the thing.

I think it has to do with the game's story taking place "in a world" created by an outspoken anti-gay guy who's the chairman in some anti-gay organization or something. There's a difference between this and, say, a texture artist being racist. I think a fair simile is not boycotting a film where the grip is a neo-nazi, but still boycotting a film co-produced by Hitler.

Holy shit, "racecar" backwards is "racecar"!!!

Yeah, I'm doing that, too, but then I hit a spot where my sessions started being shorter and farther between, and the levels so long that I got frustrated at having to restart.

I love that they eschewed reading poignant reader mail in favor of listening to drunkards calling up a answering machine at four in the morning.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT that stretchy hand belongs in a nightmare horror film, not in something for children!

It's probably related to the supported resolutions of the Amiga 500 (320x256 and 640 x 256 without interlacing), and also that I think they made graphics a bit narrower than the max vertical resolution to compensate for parts of the image potentially being cut when displaying on TV sets.

Holy mackerel, I had totally forgotten to go back and read all the comments after having played the game. Obviously you all had already written great little reviews that explained my exact sentiments much better than I ever could

Well, that was very fun. Some truly awesome moments, including but not limited to: Me jumping with the little airport luggage cart, grinding a truck and killing, uh, some guy (Nevksy?) in the head with it. James' awesome police driving. It was just like in the movies, only better. The ice-cream race, which ended up with splinter factions denouncing the race and forming rebel outpost blockades along the route. I managed to weave through one on my trusty Faggio, cleverly dropping a grenade as I did so, but other than that they were pretty effective. My rocket trap failing pathetically as I fired a rocket at the place I expected you to appear, nobody died, and James said "it's a trap."

Yeah, I actually found out I just sucked the first time.

I think it's awesome. It has some of that "new adventure" stuff I'm not that fond of, with symbol sequences and stuff like that, but they even manage to puzzle that, too, up nicely enough for it not to be lame. It's really good-looking, with the nice depth of field, excellent camera work and spectacular hand animation. I don't know if they decided to animate the characters' hands so well just because of the story, but it's most impressive. I'm not a big fan (of the expression "not a big fan of", nor) of the constant mismatch between the lines you click on, and what the character says. The first time I selected a line I thought they were going for one of the ones where no matter what you choose the guy says something hilarious, and that I just didn't get it, but they do it all through the game. Sometimes Guybrush says what you select, and sometimes something that doesn't really match what you selected. I would prefer they did it like in the previous games. But, as I said, I'm very impressed, and I'm looking forward to the next games. Tomorrow, is it, the next episode comes out?

I thought the 2012 trailer was a masterpiece. There's more destruction in that than in any so-called disaster movie you'd care to mention.

Quick question: Do any of the stats affect my ability to not drown? I ask because I came upon this powerup that I can only get to by flooding the room, and I can't get out in time. So I'm hoping this is because I don't have the lungs yet, but I fear it might just be my timing's off.

Or running them over with an ice-cream truck?

Well, I guess it's something all RPGs promise, which is decisions that AFFECT THE WORLD, but ultimately only affects some specific thing later on, and the connection is obvious, like giving the beggar a gold piece makes him appear to open a secret entrance later on, stuff like that. To be honest, I think I'm more comfortable with that stuff being like it is in current games. I have this need to experience everything in games, and if there's an almost chaotic system where everything affects everything else, I'll never be able to replay with the goal of making all the opposite choices to see the other set of results. That reminds me, I have to replay GTA IV while I still remember who I chose to kill on the park bench.