Erkki

It should be more deader on the web. Keeps crashing my browser occasionally.

What puzzle is that? Spoiler tags please. I may have not noticed there was a puzzle ther, or did you mean just Haven't finished the game yet, so maybe it's something else entirely?

I posted about this on the new computer thread. But I thought I'd start a new one. When I put my old hard drive into my new system (into a SATA3 port), the machine became really slow after windows installed drivers for it and restarted. It was waiting after the disk all the time. But once Windows finally rebooted, it showed me the FAT/NTFS partitions, but got CRC and other errors when accessing them. Under linux, I finally saw what the errors with my hard drive were. READ DMA command was failing apparently. And also SMART doesn't work any more (SMART Capability: None reported during boot). Is that likely an electronics failure? Do I dare swap the electronics? I should have an identical disk that doesn't have any important data. [edit] Linux can also see the partitions, but not exactly correctly. Two of four partitions are reported as free space. Maybe it's just bad sectors?

So I finished the 4th one yesterday, but that was just continuing a session where I left the beast half-damaged in frustration about one and a half weeks ago. I actually didn't remember damaging it before, or even successfully climbing to its weak spots, but it was damaged when I got there yesterday. Firstly, it took me forever to figure out the way I could even grab onto it.

I remember someone saying Unity wasn't exactly perfect for doing 2D. Maybe it was Ben? Anyway, the game is pretty good!

Ok, I found the setting! It is "Force Alternate Letterbox Resolution". For widescreen there is a similar setting. But still, a Steam user might not even think that there's a magic "winsetup.exe" in the app's folder that makes it normal. This is not an excusable default setting -- why not just detect the monitor's native aspect ratio. Someone might think that kind of stretched out look is what the artist intended and play through an entire game that way.

So what that my monitor is old, the game should decide to ignore its aspect ratio? No other engine does that. And isn't it the same problem with modern widescreen monitors -- it will just be stretched differently, won't it? Don't know, haven't tried AGS games on widescreen.

ah, I knew I should have written "Windowed" and "Fullscreen" there. And no, the AGS setup application does not let me select "NO STRETCHING MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU SPEAK IT?" as an option.

Frankly, I don't even want to play this game now, although I'm sure it could be great otherwise.

According to google translate that is swahili

I can see a few downsides if you'd try to use the automatic equivalent of STM for the purpose of making players not do the try-everything approach: * You either put a lot of crap into the equivalent of STM, resulting in huge menus. * Or you put only the important things there, in which case you are defeating the goal of what the STM was for: now the game offers suggestions rather than letting players come up with their own ideas. But I still kind of think the STM concept can be improved somehow. To be honest, the core thing what I didn't like about the interface was that the dragging felt a bit slow, maybe due to the speed the menus pop up and mouse speed. Maybe if the dragging was more "fluid" (for lack of better term) or there was just a click/keypress involved I would love the STM more. But still, it probably doesn't combine very well with the widely parallel puzzle lines that you open up when you get the quartet in this game. Or maybe it does, actually. PS. It'd be very interesting to see a similar game made in 3D! I hope Vince Twelve decides to do his next one in 3D (in the interview he was talking about trying Unity). Also I should play Linus Bruckman.

I completed the fourth colossus right now, but I'm waiting for everyone to finish the third. Was it Mondays or Tuesdays when our colossus is incremented?

But the things get there automatically, right?

I actually went and found an audio interview with Vince Twelve. The reason for low-res graphics is pretty much what I thought (artistic and budget), but one thing he explained with the ShortTermMemory is that it's there to eliminate brute force solutions: when you have to remember the items and actually drag them to the dialogue yourself, you can't really use the "try all combinations" or "expand all of dialogue tree" tactics any more. That makes me think if I want to take back my comment that the STM should be automatic -- perhaps I do, I actually really like the idea of making players discover things instead of seeing them presented to them, and to paraphrase the author "to have the player communicate to the game what they want to do and not to have the game offer suggestions". But I wonder if that mechanic isn't defeated by The Interconnected Nets of Web. At least for me, when I'm getting close to the point where I'd start trying everything with everything, I'd rather look up the answer online. And since trying things is now a bit harder (not quite as bad as The Cave with it's traipsing) with you having to go back and add something to STM, the point when I want to go online might come earlier. Still, I think the STM/LTM is a somewhat clever system. Have any other games had them? The original Sam & Max basically had an automatic version of that, as I recall -- everything you encountered was entered into your STM.

Why not move to a different engine, then? Well, to be honest, the low-res graphics doesn't bother me that much (I guess the reason for lowres might be that for the artists who create them, it's easier to do with limited dev time or they just want to express themselves that way), but they always seem to come with bad controls & interface, which I assume may be partly caused by cramming stuff into a height of 240 pixels or whatever the number is exactly (200 even?). The box I'm typing these words takes up a tiny part of my screen (and together with it's toolbar 200 pixels of height) and feels like peeping through a keyhole as I'm making this paragraph longer and the beginning of the quote is starting to disappear into the mysterious place where all pixels go when they get pushed outside of the clip rectangle by a scrollbar. AGS game developers make entire games feel the same way, just zoomed in a bit! And already having bad controls seems to make them not want to do nice things that would alleviate the effect of said bad controls, like I don't know, letting me press 1,2,3,4 on the keyboard to select a different one of the four characters. I guess I may have been exaggerating by putting all the AGS games into the same bucket, but every time I play one, I think: why do they keep doing this? To be honest, I haven't read many interviews with the creators, maybe they have explained it.

Finally got around to playing this. Great game, although I'm beginning to dislike the fact that "AGS Game" seems to be it's own genre even separate from "Adventure Game" -- low res graphics, bad controls and so on. Really, the whole menu system was quite horrible, although I liked the principle of the LTM and STM. And I also had the problem with STM that I forgot to put stuff in there and then kept having to walk back and forth. It should have maybe been automatic. But I only had problems with it in the section where you get the quartet and can explore in parallel. Had the same problem as Toblix and had to look up the solution in the walkthrough. It turned out IT DID DEPEND ON PROGRESS IN ANOTHER BRANCH OF THE INVESTIGATION! I'm kind of sad I didn't figure out myself that . I should pay more attention to details, like the .

Hehe. I played the exact same combo.

Finished it some time ago, and have been going back to it to do some of the optional stuff. Maybe I'll even complete the Desmond stories, although those are the boringest thing in any assassin's creed yet. Even the Lost Archive expansion was better somehow, although pretty much similar. It was pretty good, almost as good as Brotherhood, and has me actually wanting more of Assassin's Creed, so I'm even considering buying Ass3. PS. So I'm trying to get some of the FULL Synchs, but man why do they have to be so that you have to replay the entire mission to if you fail just once. Could easily allow restarting from a checkpoint at least for those which aren't timer-based. Like the one where you take the first Templar Den. There's a longish part with the bomb tutorial and lots of slow walking before you get to the point where you can easily fail the full synch, but no, you have to redo that every time you fail. Makes it especially hard to explore different options because so far I still have no idea how to do that mission without causing conflict (seems to be the same as being detected, but it's so easy to get detected there).

Finished it once, with Adventurer, Twins, Monk. The puzzles are fun, and platforming is ok, except that you are going through the same sections again and again as you try to come up with solutions. I think there's a good reason most platformers have you just go forward all the time, with perhaps a little bit of occasional back-tracking. It just doesn't work that well when the platforming is put between puzzle pieces. Shortcuts that you can unlock would probably have been a good solution, or teleporting to other characters. But other than that, it seems to be a really good game so far! I'll try at least a 2nd playthrough soon.

Already got stuck in the part with the minecarts. [edit] Of course, figured it out immediately after posting this. Glad I didn't go for a walkthrough (if any exist yet)

John Walker is not entirely wrong about this. The platforming (esp. ladders) feels a bit tedious already, and I've just played for an hour.

Should we spoiler things like these? I didn't. Anyway, good to know I wasn't alone with that problem. That was the most excrutiating thing in my recent gaming history.

I've kept most of my old computer magazines, but I only had local ones (was called .EXE or something like that). Most of the gaming-related content consisted of walkthroughs for Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max and so on.

Well, I got 5+ games from shitty opportunist's and probably for their benefit for all of my TF2 stuff so I'm happy! (one of them was even a top-selling recent release: Far Cry 3; admittedly the item was Max's Severed Head, though)

On normal, the third colossus has