vimes

So, the game is an Amnesia Fortnight project; but it's not Ron Gilbert's : Nathan Martz - Lead Programmer on Brütal Legend - is the Project Lead on this one. (he was already announced as one in 2010)

Isn't the extra stuff the 40% thing you can do after having completed the main storyline?

How so ?

So, Honneamise... The animation and artistic direction are nothing special, but its strong script clearly makes up for it : it is one of those rare sci-fi movies that manage to put great details in the sci-fi elements while knowing they should act as a background to a characters-centric plot; and in this case, since plot is enjoyably thought provoking, it's pretty great... at least for 95% of the movie. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but to me, the major drive of the movie is the confrontation of two outlooks son life - blasé pragmatism with no 'higher aspiration' vs Manichean moral compass completely divorced from reality - that are not only bankrupt, but also fail to communicate and feed on each other when they could; and when you expect they would. I find this approach interesting and it is very well handled for 90 minutes, so much so, that its natural conclusion - to have no closure on this confrontation - seems pretty much guaranteed ... but in the last 15 minutes, the movie suddenly decides to pick side; in a preachy ending that stinks of 2001 memes. It's a shame but it still remains worth watching.

This is ... my mind is blown, I can't really imagine how seeing all those deals getting done must have felt.

Cool! I hope Joe Pinney completes this awesome duo, everything he directed or designed so far has been awesome.

Now 99%, and I'm surprised how much the game grew on me since I've started completing the extras : I still stand by my original criticism, but it's been a while since going toward 100% completion felt natural instead of OCD driven.

Mmm, OK, so Sesame Street is a 100% kids oriented or does it have extra layers of understanding that DF could play with?

By the way, I haven't grown with Sesame Street - I remember an animated series but can't find any reference so I might have made it up - thus recently, I've been discovering the awesomeness of Rowlf and Fozzie Bear. FnFQevPl_1o

Could that be the Ron Gilbert game that might be part of Amnesia Fortnight? I've hear the Pajama Sam series was one of the best kid game out there; so, mmm, positively curious about this. If it's not the case, I wonder who's the creative director on this one.

So, on thumbeteer's advice, I've watched The Wings of Honneamise and Daughters of Mnemosyne. I'm a bit conflicted about both, but for very different reasons. Actually, I'm still articulating in my head what I thought about Honneamise, so I'll post my opinion later. As for Daughters of Mnemosyne ... despite a distinct amount of unnecessary gore/sex/fan service scenes - think Elfen Lied in quantity, intensity and pointlessness- I liked a lot its first episode because it acted very casually toward its background and characters. They put in a lots of graphic anecdote about the world and character; but these are mostly fragmented and never backed up by straightforward exposition. I liked that a lot and it made me hope for a low key anime. This changes gradually through the second and third episode - which are still OK - culminating in the introduction of an overarching plot and mythology, both of which turned out the be very generic and downplaying all that was interesting in the first place. There are a few interesting things here and there in the second half ( ) , but it's very marginal among the boob/rape/dismemberment scenes that take most of the screen time. If you decide to watch this, though, do skip the horrendous opening credits.

I'm not 100% done yet, but I've finished the game once and it was quite fun. Aesthetically, the game is a success with a special mention for the stellar SFX (every single particle system and post effect is fantastic) and some kind of a thumb down for the cutscenes : they spoil the pace of the game at the beginning and are trying too hard to be 'silent movie' ish in the first half. The writing also get into the same pitfall from time to time and sounds a tad cynical then. On the gameplay front, I'd join Thunderpeel's opinion, in that the game could be pushing its core mechanics further. I liked the game for its heavy bent on exploration (i.e find and try all the dolls) though and in the later levels it's a bunch of fun to witness the reactions of some dolls to others' action ... but I wish it had graduated to letting me imagine a solution through a more systemic approach instead of a one door/one key paradigm (e.g. ). If it did, it could then have been a non-violent Hitman, which is ten kind of awesome. I was happily surprised by the way they integrated replayability that doesn't sound like farming : while crusing through the story, I kept thinking I should go back here and there to find the alternate solution... which I'm doing right now; and apparently, the dolls unlocked by some puzzles are key to some others. The hijinks, however, are often artificially draggy, since you need to repeat 5 times (and sometimes 10?) the same action... In short, I liked it and I think DF is finding really interesting ways to make their short games more engaging - Stacking felt more meaty than Costume Quest in terms of gameplay because of the alternative puzzle solution - but I think they can still explore more complexity without jeopardizing accessibility.

because it's a very frenchy/french reference.

Wow,I never considered this angle and that's a very interesting point. And I'm wondering if other genre are symptomatic of this without us realizing it... Just to make sure : does your point mean that designing for a genre with this kind of 'symptoms' would translate into dropping the point of the original experience (for adventure game, the intellectual discovery) to enhance elements that might have looked secondary back then ... hence providing a radically different experience piggybacking on the original genre tropes? It reminds me of a discussion I had on 'learning methods' with a friends who's a junior high school math teacher. She told me that math goes well with young students provided you make them go through fun discovery of what you want them to learn. She wanted to try to teach adults and so built her cursus for them similarly; just updating the examples she uses to make them more relevant to their age ... but it turns out that the group she was tutoring didn't respond at all to the 'discovery' aspect, and was far more responsive to "let me show you how this approach A works all the time and that you can apply it systematically". Do you think this is similar to what you're talking about or am I completely off?

I put the "needs to die" tag on both of those threads - and sadly, could have done so on quite a few more - because they are part of a tidal wave of recent threads that bolster the impression that the sense of community on the Idle Forums is built on things we all agree to dislike and even hate, our disdain toward outsider 'who don't get it' and nitpicking about silly rhetorics; rather than on what we love and champion about video games and a genuine curiosity in hearing other thumbeteers' views on topics we already have a strong opinion about. At first, I didn't formulate this concern directly because doing so seemed as whiny, self-righteous and unnecessarily negative as those threads I criticize... and looking back at what I wrote here over the years, it's easy to see I'm not safe from that 'behavior' myself; so it also sounded a bit hypocritical. But since people have now mentioned this directly I thought I'd clarify.

Oh, that's very nice; are you going to keep expanding the page to the right ?

Is this me or is it strange that they dare communicate the result of an open trial made on only 22 people?

Heh, cool! do you feel like sharing your thesis ?

Holy cow, I didn't know my character could get stuck to an inescapable, unreachable block! The moment of realization was slightly terrifying as my mind jumped back to a dozen places when it could have happened... now, I can't really take the game as casually as I did and I'm second guessing more and more of my decisions. It's like bloody Sokoban all over again! Not sure if it's for the best, but the shift is pretty interesting - I'm just wondering if it's by design or not.

Maybe not funny, surely old, but definitely awesome : y4ctbmJuGSE 5fMZLYsWLuw

Interesting, I haven't really dived into pre-90's TV series, so I'll check this out. Also, if you're into low key anime, I suggest Kino's Journey. Six episodes ? I'll take it! I'll be also watching The Wings of Honnêamise and East of Eden by the director of the GitS:SaC series.

Thread Revive! I haven't watched any new anime series since Dennô Coil in 2007... and I'm trying to catch up; without having to go through most of the titty bouncing/shonen crap. Any suggestions ?

O, how I wish this thread would just die.

I'm in love with two of the ideas The Last Express explores 1) an incredibly detailed self-contained environment 2) modeling inaction as an action by having the story resolves itself even without the player's involvement. I'm not sure if it's because most designers aren't attracted by it or if it's just too much of a tech and marketing nightmare, but not a lot of game go for this kind of fully breathing diorama. Anyway, I'd like to explore the same kind of mechanics, without resorting to the the "1 good / n-bad endings" paradigm they used... the game suffered from it imo : because of it, it felt like a high speed race toward a pinhole; any mistake projecting you off-course irreversibly. Kind of frustrating and why I had to play with walkthough in hand the first time.