vimes

Ok, my bad. I get you're not playing a lot of recent stuff : all games released since 2005 needed WinXP, didn't they ?

I've finished the third episode on Saturday - playing in a row Situation : Comedy and The Mole, The Mob and the Meatball - but I couldn't really bring myself to write anything about it earlier because, despite being rather enjoyable, the game ends up being a great disappointment compared to the first two episodes. You know, Telltale is going to pull off a major thing when the team releases the 6th episode in a few months : they are going to be THE studio to release the first true episodic game. So, in a way, these guys are pioneers, and because they are, it was kinda expected that they were going to make mistakes. Not deadly mistakes but ones that would serve the format and the genre on the long run. It is what I kept reminding myself while playing the first episode, trying to be prepared to see room for improvement and tweaking. The thing is that Culture Shock turned out to be great and Situation : Comedy even surpassed it in every way and that, for a while, really convinced me that Telltale was going to pull it off without making a single mistake. Episode 3 kinda broke this idea. The disappointment doesn't lie in this episode relatively short length - quality doesn't come from quantity, yadayada - or its unsurprising plot. The issue here is that I feel that Telltale is making mistake they managed to avoid making in the first two episodes with great intelligence ... and I can't see why, they failed on this one. Take the balance between old stuff and new stuff, for instance. This was my main concern before the second episode was released : was it going to look cheap, were the constraints on budget and time really going to show ? Situation : Comedy blew these doubts away : they did use what was already existing but they always put a smart,not-lazy-for-a-penny twist that made these assets look as if they'd been expanded for the new episode. In The Mole, The Mob and The Meatball, all well known locations and characters are back but, unfortunately, they are presented the same way than before : same camera angle, same tone, same time of the day... changing the settings or providing alternate camera angle and camera tracks for the office and the street wouldn't have hurt. It was already the case in episode 2, but with the third installment, it's already growing old, which is q bad news as we're only mid-season. It's like seeing the same establishing shot on the spaceship in Battlestar Galactica over and over again. The recurring characters fall in the same trend : Bosco's paranoia, disguise and behind-the-counter supply were surprising thus funny in Situation : Comedy. Meanwhile, Sybil was great too : she had changed of job and her personality grew a bit thanks to that. In the third episode, Bosco and Sybil witness changes that follow the same pattern, and its isn't as compelling as before : more than anything else it makes them look as if they have been functiunalized. From the starting point, it feels like a recipe as been applied : you know that Bosco's obsession will be revealed to be true, you know that you will need him to give his behind-the-counter supply and you know that, Sybil's new job is going to be the key to a puzzle. Doing that, the designers and writers fall to a what I thought was a most renown weakness of episodic comedy : giving all recurring characters the same mechanisms of comedy twist and personality development. Of course, you can write one character to have the same routine over and over again, this is the base recurring humor; but it feels a bit cheap when both of the recurring characters are written this way. And the new stuff ? There are few new locations, with less charm than the ones in Situation: Comedy, but with several environment animation that should compensate the loss. I say should because most of the camera angles don't put these location in a great light : most of the animations are out of frame and the camera makes amm location look empty. You'd never find a Casino as empty as the one from the toy mafia. The new characters ? Most of them are given the same model - I know it's an important point of the plot, but it wouldn't have hurt to give each mafioso a particular identity by giving it a distinctive animation. This kind of mistakes brings back the problem of the underlying skeleton of the adventure genre restraining storytelling and character development : once this bits of dialog feels like it's been written only to give the player clues or once a character seems written so that he offers skills that will solve the player's problem, you know there's something wrong. Well, pretty much everything in Episode 03 feels this way : you won't find a lot of assets that don't answer to some needs in terms of puzzle solving. I find it weird because Telltale really showed the skills to ignore this deviation of the genre for the better : to this point, the characters in Sam & Max were fleshed out more than what was needed to solve the puzzle. The set-up of the story and the puzzles were designed so that the player was driven by curiosity and enjoyment for the task primarly, understanding only later how it fit into a bigger plan. Failure was always something you were going through willingly, knowing it would always be fun and would always construct the characters and the story a little more. All of that is mysteriously lacking in the last episode : you go from one puzzle to another never managing to shake out the impression that you're solving puzzles and not playing the roles of Sam & Max. For the first time in the serie, you're reminded that you're in a game. This finds its pick in the final : a non-charismatic villain, mundane actions, no interesting failure ... it's really anti-climatic. I thought over this a long time because I can't imagine how they could end up like, knowing that, Jake, who nailed the issues mentioned above in a fantastic thread on AdventureGamers, worked on this episode. Is a game a pain in the ass while playing ? No, god, no : the tremendous writing and some shining yet marginal ideas ('Yo mamma's jokes' sequence, for instance) make playing the game an enjoyable experience, but not as surprising or as fulfilling as Situation Comedy was. I'd like to think that this is due to this being an episode of transition : the über-plot is changing in scope - from local conspiracy to a conspiracy involving national agents - but so was Situation : Comedy (from neighborhood to local) and it didn't prevent it from being a brilliant game. Overall, The Mole, The Mob and The Meatball is a bit infuriating in that it makes mistakes regarding trivial stuff, not while trying risky game designs. Here, I'm done.

You mean Vista?

Well, a guy just achieved this, so I figured out I could start some development on the PC with the wiimote .

I just bought a wiimote despite the fact that I don't own a wii.

As weird as it sounds, designing a title like this is not mandatory.

I've completed the demo which is fine but not 'extraordinaire' as Jean François Sissypants would say.Mr " Wanna Play Cars is hilarious though". I shall activate the thing tonight. The only thing bothering me right now is the huge drop in framerates that I witnessed in some of the camera configuration at the casino and Sam& Max' office street. I've got a centrino 1.73Ghz, an X700, 1go of Ram and, in 1024*768, I can't believe how slow it can get. This is really getting on my nerves.

Spip with the Blog n Spot skeleton is incredibly easy to install and use.

This is not his last movie; and Miyazaki has been talking about retirement since Mononoke... I guess he can't leave the studio until they found some valid replacement for him and Takahata. Anyway, Howl's Moving Castle he's by far the weakest Miyazaki in my opinion : it's too much of a recycling of all of his previous movies to be as enjoyable as them. In fact, I'll go against Rodi on this one and say that the receipe isn't fresh anymore for anyone who watched any of his other creations : the overall backbone of Miyazaki's narration style begins to be obvious. It's not painful to watch yet and there are a few great moment [anything with the main character as an old women, the walk up the stairway] but you can't be as fascinated as before. And the very end is oh so too much with the prince, and the transfrming and the stupid dialogs. Bleaurg.

Geez, if I only knew a website that had spare entries:shifty: Anyway, what is the definition of 'the press' ? Does it include internet publication of any kind or not ?

I've been looking for a way to go to the GDC for years; but every time, I found the entrance fees very high, like over $US 150 . I'll be in the US next year so I'm seriously considering going in 2008 ; is there any cheap way to attend to the conferences ?

... another designer french is back in business : Frédérick Raynal has apparently found a nice shelter at UbiSoft Montpellier in France where he is helming a project with a small team. The story goes that it's based on a concept of his but in a canvas that was given by UbiSoft. He also claims it's a multi-genre game but also a non-genre game... something tells me they are still in pre-production. Apparently he's also working with another team in Paris [not UbiSoft related] on a DS title.Hurray! And his daugther is a great fan of Animal Crossing. Anyway, long story short, soon enough Yufster might be once again "scared the bejesus out of". Source : Sanqualis - February Issue

I must admit I didn't try it on my PC but I messed around with it a couple of hours on a friend's computer and it worked really well.

I own an Acer as my laptop [which is also y only PC right now] and after a year or so (gee, just after the end of the normal gaurantee, go figure ) it began to break down randomly. So, even if I subscribed to a 3 year guarantee so I'm covered and even if I quite like it, I wouldn't recommend this brand over an Asus anymore.

Don't bother getting a Mac : now that all of these are Intel Powered you can find patch version for MacOS that makes it run on any PC. If your budget is around 1600 € and you don't care about a graphic card here is what I suggest you : ASUSTeK F3Jp-AS011P with this Acer 20' screen But I suggest that you spend a bit to get the same version of this laptop but with an ATI X1700. As for HD : I've been using 3 desktop HDs with those things for two years and no problem so far.

Maybe what Rodi meant is that it wasn't enjoyable... as in "the Schindler's List is enjoyable; that's what kept me through the horrible events of the movie".

It's like Bela lugosi with terminal arthritis

BEWARE! UTTER SILLINESS AND IMMATURE BEHAVIOUR ENSUE:eek: Directly from the Sony corporate website http://www.us.playstation.com/Corporate/Jobs

Oh, I just got if from here [link Sony Computer Entertainment of America Inc.] http://www.sony.com/SCA/jobs.shtml The first page obtained by searching for sony usa jobs, on Google.

Since its advertisment time : http://blogs.nofrag.com/vimes/ [it's in french]

Apparently; the PS3 is cheaper than the XBOX360 based on simple maths in a comment on Consolevania So, considering that,on one hand, there's nearly no movies for the BluRay but that, on the other, we can't tell how good the games are gonna be based on the line-up ... ... I think it makes sense. The only question remaining for me is : are all the options mentionned a must have, or not ? And : have we been wrong the whole time ?

Congrats and everything! Babies have been raining around lately : this month ,my last-summer- internship-boss got one, my brother got one and so did a friend of mine. 'Hope the trend does keep going cause they'll be the ones to pay for my retirement, mwhahah. Plus, they are cute.

When I watched the Silent Hill movie, I hadn't played the games, at least not enough to say I knew them but I had been told that they were all about internal journey materialized by nightmarish storyline and shit. So, Silent Hill the movie was a disappointment because it turned out to be just another scary and gory movie with a nice cinematographer but nothing impressive. I still can't believe that Roger Avary wrote the scenario. Anyway, recently, I watched Double Indemnity by Wilder and it rocks. I'm more and more enjoying movies from this era.

I am yet to play ANY Zelda games. And of course, my opinion is still for sale, if anyone is interested.

Is that an extra pair of Vans I see in the background of the second picture ?