vimes

Ubisoft's policy was the the most clever of the industry 2 or 3 years ago : they were producing big games in order to fund riskier games (the first Splinter Cell, BGE, Prince of Persia Sands of Time) and that made a lot of sense on both financial and artistic aspect. I don't understand why they change their business model.

Who could blame them ? Wait... I think ... yeah, I think I can. Anyway, anyone knows what Jordan Mechner is going to do with the money he surely got from the success of the two recents games ?

Mmm, not to compare size but I am the happy owner of an Athlon 2000+, 1go ddram 400Mhz and a radeon 9600xt; on that reasonnable configuration the game runs just fine in 1024*768 with all options on. And I managed to preorder the game for 27 € at dvdboxoffice.com... without any goodies that is to say.

Mmmm it's clear that in Hero the uses of three different points of view is misused... it's just an opportunity for the photographer to show off... but that doesn't mean the technique is bad. For example, in Mankiewicz's All About eve, we are told the story of an actress by three persons attending to her first award ceremony and who think they are in some way responsible of her success. The several stories depicts three different characters in place of the same person... and in the end, none of them are entirely correct. Rashomon by Kurosawa went even further by describing a short sequence of events leading to several deaths and in which appears only 3 characters. Each time the story his told, the former version is nullify, but event at the end when we are told the true story, we can't remove the different aspects of the personnalities givent in the false versions. This effect is great because the characters gain huge depth from it. Anyway, I saw The Decalogue by Kristof Kieszkowski (10*50 min long movies) and its great. You should see it if you have the opportunity

The music is good but to my disappointment there seems to be few uses - if not none - of live instruments... the melodies are good as far as they go but the midi lacks the warmth and the feel of Grim Fandango. Blame the console, I say.

The voice performance is awesome, the acting is...well... let's say tetris is the best part of the show. Or maybe it's because I have no clue what the guys are doing 80% of the time. Damn, you parents! Why wasn't I allowed to have a console?!

*wooooooooo* It's getting hot in there, the guy is going nasty.

It sounds like one of the doublefine action news about the 'singer' Pink.

on a slighlty different note : is there anyway to save the game ? .. because each time I quit the demo and reload it I got to do everything all over again.

Target mini game ?! Duh, I think I missed that. Where does it take place ? And yes, you can get the kid through the mines. geez, I just beat the demo in a rush because I didn't want to spoil the fun for the whole game and dammit it's good. Reaaaally good.

I've played quite a bit aaaaaannnnnd... some things sucks but a lot and I mean A LOT rock. There are too much good points to cite them all but here are a few : the characters are fantastic,the voices are over-good, the humour I know understand I missed so muchis definitely there and the level design is brilliant However, lots of textures are blurry and some are higly pixelated(does that word exists ?), most of the protagonists seems poorly detailed compared to Raz (in termes of polygon I mean) and some part of the platformer are really frustrating -> I've been stuck at the swinging bars for 15 minutes because you couldn't find how to change the orientation on a bar... but that must be me. Well, I think I'm in for a buy because everything I love about games is in there. To bad for the side points but hopefully minor corrections will b e made. I'm HAAAPPPPYYYY.

Yeah, what do you think about PVP ? I think think the comics are enjoyable as long as you restrain from reading the creator's comment. Kinda like 'Louis-Ferdinand Céline' thingy but... different.

I suck so much at this, it makes me want to punch a dog. Any dog. *go back to his pastels* Fuck, and I also kinda suck at this!

I'm not quite getting your idea : you mean uses sounds as distant forces in a physics engine or what ?

Okay, this is an artwork... right ?! Anyway, the screenshots from the site, the story and the universe that, to sounds smarts, reminds me a lot of Dark City, are promising. Very. The gameplay, however,.... well, let's just say, I'm always kind of freak out by gameplays that are based about one singular yet very smart idea, it makes me fear that the game around the concept would be very repetitiv.

Has anyone an idea of what this game will consists of in term of gameplay ? Because, it looks beautiful and strange so I'm getting curious.

Curse of Monkey Island was an excellent game, it even remains a masterpiece to me. However,CMI did tend to break the dynamic created by the first two episodes but, hell, the different plots, the characters, the dialogs... everything was top notch.

It was made but it was rather the Ed Del Castillo's version than Richard Garriott's one ... or so people says. I think it was a terrible mess at the time so when Castillo was named producer he tried to release the game as fast as he could (i.e. 6 months after his nomination) and in good shape. You could says he didn't succeed.

*CEO Mode - On* Okay, Mr Scha- how is it again? - ah. Yes. Mr Shafer, to say the least, I'm neither impressed nor amazed by your presentation of Psychonauts : you showed poor oral skills and your products didn't seem amazing at any level in your demonstration. However... I intend to be surprised in April, so.. do what you have to do *CEO Mode - Off* Okay, so, nooooooo, I didn't drool and I didn't wet my pants while watching this show BUT, ladies and gentleman, this is a good thing. Indeed, I still don't know a lot about Psychonauts and while this demo didn't give me the opportunity to shout my admiration for Tim's every action, it didn't show anything that I wouldn't like. Plus, I just escaped the probability of being disappointed by removing any high hopes which is the best thing that can happen to an unreleased game that I may or may not intend to purchase!! I know this doesn't make sense for you but it does for me, and having writtend it down makes me feel complete. This makes perfect sense!

That's bullshit : they claimed for months that Vampire Bloodlines was finished and that they only waited for HL2 to be released... look at the bugs in the final version, that's unforgettable. However, I will miss those guys (until they fund a new company) because their design philisophy was intelligent; too bad they didn't had good technicians with them.

Shouldn't there be a 'Night of the Golden Thumbs' ? In order to give a meaning to the expression 'game awards' You know, a fake ceremonial in which the Idle Thumbs Staff would give some prizes like : - Thumb of Main Character going to the voice actor, the dialog writer and the character designer - Thumb of 'Get Yourself Some Coders' game going to Vampire - Bloodlines - Thumb of the Most original gameplay - Thumb of the best Mainstream Game things like that... Yeah one can find that stupid but I had to say this.

This trailer scared me. It felt like tiny, little lynchian movie, the kind of thing which send a thrill through your spine and make you wonder afterward with a shiver : "Did that really happen ?". The colors, the editing, the music - goddamit even the sound effects - all tend to prove that this is a mad-man job.

Okay, here, I'm not even getting close to the fantasy of adventure games with up-do-date 3D Engine. I'm just taking the 3D engine to enlight that adventure goes suddently from the main vector of innovation in the mid-late 90's to a passiv genre in the 2k years. When you look at the last 8 years, you can see that each genre as survived a huge failure - one of those awaited games which didn't met their public - but none of them really stopped the evolution of its genre. Now look at adventure games : no great failure but a slow descent to oblivion. It took the community 4 years to accept the new point&click brought by Full Throttle, 3 years from the achievment of 3D as a viable technology for creators to begin thinking about applying it to this genre and I won't talk about web-based application that finally but shortly find its way thanks to Sam & Max 2 in 2004. Here is my point - which I realize now is more than slightly off the topic -, adventure games can mostly blame themselves for their failure : they brought great advancements for years but their creators neglicted new advancements that didn't come from their own and so, missed a freaking lot of opportunities to evolve... and it is no wonder that after year of slumbers and lazyness, Grim Fandango and The Last Train didn't sold well. Now, regarding the Amerzone and Syberia, they don't represent to me an evolution because they just go back to a less interactive gameplay something more like Phantasmagoria. It's not bad, it's just... not going forward.

I know : I used it last year in a VR Project and I'm going to dive in it in the next 6 months. It's not much but when you're focusing on the software features - rather than hardcore coding - having a good 3D engine already done helps A LOT.

Okay, I'd have to admit my ignorance regarding these points, my opinion was just the intuition I got. You might be right but this brings forward two other problems : - these people go to the oldies because new ones aren't that good. So, it's not as if they have the choice I don't know if I'm clear there. - both gaming and creating community are inhibited with the respect and fear of ancestors : such games as Monkey Island, DOTT or even Myst are like some intangible parent figures who shake a finger at us from thousands of years ago and says, " Do it--get away from The Path we dug! Do it and We'll fuckin´ spank you!"... Tim Schafer may have the guts to go for a Platform-like genre with Psychonauts but he is a bit by himself these days. Yeah but OGRE is under GPL license. You know, it's like...free.