lobotomy42

...What? What IS that? I realize that 13-year old boys are, tragically, a disproportionately large portion of the video games market. I've already accepted that Dragon Age has morphed from "Bioware's next swords and sorcery RPG" to "The medieval RPG with BLOOD and TITS." But this trailer just took Mass Effect into a whole new territory, marketing-wise. "I can say 'bitch!' And kill stuff! And fuck your character! And I have a bunch of tattoos! ....Play Mass Effect 2." It's like they took one of the over-the-top ridiculous female bots from Unreal Tournament and stuck her in the self-serious universe of Mass Effect. </whine> I'll still buy the game, obviously.

My list is pretty sad. Sam & Max - Season One Tales of Monkey Island - Eps 1 & 2 House of the Dead: Overkill Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People - Episode 3 I'm not sure if I finished Fallout 3 this year or last.

Well, that's an improvement. Will the stuff to do on the planets be something OTHER THAN "go to point x and watch nothing happen"? Or will they simply be HAND-CRAFTED "go to point x and watch nothing happen"s?

And that his original comic line was "Detective Comics"

Normally, I'm the one jumping out and defending linearity. But PiT took it to an extreme. It felt like "Now you're in this room. Now you're in this room. Now you're in this room." That, combined with its sheer un-funniness compared to Superstar Saga soured me on it. Bah. Maybe I was just in a funk that year.

It was completely linear, in a way that Superstar Saga pretended not to be. And 99% less Fawful.

A few years ago, I'd have been excited about this, but Partners in Time left such a bad taste that I don't think I'll ever play another Mario & Luigi game.

Err, kinda. It had the same number of "major" planets, but each of those planets was way more linear and way more limited in terms of the number quests, characters, etc than the ones in KotOR. (And KotOR II had even more!)

KotOR II is the one that really rocked my world. Idle Thumbs used to have a fantastic review of it up a few years back. I like the combat better in ME -- and, honestly, the much improved graphics engine does a lot for me, too. (Those aliens are enormously detailed!) But in terms of story-telling, both KotORs are far superior.

I thought this episode was inferior to Screaming Narwhal. The main reason that jumps out at me is that this episode took a strange turn towards more adult/juvenile humor that seemed totally out of place in Monkey Island. The mer-people, whose faces looked a bit like over-made-up transvestites and who spoke and behaved like weird stereotypes of gay people ("Hello sailor," constantly flirting with an awkward-reacting Guybrush) were off-putting, to say the least. That, combined with Winslow's comments about loving the ship, the "Isle of Ewe" and "Nice Cans" jokes, and the Guybrush-Elaine-LeChuck jealousy triangle, shifted the tone of this episode away from "piratey" and into "Network TV Sitcom." It wasn't *bad*, but it definitely felt strange for a Monkey Island game. Still looking forward to the rest, though!

My guess is that it went something like this: Developers: Can we do another Monkey Island game? Management: Ok, but it has to be 3D and stuff. Developers: Do we have the budget to build a new 3D engine from scratch? Management: Didn't you just write a 3D engine for that skeleton game? Why can't you use that? Developers: Well, yeah, I guess... Management: Great! Have something to show me in a month.

I took sign language class for a couple of months, but now I've forgotten most of it. Maybe I can use Half-Life as an excuse to get back into it! Seriously, though, it's nice to see a major games studio think about accessibility, even tangentially. Despite the fact that many, many physically disabled people do play video games, there's rarely an attempt to make games playable via "non-normative" means. This doesn't really change that (or the expense involved in doing so,) but it could be a cool little acknowledgment.

Dreamfall and Indigo Prophecy / Fahrenheit immediately come to mine. Neither of these were totally successful, but they were certainly both attempts at using "newish" technology on a primarily story-driven game. (And, coming up, Heavy Rain.) I'm not sure which genre you'd label Ico other than adventure. Nintendo has consistently referred to the Zelda series as adventure. BG&E and Okami are in many ways inspired by that series - I think it would be fair to say that these are also in some sense adventure games, or at least hybrids. For that matter, have you played any survival horror game prior to Resident Evil 4? The gameplay in Resident Evil 1, 2, 3, CV, and 0 pretty closely mirrors what one might find in, say, Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island, right down to the control scheme. The only difference is the addition of shooting zombies - but even this "shooting" is not anything like a traditional shooter, and mostly just involves holding down the "aim" button and then pressing "shoot." They are also usually fairly story-heavy, even if it may not be a particularly good story. Additionally, although these aren't exactly what you describe, there are other attempts at doing adventures that aren't just re-hash of the point-n-click formula. The Phoenix Wright series is essentially adventure - parts of it are p'n'c, but the meat of it is in the courtroom, which is really about listening to testimony and thinking carefully about the logic of what people are saying. Hotel Dusk and Another Code (now with a Wii version I haven't played) both integrate some 3D exploration with dialogue, story-telling and puzzles. Finally, there's also been a push in the other direction towards the more casual market - the hidden object and puzzle games that keep adding more and more story and, in at least one case, an inventory. In general, I think the adventure genre has done a pretty good job at evolving with the times and blending its style of gameplay with the action genre and others. However, these games just seem reluctant to categorize themselves as "adventure."

I used to be a PC-centric gamer. But then I discovered consoles, which are: a) cheaper more reliable c) free of the peer-pressure to constantly upgrade so you can get a SLIGHTLY HIGHER FRAMERATE!!!!! d) don't suddenly stop running older games (as long as I have my SNES, I can still play SNES games) Consoles have so many fewer headaches associated with them, that...I can't understand why people would play anything on a PC! But, hey, to each his own.

Pasting the remake on top of the original version seems to have added a bunch of problems - the awkward pauses in the voiceovers, the weirdly low framerate in the animations, the awkward controls (Did we need to preserve all nine verbs?) ,the static character portraits (while we can hear their voices talking, no less.) It's possible that the lesson here is that if you're going to remake something, you should really remake it. It also occurs to me that, to some extent, the charm of the original MI1 and MI2 lies in the technology. The dryness of the humor that I perceive may actually depend on the dialogue being written out, rather than voiced, and the graphics being pixelated enough to be ambiguous - either serious or ridiculous, depending on the moment. It may that these games just don't translate to remake very well at all. Then again, it's possible that this is...just not a very good remake. It's not disrespectful; it's giving an honest assessment of how one perceives the piece. If there are no bad games, then there are no good games, either, since quality exists only on a comparative scale. So if it's disrespectful to say that one game is bad, then it's disrespectful to compare games to begin with. In any event, I don't think the claim was being made that the creators didn't believe in the project, or are untalented, or didn't work as hard as they could. Only that, for a variety of reasons - some constraints on time/budget, some "bad taste" - the end result was not very good.

For a completely different consensus on the game: http://www.adventuregamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25123 Choice Quote: "I honestly tried to play MI 1 and 2 ages ago, but the graphics were so bad that I couldn't tell what I was looking at half the time."

I don't remember the original game that well, but I still mostly agree with you. The controls, at least on XBLA, are awful. The design decisions - making everything cartoony (a bit like CMI) and the voices ridiculous - completely mar the experience. The first two MI games worked because they were so deadpan serious, that the ridiculous dialogue stuck out like a sore thumb. It could all ostensibly be serious, except for the absurd item descriptions and titles. Adding a layer of "wackiness paint" makes me expect everything to be funny, and as a result...it all falls flat, like some sort of awful Saturday morning cartoon show. I think some of the problem comes from wanting to do the "hybrid" thing instead of a proper remake. The control scheme does not lend itself well to an Xbox controller, and many of the gags are hindered by voice acting, not helped. The pauses in the dialogue, the awkward hotspots, etc, might all be better if they had just started from scratch. (Then again, if they had just started from scratch, why not just make a new game?) This is painful. The worst part for me is that this will probably outsell Telltale's new series.

Syberia was awful, but don't hold it against adventure games. There are still some modern ones that are quite good. *cough* Phoenix Wright *cough* The thing to keep in mind is that it's such a small genre these days that the budgets for these games are generally quite low, and so a very large portion of them are...crap. But not all of them are. The ones that have been released under major publishers and snuck in under the name of "interactive book" or whatever are usually good. You may not love them, but I thought Telltale did a bang-up job on the Strong Bad games. Down the line, I'm also excited for Jane Jensen's Gray Matter, assuming it ever comes out. Also, I can honestly say adventure games are *not* a form of nostalgia for me. When I started playing them, they were pretty much already dying off. I think I got into them right around the time Grim Fandango came out, and everyone was calling them "dead" by that point.

Kotaku still has it: http://kotaku.com/5315687/shadowy-clip-of-an-insanely-twisted-shadow-planet Also, whether or not that dude's a butt, this trailer looks pretty sweet.

Hmm. It looks pretty, but not particularly Fallout-y? Especially the idea of historical figures running around shooting thing... What are the odds of all five Fallout 3 DLC packs being lumped together and sold cheaper as a general "Fallout 3 Expansion" disc for Xbox 360?

It's not so bad as to be unplayable, but it is quite a let down in comparison to the other three. I definitely wouldn't play it unless you get through the first three and think "Man, I absolutely MUST KNOW everything that happens next before Tales of Monkey Island!"

With regards to the MI2 ending, I'm almost completely with Thrik. When I finally saw the ending to MI2, everything just clicked in my head. The idea of the MI universe being, essentially, a theme park makes a lot of sense. The universe was *always* sort of set up that way. The pirates in MI are basically Disney World "Pirates of the Caribbean" pirates - a collection of stereotypes and archetypes, with any actual "piratey" violence significantly lessened, and a dash of blatant consumerism to boot. In many ways, this makes it easier for the player to accept as a game setting: a "realistic" pirate universe would probably be unrecognizable to most people, since our image of pirates has been so heavily shaped by 30s adventure films and Disney rides. Even Guybrush's catch phrase - "I'm Guybrush Threepwood, and I want to be a pirate!" - indicates a certain degree of fantasy. There's little reason for most people - either in the Caribbean in 17th Century, or the present day - to want to be an actual pirate. Guybrush's ideal pirate is the adventurous, friendly kind from Disney rides and movies. I don't think Elaine hanging around by the pit and waiting for Guybrush necessarily negates the "It's a theme park being interpreted by a kid's imagination" scenario, either. It's "all in his head" doesn't mean that the people whom Guybrush has imagined cease to live out their fantasy lives or stop behaving as if the universe is real to them. For Elaine, Guybrush is still stuck in that hole, and she's hoping that an evil spell wasn't cast on him. Guybrush, in the real world, is eagerly waiting for a chance to return to his fantasy world and tell Elaine that LeChuck has been dealt with. And...yeah, it's tough to see how anyone could have written a third MI game with that premise, and I wouldn't want one. But it's hard for me not to read the first two games this way. On an unrelated note, anyone know when Tales of Monkey Island is hitting WiiWare?

Oh look! Elaine's British again!

I agree. Mass Effect had a real "quantity over quality" shtick going, which left the galaxy seeming really big, but also really empty and dull. The only city of any substance was the Citadel, and even that felt really empty. The rest of the major locations were outposts, excavation sites, and corporate havens, and the sidequest planets were essentially completely empty! As a result, I felt like I was constantly on the outskirts of the universe, far away from all the real action. I would have preferred some seriously fleshed out sidequests and locations over the repeated copy-and-paste jobs they gave me in ME1. I get that they want to give you the feeling that "you can go anywhere," but that's only fun if there are interesting places to go.

The last third of the game was Monkey Kombat. (Or at least, it *felt* like the last third of the game.) I feel like there's not much that can be said about why this is a bad idea. There were some positive moments in MI4 - most notably the time paradox swamp puzzle where you meet yourself from the past and give yourself the same inventory items you received a few moments ago. But really, it just felt weird and had some fairly hard puzzles with fairly little reward. (The damn thing shipped with a walkthrough, which is telling.)