syntheticgerbil

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPZ8gTT_axY I think I'm just going to mimic Spike in this classic Droopy cartoon. That'll ensure none of them hit me with their shillelagh.

I will only play insult arm wrestling. And with that reference to the least popular Monkey Island game, I will remove myself from this thread. Although on the chocolate eating games, I always wanted this to be real as a child: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZOBxIWh594

After that, I feel as if the whole world has congratulated me now. Thank you everyone. One honeymoons, the idea was originally to go to Ireland for a week but I don't know where my life is going at the moment in terms of jobs and monies. Not going to have the money if I keep going through with finding a part time job and the comic idea though.

Haha, I think that is the best one I've read so far in this thread. What is this deep seated ostrich fear?

More like NEIGHstation.

I did that all weekend since we were driving to a couple of cities. I wanted to start being obnoxious and slowly passing every McDonald's we saw, but I had to settle on the ones that it picked up by us being at a stoplight. I finally got three software users in a row!

Okay, so I proposed and I will get married June next year in Galveston, TX on the beach near a beach house we have rented way ahead of time. It'll also be our 10th year anniversary then. About time I got off my ass and did that.

Also Scurvy Scallywags, I haven't played it, but I hear it's Monkey Island 3, original version.

Haha, I wanted to roll my eyes at the Matrix bit because it's so outdated, but I enjoyed how it played. Definitely the Dracula part is where I'm feeling it dragged. The WWII stuff was great until I had to drive that tank around and tediously try not to fall off the cliff. Haven't touched the multiplayer parts, but I know all original Xbox online services no longer work.

Hah, I don't know how easy it is to do a job where I can sit around and work on my own stuff in secret. Security Guard? But a lot of the work would be on the computer for the coloring and cleanup stage, which I would have to do in my own home. I think though after looking through a bunch of comic Kickstarters right now I need to lower my scope and any funding ideas. The story I want to make needs about a good 200-250 pages, but I could just do a half or a third on Kickstarter, spend way less time, ask for way less, and then see how it all works out. The people who tend to make a up to crazy amounts in funding their comics are already super famous, but I see some really bad comics getting 5k and up. I also see much better drawn comics getting only 1k. I'm not clear on how the general comic funded Kickstarter audience feels on funding someone to work on the thing or if they'd rather just fund printing costs of finished products... I'm bookmarking Symbiosis though. Everything I've funded comicwise on Kickstarter has involved well established artists, so it's not going to be much help to me. Not saying Symbiosis isn't by a well established artist, as Steven Sanders has a decade of comic experience, but he's not as well known as a lot of "creator" comic artists. I have a lot to consider, but either way I'm going to just be working on sample pages just to get an idea of what exact pipeline I will use and then get a gauge on how long it takes me. Plus probably need some feedback from other artists I know to ensure it doesn't suck. But thinking about what Justin said, IndieGoGo might be the better route, since you don't have to reach a goal. But I get the feeling no one goes to IndieGoGo anymore.

Funny you should say that, the last company I was at started using SCRUM for a while, but they just implemented it like complete idiots. It just meant hour long meetings every morning with every employee speaking (instead of leads only like SCRUM outlines) leading to personal conversations. Then the "sprint" portions meant everyone needed to do a ton of overtime closer to the end of every month to get whatever idiotic update for their Facebook games out in time only be generally ignored by the public. Repeat every month over until they forgot they were doing SCRUM and went back to the usual disorganization that was there when I first arrived. I think they just felt SCRUM was a nice buzzword that made them seem like a legit studio even though they couldn't do simple things like pay for software for artists, since almost everyone was running pirated Adobe products. This is kind of why I'd like to shift away to try my own comic for a while. The same company I was just speaking about, I went through stints where I would refuse to work a bunch of overtime because they worked on games that constantly needed updates and I was seeing over and over how much my long hours of work didn't make a difference. A few months ago, after animating a fuckload for many months on end, the CEO sent out an e-mail asking everyone to test the newest game during evening and weekend hours and to always be on call to do so. Even though he asked for a personal written letter from people to give a reason why they couldn't (guy was a bully), most people just said they would and passive aggressively did not, resulting in no consequences. I however made the mistake of writing a letter saying I've already been doing all of this overtime to animate and did not think it was fair. When I was fired, during my exit interview it was cited that the fact the I wrote this letter meant that I was not a team player and did not contribute enough to the projects while everyone else worked hard. D: But on the part time job, I have been recently applying for full time courier jobs with the plan to quit if I found something good careerwise, but no call backs yet. A lot of them require a car manufactured 2008 and beyond, but mine is a 2001 even though it gets a good 30 miles a gallon. My girlfriend did courier work for two months once and it was a good low commitment gig. Might be able to find one part time. Justin, I think I'd feel really bad using an IndieGoGo to fund my Kickstarter stuff. I think I can get the materials together enough. Some of the concept art for the comic I want to make has actually been floating around my portfolio site throughout the years and I have pages I've written before of the story arcs, so a lot is already fleshed out. I don't think I could produce quality at the level of Symbiosis though, that guy is a much greater artist than I am. I'll give it all my best though.

Hmm, I don't know, I figure the idea would to get 6-12 pages ready, some paragraphs, some concept art, and make a hammy video with dreamy music. I don't think the idea I have will be subversive, novel, or blow IGN away, but I think I can execute it well and treat it special. Hopefully what I get together can show that. But yeah a full time job anywhere makes it really difficult to concentrate on personal projects, especially if I'm already doing art all day. It's just tough since an average work week at a game studio is 50+ hours and then I have done stints where I was doing things for other people or personal outside of the job, especially this animation for a documentary over three months last year, and it is just really tough to keep that kind of motivation going without incredible amounts of stress an exhaustion. At least for me. I don't know, there are other artists out there who are amazing and prolific and have a ton of things going on and then others I also like that tend to put out work every once and a while even when it's their full time job (often wonder how they survive). I tend to take a while on the slower end just because I get really detail oriented and want things to look as nice as I can. Plus the idea behind getting it to be a full time project is just so I can get it done. I'm so used to doing art stuff as a 9-5 job that its become what I'm comfortable with. Leaving personal projects unfinished or working on them in chunks a few times a year always get abandoned because I see I've become a better artist and I might as well just start over because it looks so ugly to me now, or I've just gone through somewhat of a style shift. But it sounds like you guys think I really need that crappy part time job at 20-25 hours a week. I would just like to find an "easy" one. My worry is every time I took a part time job during my time at college, they were all easy enough but every single one ended up at 40-50 hours a week even though I never wanted to go over 30. The three main jobs being LaQuinta, Kinko's, then Walgreen's. I guess it was a combination of me being competent enough and other employees always flaking (since the pay is shit I guess you should never put in a two weeks?), so it was always the same story where I constantly asked to cover shifts or take on more tasks making me stay late. I also tend to have a problem saying no when people are nice to me. So all three of these jobs, when I did tend to say no I would be guilted over it. LaQuinta had a manager threatening to give me almost no hours if I didn't take everyone's shifts, Kinko's had a manager wanting me to skip classes for him so that I could work all day, and Walgreen's had like 6 managers who would call me multiple times a day to pick up whatever dumb highschooler's shift because they quit the same day. Walgreen's actually became so unbearable that I ended up unplugging my home phone since they wouldn't stop harassing me (didn't have a cell then) even when I had just worked 10 hours over night and got home finally sleep at about 9 AM. Come 10 AM, the jerks would be calling me to come back and work another shift because yet another cashier quit. So there's a lot of fear there in doing those types of jobs again. Although it seems like I should try to find something that works well with 25 hours tops without managers getting all manipulative on me. That must exist somewhere. Thanks for the kind words though guys, I'm still excited! Also dibs, the plan is to get married next June. I'm hoping to propose in the next week (maybe this weekend?), even though she's knows it's been coming for a while.

I might have a sort of plan to do something art related with my life. My girlfriend kind of offered to support me being broke if I were to get this going. I might take some shitty part time job even though I thought I was done with those type jobs for the rest of my life after graduating. So the plan is to get together some sample pages for one of these comic universes I've always wanted to flesh out but have never gotten anywhere due to working on art crap for video games and other things. Too many hours or just not enough will left in me to work on anything I want to finish personally. All I've done so far for a few different character universes is knock them around reoccuring appearances in sketches and various media as some kind of semblance in the story I have floating around in my head. I've been making shitty comics since the 2nd grade on and off for my own personal pleasure and then kind of stopped trying with comics when I made it to art school and realized there's no money in comics. I even e-mailed Evan Dorkin back and forth a few times then and he pretty much told me that it's really tough to pay the bills especially for an unknown. So I gave that up. But either way it was always my dream to just kind of work on a personal comic project and get a nice little book published even if it sells no copies, because it could be something I could look at and feel proud of that I accomplished a story with characters all on my own. The idea would be to have enough materials and information in the next few months to get together a Kickstarter for myself. I wouldn't know how much people would give but I imagine it would take me a year to finish my project (I want to get like 200 pages of story) and I would need money to help pay the bills so as not to completely bankrupt my girlfriend in the process. Plus I'd have to figure out what all it costs to print full color tpbs. I don't know, I'll have to think a lot about all of this. It would be nice to ask just slightly less than my last year's salary from Kickstarter backers but no one knows who the hell I am and the chances of anything I would do going viral are nonexistent. I would hope I could possibly make an okay amount in donations based on the quality of the sample pages and my concept for the story I have in mind but I realize Kickstarters usually only work if the person has already made a name for their self. Strangely, even though I'm now a deadbeat and have found no jobs, my girlfriend is really on board with this idea and is already encouraging me. When I met her 9 years ago, the dream was to always create worlds and stories much like my art at the time. It was all kind of killed into process through school and jobs which she's never neen interested in except in a few cases where she would remark, "This project seems like you're allowed to be you." Maybe after making a bunch of concepts for years and having it all committeed to death, it's time to just make something from my head the way I want. I sometimes feel sad looking at my professional portfolio and seeing how it's all been completely watered down on purpose for the sake of marketability and then looking through some of my older work and wondering if I "lost it" or forgot how to create like that. And ramble ramble ramble, I don't feel like proofreading this post... Anyway, I'm excited, I guess I have a lot of work ahead of me. If I get hired in the meantime at yet another shitty video game company before I get a Kickstarter up, I guess it's abandoned again.

Nah I played the Xbox remake. I was loving the first half but then the second half started to get really boring and tedious and it stopped being so funny, although not all the time. It was about a 10 hour game so it didn't really wear out it's welcome. I still enjoyed it overall though and I have no issues with a bunch of sick jokes and potty humor even if it's hit or miss. Also the Xbox version is absolutely gorgeous.

BUT NO GUYS IT'S FINE YOU CAN TOUCH THE DUDES. Also it's optional so DON'T DO IT IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT! WAHHH INTERNET TROLL ANGRY WAHHH Dragon's Crown is a work of art because it references no less than 30 random things from art history and Google images and Vanillaware invented Flash, so if you are annoyed at Dragon's Crown, you obviously have no background in art history or an appreciation for high brow video games. You also hate innovation. Shame on you.

Fine I will participate in this thread again. In the last few months I have beaten Conker's Bad Fur Day, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (again), Enslaved and DLC, Ratchet and Clank Going Commando, Up Your Arsenal and Deadlocked HD, Jak 2 HD, 3 HD, and X as well as Daxter, Tales of Monkey Island, Mario 64 DS, Mario RPG, Virtual Boy Wario Land, Teleroboxer, Mario Clash, Lollipop Chainsaw, Liberation Maiden, and Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. I don't even know what to say about most of those except that they were games I all enjoyed to some extent but don't feel like making a thread about them. Half of those were done because I am jobless, egh.

Yeah I find it fascinating. People sure loved the characters portrayed by Arnold back then.

I saw that link and it really pissed me off. Guy just seems like he's full of absolute bullshit. It's kind of stretching it for most of the references, almost like the person dug them up trying to match things that the team drew. If they did use the references, I almost imagine it's the usual artist motions of checking google images for references and picking something from the first page. Probably explains why a bunch of unrelated shit from art history is in one game. Definitely not a "genius" team in my books. Also the "homages" to the Conan rip-off and Frazetta's work don't really stick. Reeks more of the traditional video game practice of plagiarism: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/tracing/tracing.htm And one last thing to note, this is completely incorrect: No! They didn't pioneer shit! Flash existed in 1997 and Spumco already had a load of Flash cartoons on their website that very fucking year! Actually John K. had a lot of input in early Flash development starting around 1995. Even Flash didn't pioneer shit. Mode 7 graphics already existed. Also the first Rayman is almost nothing but "tweened" animations. Just ugh.

I recommend playing Fate of Atlantis all three ways just for fun, but I'd agree the usual team path felt the most Indy. Wits path is good, definitely "hard mode" but there's less dialogue to be had with others. If I recall you can pretty much switch the manner of completing puzzles early on until you get locked in for a major stretch of the game when Sophia asks you directly.

I don't know much about the details of the original tale outside of the iconic bits, having never read any versions of it, but after having read a few summaries of the plot I get the feeling Enslaved doesn't follow it much outside of just having similar characters. I'm actually wondering what was the point of using Journey to the West as some kind of inspiration.

I recently finished this and the Pigsy DLC after really only finding out about what Enslaved was a little over a year ago. For various reasons what this game looked like or what it was about completely passed me by. I somehow thought it was a Serious Sam clone, but it turned out to be post apocolyptic version of Sands of Time. I kind of wish I had paid more attention to this thread, especially because I vaguely remember Toblix gushing, which doesn't normally happen. I don't know what else I can really add other than Enslaved was a smooth and memorable experience that I rank very highly. My only frustration or annoyance would just be that it is not challenging enough in the mock Prince of Persia bits. I would have preferred failure being possible more often because part of the fun from the Ubi Prince of Persias was looking around the area ahead of time and trying to map out your jumps. Since Monkey doesn't go fucking insane with wall running and jumping, surely adding the ability to jump the wrong way would have been okay? As it was, I found myself getting lazy and sometimes just running around and hitting X without even looking during platforming sections since the game had it all scripted out for you. I don't know, maybe it was for the best Ninja Theory did this, because the prince can rewind time, giving you about 5-6 fails possible before reloading the checkpoint. Toblix said it already in terms of story and characters, but wow, I'm incredibly impressed with how much is told without words and just glances, tone, and the way a character moves. I know the writing was done by Alex Garland, but it seems a lot of the story is well carried by the animation. Normally you'd expect the opposite of a AAA game desperately needing a writer to fill out masses of overdone plot, but the way that every story point here is subdued is impressive. Although I have seen all of the directed Danny Boyle scripts plus The Tesseract, so I really shouldn't be so surprised as they all work more or less in the same vein as Enslaved. The back story is all completely implied, the character motivations lie within the expressions on their faces, and the ending necessitates that audience had kept their attention the whole way through to understand the impact. There aren't any lazy audio logs or voice overs to fill in the blanks. I guess I have to credit the actual actors and not any animators, as much as it pains me to give credence to a mocap production. Although the artists sure did well to model characters that look amazing and stylized in all the right ways so not lend themselves into dropping far in to uncanny valley with the mocap like the ugly Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire. I took a lot of mental notes on what was going on here in hopes that it'll help my work in some way at a later date. And so when I got to the Pigsy DLC, I was somewhat expecting it to be more comical, but not a complete style and tone shift. It's more than fine, it has a great tale all on it's own and is an incredibly fleshed out prequel story making the Pigsy character less of a sleaze and his actions more understood. I really appreciate all of the hard work Ninja Theory put in to what was originally a (high priced?) $10 DLC. There's a slew of new cutscenes and the gameplay is very different, sort of closer to a stealth game in the manner of setting up traps and keeping yourself out of vulnerable positions at all times. There's also a lot to be done in surveying the scene and trying to map out the chain of events with what bombs you will use, which as I said earlier, Enslaved was missing. If any in this thread loved Enslaved but did not play the DLC, you should buy it. I mean it's years after the fact, but one day it may be gone from the PSN and XBLA store and will never be seen again. Go in to a panic and buy it!

My favorite is the nose. Actually, it's probably the bloody hands.

This guy is so much fun. THE NEEENTEENDO SHITCUBE! I used to love shouting like him at work. THE CONTROLLER IT DOESN"T WERRK! THE DEESC LOOKS LIKE A FUCKING COOKEEE!

Wow, that's a lot of progress all at once. Definitely good you figured out the weaving of spells backwards early on. The extra stuff you can cast spells on is just there for "tutorial" purposes I suppose. If I recall you can also cast all of the spells backwards on the straw or cloth just for fun.

Strange, that finally explains my confusion on why playing Expert mode never resulted in any differences. It's more confusing because the manual mentions the extra animation. I always figured it would be something at the end of the game.