syntheticgerbil

Well I want the whole collection.

Er... I mean like if you had drawn something in the past, can you post or is it cheating?

I didn't realize this was a thing. You thief. Although, I think I've heard a lot of this music recycled for Key Gens on certain art software.

WHAT DID SHE DO TO THE BATHROOM? Did you draw this? 'Cause it's neat. Is this an original content thread?

Yeah, there was a year or so there I used to load up one of the Kyrandia games on a Saturday morning and try to beat them within the same day. The music was so good in every game in the series. When I posted that I realized I had been listening to them "wrong" because we only had a Soundblaster card, but the MT-32 versions don't get me all teary eyed. I have the Lands of Lore games, but I haven't started them at all.

Fucking Kyrandia and nostalgia.

I'm so glad they never went through with their plans to have Wally drop his monocle in the ocean. It would have broken my heart.

Haha, awesome, I'm glad the tape and the solvent led to a series of events where everything clicked. I didn't want to say anything about your plan because I knew you'd figure it out. I'm pretty sure in my first playthrough long ago that I did not use the tape with the solvent as I would have thought you would have to pick it up in order to use it with another object, so I was never able to get the kid version of the Grail Diary.

I thought the wine bottle was required to even finish Venice. I finished the castle multiple ways last night using Thunderpeel's guide to up my series score. I kept having problems early on with guards spotting me from way across the hallway and then I realized because I was talking my way through people and then going back and beating them up. So I left everyone alive and tried again after guard 4 wasn't even going to talk to me and I was still having issues with the guard after him. Turns out in my save I had punched out the drunk guard and that still heightens everyone's alerts. So, started the castle over again. I had always played where I thought I was supposed to get caught rescuing my father so I had never even realized you could get out of the castle without being seen or disabling the alarm and opening the safe, so a lot of this stuff is new to me. It strikes me how much of the stuff the game wants you to do in the castle doesn't matter and that finishing the most obvious way where Indy and Henry are caught seems to the most exciting. Plus you don't get to go to Berlin and have a chance to punch Hitler if you are not caught. I also read ahead in the guide and realized you can skip the whole Zeppelin sequence as well. Seems like there are many easy ways to make the game much less eventful. Anyway, having fun dismantling this game for all the points. I had some strange bug where the music sounds like awful bleepy garbage in Berlin.

All the heartwarming ads for banking, diapers, and hotels feature either ukeleles or little bell chimes. This has been going on for years now and I'm fucking sick of it.

Robin Hood reference, you wouldn't get it.

I guess I'm not really aware of anything Giant Bomb related, but on a personal level, this situation is really upsetting. I hope his wife is getting enough support, as this sounds incredibly awful to bare.

Ah, yeah you can't reenter the library once you've already gone underground. I've also started this, but I'm just trying to get 506 points (supposedly the maximum) for a full playthrough and do 800 series points by saving and reloading a few games for the alternate paths. Until you get to the castle, nearly all the points except for the ones in the classroom in the beginning are mandatory. So this is where it gets good. I guess I'm going to talk my way through every guard, then fight them. This is going to be tough. I think I may end up messing around with ScummVM's save states and slowing the game down for the fist fights as I remember as a kid I pretty much avoided any fight I could because the depletion to your energy is permanent (at least for the chapter I think?) and the fighting controls are really clunky. Also the FM Towns version doesn't have that dorky Venice song even though so far it has added music in many other places that were completely silent. I was looking forward to hearing an orchestral rendition of it.

I'm just going to go ahead and start a thread for all Layton games, since like Toblix, I'm pretty sick of commenting on games in the "recently completed" thread. However, I don't like making a thread for every old game I finish, since I'm afraid I'll clutter up the forum, just like all these damn Swapper threads. I don't often have a lot to say either. But I figure Layton is popular enough with most here. So about The Swapper... Or I really just wanted to talk about Unwound Future, as I finished it last week. The design and pacing was pretty uneven compared to Diabolical Box, but I think this may be one of my favorite stories in a video game. Somewhere in the top 10 or 20 at least. This one had me guessing all along and while the far fetched part of this game, which is , kind of sucks compared to the two I've played so far, it's maybe a bit more believable than Curious Village's far fetched part. Maybe Diabolical Box had a tighter mystery, but the emotion evoked in this Layton game was just unexpected. I guess because the whole series is built around how calm and collected Layton is, I actually teared up at the end when The mysteries had me guessing the whole time as well, but I suppose that's the usual. I'm really glad this series takes notes and reexplains things when certain parts of the mystery are solved because it took me months to chip away at this thing and I would sometimes forget plot details. But as I said before, the design and pacing were the weakest here. Not much to say about it, typical Layton, but I didn't find the extra minigames as exciting as before and the puzzles were almost nonexistant for the first half of the game. I knew while this was happening that it meant that they would just throw a ridiculous amount of puzzles at me near the end in a large open area. I hope they don't do this in future games. Er... also I watched the movie after that, The Eternal Diva, which I've been waiting to watch for a few years, since I want to watch the story unfold in sequence. It looked nice and animated well in some parts, but the story was crap. I guess Layton just doesn't convert well to movie form as the puzzles they inserted into the film were just strange and had solutions that were either obvious or came out of nowhere. Layton builds a flying machine with a chainsaw and some oars? Huh? The movie also seemed to just rush every mystery and character introduction to the point and I didn't feel like I was involved the way the games keep you going with lots of dialogue and events. I guess there's something to be said of throwing a bunch of game in between a linear story.

Ah, I don't know how much designers are willing to throw up on a portfolio site, but artists tend to violate all sorts of NDA when putting up their most recent work. You kind of commit career suicide if you don't even though you aren't supposed to. The first job I worked at my art director there told me unless a company finds your site and sends you a cease and desist, then don't ask and don't worry about it. But I'm sure that doesn't work out if you are working on high profile stuff that people do random searches for like the leaked stuff for Duke Nukem Forever. But you could set up a quiet little site for your next employer to show off all your cool prototypes. I personally love seeing designer portfolios just because it's like a bunch of neat toys.

Oh man, those prototypes should lead to a good chunk of portfolio work. Glad to hear it! I feel like Twig isn't specific enough to track down on Google though.

Yeah, I got a super long e-mail update yesterday from the Banner Saga folks pretty much telling people that this is what happens in game development all the time, but Double Fine is showing it warts and all. I think it was also a reply to them being lumped in with Double Fine with Kickstarter being some kind of risky failure for all games because of project delays.

Nah, I think you just have the regular DOS version, hopefully with VGA though. Only difference is the music.

Yeah pretty much, in different ways for different genres, every once and a while I'll give up or cheat because that list bit that finishes off your completion is too hard or just tedious. I tend to look ahead of time if a game is going to be too ridiculous to 100%, so I don't bother in the first place. But yeah a lot of the time it's not fun but I feel compelled to do it. There's things like adventure games or Metal Gear where I play with a sheet showing me all the little easter eggs and fun things to try, and that's an enjoyable 100%, but then there's games like Shadow of the Colossus where I have to do a time attack mode on hard and do multiple playthroughs to finish. So that one is left unfinished for now. MGS2 and 4 were a ridiculous chore to get to 100% with that sucked the fun out of them by the end.

OKEEYYY DOKEEEY

I have a bunch of stuff I gathered over the years as things I should play, but I don't like to think about the exact number (my guess is about 70 games). I figure I'll be done with this batch in about 8 years, but by then more games will have come out. They are neatly arranged on my shelves by played and unplayed. I'm very behind on Nintendo stuff especially, feeling very guilty about having yet to play a Metroid game even though I've had Zero Mission waiting for me for years and years. I've kind of started getting rid of some fringe games I own that gave me a passing interest but probably are not that important. I also tend to never take anyone up on stuff they recommend either because I just feel guilty I'm not playing the games I own. All of this is made more difficult by the fact that I can't really move on from a game unless I 100% did everything. It's all so stressful to think about, along with man unwatched DVDs I own and books I haven't read yet.

I voted for your girlfriend even though I suspect you are a robot and your girlfriend does not exist.

Well, it's not the first game I've worked on by far, but it's definitely the most troubled that I've been through and the one I felt closest to in the concept stage. Before at the same company I created art and animation on a few garbage Facebook games with the pop ups and selling energy, but I guess I didn't care since they would never be anything more than what they were. I think if I can keep this artist career going, I'm going to try much harder at the next company to separate myself from feeling anything for any of the projects. I should probably just put that all of that energy into personal projects instead.

Ah, haha I guess I am more hung up on the looks of the game, the design stuff isn't really my department, but I do know the two designers doing the actual heavy lifting were having constant pushback by the CEO and studio director in passive aggressive manners. The week after I left one of the designers told me the art director buddy became official design (he was already making design decisions with his friend, the studio director, in the evenings outside of work and then stealthing in the changes with their other long time friend, one of the programmers). The two "designers" right now are only to do QA from now on for the project and never tweak the gameplay again. But aside from that, the grid was an early argument and I guess the director and CEO were afraid a grid would be boring. That kind of divided everyone. I personally wanted the grid, but since League doesn't have a grid... But I'm also an artist and I don't really like to step on design's toes in any job unless it's in relation to the art. Any time I tested it, I was just picking random things with characters because even though I animated many of the moves, their effects were often too complicated or unreadable, so I tended to not give a shit. There's also an easy way to break the game overall by just keeping four together down an outer lane and hugging a wall the whole time. They've done a lot to counter that but in the end it can still be done, I think even now, because there's no grid and you could be 10 pixels out of someone's range easily. As for the the item shop, yeah the game was designed around one and then it was completely axed because no one was working on it. Hooray.

Isn't Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade next? I'd recommend the FM Towns version if you can. Maybe PM me. I might actually play Last Crusade with you because I've been meaning to play the FM Towns version myself with the enhanced music. I've finished the DOS version 3-4 times as a kid, but I want to go back one day and get all the points as listed in Thunderpeel's guide: http://indyguide.mixnmojo.com/lcindex.shtml Now might be the best time for me to do this actually. Crusade has some dead ends but they are much harder to achieve than Zak McCracken or Maniac Mansion. A lot of it depends on keeping your health up during fist fights, especially during this crazy Nazi castle labyrinth. I have a soft spot for the game though, even though it's probably LucasArts second "worst" adventure game, as the Zak McCracken hate seems about unanimous. The plot isn't the easiest to understand unless you've seen the movie, which I actually saw after the playing the game. Also there's a stupid copyright puzzle that requires the manual. Thinking about it, this is a very dumb puzzle and it could have been designed well with just one simple change. I guess they purposefully made it hard since there's not a ton of rooms in the first act. The vague hint I can give you is that Nah, Loom brings on the age of no dead ends. As a side of trivia, is Loom the first adventure game ever to have no dead ends? Maybe it doesn't count because technically you could forget to write down a spell since they are randomly generated and get stuck, but I swear they always throw in a way to recover the spell (by solving another puzzle) in every area you may need it. Either way, it's silly of someone to play that game and not write down the spells.