syntheticgerbil

Just reading that brings back all the painful memories of Zak McCracken. Ugh. Fucking jungle maze. Yeah I kind of want you to use a guide, haha, just because I can't wait until you start talking about Full Throttle.

Haha I'm glad this thread was bumped for that and not another strange bit of dialogue.

I feel that way too, honestly. I can't fathom why the game has taken this long or why it got overscoped so much, but I figured it was still going to be the original $400,000 game with lots of polish and extra content. It doesn't seem like what they came up with ended up being that at all and this episode came as a big surprise. I feel like now they have created this behemoth where everyone was looking at Double Fine to be the Kickstarter poster boys and now they are pointing fingers. Plus I feel like a lot of the earlier documentary episodes showed that the studio had learned from similar mistakes with going over budget and creating delays on Psychonauts and Brutal Legend. I am worried this will all be spun around towards Tim Schafer again the way that somehow Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, and Brutal Legend made it to this stupid wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_failures_in_video_gaming But in the end on a personal level, I am not bothered by this stuff, and I agree with Thrik here:

Yeah there's a long idiotic development history where it basically started as a more original concept in terms of FF Tactics type design (sort of) with myself at the helm of character concepts, then upper management happens, certain key members get replaced, and basically everything must be turned into a League of Legends rip off in terms of what sells, characters, art style, the style of character portraits, etc. Continuously the CEO was trying to get the parent company excited by citing all of Riot's numbers. I was pushing for a cutsier style since it was originally supposed to be an iPad audience and it would be more simple to do in house with the people I actually worked with and reduce overtime, and not have to give tons of gratis work to the Chinese outsourcers that the parent company also owned. But then I guess because League is PC based and they have a stand alone EXE, that became all anyone wanted to do and target the "hardcore audience" and everything must look "bad ass." Those were the exact creative qualifying words used from that point on. So basically the studio director hired his buddy in as art director for a stupid amount of money ahead of every artist who had been at the studio for years, and then he could be the creatively bankrupt cypher artist that would not argue with him. I was taken off of all concept because of creative differences, and then I spent until the end of my time only animating the bad characters that came from China instead. I guess the other side of it I didn't mention earlier is that I was initially super excited about what the game could have been and my heavy involvement with it and it was all kind of ripped away with a lot of my ideas completely scraped. I was very sad about that so that's part of the sour grapes.

Can you not skip the plane segments in Zak McCracken with escape if you are done in there?

My girlfriend put well over 100 hours into Harvest Moon Animal Parade. She didn't stop until she lost interest in her New Game + because of all the grinding involved. I was getting so sick of hearing the summer time cicadas by the end of it. She doesn't really play games, but if she does she gets hooked. She tried a PS2 and this strange looking Gamecube Harvest Moon with big heads and could not get into them. She also tried one of the earlier DS ones on my DS but hated the control scheme and I guess a bunch of waiting between dialogue and animations. So I don't know if that's a testiment to Animal Parade but she pretty much lost interest in any others that she tried after picking them up from the used games shop. She might give Tree of Tranquility on Wii a go, but she said she'd rather play a newer one than Animal Parade because she liked how fucking crazy jam packed Animal Parade was.

No way, whenever I am bored at someone's home, one thing I like to start doing is looking through their stuff. I mean it's not like extensive ransacking, but I'm sure I'm rather obnoxious.

I think you are supposed to kill the squirrel? Maybe not? I remember that mildly upsetting me.

Yeah what's up with that? On my trip to Paris long ago, it seemed like every car was super dinged up or parked like an inch apart. What kind of ramifications do they have for hit and runs? And Pirate 101, that reminds me, King's Isle never got back to me about my job application three weeks ago. Fucking taunting spam bot.

Holy fucking shit, thank you for posting that! Gonna sleep like a baby. Scared baby.

Cracker Barrel is nasty. Why is it all so bland starch powdery? I mean don't get me wrong, I tend to enjoy bottom of the barrel breakfast foods (especially breakfast tacos), but Cracker Barrel is bad news.

I figure tens of thousands audience members should be more than enough for a review copy. I feel like much smaller publications tend to get review copies all the time.

I guess the sentence stating the large chunk of cash directly following a very short apology strikes me as insincere. But this is coming off partly of my feelings of their Kickstarter bloat, so take of that what you will. In general though, I feel like using money or gifts to cover up a mistake always comes off as insincere. Kind of in the way that an abusive husband might buy his wife nice jewelry to cover up his transgressions (Yeah I know that's a way extreme example). I might have taken it very differently if he had not stated how much money he gave or spent more time explaining why he was sorry, as the others posted. But as it rests, I guess we'll have a difference of opinion on what Gabe's gesture means.

TIME TO TEACH THOSE KIDS A LESSON.

I've only ever beaten the game once and I was about 10 years old and used a walkthrough nearly the whole time. I remember some bullshit with a timed sequence where you can posess a bird and do something away from your body and if you don't get back in time you die. I remember making the mistake of saving while I was the bird having wasted too much time. So I ruined that save and my last save was hours before then. Fucking Zak McCracken. I wish you luck Zeusthecat, because it's not really a coincidence that Zak McCracken is the least loved LucasArts adventure. It's downright infuriating in my opinion, worse than a King's Quest in some cases.

I was once at an estate sale and found an old map for every Stuckey's in the United States and I instantly thought of the in game Sam and Max travel map. Now that I remember that, I am kicking myself for not buying it. I have never been to a Stuckey's though, but I imagine I've seen it all through other rest stops. Texas has its own knock off called "Buc-ee's" with this ugly beaver character.

I tried the alpha a few months back. I like the backgrounds, but the animations are somewhat iffy and the line work is a bit strange. I really don't like the look of the girls here, but it's not like they looked all that great in the VGA version (outside of Fawn). I'll probably give it a shot when I get the boxed copy (Yeah even after all my bitching and moaning I caved in and gave). No rush for me, since this is a game I've already played more than enough times.

Wh-why?

Yeah, I should really drop the revenge shtick, I've just gotta block it out. Funny you guys think the game looks so professional. I guess the art is technically good, but it all leaves me so cold. All the final art except UI was done by a company in China because none of the staff artists were considered good enough. A lot of it just ended up getting touched up in house though. My demo reel and other animations are here, Lacabra: www.mrseanlane.com/animate.html Hope you like them on some level. Hey Justin, are you going to the Game Jam? Unfortunately I have to skip this one, I'm going to Houston this weekend for my Dad's birthday, but I was considering it. I went to the Global Game Jam earlier this year and it was a great experience. I'll probably try to go to ever game jam I can as they come up. The project my team did earlier this year is still being worked on little by little, we want to flesh it out a bit for a cheap iOS app if we can. We should be meeting up again to do further work next month. But for sure I try to make it to most industry events in town. I met someone early last week who was going to put my work in for Edge of Reality early because they need an animator "soon," so I guess I would be first in line before they put up the job posting. That might work out too. Anyway thanks for the words you guys. It cheers me up.

Well the F2P "Lords Management" game I worked on at the horrible company with the CEO of dubious morals and rampant nepotism just got featured on Penny Arcade. Besides all of the constant internal strife I had and the company's ability to fire/lay off nearly half the staff for one reason or another (myself last month) before replacing them with their own bro friends that they hang out and smoke weed with, I simply think the game is just objectively bad, boring, broken, and unpolished. We were never allowed credits either, which was neat. I like the animations I did for the game but they just were just implemented crudely with shoddy effects work and sound. I like some of the character concepts I did, the ones that weren't committee'ed to death, but the final art and models from my concept leaves a lot to be desired. I also did not name the white rabbit Max as some kind of tribute to Sam and Max. I was pretty annoyed with that as a big Sam and Max fan, as I honestly was not trying to rip any character as it was originally supposed to be a game of anthropomorphic animals and he was sort of left over. The fact that the rabbit was white should have just been the only similarity. Err anyway, I don't really want to post any names in fear that my previous employers will get back at me (hopefully you guys don't name the names here either), but there's so much I can go into and really don't want to think about. I just feel like everything led to me getting the short end of the stick, even though I knew early on when working at that company that I should have been trying much harder to bail to somewhere else. Still can't find another job in the area and the places I think I would fit are filled up. Unemployment won't kick in because they are still investigating my claim, five weeks later. I deem it wrongful termination personally for multiple reasons, but I guess they are probably arguing with my former employer (or they are stalling). I can't even file an appeal unless the unemployment office makes some sort of decision. In a way it gives me hope that that the delay is maybe a good thing since you don't usually get unemployment for being fired and then I can get some kind of money and at least stop with going broke here while I try to figure out what the hell I need to do with my life. All I wanted was the company to fail, if not even for me but to make my earlier former coworkers feel better because of all the similar pain and humiliation. I am trying so hard not to concentrate on vengeful thoughts since I'm so bad about holding grudges, but my Facebook is ablaze with this crap. I don't think I've ever felt lower professionally. I really want some good karma to come my way soon.

Ah good ol' piles of cash. What don't they ever fix?

The second time I finished the game, I tried for all endings, since I didn't realize there were multiple endings when I was a kid. The meteor in the Edsel is definitely my favorite.

Haha, yeah there's so many keys and little trinkets in Maniac Mansion, I find it really hard to give clues based on memory. Going to have the same issue with Zak McCracken and (to a lesser extent) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Hahaha, this game confuses the shit out of me. Maniac Mansion always seemed hard only because of the multiple endings and different character abilities.

I deleted almost all of my posts in 2004/2005 at the time, but I have made an effort to stop hiding my atrocities since then. So yeah, I can post forever. Don't have any other forums to go to at the moment. Also Kroms, don't say goodbye forever.