syntheticgerbil

Yeah I can't get back to it for the next two weeks. I will catch up though.

This game makes me feel really uneasy, like one of those nightmares where you are desperately trying to grab something but try as you might, your hands are not working correctly.

The 25th Anniversary Four Swords is no longer available either, which is a damn shame even though I downloaded it in time, because I can't play it with any friends who have recently purchased a 3DS. I mean I figured the game was just free for a limited time and then Nintendo was just going to sell it for $6-8. I did not imagine they were just going to remove it from existence.

It's more of a want. Plus I think it involves me installing and doing something with Team Fortress.

Oh sorry, I didn't mean on the podcast as I was more referring to this thread in general, as I thought someone in this thread had called his design perfect. I guess no one actually did. Oops. Anyway though in reference to the podcast, my big dumb wall of text just pretty much said everything you guys said on the podcast about character appeal has some factor in appeal, fundamentally and ubiquity. Baby heads and monies.

As much as I hate Time Gate, Gearbox is definitely responsible.

Hey wow, I never post in these individual threads for podcasts. I just wanted to chime in about Rayman's character design as a pretty big Rayman fan. I've often actually felt a little bit of disappointment in the series that the least interesting looking character is the main character. He's a design directly out of the early 90s European Amiga scene, and the rainbow sweet art direction in the first game reflects this completely. He's kind of a remnant of a very different aesthetic that was a big deal and well liked in video games at one point in time, much like Felix the Cat. He was designed much like an every man for a platformer without any kind of real hook or personality, as most 90s platformers tended to be (not counting the 'tude dudes Bubsy and Sonic). I guess a lot of you disagree, but I found the most appealing hook of any of the characters in Rayman 1 to be the lack of limbs (as just about every character was Rayman in a different outfit). The team did it so they wouldn't have to spend so much time animating and could tween (early tweening) their way through it quickly. So that said, I find Rayman 1 to be a solid game in terms of platforming goodness, but I really despise the look. I don't feel like the appeal started the Rayman series until the second one. You'll notice in that game, Rayman is the only character left with the chunky face cutesy design, while everyone else has been redesigned with limbs and given a very general and specific variety. The colors stopped being completely rainbow and evoked many different modes. I don't think pertaining it has much to do with Rayman vs. Mario game designs that affect the appeal, especially because I think the main series of games have all been completely solid experiences that rival any Mario game. Also Rayman 3 GBA is platforming fucking gold. I think it's more a franchise that is stuck with a bland character that can't be drastically changed. Rayman has become much nicer to look at as the series has evolved, but he has also had a less evolution time and Ubisoft also doesn't seem generally interested in churning out quality games anymore with consistent direction. I'm also confused why Mario is considered a perfect character design. He's somewhat bland himself but I think has been refined over the years to a science of appeal. I mean check out these early designs, they are pretty poorly conceived and are exactly what Rayman is, full of completely round shapes of poorly conceived character design: Maybe some of you will be annoyed I put the iconic Mario 2 cover up, but that is a bunch of ugly floating shapes without any kind of tight construction. I put the Mario design above Rayman, but not by an incredibly amount. I definitely feel like the side characters in Rayman are way more identifiable and appealing than most Mario characters. I would also put them both above Mickey Mouse, who has one of the most vapid and uninspired character designs I've ever seen, only propped up by the ubiquity and money of Disney. I think Mickey's interest at the core has always been hinged on the supporting characters as the mouse is nothing but a bowl of zero personality. He's a rip of Felix but a step down, like bad fan. If you compare Mickey, Rayman, or Mario to many of top the Looney Tunes characters, I think you'd also find that the longevity and definition of those characters has come from the way they have been created, with personality and roles in mind as well as a nice contrast of rounded and sharp edged forms. It's really a testament to Looney Tunes character designs that they still have a lot of recognition despite having been through decades of bad animation, bad attitude adjustments, bad redesigns, and a general lack of support of even keeping the characters in the limelight by Warner Bros. in anything resembling their original forms in the 40s and 50s. If you just look at Bugs Bunny in his early yellow gloves form, the way he head and body shapes along with his overbite along and manner of speaking just almost instantly had a classic character going without any refinement needed. A lot of these shapes were later stripped even before he got uglied up by Chuck Jones (I know, not a popular opinion, but I feel like in the long run, Jones really fucked up Bugs and Daffy), because a lot of the animators at the studio had a very difficult time drawing these more subtle and complicated shapes in 3D space coming out of the rubber hose rounded overly generic characters of the 30s. Anyway yeah, I love blabbing about character design and inherent appeal since it's been mostly what I've done professionally outside of animation and I just love having a bunch of trivia and theories in my head of this shit anyway. I could go on for hours.

I get the feeling a lot of companies do mock ups like this and we never know it. Creating trailers or gameplay demo videos with the intention of having all of that working later. I'm guessing we only tend to notice when someone fails at living up to what they had on display as part of their promo material. Two other examples I can think of this are Metal Gear Solid 2 and Munch's Oddysee. MGS2 apparently was not a playable game by any means when early gameplay trailers were released, but instead scripted animated mock ups of what their working game should look like. The only reason I know this is because they went into detail about the issues with their own making of material. Kind of gutsy. Luckily MGS2 does about everything shown in their early videos except for Snake running from a wall of water in the Tanker. Munch's Oddysee however had some promo videos that were mocked up when it was still for PS2 including a character that never made it into the final game as well as notable missing functions. I guess I never caught wind of these either being cut or never existing as functioning gameplay pieces in the first place, but I was left pretty disappointed. So I don't know, it's definitely a grey area, even if everyone probably does it. You can't really deny early gameplay footage and trailers to your audience once it's out there. A lot of gamers are probably clicking on these videos without any kind of frame of reference of when they came out as well.

Hahaha I know I know! I mean to, I've just been really busy. Actually it helps me not forget if you guys keep bugging me.

Ah I guess that answers what I was asking earlier, as I wasn't sure if you'd have to pay any royalties for a port. I've already bought the Peter McConnell soundtrack from Amazon though, I'm mostly interested in his work more than anything else. (Also Mr. Remo, can you use any pull you have to get Double Fine to start releasing all of the work Peter did since Brutal Legend? I would really love the Costume Quest and Stacking soundtracks.)

AT&T is one of the worst companies in the United States, they have almost all areas on lock down. I don't know where you live but is Clear one of your options? Clear is certainly not the best but I don't pay too much and get much better speeds that I would have gotten on typical AT&T DSL, without going to a cable service or U-Verse (Which are both expensive). I don't really experience much if any lag in online games if that's any point of reference.

From Nathan at Double Fine, in one of the postings on the Steam hub: "This version has a lot of technical/graphical improvements (with more to come) and it includes all of the DLC from the console versions, but right now no plans for new content. However, if BL PC does really well, there's lots of stuff we designed that we'd love the chance to make and share with players." Sounds like I should buy this especially if there's a hope some of the cut content comes back.

I didn't realize it was an issue to grab the rights again for the ports until you said that and I checked the Double Fine forums. Is this truly an issue? I'm not really attached to any of the music in the game, but it would suck if the soundtrack would have cuts or switched out songs. Awesome, yeah I've had it preordered on Amazon. Good to know it's going to make it. Last time I preordered it, no announcement was officially made that it was cancelled as Amazon just constantly pushes the date back and keeps your preorder when that happens. I had to find out by messaging Double Fine support. That said it led to one of the most awesome customer service experiences I've ever had, because when the person e-mailed me back to tell me that the book was cancelled, I jokingly asked if they had any more Psychonauts DVDs that I could buy from them so that I could feel better about the art book cancellation. I mean I did want the DVD, but I figured it was going to be a "no" as the thing was a limited special supply, yet the next day I get an e-mail telling me they found one sitting around the office and that they were shipping it to my address for free. I love Double Fine so much.

Oh yeah, where the fuck is that art book they said was coming out at the end of last year?! I don't feel like anything was wrong with Brutal Legend outside of pacing in the campaign mode concerning either the story or the RTS stuff. I'm still waiting for someone to confirm my theory that a third of the game was cut for time and money. It's a shame it has those flaws, but I find it an otherwise complete and satisfying game.

Oooh, I wonder if it will have any new features or multiplayer improvements? I'm not ready to replay this whole game just yet, but a good reason to would be nice. Plus I was getting pretty okay to good on multiplayer stuff before I finished with the trophies.

I'm always playing the boxed games... although I suppose there's some games on Steam I want, there's not $100 worth (if that is truly the going rate of the items).

I might have to drag until the next one and do two in a day. My idiotic boss doesn't know how to count days in my original scheduling so I have a lot of work to do to catch up to his changed times.

I was actually going to say that probably a lot of this was Timegate dropping the ball before you posted that. Everything about that studio seems pretty sleazy based on my very minor first and second hand experience (I haven't worked there). The Houston game development world is a joke as it starts and ends with that company. That's not to say that Gearbox should have some quality control in place for outsourcer screw ups, since it's ultimately their name on the box. That is such an incredibly unpopular opinion to have, but I love you for it. Totally agree.

It's possible I already posted this in this thread, but it never fails to make me laugh after all of these years. Such masterful filmmaking.

Hmm, I did feel like they upped the ante on each of the enemies in interested ways this time. I mean there's only two types that have about 4 phases of growing strength types each, so with that limited number I found it all very fun to mess with and figure out the weakness of each. The user generated stuff I've played has been absolute garbage, but I expected that, so I'm not really counting any of that shoe-in mission creation stuff against Sucker Punch.

WAIT NOT CLARIFYING

Sounds about right. If you get all the blast shards it takes longer. I collected almost all of them but I did not bother looking hard for the remaining two or three I was missing. Someone made a custom mission you can play in the online mode that just teleports you to every blast shard at once, very convenient. I'm just going to do that for my second playthrough since I don't see how doing that again is fun or worth my time. As far as Infamous 3... er... MAJOR SPOILER HERE

Man, I just finished the good playthrough of Infamous 2 and even though I felt the first was mediocre in every way, I very much enjoyed the second, It just felt well paced with constant smooth fun along with a very defined progression of powers and abilities. The powers were the best part of the first game and they were just made even better here. Climbing felt better and fluidly jumping around the city felt just right. The minibosses roaming the streets was a nice touch along with just the improvement and inclusion of a variety of bosses in general, which the first game severly lacked. Each one you are introduced to feels very tough and stressful but later you start finding you are earning powers that easily take those guys out, only to find the next boss that makes routine appearances is an even tougher asshole. Once you get good at disposing of those dudes (although never very simple at that point), they start pitting you against multiples of all sorts of bad dudes at a time. The game just felt like it ramped up the difficulty in all the right spots and never became boring, tedious, or routine. I think part of this nice pacing is the game just feels a lot shorter than the first Infamous, but not in a bad way. It's like Sucker Punch decided to cut out all the fat and tedium that comes along with open world games. I'm pretty sure the map I was traveling around was smaller, but it wasn't a bunch of copied and pasted locations, and instead a lot of thought appears to have bee put in most areas. There weren't enough samey side missions to annoy me this time, and generally kept me engaged as well as enough unique ones that expanded the story this time around. The mission where Zeke sets up Cole with a dating commercial was brilliant. I think the shorter game also kept the storyline going at an engaging pace where events actually happened. Infamous 1 was just a meandering story full of introductions and an abrupt ending with a useless twist. It was like the first act of a story stretched out way too long. In Infamous 2, all of the story from the first serve as an essential prologue, but completely builds off of it on it's own. The moral choices, from what I could tell from the good playthrough, were very well thought out this time. There wasn't any part where it was "Kill this dude or not" outside of the typical little mini missions on the street. All major storyline choices seemed to hit somewhat of a grey area, but it could be because they were both to achieve the same end, while the first game did not have an end that you knew you had to work towards. Plus Cole is actually likeable this time, since they switched his voice actor from that uncharacteristically gravelly voiced dick head to someone who actually sounds like he may have been a bike courier. That all said, I'm sure I'll hate this game just a little bit after playing the evil playthrough next since I dislike acting like a douche in games.

His grin seems to indicate that you will meet again.

Ragnar, girlfriend, I can't wait to explore your long dialogue trees.