syntheticgerbil

I'm trying to meet these guys in person because I really want to talk to the animator to steal his secrets. It looks really awesome.

My earliest memory is either my Dad's Atari or playing games on this early laptop he had (he worked at Data General, it wasn't his): They called it the "Pharaoh" and it had four shades of yellow! I could play games that were not made for it but ran in four color CGA. No idea I was playing on the pioneer in laptops.

If it's one or the other, but basically is the full game going to be redone with updated models and textures?

You really should think twice about ever going there: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/21/nathan-dunlap-convicted-i_n_1371793.html http://vacaville.news10.net/news/crime/95549-man-shot-outside-fairfield-chuck-e-cheese http://www.aolnews.com/2010/02/18/four-arrests-made-in-chuck-e-cheese-melee/ http://blog.chron.com/newswatch/2012/03/chuck-e-cheese-a-popular-spot-for-family-violence/ http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/east_bay&id=7793728 The best one (I recommend reading this out loud to a loved one for full hilarity): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122878081364889613.html

Yep!

Either way, it's great of them to do that. Beyond Good and Evil did not have higher poly cutscene models, but all of the Sands of Time games did which would have been nice if they were used, assuming that made things easier.

Oh wow, I would like to see what's going on with the 3DS version. I clicked on everyone's links but I could not seem to find screenshots and animations. Any chance of seeing this stuff at the moment? I bet it looks gorgeous.

Yeah I was thinking it probably couldn't be THAT hard after noticing on the Grim Fandango remake project they had smoothed out the model and had not broken the animation. Thinking about it, I'm feeling more and more ripped off by these HD versions. There's multiple HD comparisons of the models for Stranger's Wrath, but all of the characters were remodeled to look more like those in the prerendered cutscenes. It's actually kind of funny now because on one particular prerendered cutscene, they are using the old jaggy models for the minions while in game they look much better now.

Just saw this, very neat! I don't know if you mentioned this before, but is this supposed to go to finish?

That video is upsetting for too many reasons.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. I'm too kitchen/food/coffee stupid to make these drinks as amazing as they are at the restaurants. But yeah, amazing, a must order with any Vietnamese plate!

Eh, that doesn't make for good small talk. On the trust note, I don't see any reason for him to make that up, but I guess I'll leave it at "rumor" then since I have no names, recordings, or transcripts. EDIT: I wrote "art director" in my original post when I should have said it was one of the 10 or so lead artists on the project. My coworker and I looked up pictures of the art director on the project and he said it was not him. I read off the names of all of the other art leads on Mobygames but nothing rang and bell and we could not find photos of everyone.

I was actually thinking about why companies do this and the most I can get is that adding polys to preexisting models just completely fucks up your animation... at least in my experience, I don't have a major amount of professional 3D knowledge. Add extra vertices, then you have to tell the bones what to warp all over again. I'm guessing for everything in Oddworld HD, the company went through and rerigged all of the new models to the existing skeleton animation and probably had to clean up all of the existing animation in turn, looking for breakage. Seems like it's a major headache, but if they are repackaging an existing game for this console generation, why not? But I certainly don't want to be involved in anything like that. I'd rather just repaint textures all day.

Saw Sound of Noise. That was a nice little treat. Not much going on, but I had a lot of fun at the theatre. I really like being able to have fun at the expensive theatre.

Ah the flower fiasco. Those are early comparison screenshots. People on the official Beyond Good and Evil board were up in arms about the flowers. I can confirm they are there in the final product though. It's possible the texture was missing when the earlier HD screenshots were taken. There's other screenshots of the intro fight floating around that are also missing the purple flowers, yet there are there in the finished game as well. But yeah, really it's just cleaned up/redrawn UI elements for HD, new or redrawn textures in probably double the resolution, and supposedly there is high quality audio and remastered music, but I'm not an audiophile nor do I have a neato sound setup so I can't tell. I have read before that Ubisoft's HD remakes have normal maps on top of the new textures to give everything a more fully formed look. It seems like this happened from what I can tell. It's very apparent in Prince of Persia HD because of the rocky textures of flat surfaced environments, but if the normals were put on things in Beyond Good and Evil, it's very difficult to tell as a lot of environments are organic jagged polys or stylized graphics that would not need normal maps. It's probably on the grittier textures, but I am not positive. It could just be the difference between bump maps originally displayed in 480p vs. 720p, but in the above screenshot, it appears as if there are normals going on in the buildings. I was a lot more forgiving of these HD versions from everyone before playing Oddworld Stranger, and now I just feel disappointed since that was the only game to completely redo all of the character models. I feel like that's the most important part as there's a big disparity when going close up to the characters on the Ubi HD remakes (see through polygons, broken portions, etc.) and it would have been nice had they taken the time to at least clean up and smooth out the main characters in these games. I think we've reached about the last of these now. The ones I'm looking forward to are Ratchet and Clank, Rayman 3, and Oddworld Munch's Oddysee. I'm sure once again the Oddworld game is going to be the only one with actual hard work put into it.

Guess they'd better rehire everyone they laid off then? Fun fact: A coworker had interviewed with Junction Point before Epic Mickey started production in full force. The lead artist he had interviewed with checked to see if he had a girlfriend/wife as this apparently is a test often given by the interviewer to make sure he has job candidates who are dedicated to their job only and not some kind of outside spousal force. If only my coworker directly remembered this mother fucker's name. Needless to say, my coworker was about to be married during that point in time and did not even bother following up.

I'm actually always curious to know if the people who set these age prompts up will stop taking January 1st as an answer because it'll show you are being a pathetic liar. But then what if you were born on January 1st? It'd be chaos!

Ugh, this feels so gross.The guy's delivery was the usual regular public radio awkward lisp, but now it's all slimy and disgusting replayed in the retraction episode. However, the issues brought up with Foxconn and Chinese workers are important, but I wish it was something more honest and less theatric who had done it. The guy did actually visit and saw it from the inside but missed the chance of handling it correctly for the sake of having exaggerated emotional and tragic parts in his stage show. When first hearing the show, those parts were the weakest anyway as they were kind of straying towards facts and asking for extreme empathy.

He said he was out of dust. On the bright side, he did screech his portion of the Autotune song at me through a megaphone. I think most people in the street thought he was singing a song about me be being gay.

I shook hands with Vermin Supreme last week. That's my whole life.

STOP THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS! QUICK! Ban Grubbins on Ice until it's changed to it's proper name, "Grubbins on Christ!!!"

I feel buyer's remorse already, but I know this is going to be worth it. (I also didn't tell my girlfriend I put in so much.)

The addicting part is best. Ugh, free to play is creepy.

Gimme yer artbook!

I think I disagree with the point about atmosphere in games not coming from music or art fidelity, but I'm not sure exactly what Remo meant. Graphics with high resolution tons of detail and music with a ton of cues and an orchestra or whatever, sure those don't matter in the end if that means "fidelity' but I think of more of having a cohesive art direction and consistent music style to be super important. To me that's "high fidelity," but I actually hate when anyone says fidelity referring to graphics, since it is so vague and not really technical, so eh. I also didn't hear the talk.