syntheticgerbil

Hooray, Swapnotes for all!

Elevator part was the best!

Ahhh, I am sorry! I will have to try again next time, it would be neat hanging out with you again.

Gosh, I really still need to make an effort to see Kells movie. The character designs themselves really put me off, but everything else I've ever seen or heard about the movie really speak of something remarkable.

According to this review, Day of the Tentacle is only slightly better than The Longest Journey. However the real travesty is that the precious Syberia is aligned to the same 4 and a half star ghetto when Day of the Tentacle offers nothing but pooty jokes and funny faces. The problem with Tim Schafer is he does not know how to be serious and write for dry and long winded conversations of nothingness. There's no exquisite sense of wonder inherent with the universe and the design lacks discovery. What I would like to see is for adventure games to move forward, maybe incorporate elements of my favorite subject, quantum physics. No two puzzles could be predictable in the normal human thought process but it would exceed our boundaries of intellect as adventure gamers to have such a special game designed around something so complex yet so simple. We would thrive. We shall see if this Double Fine game can deserve to be called an adventure when it proves itself to hold up in the likes of Alice: An Interactive Museum and Riana Rouge.

We can't all be a part of it, someone is going to fuck it up.

I don't agree with this article whatsoever. I don't see how the design of burning every tree and every rock is good design or even fun gameplay. The fact that he's referencing the second quest as some kind of genius makes me think this guy is writing some kind of trolling fluff piece. I played the second quest and all it is is just harder enemies with unmarked rooms on map dungeons and the added bonus of running against wall tiles to find invisible doors. I do wish the games weren't so easy now and I do wish they would stop being a nonstop tutorial of instructions and reminders (haven't played past Twilight Princess and on for reference, not sure if this stuff was fixed), but definitely I feel like the games have delivered what people wanted in the first place in terms of puzzle solving, items and story since the NES ones. The NES ones just feel broken or archaic, coming as someone who failed to beat them when young and finished them frustratingly in my teens. It's not the fault of those games, but I don't see how those are some kind of pinnacle of the series.

Holy shit. I hope the cane is gone soon, then. Good luck!

Are they asking for monetary help or just some moral support?

I don't want to argue any of this, but I wanted to throw out that in Bioware Austin, testers make about $8.50/hr, which is about what you'd get paid in a Walgreen's photo lab for reference.

This is about correct for artists in California dollars, so yeah. $33 is low there for cost of living, but I'd take it in a second here.

When did this exist?! Damn it, I posted for the friend codes in the multiplayer forum back in November and no one replied. Mine is 4725-8272-1788. Duly adding people...

I personally funded minigame sequences just to anger everyone at Justadventure.com

Finished Metal Gear Acid 2 and I loved it so much more than the first one. It's kind of overwhelming though, I had that learning curve thing (yet again) where I barely played it for three months and once the ball got rolling I was hooked and could not stop. It's definitely a very awesome series even though they are not considered must plays or canon to the Metal Gear universe at all. The only thing that really annoyed me with the game is that it has all these unlockable videos in 3D that turn out just to be real life Japanese models posing in bikinis or having wet T-shirts. Apparently they were filmed especially for this game and it makes no god damn sense whatsoever. It actually cheapens the game to throw in a bunch of jack off material. It's not even good stuff anyway, it shouldn't be there. Along this line, there's also a female scientist that has a ridiculous amount of cleavage coming out of lab attire that has an extreme amount of jiggle factor in a character with not much action going on.

So I'm kind of sick of arguing about this topic and I'm looking for some help in understanding the unscripted game thing in mostly an unbiased way. A lot of everyone here plays a multitude of different kind of games and I love this place for that. Full disclosure, I don't care about the FPS type games where you run around and the game's story unfolds through clues in the world and people talking at you. However, many people I seem to keep talking to here in Austin, partly because of the companies that have been big here, are in head over heels for Looking Glass, Ion Storm, or Valve games forever. Like these somehow all represent the future of video games and that everything else kills immersion. I've never had any kind of interest to play Half Lives or Deus Ex. From watching people play them in person, to videos, to the discussions I read about them, the games just seem really boring and unengaging to me actually. However, I automatically lose credit with a lot of video game types if I have not played every Valve game ever made. I don't see the company as a god send like others. I just don't see the appeal of the company and I'm being completely honest here, not trolling one bit. To me, cutscenes or dialogue trees have always been an integral part of a good story and that it's very difficult for a game to tell an engaging story without it. I know a lot of these unscripted event games just get around this by playing audio logs while you play or cutscenes sort of happen while you jump around and your weapon or whatever is disabled. Part of it is not having a third person view and not having a defined main character that you play. A lot of this is still actually scripted to me, you're just skipping the movie part with set camera views and and characters that take over. Sometimes these things actually seem very lazy to me. Then there's the multiple path thing with lots of little variables which have also never really gotten me excited to be honest. Since the 80s, games with multiple paths have been touted as the future and I'm kind of annoyed by it at this point. I just prefer a defined designer/writer to take me through a game, these types have always been the most special games to me. Even though I was raised on staples of platforming, adventure games, arcades types, and puzzlers, I don't see the types of games I like as archaic movies that I just have some interactive parts to finish. I've just always felt like storylines and cutscenes are part of the reward for finishing parts of the game. I personally feel that the director type games are ever going to go away because of some unscripted game takeover. I just think they will coexist and one or the other is not necessarily wrong or less of a game because of it. But I guess the problem is, I have not beaten a single one of the touted games that promote this argument. Should I really just slog through one for the sake of it? I'm tired of people thinking less of me, but I have like 80+ games at home that I'm very interested in playing and feel like I'd enjoy more than playing something for the sake of argument. It's not like the usual people who are arguing against what I prefer have played the adventure games I love and are obligated to on their side. What exactly am I not understanding by not playing these games? Where is the essential unscripted part that is at the core of these games? Is it the sandbox stuff, the variables, the differing storylines, the first person view, the customizable and blank slate characters, the audio playing over, the lack of cutscenes? What is not on that list? If I should just pick one game to give my time to fucking know what's going on here, what should I pick? Half Life? System Shock? Bioshock? Deus Ex? Some huge Bioware thing (please god no)? Far Cry? I hope no Valve and Looking Glass elitists lurking on the forums come in here and tear me a new one, I get that enough in real life now. I would put the disclaimer of adventure gamer elitists which I find just as annoying, but I really have never seen that here. As said, I love the differing viewpoints here and I trust you guys.

I guess this was my argument with everyone against them and the reason I started this thread, and I also don't think one is inherently better than the other. I think Metal Gear Solid 3 did not make a lot of cutscene mistakes like the others, and I always directly think of Grim Fandango with any time someone goes against either adventure games or games with heavier cutscenes/dialogue. Also thanks for the write up Hermie. I guess I didn't take away that minimal to no cutscenes was necessarily more a part of the medium but that you seemed to compare more the difference in player expectations. There's also the game playing types that would just rather play a game without any story whatsoever or do multiplayer solely in all this mess.

THIS IS FINANCIAL SUICIDE! HOW WILL THEY BREAK EVEN?!

Happy birthday, voicelessunderd and luxuriantitem26! You are both 69 today! Just think, you'll be over that 70 year hill next year. Enjoy it while you can!

Well I know breaking even is always ideal, but profit just going towards companies in hard times or the next game is always nice. It doesn't really help the employees directly outside of possible raises, but making a little over the top always helps the company as a whole.

Oh, I guess opposed to any game Tim Schafer has been involved with, most Lucasarts adventures, Little Big adventures, just about any Telltale game, the Prince of Persia series, Another World, Limbo, Beyond Good and Evil, and Oddworlds. I'm mostly just citing a lot of my favorites that tend to be either cutscene or dialogue heavy. The cutscenes tend to take your control away in either real time 3D or playing a video file. There would also be little to no deviation from the path other than having the order in which to do things. I do really appreciate large adventure game settings like Rubacava or Melee Island where there is a lot to do at once with many things to chisel at. That is my favorite style of adventure design, although I do prefer platformers to be the more cinematic type with point A to B. Zelda overworlds tend to be similar to Rubacava and Melee Island to me as well. Really my reasoning for playing in the first place was just lack of interest in art direction (which is always important to me, for better or worse), the world in which they take place in, the characters, and the FPS gameplay with different weapons. The become a must play by many just because of the importance of them in the game world. I know for sure none of the games I listed or people are citing are bad games. Not bad at all, I'm sure. They just have all never appealed to me for those reasons, except save Deus Ex, and I only feel obligated to play them just so people will take me seriously when I talk about game design, pretty much. I don't think I'm overreacting, I think I'm just trying to get a grasp one whatever is going on here with the differences between these games. I don't mean to insult anyone even though I tend to use harsh words.

I would have figured a portion of these donations do cover profit even before copies of the game are sold after the project is done. $15 isn't really priced differently than the previous smaller Double Fine games to come out. I'm actually now more interested in what the budgets were for Costume Quest, Trenched/Iron Brigade, Once Upon a Monster, and Stacking just to compare to what kind of game we might be looking at here.

Kind of just what I mentioned earlier: Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Bioshock, Half Life 1 and 2, Mass Effects, Dragon Ages, and Far Cry. Not all of these are exclusively mentioned all in one breath by the same people and this is me seeing some sort of common thread between them. This could really just be my own ignorance. We have these beer nights with the game developers in the area, most of which tends to be Bioware employees here, and get to talking, so this is kind of me just mixing the opinions of many people into one all basically talking about these games being the future vs. any game with long cutscenes, Metal Gear Solid being the trump card. I'm also somewhat confused because my perception of what these are kind of matches up with what all of the replies have already said here. Also my perceptions have been shaped by what a lot of what you guys have said already, since I tend to read threads here about games I haven't ever played and probably never well, just out of curiousity. But, I don't think one or the other is necessarily better myself in terms of how events play out, but I prefer more scripted games obviously. But it seems I'm required to play some of these by the standards of some. I also felt like Zelda has been extremely scripted, Thrik, even though I love those series. I suppose you are right though and it seems to be more of a matter of freedom with a lot of the examples.

Out of all of the games I listed and people cite, Deus Ex is the only game I've ever been somewhat interested in. I even owned the first one boxed for PC for a while years ago until it collected so much dust I sold it. Maybe I'll purchase it again then.

See I guess I've been misled, maybe people I'm talking to are phrasing it wrong and I'm just now mimicking what they are saying. My boss was calling them all specifically "unscripted" earlier. That's why I put unscripted in parenthesis in the thread title because the games still seem scripted to me but less so. I don't even think my problem is with unscripted games now at all and I want to change the title of the thread. Fuck. Is the difference between these games then just basically the amount of scripted events that you have no control over instead of anything being unscripted or emergent at all? Because I agree with everything you said about Uncharted 3, Nappi.

Crap, my browser window is all narrow in width right now so I didn't focus too much on that side of the page outside of the number of monies. Thank you!