syntheticgerbil

Alright so I finished this about a month ago. This game really could have used more polish in all areas except the art and animation. Even though, the animated cutscenes just looked like ass (They were farmed out to a different company). The frames were all jittery in those and there was a this awful shadow and highlight scheme on the cells. The way the plot went was unexpected and I rather enjoyed that at least. I was kept guessing the whole game. The character development I was hoping for earlier sort of happened with Sadwick, but he was also kept as a downer and somewhat annoying even at the end of the game for jokes. That said, most jokes in this game were not even near funny, so I'm not sure why so many dialogues and item combinations had to be drawn out for that purpose. It's different if the dialogue is snappy and witty, but every joke in Whispered World was drawn out and predictable. Maybe it all would have been handled nicely if they didn't make the grave mistake of picking such a terrible voice actor for the main character, but the best parts of this game were the more serious parts. Also, I don't know if I've ever played an adventure this long or difficult in a long while. It starts out easy enough, but puzzles start to get brutal near the end, some reminding me of things in The Feeble Files. There were way too many illogical puzzles, mostly dealing with picking up animals and putting them in your inventory plus figuring out how to make Spot into new shapes was just sort of a crapshoot. Most of the game I was getting through because I was routinely using random unrelated things on other random unrelated things since so much dialogue was written for nearly every combination. Even then I'd still miss puzzles or useful items and get stuck. Since many of the puzzles near the end of the game got increasingly illogical or dumb, I think the designers could have toned that down or just scrapped them altogether and the game would have flowed just fine. As it stands, most idiotic portions of the puzzles seem to have been added for the sole purpose to inflate difficulty rather than to add a clever element to the puzzle. Maybe Germans need this as they are all expert adventure players and they are not challenging enough at this point? Either way, extracting the Whispering Stone from Spot near the end was one of the most convoluted puzzles in the game. I can't believe they thought that was okay. I really just wish the localization team had done a better job, since the music was nice. The voices just tended to be reused as if there were only four paid actors. Alongside that there were a lot of voice file errors throughout the game with the wrong characters voice being played or the original German still existing. Sometimes the dialogue did not match the subtitles at all. This actually interfered with a puzzle or two. Along with the flaws in the basic game, this kind of lack of polish made the game more frustrating than it should have been. I sort of liked and disliked this game. What was achieved here as someone's original pet project is great. It's also intensely beautiful with a story that is good but could have been told better (and had more tension). I just sort of still have mixed feelings a month after finishing so I really still don't know what to think overall. Glad I played it though.

They are related even, who would have thought? (Well, outside of Seinfeld fans.)

Even though there are many things making The Diabolical Box not as good as the first, I must say I still really enjoyed myself. The biggest problem was just the plot of The Diabolical Box. It was more I know Professor Layton still is very whimsical, but they do make an effort to tie up every loose end in the game with some sort of reality based explanation. The only other insane part was What the hell? Also as everyone stated, the puzzles this time around were definitely given much more of an attempt to integrate them into the storyline, which I appreciate. But also as everyone stated, they were definitely much easier. Even the really hard puzzles like the marble jumping puzzles, somehow I got through them by just chance without having to look up cheats. Some puzzles I'd mess up by overcomplicating them with precedence from The Curious Village. I guess it's a tradition for all Layton games to end the very last puzzle with some impossible ass sliding game? Anyway, I don't have the third game yet, but I'm looking forward to it, hoping it will at least be more grounded than this one and have more varieties of puzzles since the production values seem to be increasing per game and I am just in love with the animated cutscenes and characters.

This is the best part of that article: I'm really confused how both Seinfeld and Bosco appear in the top 25, but it is an amazing fact Outside of the blackface Bosco of yore and the one in Sam and Max, where the hell do you ever hear that name?

I agree with the part that the Zelda mechanics being used over and over again are part of the draw. They just feel so nice. But... I think you jumped from Majora's Mask to Twilight Princess there and missed Wind Waker if I'm reading your timeline correctly.

Hmm, good news. If it were to never come out in the U.S. I guess I could just make a European account.

Geez, what did they do when you snatched their phone from them? Also I found the blog post by the Alamo founder over this incident and this girl was actually given two warnings before being kicked out of the theatre. So she was actually given more leniency than the standard one warning at Alamo. Ugh.

Either way, their silence doesn't make me confident on the matter. I've been checking around everyday for an official announcement on the HD release over PSN, but still Ubisoft has said nothing, not even saying, "Hey PSN was down, we have to figure out a better release date." I would appreciate anything said, basically. While in theory I agree with this, to be honest, personally I don't feel like I have a grasp of what's obvious with Ubisoft at all. I really just want to play this HD rerelease already though, it's exciting all over again even though I know what to expect.

Really? I had no idea people played movies without projectionists. Is it just like a computer program now or just is it streamlined so some guy can start the movie and leave? I mean I know what this is like, when I went to a certain AMC in Houston, it was almost worthless everything because something would be wrong or the aspect ratio would be off or cut. Volume would be too low or ear splitting. Junk like that. I'm glad in Austin there are tons of Alamo Drafthouses which seem to work very similar to Miffy's community theatre. Bless that business model! As Scrobbs showed: They have gotten really serious about throwing people out by the way recently, I guess the theatre talking has gotten pretty obnoxious this year. I'm now afraid to even whisper to the people I'm with as I'm prone to do. Even still I haven't seen that introduction and that texter totally deserved it. They run multiple shorts before the movie begins on what you can't do in the theatre. It's posted on their website and on signs around the place. I'm guessing she got there late for her first time and just generally had no idea what she was getting into.

You're just this constantly growing zygote without perspective on what age is sometimes!

I am planning on adding all things to respective threads, but I get so daunted with the blank message form sometimes.

Throwing in some more negativity here which sort of answers a question I was wondering about earlier... I spoke with one of the people involved in publishing Swarm last night and they said even though 50% of their game's market was destroyed for two months with PSN down, Sony has done nothing to apologize for that or reimburse for lost sales. Apparently this has hit the publisher (and Hothead of course) a little bit hard, considering there's not yet a Steam release or anything like that to balance that out. Not sure if Sony is ignoring everyone, but they also owe the developers whose game releases and sales they have jacked up in this equation something to make good and patch up all potential lost sales. But hey, maybe they'll treat the smaller game developers to free copies of Sonic the Hedgehog 2!

Also isn't Ancel doing work on the Tintin game as well? I somehow get the feeling that the only reason Beyond Good and Evil 2 gets to keep going is because Ubisoft really doesn't want to piss Ancel off because it would be like Nintendo crossing Miyamoto. At the same time, it doesn't seem like Ubisoft as a company is very serious about Beyond Good and Evil. For instance, the PS3 HD version was supposed to be released last month while PSN was down, yet no announcements have been made since on what the new release date would be or even if it's still coming. You'd think someone at Ubisoft would give a rat's ass enough to inform fans who were planning to buy said HD remake a heads up the game's new release date and reassure them it was still coming out, but possibly it's a better marketing strategy to ignore everyone and say nothing? I don't know, I didn't go to school for marketing so maybe I don't know the new cool tactics marketers use. Every year, I think I hate Ubisoft more.

Written on my iPhone.

I didn't know there was an original Flash game, so I tracked it down and finished it pretty quickly. It was enjoyable enough, but the mechanic was sort of frustrating. Still interesting though. I imagine from the screenshots and video besides the art polish, the game will be much more fluid. I'm really curious what happens each level and how they will stack the scenarios still!

Hahaha, that's the way to do it!

Which had you been reading what I wrote earlier, as I stated I read the pop up message, but it still doesn't change that it's a wordy piece of junk that looks like a bunch of ToS. Which is exactly why most of what they gave up was worthless, out of print, or had already run its course. No sense on riding the fence about that. I'm done with this if you don't have much to add that I'm somehow abnormal because I don't like companies setting up any kind of automatic payments without my permission. You say normal, but look at how relieved people are over similar things like overdraft fees which are now thankfully automatically off by law for the consumer's convenience.

The second professor Layton is now finished! (Also Sam and Max season 1, a miserable fact on how behind I am on Telltale games.) I really need to get on adding to threads about my last 4 games. Crap.

That really makes no difference to me whether everyone is doing it, man, or not, it's still bullshit. It's just like student loans wanting to enroll me in automatic payment without asking just for having student loans. Car insurance too. I shouldn't be automatically doing anything unless I specify so. I think you're missing the reason companies do this, and that is to gather monies from those who have no idea they are automatically enrolled to anything. Once they find out, often people have no fight in them and will only cancel the month after, paying the people enrolling the automatic services another month. So yeah, I'm obviously not saying you have to do a ton of work to turn off a single option. I'm saying it's absolute bullshit it's on automatically and you have to go and turn it off. That's not so, if they had given everyone $10-20 to spend on games in the store, I'm sure it would have been more pleasant all around. Also since the amazing offer of renting BAD BOYS, GHOSTBUSTERS, and FINAL FANTASY 2001 for FREE has already passed, they could have allowed us a selection of their usual rentals for free for one weekend or even a selection of 20 movies released after 2004. As it is, that rental service was not worth any of the fucking hype Sony gave it beforehand, it was a joke.

According to this, it always defaults to, "on." So you must have turned it off at some point. This is apparently standard to anyone obtaining a PSPlus account, free or not. http://legaldoc.dl.playstation.net/ps3-eula/psn/e/e_tosua_en.html

Hmm, I think I came off as sarcastic, because I edited a longer tirade post about how worthless their welcome back gifts are (3 movies to rent that everyone has already seen and games everyone probably owns or made the decision not to ownat this point). Then I decided it's still a free service so it's really hard to bitch. Guess I'm still annoyed because then again my personal information was taken and my password lazily unencrypted along with online service being down for two months and the most they can give me is a choice of awesome Playstation Plus benefits like free Sonic the Hedgehog 2? Yeah, it's ungrateful of me to be dissatisfied with free stuff, but I feel like Sony deliberately put out things that everyone already owned or has seen because doing something awesome like giving everyone $10 PSN Store credit would have cost them way more money. Also what really pissed me off is everyone who is now signing up for their free useless month of Playstation Plus must make sure to turn off automatic funding in their user options now (which is automatically on) or they will be charged by credit card at the end of the month for renewal. I'm guessing a lot of people will be skimming this message since it just looks like a bunch of ToS, which no one reads anyway. I guess I'll find out how that aspect plays out.

Yeah I'll ask after I finish this next batch of backgrounds and I'm done for the game if they want me to try to give the game more polish or make it mesh together. Hah, thanks. Finishing that short is what I'd really like to get back to, it's a lot of tedious fun to work on.

That cover is super fucking classy. I love it! Also probably because I haven't played Season 3 yet, but am I supposed to be accidentally reading "skunk rape" on that first menu screenshot?

I am so angry and ungrateful at this free crap.

Yeah I only found that moonwalk video and that's why I was very confused.