syntheticgerbil

My personal guess is that the next installment of Samorost will not play like the first two and probably take more from Machinarum design.

Yeah definitely the extravagant mascot games of the 90s with the 'tude stuff or the uselessness of non memorable platform characters of whatever animal was what I was referring to. I was also sort of meaning the big three Sony mascots for the PS2 era (and PS3) with these second party companies developing similar things all simultaneously and in threes no less. It's not so much in the way that Mario represents everything Nintendo and is also the happy man who walks around with the tool box on the Nintendo repair form. Definitely Sly, Rachet, and Jak all go into much more depth than any of the unmemorable folks from the 90s like Aero the Acrobat, Bubsy, Jazz Jackrabbit, and whatever else I have surpressed. But I suppose the weird thing with me is that while I am generally annoyed by not well thought out platformer characters jammed into some world that takes them through the ice, fire, forest, and water levels, this kind of stuff has a soft spot in my heart as nostalgia, so deep down I'm not really against any well done platformer mascot type of fare.

Alright, you guys got me, I'm adding Ratchet and Clank games to my wishlist. I'm a sucker for these types of platformer or action character games, so I guess I don't need a ton of convincing. I guess while I might have been okay with character mascots when I was younger, I think the furry inclinations (or furry artists working on the team) plus the sheer obnoxiousness of anthro animals kind of ruins it for me. I'm fully okay with the classic comical animal stuff like Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck, but I guess I see it all in a different light now. That being said, there are plenty of games I do enjoy starring a bunch of animal types and I see the appeal to a point, but I get weirded out if there is some kind of deep drama or storyline going on with a talking cat/bird/monkey/whatever. There's a lot of this kind of walking the line in Sly Cooper, but I felt it was handled more in the way of a Saturday Morning cartoon with less furry pandering even though I could tell many of the artists working on the game were probably furry artists. Luckily, most of the main art was done by people much more seasoned, including a few people from Humongous as well as some early concept from Peter Chan. Also none of the Sly 2D movies were done by someone with that kind of artistic style. But even then, gritty realistic humans is just as obnoxious to me. Elf people like those in Jak don't make any kind of exception and neither does playing a frat boy. Sonic was much better when he was just a Felix the Cat mimic and there wasn't a bunch of high sci-fi drama. I think Nintendo characters are all very appealing to many and likeable to a general audience. I feel like Beyond Good and Evil and Rayman achieve that sort of appeal to everyone Nintendo thing, but I guess not since people were bothered by Pey'j and I think Americans generally hate Rayman. I guess I just compare everything to Rayman 2, which was released in 1999 and something I never had any major camera problems on. At least not constant. It seems most cameras in that game were set up both functional and cinematic and routinely snapped to the back of your character (or the best view).

Stop that Hermie, if you keep recommending, I will have to play them! Ahh so many games! I do think I'd like the more arcade style kill 'em all gameplay of Ratchet and Clank, what I've seen of a last boss that was a Britney Spears parody, as well as finding the robot design to be solid, but I guess in a weird way, it feels silly to eat up all the Sony paid mascot games completely. I think Sly Cooper doesn't make it over to next generation because Sucker Punch is smaller and can't handle more than one game at a time. It doesn't help that Infamous pretty much sucked, yet for some reason there's going to be another one. The parallels between the three developers is extremely ridiculous though.

That's good to hear that Unwound Future is still going strong, I was wondering myself if there were only a finite amount of these type of brain teaser puzzles that you could do before they get repeated over and over except in different arrangements. Also I see they add more puzzles per game, further milking the amount.

I don't want to play this game unless someone else I know buys it and asks me to come over and play, but those hilariously lowbrow trailers lacking all sorts of tact or appropriateness are making me feel otherwise.

You sure get touchy about those Valves I've noticed.

I don't have much to add concerning this games other than it has the ability to make you either feel very stupid or very clever, sometimes at the same time. I like the criticism Nachimir had towards the story and I agree with all of it, but I suppose I was thinking the game was more of the Saturday morning adventure fare, sort of like Tintin, where revelations about freaky or ridiculous situations are handled without much concern. I started Diabolical Box and I can already see the puzzles are connecthing to the storyline much better, although I don't know if that was a must. http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/showthread.php?t=7722

Christ, I wasn't going to click the link because I am also not at all interested in city building games, but did so because of Miffy's exclamations. Man, those are definitely some beautiful screens.

I guess I'll sell some stuff on Ebay and get back to downloading the offline version for a couple of bucks. Also they announced on their blog that they have started work on a full length Samorost 3, which is great news!

I am very close to giving up on this fucking game. I am only in world three and while I appreciate the game mechanics and the happy singing colored ball people, I don't appreciate the difficulty that the game designers felt would be appropriate for a game with happy singing colored ball people. I compulsively have to perfect all the levels since I get shit for some stupid house I don't care to build but it's the principle of the matter. They could give me nothing for my troubles, I don't care, it's there. The problem when I go through levels trying to collect all available things or getting a maximum fat roco ball person thing, more often than not I either find out I was missing something or I am hurt by some bastard fuck shit at the end of the level that screws up my chances everytime until I have replayed the same fifteen minute level for the 20th time and did not get hurt by some garbage spike crap at the end. ARARGSDGDSg:(:( Why would they do this? Why is there no save points in this game or at the very least a way to collect something once, whether you die or not, and be done with it? I thought I'd enjoy this game, but I really don't subscribe to the game design theory of having people redo some level for an upwards of fifteen minutes until perfect. Someone please tell me Locoroco 2 is much nicer to the player and fixes this, because I am ready to put these on Ebay and well... it sort of breaks my heart because I love these happy singing ball people.

Somehow finished two about simultaneously here. Jak and Daxter and Professor Layton (first one). I sort of forgot why I had bought the whole Jak series, but I suspect it was on some kind of Thumbs recommendation and following a designer, as this was before the whole Uncharted is awesome business. Can say the title was as memorable or lived up to the hype I created in my head when seeing commercials back in 2000 and wishing I had a PS2. The level design was delightfully solid, but the characters were all sort of lame and the camera was just atrocious. Professor Layton turned out to be much better and intriguing than I was suspecting, since I had only heard the puzzles were annoying and disconnecting from the actual game. They sort of are, but I was just foaming at the mouth for the next puzzle while enjoying all the animations and story, so no big deal at all.

Woo! I forgot to say I had seen this movie about a week ago. A guy from the Lucasforums took me to a far side of town and paid for my ticket despite being broke. I owe him big. It was wonderful and very beautiful. Honestly, I can see where people say it might be boring or long despite it only being around 90 minutes. I think seeing it in a theatre makes the film much more engaging because a lot of the movies relies heavily on atmosphere and surround sound. When you are forced to take it all in, it's quite magical. I can see when I get to the point of watching it at home, it's just not going to be the same. Despite hearing all the talk about the film's history and that somehow Chomet stole the script or that the interpretation of the script is disingenuous, I agree with Ebert's (who did a lot in spreading the original controversy) viewpoint that whatever was going on with the rights to the script and who was right, it is in no detriment to the movie itself. Anyway, what a sad and beautiful movie. I don't know if I quite understood the photograph, but I would probably figure it out upon viewing it again. I wish we lived in a world where more animated films tried *something.* People seem to think it all ends with Pixar, but as far as I'm concerned, those guys have a lot of work to do still as far as engaging story and characters that last a lifetime. I'm just absolutely annoyed that there are so many movies I like with great storytelling or memorable scenes (and on and on) when the majority of animated films have completely failed to be anything like anyone's favorite movies despite animation being as old as film itself. I guess video games sort of fill this gap in a way. Grim Fandango ranks as one of my favorite animated things despite it being a game. I really shouldn't leave great animated movies frustrated and only thirsting for more though, that's a very pessimistic viewpoint.

Hey I went camping the last few days, but not with thumbs. For whatever reason this time we had some brave raccoons that felt it necessary to walk right up while cooking chicken to just start raiding our stuff. They only made way with some pieces of dog food and a half eaten subway sandwich (which fell out of the wrapper on to the dirt before their getaway). Chasing them away only brought them back thirty seconds later. Even chasing them with logs while smacking nearby trees in a feeble attempt to be scary and make loud noises only made them pause and stare at you like you were an idiot from safe 20 foot distance. I'm guessing people have been feeding the raccoons at this particular state park, because in all the times I've been camping so far I've found raccoons prefer to wait until you're asleep to raid your campsite.

God, this is on my list to play, but I've been trying to track down the boxed version of this game forever. It always ends up way too expensive on Ebay. Maybe I'll luck out one day when I have a lot of money to burn and better bidding skills.

I really don't know what this thread is about anymore but I was going to say way earlier in reference to the European aesthetics that that sort of thing is probably better to go by country rather than lumping Europe together as one. I decided not to post it then because it turned into some eight paragraph drivel about nothing. Now I'm feeling more terse! But when I think of an aesthetic of a country, I think of it pertaining to their rich art history as well as the general architecture of the area around down to things like the general weather. It's hard to define exactly but seems to come to a "hand me down" type of sense. Almost every country in Europe seems to have a deep art history of it's own while I think the crossover aesthetic in Europe comes from many sharing country to country. Places like the United States have a sort of really crap history of good art and I would venture to guess art education is severely undervalued here in comparison to most of the big countries out there. Red shoes are so FUCKING AWESOME! I'm hoping when I get a new pair of sneakers I can find some fucking awesome red ones next time around.

Pajama Sam 3 and Wheelman. Aw, that little Pajamer Sam. Oh god, Wheelman. I don't even know where to begin. I'm going to let everyone guess for the unlikely (or most likely for me) reason why I'd force myself to play anything like this. Honestly, it was tough to get all trophies and junk, but it was sort of a fun GTA clone for the most part. The story is a laughable and idiotic mess that makes zero sense. Best part is Vin Diesel's studio that is supposed to know this stuff handled the amazing storywork while Midway just did the game. It must be awesome to animate a main character in a game who only has one facial expression: blank. Best part was the way my frustration dissipated every time I failed a difficult mission on a motorbike since I was congratulated with Vin Diesel flying 100 feet down the street and faceplanting ragdoll style into a building/car/dumpster. I think I eventually just started failing on purpose. Wheelman does not deserve its own thread, toblix, honestly.

You do sort of look vaguely like someone famous (at least in all of the pictures I've seen of you), but I wouldn't know which famous person exactly. Maybe that's it?

Huh?!

Damn Kroms, I can't even begin to fathom what it's like to live in civil unrest! I hope everything stays well with you!

Still not finished completely yet, but I should note a major problem I was having with this game. Apparently it was all being caused by SecuROM, which really sucks. I have installed games with SecuROM and Starforce before, and while I guess it's annoying that spyware or malware is being installed on my computer for copy protection reasons, I haven't been that bothered until now. My computer specs are more than enough to nicely run this game. The load times (about five seconds) between screens is a little bit weird to me since it's all 2D images, but it could be the layered backgrounds, I don't know. But either way, by the end of the second chapter, there was a longer cutscene playing where the voices ended way out of sync, which was incredibly bothersome. I tried replaying the cutscene from a different save after exiting the game and taking the time to close a bunch of Firefox windows and Photoshop among other things running, hoping the cutscene would not slow down so much compared to the audio, but still no dice. I searched around the internet to see if anyone was having similar problems and on Daedelic's forums, it appears they confirm themselves that the problem is SecuROM running simultaneously on English releases of the game. Someone suggested getting a DVD crack for the game, which I guess Daedelic is not annoyed by, considering how upfront illegal that is and running the game. This person also reported the game ran about 20% faster. So I gave in and found the crack on seedier websites so that a game I PURCHASED NEW would run correctly on my computer. So lo and behold, it works! The cutscene was completely in sync and running smoothly. The video did not stutter in any spots any more and I also noticed before the video was skipping frames. I then went back and replayed the intro and also found it was skipping frames before. So while the cutscene team didn't make the best animation and the shading is blobby and the character design can get iffy, at least they put enough frames in there to make up for poor construction. SecuROM just tends to make the cutscenes painful apparently, or not play at all in some cases. And just as the person on the Daedelic forum said, the game does run faster. Maybe 20% is a lot, but the walking and scrolling is noticeably smoother and less laggy as well as load times between screens halving. I've never had to crack a game for performance reasons, but this is ridiculous. All of the English publishers of this game are doing the original company a disservice by adding on shitty spyware on your computer that hinders paying customers from enjoying the game as it's meant to be! That's just absolute garbage. I would recommend anyone planning on playing this game to find the no DVD crack first so you can experience it as it's meant to be by the original designers. Sucks I got about halfway through the game until I realized what was going on. Argh.

I really have no idea how the Unreal Engine works. I would think default textures would be blank and naked, but maybe not? Maybe it has a certain library where many pictures and variables are added depending on what you are making or implementing? I think the fad is already starting to go away since many seem to already make fun of games for looking so brown and unsaturated among other things, it seems like audiences are ready for something new and then maybe the next trend in art direction will come by. Just a guess though. It would be awful alternatively is games become increasingly monochromatic with black lines and dirt all over everything to the point where you can't even see what you are playing, but that seems hard to sustain.

I don't think I've ever had one besides wishing a really good dream would come true. I would also entertain the notion even if I really don't believe in that sort of stuff. I don't know if this is equal to deja vu, but I haven't encountered that feeling in at least a decade or more. Did I break it?

To me this is all really a statement of art direction and not really to do with the subject matter of the game, as that gets so particular and can be argued any way with whatever game you choose. I think the problem with the grit and brown in American games (and their 3D art) is that everyone is so enamoured here with uninspired wrinkly zbrush character models and layering on realistic textures upon realistic textures from cgtextures.com for different effects because that equals success, at least on the 3D gathering forums like polycount.com. It's not necessarily inspired but that kind status quo usage of 3D art asset creation is easier to get a pat on the back for. On top of that, brown, grit, wrinkles, and other ridiculous detail hides mistakes and bad form or construction very well. I equate it to the obsession that Image comic creators had in the early 90s where overdrawing = good. They could cover up the fact that most of those jerks could not draw an anatomically correct human to save their life on top of no idea how to make proper backgrounds and settings. To do this, all they had to do was add tons and tons of black lines all over the page until most was obscured. The fact that so much work was put into black lines gets the layman to ooh and aah at what was done. It's kind of like creating any piece of art by stippling: anyone can do it, it's tedious and boring, yet when you are done, everyone will exclaim, "Amazing! That must have taken forever!" So if you go backwards to earlier Japanese console games like Sonic, you'll see it's really all very stripped down, using basic shiny gradients and rounder forms that aren't exactly interesting in themselves, but in how they are arranged. Even LucasArts games tend to look more beautiful than any Sierra counterpart for the same reason. Sierra games tended to throw everything at the wall in a gaudy fashion while LucasArts seemed to take more care into making their pixel art and scanned art work well at the resolution it was made to be at. The Dig would be a great example of this I think while not being a blue sky all the way around. The problem with the more basic form and more colorful approach is that all your flaws are easily shown and you have nothing to cover them up with. You can easily fuck up any color theory rules shown by games like Zool or any other similar rainbow vomit Amiga game. Plus, badly inspired or constructed characters are put under a magnifying lens. To go back to the comic book analogy, I equate it Mike Mignola. So while his stuff is always dark in manner, it is completely different from the Image big shots. Everything he does now is all parred down to basic forms and only enough information, making construction a monumental task. In interviews Mignola is constantly talking about how he starts over or ends up unsatisfied with a lot of his work because of how much thought goes into composition sketch rather than carrying out the final work itself. So I guess to sum it all up, to me it just always seems to be a matter of art fads and how they can stifle or shine good or bad artists. I don't think brown or saturated color/textured or smooth much of a difference in the end outside of how they are ultimately handled. I guess this topic was started because of the buzz with few Japanese designers (don't remember their names) openly stating they are targeting American tastes?

I'm not planning to play these ever but I did like the screenshots I saw of a lot of the art direction and the character designs of the side characters. Very interesting stuff you don't often see, especially from Japan. So I can only guess the way you talk about the atmosphereor mood seems very spot on to me.