syntheticgerbil

Ahahahahah! WHICH ONE OF YOU IS CRYING?!

Awesome! No longer will we have to wait 4-5 years for a Double Fine game to come out!

Yeah I really felt like there was only 30 minutes or so of commentary and I'm sure I was very thorough. I think the hour was something LucasArts was touting by rounding up.

Well that's being daft. Thunderpeel brings up an interesting point. Kids games and games meant for adults or all ages are almost a whole different animal in terms of design and presentation. The guy ACTUALLY hasn't been a designer or project lead on a game since 1996. He's been credited as creative director at Hulabee and on a few Humongous games from 1997-1998. Then he functioned as a design consultant on the Penny Arcade games. Even though he has been managing and producing multiple projects and multiple companies since he left LucasArts, he still hasn't been in the thick of design or writing for a while. There is a five year gap from Hulabee to the Penny Arcade games. That's a long time! Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer have been almost constantly active in designing or writing games since their LucasArts leave on the otherhand. Skepticism on whether or not Ron's rusty on game design isn't exactly undue here. I'm personally not skeptical but I still find it intriguing that Thunderpeel is, and also understand as well. And besides I think most of us here are major long time and ancient fans of Ron Gilbert/LucasArts/Monkey Island, and probably ended up at Idlethumbs through one of those fansites someway anyhow. So either way there's certainly no hate happening here. Also I think I'm just going to get this game on PSN anyway tomorrow. I think if it does come to PC it's just going to be Steam or Direct2Download or something, which I'm not interested in. Hmm... that's a strange place for a dialog box to come up at. Any chance there's maybe a way to offset it in the menu?

Assuming you want to play 70% of those games that come free, it seems well worth it, otherwise I'd say stick with what you have and see if you can find a larger memory stick cheaper.

Uh... what hate? I don't even see where anyone actually said anything bad about Humongous games. In fact I don't think anyone commented one negative word about their design at all (Unless you are upset I revealed Ron Gilbert didn't do much work on most of the Humongous games after the first few, with Dave Grossman coming more into the picture, where even then I didn't say anything negative). It's generally known Humongous games are all good and well suited for kids, except maybe those last two finished after the Atari takeover (A couple of years after Ron and Shelley's departure) and the subsequent firing.

I had read the interview before because it was posted on Mojo first, but someone sent me an article this morning from Kotaku also stirring up the prick and dick parts. Fine, he said it, but I can't tell if these sites are trying to be sensationalist about it or just give what Schafer was saying about the industry and Activision more audience. I guess we'll see later this week if nothing happens or it becomes a three ring circus.

Oh god, I guess this may be a strange type of prejudice, but I generally try to avoid being in the same lane as any SUV on the road. Too many bad experiences with either SUV drivers who don't care to check their blindspot and nearly kill me changing lines or just simply don't use their blinker and just cram their big fucking refrigerator wherever and whenever they fucking feel like it all over the road. Other big problems are big Ford truck driving redneck assholes. They are obnoxious in their complete and unhinged aggressiveness, but don't usually handle around the road near as idiotic as a SUV driver. Then there's the BMW driver who drives very selfishly and without any kind of signals but is usually not there to be aggressive, but instead to just leave everyone in the dust. God I hate driving at any time other than night. EDIT: Oops, I just wrote this crap in Movie/TV recommendations. Oh well.

Not sure of the specifics Nachimir, but it may be worth a shot to try again maybe? Sometimes having gone through a lot of pain with someone only helps make you have a stronger bond in the end. Granted, both parties would have to try for a healthier relationship this time. This seems to work with old friends as well, in my experience. Although there are some people in my life I would never want anything to do with ever again. I try to pretend they don't exist.

That's a little harsh to me, but you bring up a good point. Ron Gilbert has spoken a lot about game design ideas in the past decade but hasn't really been in the thick of a major game's design for a long while now. I'll probably still blind buy Deathspank, but I'm kind of curious how it's going to play out. Haha, I've actually been enough of a nerd to play many of these Humongous games well over the age range (although I did play some Putt Putt's and Fatty Bear long ago when was only year or two over the age range instead). They are all designed very nicely and I'll be sure to shackle my hypothetical kids to a chair and force them to play all of them. Ron Gilbert however was only really involved in the design and direction of many of the firsts of all the major Humongous series. Checking credits, he was most involved with the first two Putt Putt games, the first Freddi Fish and Fatty Bear, but has design and creative direction credits in the first Pajama Sam and Spy Fox. Dave Grossman also did a lot of Humongous work as well though, having written the first three Pajama Sam games fully (and probably contributed to the design in turn) as well as one of the later Freddi Fishes. I think at Hulabee both of those guys might have been more hands on again since it was a new company, as the credits seem to indicate. Not sure, I haven't messed with the Hulabee games yet, but I did play a little Moop and Dreadly, which seemed really cool.

There could be more. It comes in really short snippets. I want to say there's a total of around 40 minutes of commentary. I could be wrong though, that may be a little high.

Because it gives me a boner.

I'm actually not sure if I should buy this this week. I would like to get it off of PSN, but Ron keeps hinting at a PC version sometime down the line. Of course, I don't actually want a PC version unless it were to come boxed. Chances are slim I think for that, but I wish something official were said.

Haha, he did have that design document with all of the concept art lying around still it seems. I wonder if he had to smuggle that out of there or if he was allowed to have a copy for himself.

Monkey Island 2 remake completely done. I even somehow got in 7th place on the speedrun score on PSN. Didn't expect that at all. I guess I still know the game like the back of my hand. Loved the remake for the most part. Some bad art in a few places still, but at least 80% great, which is good enough for me. The 3D characters were a bit stilted but no complaints on people just looking hideous like the first SE. I think someone else did the character redesigns this time around. I at least noticed the game had a completely different art director, so this could be a factor. Most characters looked almost exactly like the originals, except maybe with bigger noses, which I find cute, I suppose. Funny that to me, Guybrush was still the weakest looking character. Biggest annoyances were just the lack of a complete working classic mode and missing intro (and things to try list), as well as Rapp Scallion corpse appearing missing tons of inbetween frames that would have made it look as great as the original had they went the extra effort. Also the Bone song was crap. I heard of all of this before but I was guessing the thing would have a plethora of even more problems besides the standard complaints (like with the first SE). It wasn't so. Good on them.

Yeah, it might be really tough to get everything just right as it originally was with new models and new post processing and then I'm sure there would be a million problems before you could just "simply" rerender a cutscene. I can only dream though. I think Grim is amazing how it is. It's still my top game in terms of atmosphere and story, and while it's still great, I wouldn't mind seeing it improved upon at all. Reinterpreted though? No way. Since Forbin was speaking about rerecording the audio, I would hope for any kind of high definition remake that they wouldn't do such a thing. It's perfect the way it is, music as well. I'm assuming for cases like that people have higher quality masters of all of the recordings, but who knows? Earthworm Jim HD had all the voices rerecorded for the sake of higher quality audio and even though it's just a platformer with throwaway lines, it was infinitely disappointing.

Definitely, smoothing out those models and adding maybe some detail to the backgrounds and rerendering everything in a higher resolution would do the game great justice. I said on the Mojo forums I would be perfectly okay with them still keeping the texture swap style for the vocals. I think Glottis would look the best with more polys.

That's way easier said than done. Even this time around, they had a hard time dealing with pixelated character animations still. They couldn't animate the Rapp Scallion animation in it's full glory even though all of the frames were there. Instead they cut frames and made do with what they redrew. Character animation is the hardest animation you can do, even upping the resolution and redrawing everything takes some understanding of traditional character animation. So far the ONLY time these guys have been capable of adding frames and smoothing the characters out is by making a 3D model of the character first. It looks smoother sure, but the poses are stilted. I would hate to see them using 3D models as their basis for Day of the Tentacle characters. As I've said many times before, the original LucasArts guys were working with a plethora of frames for many of their animations, most counts are still more than suitable enough for today. So to redraw all of those so they work good together takes time and major skill. A rushjob and an amateur just can't handle that work. To recreate all of the frames in DOTT faithful to the original characters and keep the animation smooth is a bit more monumental than some here may think. Also they weren't always completely true to all of the original backgrounds even this time around, because many of them are still made much more silly than the original Peter Chan art. Just looking at the mansions for both Phatt and Marley and comparing them should show just how much liberty they took with making "wonky" backgrounds. What's the point of making the architecture in a completely different manner? Part of this could be just them taking the easy way out of dealing with perspective, and luckily this time around they didn't use the approach of the first SE where they took the approach that "straight lines are stupid" since no one of the art team for the backgrounds of that one seemed to know when it was important to just draw the line straight. Luckily most of the backgrounds of the MI2 remake aren't like the mansion ones and are much more true to the originals, so that's great.

And Blackthorne: The Prequel.

Oh man, the music in both Jazz Jackrabbits was definitely the best part!

And complaints about NO LOST VIKINGS 3!

Does this band always make video game songs? I'm confused what they are about.

I've read some of these articles before on the matter, I'm just wondering if there's a compendium of news articles with people getting too "serious" in real life finding other online gamers and causing physical harm.

What?! Seriously? I've completely worn out my Grim CD and case by listening to it on its own over the years maybe way too many times. That soundtrack was made and edited to be quite listenable. While The Dig is great and I also have that whole CD, I tend to start getting sleepy around track 7 or 8.

I'm pretty sure Kingz is just playing around with you, being an adventure veteran himself. But yeah, I hate Myst style games. I've never understood the appeal. That said, I probably wouldn't care that much about the puzzle to puzzle format since it is also in many adventures I do like, but I think the overall art, atmosphere, and look of the Myst games is what puts me off more than anything. Too straight for me. And now I'm going to stop posting in this thread because I haven't played Scoggins yet and I feel like a big asshole.