syntheticgerbil

Wait, what? You have a direct line to Ancel at Ubisoft? Did you always work at Ubisoft since joining Idleforums, Murdoc? I guess I didn't realize this until now after rereading your posts. Upon rereading your posts in the Prince of Persia Forgotten Sands thread, it appears you used to work at Ubisoft (guess that went over my head before), but right now your posts seem to be hinting you still work there... So then, are you really allowed to comment on any of these things or even what you were talking about in the Prince of Persia thread? Just curious.

So now there's another shady article affirming he's not quitting: http://www.gameblog.fr/news_15707_michel-ancel-quitterait-ubisoft-c-est-faux I don't really know what to believe. The news that he is quitting seems to be spreading much faster.

Well that really sucks. I would have figured Ancel would be more of an asset, considering he's very responsible for Ubisoft's success in the 90s, allowing them to get as huge as they are now.

What are you guys going on about? Everyone knows James Cameron invented 3D with his bare hands.

I'm just going to rub marijuana leaves on my privates if that's okay with you guys.

You could also get really high... (just kidding) Best way I think is to just keep bothering your friends to hang out, particularly friends that make you laugh.

Yeah, June 2nd, everyone else has said. I might just post it publicly at some point. Also I think there's a catch that you have to own at least one episode of Sam and Max already. Episode 104 Abe Lincoln Must Die! is free though, so it may work in conjunction with that...

Is anyone interested in having my $30 for three seasons of Sam and Max coupon code I have ? I've tried to persuade a few friends and they either weren't interested or already own all 3 seasons and have their own code. It would be a shame to see this deal go to waste.

Considering the Humble Bundle has gotten much more press before this fraud (so far), I would guess that's more of a worst case scenario at this point. I see this more as a crook seeing the success of others and taking hold of the opportunity to scam similar customers and developers and run.

Thanks Miffy for the big write up! The gameplay sounds solid, which is good to hear. Any chance you'll ever be playing the Wii version just to see the differences Ubisoft is boasting?

That's pretty bad, for sure, but in a way, it sounds like the life.

Wow, now that you mention it, you're right, I have noticed in making of features for some of my favorite director's, when they mention the DP, they usually go down the list of all the past films they worked on together. It would make sense to me now that a consistent look is probably created through a stable partnership. Neat. Everyone else spew info in the thread. It never hurts! I have none to share unless we start talking about animation directors and crap, and even then I still have so much to learn.

I hope you feel through your new apartment!

Which ones did he direct that I missed that were awesome? Blue Gardenia was one of the ones that was okay, but that was a later one. It wasn't very interesting to me either way. I found Fury, which people say is great, to be boring and ugly with weird acting. Or do you just mean his film and camera techniques and copious uses of shadow and spotlights were awesome? I can agree with that if so. I liked Metropolis much more without all of the added lost footage, honestly. The movie really didn't need to be longer than the 90 minute version from the 80s that I first saw as later viewings of new DVDs on top of new DVDs with new footage only became more disappointing. The visuals of the city, robot, and action were more important to me than than a bunch of extended overacting scenes that just drag on and on. It seems to me that when theatre projectionists were butchering the film in 30s, they actually weren't doing that bad of a job. This probably makes me lose all credibility, but the cheesy 80s synth/rock version of Metropolis is my preferred version.

Come on now, enterthewumpus, that's actually the proper way to write a headline, confusion between similar looking Gabe people and the episodes they touch aside.

I enjoyed those two Fritz Lang films and bought like 10 DVDs of his other works on blind buys since I had no idea what to buy and realized he kind of sucks at making movies besides those two. I instead bought a bunch of Chaplin DVDs to replace the "black and white" section and now I have more fun.

I don't know if everyone got this e-mail, but there's this fucking crazy Telltale deal that I just got sent that is allowing me to buy all three seasons of Sam and Max for 30 bucks since it says, "Hey I noticed you have bought an episode of Sam and Max." Thing is, I already own all three seasons.

This forum is over!

Yes, happy birthday Ben There!

I've played a bit of Magna Cum Laude and it was just awful in design, graphics, story, characters, and dialogue. Also, everyone seems to take cheapshots at of Box Office Box Bust, and rightfully so. I really don't consider any of them proper Larry games either way. Al Lowe sure seems to hate them. I think Larry 7 is probably the best it's going to get, and it's a damn good adventure game to boot. Maybe some will disagree but it's not often the "last" in a series of games is the best one.

It was a weird setup for LSL 5. From what I remember, the major requirements for the game were getting in and out of the airport or limo to do whatever the game set you up to do at about five or six locations in the game. Larry was supposed to film all of these girls, but you could just drive to the locations where the girls were, then drive back, and leave from the airport. Same with Patti. You also weren't required to film anyone if you didn't feel like it. None of this really seemed to have any impact on the ending either, besides a few dialogue changes. The game of course wants you to do the tasks at hand, but you could get away with doing almost none of it. It was pretty much just being rewarded with scenes and points that weren't necessary to complete the game, since it seemed more situation based than inventory based in LSL5. I know Al Lowe deliberately tried to make a Leisure Suit Larry game where you couldn't get stuck or die, but I think Leisure Suit Larry 6 and 7 are much more representative of that. I'd say 5 isn't really worth another try, but you may want to play 6 and 7 (especially 7) if you are up for revisiting the Larry games. I don't own that series in full yet, so I haven't really messed with any W&G episodes. If they put in hot spot indicators, that's great, though! I don't think pixel hunting or hidden objects on the screen really does anything but artificially inflate the difficulty of the adventure. Even then, I've always found it annoying to sweep the cursor up and down the screen. I think there was also a cheat for the first two Kyrandia games that put red boxes around all of the hotspots, but I think it was both difficult to turn on and to turn off.

Yeah, I actually don't know what I was on about anymore. While this game doesn't appeal to me, I'm sure many will find it fun to see all the story, character, and game design conventions played out as such and no one's really going to get this mixed up for Zelda anyway even if some of the bad guys and characters are basically clones, so I guess disregard any objection I have from here on out. It's obvious to me now that the only people who are going to play 3D Dot Heroes are JRPG and Zelda fans, as part of the fun is the source material. Also I do agree with you Murdoc that more games should certainly use Zelda style design. I don't know if you separate the design methods of the 2D and 3D Zeldas like some, but I found Beyond Good and Evil to be an amazing take on basic Zelda design, even if it added many elements from other genres. I find the Zelda setup so intuitive even if it means the game is almost uncomfortably the same.

I love everything you said here. There's really not much stopping players to use hint systems in the adventures that have them either. As mentioned before, Tex Murphy had the UHS type system within the game. All it did was take away your points, which really had no bearing on the actual game itself. There is a bug in Under a Killing Moon that allows you to get unlimited points actually, so you could cheat through the whole game if needed. I'm still all for the clues just being within the adventure games. I haven't seen this short coming in Telltale games or the old LucasArts ones, but there have been adventures which do give you a clue within the dialogue or a comment on examining something, the instance where the answers are in the game, but the comment is unrepeatable. This is another design failing that used to plague many games, if they even offered incidental dialogue clues at all, rendering them useful if you did not listen carefully the first time. Sometimes I discover these kind of design failings upon replaying certain older adventure games. I'm not sure those two are majorly the problem. I think that depends more in what adventure games you are playing. The modern ones where you can't get stuck and have the hint systems probably don't have death situations or situations where you can get stuck. The latter two elements open up much more serious problems with successfully completing a game. I think the best way to handle missing items is just to do what Simon the Sorcerer 2 did: you press a button to have all hotspots on the screen highlighted. The game laid everything you were working with out for you instantly. It wasn't a cheat because it was in the manual as part of your controls. It's too bad adventures sense StS2 have not taken this cue (not even in the Simon series), because while the game was still tough, you knew you weren't missing anything. Just curious, but did you play 5 then? That particular Larry was designed so that you could finish the game without really having to complete almost 75% of the puzzles. Not that I think that is a good way to design an adventure game or anything. As a side note, I don't really like Monkey Island 2 coming up in topics like these because while it did have tough and obscure puzzles with really weird solutions, there was an easy mode (at least in original versions) for those that did not want to bother with all of that crap. The game did warn you in the beginning (although I know some did not like that it also made fun of you for choosing easy mode). I also think the MI2 easy mode is much more successful than CMI's, but both are good. I personally feel like at least two difficulty modes would solve most people's frustration with many adventures where incidental dialogue is not enough. It would have properly at least upped everyone's list of adventures actually completed. That did exist, and I do remember a few instances of begging my dad to ask them something for me, but he did not want to be charged a lot of money to call a 1-900 number. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, he did give in and order me hintbooks from their 1-800 line instead, although on retrospect, it probably would have been cheaper for him to just call the hintline for me because I was really only stuck on one puzzle in Secret of Monkey Island and Loom each. I'm guessing his reasoning is that calling the hint line even once would mean he'd never hear the end of it on subsequent adventures.

You get a fly by of all of the characters you met so far doing silly things or hanging out while the end credits show sepia tone still shots of parts of the game?

While it may be for some, I think it's really oversimplifying people's motives to put it down as just someone's laziness. It could be ignorance just as well. Not everyone feels like they have to pay for something as ephemeral as a video game also. I don't think even then that makes them lazy or ignorant even then. It becomes a whole different factor after that. You could steal food for many reasons and they all might completely different from the reasons for stealing a Ferrari. A video game is probably somewhere inbetween those in terms of reason. I suppose, but Valve isn't perfect, and as I said before, neither of the solutions they gave for their "underserved customer" argument would make any impact whatsoever on the pirated games in this topic, being a pay anything you want download in a centralized location only on the internet. Sure they can easily do things to reduce pirating, such as the no-brainer of making your games available in as many regions as you can and premiering them all at the same time, but people are still going to pirate. I still don't think the pirating percentage for The Humble Indie Bundle is really that bad, all things considered. I'm glad you said that, because there's also the market disparity involved between big and small developers or publishers. Valve are big guys. I know they can release a statement condemning DRM and promoting their foresight to release in all regions, for cheap, same days, etc., but the fact of the matter is, not everyone has the money or means to start a marketing and publishing campaign in Russia like them. Basically Valve's end ideas are cover the whole world, same day, at affordable prices for each and every company. Just quickly looking at Steam's wikipedia article says they have failed at all of that to an extent. Do I expect them to be completely successful though? Of course not. No one can do that. What Valve is saying is nothing new or innovative by any extent, it does help reduce piracy or stolen products in almost any case, not just video games. The problem I have is that it's still one sided, placing all responsibility on the developer and publisher to fight pirates. It's basically playing the Valve Card, pitting the angelic developers and Steam givers against all other arguments. I do, however, think everything Valve said is much better than just saying, "We need better DRM." Personally, I believe everyone should feel guilt for enjoying someone's creation that they didn't pay for, even if there's a fat chance of that happening. I have a few close friends who pirate many games, not exactly sure the motive (lack of money or demoing comes up), but I don't go on some kind of preachy rant against them or presume why. So that's kind of where I stand. I think the best way to look at it is, marketing and availability aside, is if you did a damn good job if your creation caused a regular pirate to have some kind of moral epiphany and decide they like what you did so much that they need to pay you.