syntheticgerbil

To clarify, I should say most classic animations were averaging closer to 12 drawings per second of film time, which was the general rule when nothing fast was happening and for walk cycles, but everything was still running at 24fps, which means they were shooting on 2s to fill the gaps. This is still a typical today and this is how any kind of traditional animation that is not done with vector art, polygons, or moving shapes are still based around. But neither of those original games are running at 2 frames per second at all. How on earth would Guybrush get across the screen on a 7 frame walk cycle if he were only allowed to use 2 frames per second to do so? Besides, the answer is they are all running 30fps as their native NTSC environment. Just nothing is animated with a full 30 frames per second (which is too much to expect even now), although again, check out things like Guybrush getting into a cannon or using the Q-tip. That's a lot of sprites going on in a short time, which also add up to be pretty much 12 drawn frames a second or more, which is certainly not 2. Maybe you are all expecting everything in the game to animate like the special animations and for everyone to have some constant smooth idle animations? Like I said, not even Curse of Monkey Island had tons of stuff going on at once and elaborate animation filling up every second of time. Many idle animations were nonexistant sometimes as well. Reference: http://sdb.drshnaps.com/objects/17/1513/Sprite/GuybrushPart1.png

I guess when you put it that way, it is a pretty great game for multiple reasons. I should have played other games I didn't know the language of growing up. Ergh...

I've said it before, but I have no idea why resolution would come into the matter of amount of animation frames. Of course any good animation is going to be better appreciated at a higher resolution and be lost at a lower one, but good animation movement basically consists of showing the most effective movement with as little amount of frames as possible, no matter what resolution or medium you're working in. Overdrawing something is not usually desirable. If people can animate with the frame count used on the special animations for the original Monkey Island for theatrical shorts on a big movie screen and MAKE IT LOOK GOOD (Check out both Dead Leaves and anything by Bill Plympton for reference), then I don't know why that would be such a monumental problem unless we are now so spoiled with every game running at 60 fps because of major usage of vector art, object tweens and 3D. A lot of the special animations in Monkey Island 1 are more than enough frames. If you just look at the amount of frames going into the cotton swab animation, for instance, people should be so lucky to get that today with hand drawn stuff in video games or movies. A lot of the sort of animation tricks commonly used to make less frames look like more motion in the first Special Edition were faulted from bad character design, stiff poses, and just because they were tracing the damn things over ugly 3D models that were posed over the top of the original animation. Add that to the fact that they have things running on screen at a constant 30 fps creating a constant ugly juxtaposition, which the original Secret of Monkey Island did not have, like the smoother scrolling, as well as moving water and sky. To illustrate the juxtaposition problem further, movies like Steamboy are smart and reduce the frame output on their 3D rendered vehicle animations to match the frame rate of the rest of the movie. Movies like Disney's Atlantis have 3D vehicle animations running at full speed on some kind of ugly cel shade look while the drawn characters around it can't keep up. I mean, the Special Edition team isn't really good at animating, which makes the lack of frames even more noticable especially considering the animation was all there in the first place, but I'll give them credit for at least creating individual frames and attempting to do it the more traditional, harder way, instead of doing cheap-out tweening digital puppet animation that is all too abundant in any game attempting 2D now. I think we would be worse off if they went that route with a low budget. So I'll agree that the game would look nicer with more frames, but I just don't think the current team at LucasArts, consisting of some head artists over here and Singaporeans doing a majority of the work for cheap overseas, is really capable of significantly improving anything like that without making it worse. So I'm completely happy they aren't messing with that at least. But I'll never prescribe to the idea that more frames equals better animation, because you can fuck up animation with too many frames just as well. I would suggest even looking at Curse of Monkey Island again as well, because while Guybrush has this ridiculously long walk cycle and moves way too slow because of it, many of the characters are hardly moving on many gameplay parts, with sometimes just their mouths flapping around only. Murray for instance is just basically one drawing with like 3 frames used over and over while you talk to him for 15 minutes at a time on some parts. It's really just about how you use what you have. I'm also sick of people bringing up Street Fighter HD as an example too. With all of what I just said, part of the problem with that game is that it goes against what just about any of the great instructional animation books will tell you, which is that you will generally need to bump your frames up to 24fps (with traditional film frame rate as their reference) when lots of fast action is happening. You can't seriously expect fights to look nice when the fighters are just popping from an idle fight stance to a 1 to 2 frame kick. No one is casually walking around and talking to people in Street Fighter. It's all about conserving your frame count to when it's needed. In a game like Street Fighter, if everyone is constantly in action there's not much conserving you can do. To me, it looked just about as silly as it now on SNES, but the difference is it was more understandable because they could only hold so much on a cartridge back then. Resolution had nothing to do with it.

I'm hoping they add the option to have the voices and new music on the old graphics on the new PSN and Mac ports.

I'd rather them not add frames, just because I think they would screw it up. But does a low frame count really ruin stuff for you? There's tons of detailed animation out there that doesn't move beyond 8 frames a second and still looks good. Most classic film animation still runs on an average of 12fps.

That cover looks like complete ass and Guybrush looks like a Final Fantasy dickwad. But I'll admit, the art is shaping up much better this time around. I hope they either fired a lot of people or STOPPED FARMING THE SHIT OUT TO SINGAPORE FOR CHUMP CHANGE, but I doubt it. Looking at the model sheets, which are great, I would say it's also nice that they apparently took the time to DRAW the characters this time around past the concept stage and show how the finished art will look instead of tracing around bad 3D models. I had back and forth arguments with dumbasses who think it's great for everyone to trace 3D models because it keeps things consistent, but MI:SE didn't end up anywhere near consistent and the characters were a stiff mess. Real drawings and animation by people who know how to draw and animate without tracing over anything will always triumph. Anyway, I'm going to try to enjoy this one this time around, if only to get over my complete bitterness and anger towards the first remake. I'm already feeling the Monkey Island 2 atmosphere on this page even though I was dreading the worst. I hope no amateurish graphical mistakes appear this time around, as that stuff should have been properly patched in the first one. Still I don't want anymore remakes, though. I'm also guessing the stiff animation by the characters on the website is probably stemming from Flash tweens done for the site and not representational of what will happen in the game. Also there's going to be in-game commentary from the "game's creators!" I'm hoping it will be Grossman, Schafer, or Gilbert, but something tells me it could just be the Special Edition team. Also this time around we get to play the classic game with the voices! And I'm also crossing my fingers that many problems will be addressed with the next MI:SE ports! OKAY I THINK I"M HAPPY THIS TIME WEEEEEE! I hope it's not spoiled!

I don't remember what he said, but I don't think so. It was probably something pretty smart ass and nothing poignant or tying up loose ends. I was similarly disappointed with the way the plot went near the end of the movie.

I guess I'll plug the company I work for here, with risk of my coworkers or ex-coworkers finding out about my online persona. www.playnormous.com They all have a healthy and fit type theme if that interests you. I only did animation and characters on one game though.

dih-mhJvdpA&feature=related Why are Americans winning Amigas?!

Do you guys ever play Brutal Legend on PS3 here? I just finally bought it, but I'm not ready to play through it yet until I finish the Uncharteds to completion. But I'm wondering if I have some people maybe I could play against since I don't know anyone in real life with this game (although I do know some with it on 360). Also does anyone carry that "six degrees of schafer" trophy? It seems like it might be hard to obtain.

Haha, well I'll need to get good at the main game. It's next up on my list to complete after Crushing mode of Uncharted 2, and hopefully I'll be playing you guys soon. I should go ahead and add you guys, though. Sorry I haven't yet.

That's okay, I went for the $37 dollar deal a month ago, thinking I was getting some sort of steal, and have only turned in about an hour's worth of game time as well. I feel your pain.

Yeah sorry, I didn't want to just start going out with the verbal diarrhea if you weren't interested and I get self conscious when I do long posts.

Oh wow, Amazon has got the $20 deal running for both systems! http://www.amazon.com/Brutal-Legend-Xbox-360/dp/B000XJNTPG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=video games&qid=1268077485&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Brutal-Legend-Playstation-3/dp/B000XJLQ24/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=video games&qid=1268077485&sr=8-2

I get this, it's totally not fun to watch some dude to fuck your ex-girlfriend, but it's always fun to watch some dude fuck a girl you have not touched! er... This to me describes exactly how much of a spectator sport videos games can be. I am also guilty of being one of those kids who just leeched around the skilled game players whose parents gave them a ton of quarters to finish the game. Great memories watching people trying to finish games I would have been terrible at.

I was actually gearing to start a thread on this about 3 weeks ago, but I messed up my browser window and lost all of my text. But it makes me feel like Ubisoft is missing the point on their lost sales, much how they blamed DS pirating being the reason the shit they put out won't sell: http://www.destructoid.com/ubisoft-blames-ds-piracy-for-50-sales-drop-141574.phtml The PC market has always had a ton of pirates, no doubt, but I think maybe Ubisoft is expecting too much of a paying audience that isn't anywhere as big as it was a decade or two ago, even if the amount of personal computers owned has skyrocketed. Making a ridiculous online-only DRM system seems to have them desperately trying to prove a point that pirates will desperately try to disprove back. Ubisoft has sort of just gotten way too big compared to the modest company of the 90s.

As another who loved Braid, I agree with this as well, but I guess I didn't want to criticize too much because when I enjoy something so loudly pretentious, it's a rare thing. I'll also agree with the David Lynch reference, because I'm not a fan and don't understand people who are. But if Braid were maybe a series of illustrated pages with that text, I probably wouldn't have liked it. Since it is a game that is fun to play, it was great. I did love the art style and presentation, so I don't have qualms with that. I did not think the digital brush strokes were amateurish outside of the close up puzzle/paintings, and they certainly weren't anywhere as sloppy as Monkey Island SE. I guess I'm always sort of a rube when it comes to abstract prose, but I wish whatever was going on with Braid's story was much more clear. I don't really need it to hit me over the head, but I agree with Thunderpeel when the creator starts making cop-out answers like that with not even the slightest bit of help, it makes me think Blow didn't even know what he was doing and was using the trick of putting a lot of stuff out there with little to no link in an effort for it's obscurity to become a story in itself. Anyway, it won't bother me much until the it gets to be a habit and the third Blow game does the same.

So is it really possible to do the blowjob or is there always something that prevents you from getting to that point somehow? Or did they cut that out?

Well to separate both Disney and Warner Brothers eras seems pretty ridiculous to me, because as you said, they were roughly concurrent. But it would be more correct to just separate things into rough decades as most animation historians do. Disney also didn't really have any fame or his own studio until the very late 1920s, and if the studio were to have it's own era, it probably wasn't until Warner Bros. talent was mostly dying off and UPA was finishing it's reign in the 1960s (A lot of thanks goes to Disney himself for attempting to turn competing animators in to the government during the red scare), who had cartoons which were mostly human and influenced everyone back in that direction, although in an abstract way. But anyways, since this is on the topic of anthropomorphism animals, I think it's way more complex than just Disney versus Warner Bros., both which had the output on walking talking animals as mostly the same except for "spring has sprung" type wholesome films Disney put out like Waterbabies, Fantasia, and Bambi where the animals were much more realistic. But since their bread and butter for nearly 30 years was the Mickey world, those realistic films were mostly the exception to the rule, since every "human" was a dog person, while Warner Bros. cartoons at least had characters depicted as typical humans. Either way, I think it has more to do with Felix the Cat, who was the first animation star, being extremely popular from 1918 up to 1930 which is when Sullivan studios killed it by basically refusing to do sound pictures. Felix started off on four legs, very catlike, much like Winsor McCay's animation lead of realistic animals only from the start of the century onward, and became a wailing, beer-drinking, horny, smart ass on two legs by the end of the silent era. The era of cheap Saturday morning cartoons was much less furry than you think with Filmation as the rule for ugly humans with no eye-whites, outside of Hanna Barbara's animal output, until the mid 1980s when the anthropo morphic animals came full force, maybe taking cue from Ralph Bakshi's raunchy movies from the 1970s, which in turn owe a lot to Robert Crumb in style and substance. There was a lot happening in underground comics in the late 1970s and 1980s that isn't well documented that shows a lot of where the direction was also heading. The Ninja Turtles were only one of many animal comics, and a lot of it seems creepy both with strange artist rumors and their output and hard to find information on so I don't have a ton of knowledge of what was going at that time. The motivation and history behind making animals humanized in a creepy manner is not one I pretend to fully understand and I'm sure it reaches far out of the boundaries of animation, but it bothered me that you basically summed up a century of animation with two main studios and Saturday Morning cartoons, which span decades and dozens of different studios who all had their own characters and ways of cheaping out. And this all has jackshit to do with Flotilla.

Your grasp of animation history is all screwy.

Fuck yes! A HAPPY ENDING! But seriously, I hate when I look around on forums through google links for help with whatever problem I'm having and the person with the initial problem almost always disappears with no update on whether anything is resolved or not. So now, you, Toblix, are someone posting the satisfactory resolution for people to dig up on Google years from now who are searching frantically on whatever software they should use to get their lost files back.

Wow, the reader mail was bizarre this time around. I want to see the David Cage E-mail! PLEEEEEEEEEASE And what was up with the LucasArts musicians battle? Amazing! And I'm all for a recorded mock Clear Channel radio bumper made by Mr. Remo.

Ah great art! I love the Discworld art books!

Now whistle.

The skeet is frickin' awesome.