syntheticgerbil

I don't know, as someone who continuously has his full 100 saved searches going for rare CDs, games, and books, there's a thrill ebay gives on finding something that is not just rare but super rare, and then getting a deal. Regular stores just don't have that long lost item you have always wanted.

Oh I misunderstood, I thought you mean the game only had 15 minutes total. I've never seen these videos before, thanks. Yeah I bet there's way more then.

I remember for a bit in 2003-2005 Sanitarium regularly appeared in bargain jewelcase racks, in the United States at least. I remember being really disappointed in that game after the school kid chapter. Like it didn't just get sort of bad, it got really bad all around. The graphics became shit, the puzzles became nonsensical, the game started becoming buggier, and the writing was just horrible. No idea what happened there since it started off pretty strong if I recall. Needless to say, I got rid of my copy long long ago.

This gets stuck in my head often. I love it. No mafia heeeeeeeeeeeere.

Do you think they recorded more? 15 minutes only?! I felt like it was at least an hours worth but it looks like it was incredibly incorrect.

Man that's one of the things I was really happy about, the recording of commentary. I'm so glad they sprung to pay for that. I wish there was a way to get all three guys in the room for full commentary on the first two Monkey Islands.

Hi Tim, thanks for coming by! I'm glad you explained yourself some more as I'm terrible at searching Twitter. I agree with this part. I'm often very frustrated with many of the examples in Anita's videos and often feel this claustrophobic blanket of criticism when I'm done (although not one every video) that I don't think any narratives are ever going to properly stack up against. However I guess this is the part that concerns me. I think ultimately her work is for the better for all games and this kind of critical analysis in very easy to consume videos is very important and she's not intentionally causing any toxicity. But I think maybe I considered you full of Gamergate because of the choice quotes and my inability to deal with reading anything on Twitter. Sorry about that. I guess this has all become a really bad time to engage in any of this lately, at least for me. And, yes those early screenshots are awesome. I was also really excited about the bump in resolution, it looks even more awesome that way.

Hah yikes. I feel pretty self conscious if I don't have any kind of beard hair going on. Just because at this point I'm not used to it and no one else it either.

Yeah it looks like they just halved them or just skipped some selections. It's disappointingly stiff. There's no reason why not, just probably too much full screen drawing that they didn't budget and did not have a 3D model to base it on. It's kind of a lot of time to waste on one small part, I'm sure. Possibly I read the animation took up a full floppy or half of one in the original game? Maybe you wrote that at some point Udvarnoky? I get the feeling Steve Purcell had the tendency to go overboard in his animations back then, but in a good way, like the final death scene in Secret of Monkey Island or the over the top Bishop death scene in Loom. I didn't notice that. That sucks. It's funny, I know that the painterly strokes are kind of an abstraction because of final low resolution scans they'd become, but I think it would be really awesome to have that sort of painted water look lightly animated on that background. Maybe too stylish for the game? But I would love to see it.

Yeah you had linked that before, that's sort of what I was referring to. I was hoping you'd link again. But really I guess even though it sucks for everyone involved who wanted it to do well and wanted to have jobs in house, I feel like maybe a lot of heartache would have been spared had it not been started with that business model in mind in the first place. Pretty much the same happened with Gameloft Shanghai doing Earthworm Jim HD. Just an inconsistent mess that maybe didn't need to be produced. And my biggest complaint with the SEs is just the use of 3D models for all of the character animations (Besides the general hideousness of the first). Since it was farmed out to what I'm thinking what was a large outsource house with high turnover and rotating team members that aren't dedicated for the whole project (even though it's LA Singapore, same happens Ubisoft Shanghai and so on), you can't get anyone who is just good at a certain character and instead have to do this weird prerendered sprite stuff that doesn't do much justice to the original but is a cheapo sacrifice to keep everyone on model. That and they cut the frames in half from Steve Purcell's resurrection animation. Couldn't keep up with ol' Steve P. Animating that part in sprites like that back in the early 90s would have been so much difficult than tracing the frames in a painterly Photoshop style now.

That painting is making me hungry too.

If it's licensing to the original creators (or most of 'em) like Tales of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango remaster, I would be cool with that, but I doubt any kind of sales at this point would influence that enough. I sure wouldn't want that special edition team coming back with their outsourcing mentality. Too much rush work and art direction issues. If I recall it was started at some point, but that HD team is long dead by now. If I recall everyone was laid off shortly after Lucidity failed. Is it just that you don't want the disc version of Day of the Tentacle, Miffy? (Although Ebay shows just a loose disc of that game is now $30 and up. Sheesh.)

Hmmm. I wonder if this should bug me at all? I mostly made my video because Danielle is absolutely hilarious. I did love the stylishness of The Last Night though and it was very cool. Maybe Tim Soret will change his tune at some point?

I think I would be thrilled about this news if game development had some kind of royalty system. But it never will, and so the Mouse collects more money. I guess people can buy them legit.

I loved this and the amazing Karl Marx quote.

This was one of the funniest episodes of the show I've heard. Not Everyone sounded like they were in such high spirits. Also I have no fucking clue why, but I played Chex Quest 1 and 2, not because I didn't have access to Doom or Wolfenstein but I guess because they were free(?). I remember absolutely despising the design of every fucking character and how ugly it was but I finished them. Here's what's amazing about Chex Quest 2. It did not come with the cereal but instead you had to download it from the official website. The intros and endings were done as flash cartoons. I remember them being some of the earliest examples of Flash I had seen (in cartoon form at least) and they were done in a different style completely different from the bad primitive 3D intros and endings for the first game. And I guess to save file size these flash cartoons were not included with the, either rendered as an AVI, mpeg, or just image stills or whatever. So you were supposed to go the website, watch the intro, finish the game, and then go back to the website and watch the ending. Of course fuck that I just watched them all in one go. If I recall, looking a few years ago much to the outcry of Chex Quest fans, these flash cartoons have never been recovered as I guess archive.org doesn't have the working swfs, so you can never play the game as intended in full ever again. I wonder if someone has located them by now... EDIT: Yes it appears these flash cartoons are still lost forever. To think, I'm one of the rare few to see such an important historical document. Nooooo way, it was NEVER good. 90s prerendered cutscenes generally were of low quality, but Chex Quest was bottom of the barrel. I don't know, maybe I was spoiled by seeing the intro to Bug! before, the most popular Sega Saturn game released on CD-Rom for Windows 95, but there has never been a time where the Chex Quest intro didn't make me embarrassed for those who made it.

I don't know why you think I'm ignoring that because I'm not trying to convey that. I just feel like in the last eight years or so, games have changed for the better in so many ways. I just refuse to be pessimistic about it. Marxist?! Are they old man Republicans hanging out in their country homes now? What on earth.

I can just hear Bob Saget talking over it.

Looks like I spoke too soon. Just marathoned the four available episodes of season 2 and it has just kind of turned into simply yet another violent gangster show. Pretty much lost all interest in the characters and plot threads. Oh well.

I guess I don't see it going on for years. The Gamergatrs have made fools of themselves since day one and don't really have a clear message besides harassment. With all of the time they spend on this crap I don't even think they spend any time playing games. I mean to say is that even though some people quit, which is incredibly unfortunate, I hope they will be back and there has definitely been proven to be an audience out there for a wider variety of games that are more inclusive. I'm still optimistic even though all of this current shit sucks so bad. If the quoted statistics in all of these outside articles are true, there's still a significant amount of women playing games, and they still provide a good deal of profit, so it all can't be abandoned for more Dead or Alive sequels at this point.

Geez, concerning Serial. Not sure if anyone has seen this yet, but there's others (or just one guy posing as a bunch of people if you ask Rabia) speaking about Adnan on Reddit, most notably the Adnan is a psychopath thread. Rabia and Adnan's brother kind of lurk around many threads on the serial Reddit and they certainly seem to have a bad attitude as people speculate after each episode. I'm not sure if having a Reddit for people to argue with thousands of posts inbetween episodes is necessarily good for this new podcast format. Especially because I see people digging up persons of interest from the case and info from documents Rabia posts and using it to find them on Facebook, checking their addresses out in streetview, and attempting to contact these people. Some of the names are changed in the story, but really it doesn't seem to phase them. I'm pretty much leaning towards Adnan being guilty after the last episode anyway, but there are 7 episodes left. I wonder if they are going to start addressing all of this talkback on Reddit.

Wow, that Chris Suellentrop article was rather cynical. Also that title is total clickbait, since he's not speaking about the death of video games at all. I think saying Gamergate has put the nail in the coffin of intellectuals ever having a chance of offering their respect to what the medium can achieve really says more about the close mindedness of these supposed types who only read books and sometimes see an art film. I'm not even sure that stereotype exists, since there's plenty of intellectuals of a younger generation who play games and continue to play games. See: www.idlethumbs.net/forums/ Since he cites Frozen and the majority of garbage comics, which are also newer mediums than books and music, does he not realize that U.S. animation and comics are already bloated with enough infantile tripe that these hypothetical intellectuals would also tend to repel from? There's always going to continue to be good stuff buried in landfill of media created by the suffocating power of capitalism and nothing is new and these beret wearing art gallery lounge types we're worried of scaring off probably aren't really interested in checking out anything beyond their comfort zone as it stands right now. I'm sure they instead have a lot of expensive wines to sip or Mozart albums to play from their gramophone to fill their time. I don't know, I think of the last few years as ultimately being a good thing for games and geek stuff in general, since that's where talent is moving these days and it should hopefully change for the better, even if you have to step on the toes of a bunch of angry little boys.

Perhaps you're right about the inspector, but the Grace character is one of the major reasons I enjoyed it. I think a lot of her info is still intentionally withheld for season 2, as she still is a bit of an unknown when it comes to backstory and she's not telling. The name? It's based on an actual gang around the turn of a century, but I think they've been altered to be of Irish descent and it's by no means a historical account. It is a bit goofy, but eh.

I don't know Twig, I just figured you misspelled when using all caps! You're already hammering away with that shift key held. I don't really agree with the J and K in front of things either like K or J pop. Even JRPG has a twinge of condescension to me. Oh well.

Twig, don't get mad, you brought this up in the first place. That's for a specific type of Italian film, it's not a catch all term for movies from Italy. Shows produced in the UK are produced, disseminated, and consumed in ways that are sharply different than American television. All of your comparisons could fit any country that we don't have a catch all term for. Japan does not do it back, they call all animation anime, so what we have done is make an American term to separate industries based on country. It's less insulting than "Japananimation" from the 80s and 90s, but still obnoxious. It's much more accurate to see in terms of country when there's one industry set in a region that perpetuates the particular idiosyncrasies through the nearby schools, producers, company methods, and dominant directors. Then after that it's easier to go by company house style and animation method and then director. It used to be easier in the United States in a particular region during the golden age since you had Fleischer studios, Disney studios, and Warner Bros. all producing shorts created from very different ideas of styles and animation method. Considering Japan right now has the biggest animation industry of any country in terms of content produced and not money, seems rather silly to create a catch all term that lumps some sort of specific style, one of which no one can actually agree on. I guess I see amazing amounts of variety while you guys don't, I'd prefer to drop these Americentric terms though.