Noyb

Are there any single player spoilers in this podcast? I'm trying to remain relatively unspoiled since I've already preordered it. (I already heard about the , but didn't see the first twenty minute demo video that's been floating around the web.)

"No one knows what it's like to be the bad man, to be the sad man... until NOW! (You can customize your eye color)." -- IGN.com "The last game inspired me to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal savior. This sequel inspired me to renounce him." -- IGN.com "Activision owes me a new pair of pants." -- IGN.com "you dont rock your a sad loser whos never gonna loose his virginity" -- The New York Times

Happy birthday, internet person!

Steven Lavelle (aka increpare) releases the source for a number of his freeware games, including Trigger (a balls-hard 2d Panzer Dragoonish puzzle shooter), Judith (a first person interpretation of the Bluebeard story), Mirror Stage (a game which uses fractals to tell an abstract story), and Opera Omnia (a game about using backwards thinking to "justify" racist claims).

You missed the chance to put Punch-Out right after Time Donkey in the games list.

After an overly long introduction, I managed to get myself killed on the second screen. The demo disabled saving *and* continuing after death, so I restarted the game and skipped through a slightly shorter introduction only to get myself killed on the third screen. Must be from the Sierra school of design. Also... zoAZsXOTJy4

LucasArts is selling a fake lightsaber for your avatar for $5. Nice to see it still takes 20 seconds for the list of my last 10 games played to show up. Good job with the dashboard update.

I loved how insane the puzzles were in Day of the Tentacle. By far my favorite puzzle in adventure gaming is when you . Anyone interested in adventure game puzzle design should check out Old Man Murray's article "Who Killed Adventure Games?" The Gabriel Knight puzzle is the most circuitous and illogical I've heard. Oh, and I found Time Gentlemen, Please to be slightly more logical than Ben There, Dan That. (Although I love time paradox puzzles as in DoTT and Braid. YMMV. Both are worth playing.)

It's only five hours difference: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=new+york%2C+london

I think it's more like he used that Lego pirate set as his muse when making Monkey Island, and now that it has returned to him, he hopes to continue to use it in that fashion in his future projects, including but not limited to DeathSpank. Either that or he's hinting at Monkey Island LEGO sets. Hey, Prince of Persia is getting some...

"I can't solve the puzzles and there's no hint system. 7/10" -- IGN.com Loosely based on this. "It's like there's a party in your mouth, and that party got vomited all over the screen." -- IGN.com "Upon hearing the voice acting, I had a nerdgasm. Then a real orgasm. Then another nerdgasm." --IGN.com

In the few I tried as a kid, I remember absolutely hating the whole "curiosity killed the cat" ethos the Kings Quest and Space Quest games embraced. Pr6FY-WAmgs Sort of tempted by the Steam offers. Was I just a dumb kid and the puzzles didn't require quite as much masochism and constant saving as I'm expecting? (Heard horror stories about a bridge which collapses after crossing it the exact number of times necessary to solve the game, not to mention the character's tendencies to drown in shallow water, fling themselves off cliffs, and give themselves fatal wounds when trying to pick up anything sharp.) Oh wait. Activision-Blizzard owns Sierra-Vivendi now, right? Screw that. Don't want the meager profits going to the lawsuit with Double Fine. Kind of a funny development in the Sierra vs. Lucasarts religious war, come to think of it.

What the hell. He got some sort of shady post-dated deal with the Edge of Twilight devs. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/edge-of-twilight--edge--trademark-dispute-resolved Let's put that on a timeline, shall we? March 2003 - An unsigned British musician called Nod, with 5 Myspace friends to his name, registers www.edgeoftwilight.com October 2006 - Fuzzyeyes Studios registers www.edge-of-twilight.com August 2007 - Fuzzyeyes Studios officially announces Edge of Twilight December 2007 - Edge of Twilight gets a publisher October 2008 - Edge of Twilight receives mildly positive buzz at TGS: "Serious potential and a number of interesting mechanics" June 1, 2009 - Langdell registers the trademark "Edge of Twilight" June 16, 2009 - Southpeak shows a few trailers at E3, again to mild buzz July 23, 2009 - The above press release was released. August 1, 2009 - Today August 23, 2009 - The above press release as dated. So, Langdell waited until a game was well into development, saw it was getting popular, trademarked the game's name 2.75 years after the developer's first public use of the title (and six years after Nod's), then exerted legal pressure close enough to the game's release date that the publisher would be daft to change the name?* There is an important date missing from the timeline: when the developer "approached" Edge Games. "Several months ago" is too vague to determine whether this this happened before or after Langdell trademarked "Edge of Twilight," even without the oddity of the anachronistic date on the press release. I wager afterward, but then again, Langdell has previously trademarked a title in the middle of negotiating with a victim to make his side appear more legitimate. If we take the press release at face value and the developers approached EDGE themselves, this is a frightening development. Every content producer, whether magazine editors or Hollywood producers, hardware manufacturers or software developers which succumbs to Edge gives them legitimacy. The biggest defense against Edge is that they haven't produced anything since the 80s, and everything since then has been associated with their brand through abusive trademark disputes. Settling out-of-court like this only requires convincing company lawyers that Edge has a case, and the stronger the Edge brand appears, the weaker his victims feel. Weak enough to approach Langdell himself and throw their hard-earned money at his undeserving face. Of course, the scarier thing is that he actually won his lawsuit against Velocity Micro over Gamer's Edge PCs, although Tigsource has been digging up that he potentially falsified evidence during that trial. Seriously. He presented a false magazine cover attempting to link together Edge Games, Edge Magazine, and Edge-branded computers. * Scarily close to the optimal strategy in Edge Tycoon, apart from the falsifying prior use step.

Some Tetris game had you for the credits screen.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/realnoyb

I was hoping this would be an announcement of David Lynch's The Force Unleashed.

Or, Heaven forbid, they would have replaced all the characters with the soulless shells of what became of Harmonix's designs. Lyta Ford -> Midori, General Lionwhyte -> Clive Winston, etc.

Are they throwing themselves wholeheartedly into IGNDOTCOM quotes because their standards are dropping, or is it something more sinister? Is our mission being perverted? Have we become... viral marketers for IGN?

God Hand's ending was the perfect final note. Cheesy song. Cheesy dancing. Cheesy game. vAga2AjfZlg

Oh, god. I still remember that final boss of Mario & Luigi. After whittling down her first form, you get automatically knocked down to 1 hp, and then have to perfectly dodge attack patterns you've never seen until it gives you the chance to heal yourself. On a similar note, I never beat Rayman 2, because the final boss has you flying a rocket, which only showed up in one of the more frustrating minigames, and was damn difficult to control with the keyboard. Can't believe they changed the gameplay entirely for the final boss.

It feels really weird to hear a bad knockoff of the King's Quest narrator play the role of the announcer in MI:SE. Like, Mario vs. Sonic at the Olympics weird. Did they hire him solely for the gag? Edit: Wait, they didn't even have him do that gag. And they completely removed any semblance of Sierra death screen in the SE graphics. Edit2: Wait, that was Danny Delk, he-who-voiced-Murray-in-COMI-and-Hogie-and-both-tentacles-in-DOTT? Guess the voice was intentional.

Yeah. They added no frames of animation whatsoever, and had trouble with the frames they did copy. Yet another example: the parrot on the map salesman's shoulder jitters terribly as if it were copy and pasted from a separate image file without bothering to check if it was in the same place as the previous frame. I really wish there was an option to have the voice acting with the original graphics and UI. When you interrupt a character who is talking while you're walking around, his new dialogue plays over the old ones. Especially annoying with the Troll. I also love how in the XBLA version, the menu screen tells me to press in the center of the D-Pad to select "Look."

I would have rather Microsoft encouraged a My Saves folder instead of letting each developer make their own separate folder in the already cluttered My Documents.

Like Walter said, the tutorial was integrated into the introduction this time, and could be used to illustrate any intricacies. The very first puzzle has you look at an object, combine two objects when prompted by the tutorial text , and then combine two on your own. It's hard for me to say if that's enough, having played adventure games from childhood. Come to think of it, the combining panel might make it marginally less annoying when you're combining inventory items on different pages (which I don't think came up in this episode.) You've got to have options. Maybe that's just my play style? When I'm stuck, I tend to look at everything I have first before doing anything. Granted, during normal game flow it didn't bother me much. More independent of play styles, the first time you open your inventory in the introduction you have 3-4 brand new items calling out to be observed. First impressions matter. On a broader scale, I can't remember if there were many times when you picked up an item, then were able to use it on the same screen without walking (apart from the few inventory combination ones). I didn't think to try dragging objects to the magnifying glass after dragging to combine items didn't work. It's also a bit backwards for me to think object-->action, although this might be the preconceived adventure game notions again. Yeah, I was too vague earlier, and wasn't even thinking at this level of depth. Mouseover to open the inventory probably wouldn't work well since you're using a dynamic camera and can't guarantee there won't be any important hotspots in that part of the screen. Mouseover to exit when you're holding an item like you're describing has never bothered me as long as the buffer zone around the inventory is large enough to minimize accidental closing. YMMV. Oh, and, err...I didn't realize you worked on the UI until I hit the credits. Apologies if my crazy internet forum rant seemed too harsh in tone. At worst, the ToMI UI is inefficient. If it's any condolence, in Macarena of the Missing I committed the far greater game design sin of implementing item combining without actually using it in a puzzle.

On a Murakami kick at the moment. Read Norwegian Wood and halfway through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. Excellence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Another_Thing..._(novel) Wait, what? Leave the poor guy's work alone. I'm tempted to say something snarky about the author, but I never read Artemis Fowl.