Noyb

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Noyb

  1. Posted

    "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

  5. Posted

    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

  7. Posted

    I loved how insane the puzzles were in Day of the Tentacle. By far my favorite puzzle in adventure gaming is when you

    give Betsy Ross a tentacle physiological diagram to transform the American flag into a tentacle, which you can use to disguise Laverne in the tentacle-infested future

    .

    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.)

  10. Posted

    "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

  11. Posted

    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.

  12. Posted

    What the hell. He got some sort of shady post-dated deal with the Edge of Twilight devs.

    :(:frusty::finger:

    http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/edge-of-twilight--edge--trademark-dispute-resolved

    PUBLIC STATEMENT

    23rd August 2009

    FUZZYEYES™ approached EDGE® Games several months ago, with the intent to resolve any issues arising out of both companies use of the mark "EDGE." Fuzzyeyes, developer of the game titled "Edge of Twilight," sought to address any potential trademark conflicts. Through amicable negotiations, Fuzzyeyes and Edge Games have arrived at a satisfactory arrangement that addresses the concerns of both parties. This arrangement allows the highly anticipated Edge of Twilight to proceed with its title unchanged, and without infringement on any trademarks held by Edge Games.

    Lu, Wei-Yao

    CEO of FUZZYEYES™

    About EDGE OF TWILIGHT

    Edge of Twilight is a 3rd person action adventure game in development for the PC, PLAYSTATION®3 and Xbox 360 platforms. Gameplay is split between combat, puzzle-solving and exploration. These elements will in turn be split between the two parallel planes of reality that only the player may traverse; the spiritually influenced, Lithern night realm, and the industrial, Athern dominated, day realm.

    Official Website: www.edge-of-twilight.com

    For latest trailer: http://www.gametrailers.com/video/someone-special-edge-of/51345

    About FUZZYEYES™

    FUZZYEYES is amongst the freshest and most innovative game developers within the Australia/Asia Pacific region. Founded in 2001 with headquarters based in Brisbane Australia, FUZZYEYES focuses on developing original IP for video-gaming platforms.

    Let's put that on a timeline, shall we?

    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.

    :spiraldy:

    * Scarily close to the optimal strategy in Edge Tycoon, apart from the falsifying prior use step. :buyme:

  17. Posted

    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? :zoid:

  19. Posted

    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. :hah:

    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.

  20. Posted · Edited by Noyb

    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

    rubber tree

    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. :getmecoat

  21. Posted

    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

    George Lucas

    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." :nuts:

  23. Posted

    For what its worth I originally was going for a more streamlined inventory combination UI, but I was asked to make it something which was omnipresent and more activity center-like, so that it would always remind the player that they could combine inventory, even if they hadn't in ages. Nothing is worse than roaming around in an adventure game for a couple extra hours because you didn't think to use one item on another, and this is the first time in its five year existence that Telltale's done a game with inventory combination so we wanted to make sure people knew.

    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. :erm:

    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.)

    As for why we don't alternatively also support dragging one item onto another, if that was my decision I could answer that definitively.

    You've got to have options.

    (Corporate politics. Got it.)

    :grin:

    Your instinct is leading you astray here, I promise. There are more times that you want to just examine something once and then to try and use it than there are times when you want to go and examine many things in a row.

    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).

    Protip: Instead of clicking the magnifying glass to enter "examine mode," you can instead drop an inventory item onto the magnifying glass icon to examine it immediately.

    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.

    Maybe once you've actually got something equipped though... maybe that would be good and not bad. I guess that's what they did in Curse of MI but I don't remember if I liked that or was annoyed at it for closing on me. (parenthetical statement))

    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. :getmecoat

  25. Posted

    Only finished the intro puzzle, but so far the inventory UI is atrocious. Why is there a completely different UI element to combine inventory items? Why can't I just select one item, then the other? Is reordering my inventory so important that it requires the clunky panel? Why does the magnifying glass deselect after looking at an item? Why do I need to click to exit the inventory? :(

    I'm enjoying the game itself, though. The art works a lot better than I expected. I love the trees effect when going to the menu.