mikemariano

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by mikemariano

  3. Posted

    You may notice that one of the previously indistinct portraits upstairs in the past has been turned into another cameo...

     

    I could barely make it out, but is it old man Corley?

     

     

    Maniac Mansion is barely playable since you can't save in it.

     

    Wow, really?  I pressed so many function keys, convincing myself I forgot which they were.

  6. Posted

    It’s almost as though the meta-experience of what it is, who made it and how it got made has to be taken alongside the game itself to get a complete picture of it.

     

    I had that feeling, too, but less about Schafer and the history of adventure games and more about the saga of getting Broken Age made.

     

    Act I contains all the Kickstarter promise of a Double Fine Adventure!  Act II contains the delays, the frustration, etc.

     

    Just started Day of the Tentacle Remastered!  I haven't even solved any puzzles yet.  I've just walked around talking to Founding Fathers.  I am laughing hard at all the lines I remember and harder at the lines I forgot.

  7. Posted

     
    I'd love to hear your thoughts, Thumbs. 

     

    These are similar to jump cuts and are speaking film language pretty well, so I bought them.  They also prepared me for the abrupt beginnings and endings of the "Days" for the remainder of the game.

     

    But that's a good point that it's kinda weird to use the otherwise non-interactive backpack as the introduction to interaction.

  11. Posted

    One of my main reasons for wanting to do this is that everything you build looks so destroyed, I want to build nice things.

     

    Right on!  The only justification for why the game doesn't offer you pretty building materials is because then they'd have to justify why none of the NPCs slapped a coat of paint on anything in the last 200 years.

  12. Posted

    Coming home tonight I had my first ever big boy accident! A guy hit the crosswalk button on 8th street, so I stopped for him. The Acura behind me didn't. I'm fine, blew off steam by running 5k when I got home. If I can still do that on a Wednesday night at like 8:30 in March, I must be ok.

     

    Car is mostly ok. All the vital car-bits are unscathed and he managed to miss my lights so I'm still legal. Big difference is that my back door is now concave where it was once convex and the hinge to open and close it is all kinds of fucked up. Thank god for a rear-mounted spare tire, as that actually took the brunt of the impact. Tire's now a write-off, but I salute it and it died with valour.

     

    Called insurance, gonna get the damage assessed tomorrow after work. First time in my life I've had to make a claim. It's a fun adventure! On the plus side, you can't really get more "not at fault" than stopping for a pedestrian in a crosswalk with the lights flashing.

     

    I got rear-ended in a similar experience and everything health/repair/insurance-wise all went OK, so I hope it's the same for you, Miffy!

     

    Definitely keep an eye on how you feel in the next few days, but early signs seem good!

  14. Posted

    For no reason, here is a 1998 Computer Gaming World interview with Gillian Anderson about The X-Files FMV game.

     

     

    There is also a transcript at a fan site.

     

    At the 3:11 mark she starts talking about the games she has played, including Tetris, Myst, and a Tetris clone called Tortured Souls?  "It's like Tetris, but with the eyeballs and stuff coming down.  I really like that."

     

    Does anyone know what this game might be?  I can't find it by that title.

  15. Posted

    This is also the worst. I've done this before when hosting a game and felt like such an ass. "Why wasn't this sample round fun? Oh, I ruined it and missed a rule." :/ It sucks.

     

    The fun counterpoint to both these situations is Monopoly, where the written rules and the house rules (no auction) both result in a grim, endless endgame.

  21. Posted

    It's interesting to me that people bring up Gone Home so much. In the case of Gone Home I felt like a big sister, because I am a big sister, not really because Katie, the character, did much to make me feel that way. I would be kind of surprised if men who played Gone Home really identified as a Katie, the big sister, rather than a big brother or just an intruder on an existing life. But the story isn't about Katie. It's about Sam and it's about Lonnie. You don't really need to be Katie for the story to work.

     

    I needed to be her!  Gone Home was one of the worst experiences of my life, primarily because Katie Greenbriar doesn't exist.  I have actual life experience of coming home from college to a house I've never lived in, in which my younger sister was adjusting to a new school.  But everything I brought with me just slid right off of Katie.  I dumped real emotion and experience into a black hole.

     

    I think player perspective is extremely important.  Even if Henry was a mute with no backstory, and even if he wasn't the subject of the story (as you argue Katie isn't), the game still needs to acknowledge that the player has done things.  That a player is even there.  Maybe I'm totally wrong—does The Witness do this?

  22. Posted

    I just completed Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode Three, the first of two Zeboyd Games Rainslick games and the only one available on the Mac.

     

    I am eagerly anticipating Zeboyd's Cosmic Star Heroine, so I decided to give this earlier effort a try.  It was decent, and Zeboyd made a good effort to try and mix up the way you battle (at no point is spamming the Attack button a good option), but it did get just a little repetitive.  The Interrupt system (where some of your abilities decrease your opponent's ATB bar so they don't get to attack as often) wasn't as dramatic as I thought it would be, and there were no real combos, either across characters or with the job/class system.

     

    It's good that Zeboyd was thinking about all these systems, though, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with for Cosmic Star Heroine.

     

    It was also interesting to see the Penny Arcade characters look and act consistently and be given real character arcs.  The strip never aimed for that, but Krahulik's art has become frighteningly grotesque over the past half-decade.  Constraining his art-style to SNES dimensions makes it much easier to look at.

     

    Does anybody have any 16-bit-style RPG recommendations for a cranky old guy who doesn't really like anything except for Chrono Trigger?