Ben X

'Ben There, Dan That!' from Size Five Games

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I'm afraid it's already time for my bi-annual plugfest again. *ahem*

 

Part-time Idle Thumbs forumite, and my best mate, Dan Marshall has launched Zombie Cow Studios Size Five Games. He has a few games for download, including 'Ben There, Dan That!', an adventure game written by me and Dan. It's a tribute to the classic Lucasarts adventures, and is now available as a Special Edition on a "pay what you want" pricing scheme. [EDIT: you're probably best off buying it in a bundle with the sequel these days]

Please pass it on to anyone who you think might enjoy it, and direct any questions or requests for exclusive site content (interviews, etc) to [email protected], and we'll be more than happy to help.

 

Thanks everyone, and see you in two years for the next plugarama!

graveyard.png

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Oo, I'll definitely download that. I loved Gibbage (bought it as well). I'd really love a sequel which would be friendly to the HDTV I have as a secondary monitor and my gamepads, but I guess it's good for Dan to do other things.

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I've begun playing it and so far - I'm stuck at trying to make Dan enter the passage under the altar - I really liked what I saw, especially the amount of dedicated dialogs for the weird combinations and the in-situ beginning (if it's new, you just created an awesome way of introducing the genre to non-experts, congrats)!. From time to time though, the said dialogs are a bit too wordy and there's a number of frustrating issues with the UI but I'll detail these on your forum.

All in all I'm having a very good time and I think anyone should try this.

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I loved Gibbage (bought it as well). I'd really love a sequel which would be friendly to the HDTV I have as a secondary monitor and my gamepads, but I guess it's good for Dan to do other things.

Gibbage 2 is a strong possibility, with much wider compatibility, better cartoony graphics, more accessible gameplay, destructible terrain, a level editor and online play. Zombie Cow has one or two other things in the works first, though...

(if it's new, you just created an awesome way of introducing the genre to non-experts, congrats!). From time to time though, the said dialogs are a bit too wordy and there's a number of frustrating issues with the UI but I'll detail these on your forum.

All in all I'm having a very good time and I think anyone should try this.

Thanks bud, good to see you at the all-new forums! We defo tried to make the game accessible for people who have never heard of an adventure game before, now that the genre has fallen from its golden age. I think we mix the wordy with the succinct quite well, but I can see your point. And we decided not to spend huge amounts of time on stuff like what we considered in the end to be just niggles with the UI, as it's a freeware game. We wanted to have fun creating the story first and foremost, without worrying too much about the odd rough graphic or UI 'quirk'!

EDIT: We're having a few teething problems with the hosting company, so the site may be down for a little while. If so, please try again later!

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Mmm, now I'm stuck with

four doors opened : the church thing, the elevator, the US-UK dimension and the floating islands. I've got a bunch of items now : the blue-tacked dead hand, the sponge, the loo cakes, the scissors, the endless stack of coins and a rock but I'm not finding any use for them. I can't enter the castle (need an invit' ? from who ?), can't seem to find anything to do with the triforce (there must be something to do with the blueprints) and can't get the trap to open ...

I've ran out of ideas and the forum's still dead. Anybody wants to give me a hint ?

edit : never mind, I got the lift working... finally got it when the 'primitive tool' dialog was trigerred.

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Hello!

Glad you got it sorted ;)

One thing that seems to throw a few people off with regards to BTDT's puzzles is that they're all thoroughly logical. There's no madcap, improbable solutions to anything (I don't think) which is odd because most adventure games have a few 'use monkey's hand with ********* to get past the grumpy sailor' puzzles ;)

With regards to a Gibbage sequel: it's definitely happening. We're shooting for an XBLA release which is probably a bit unlikely, especially given that the studio's very much a part-time affair... so we need to shift some serious numbers of games in order to be able to afford to pay to get it done 'properly'. I'm not committing to a full-on online HD Xbox version unless it gets coded properly, arted properly and what-have-you. And that's going to require serious £££, I'm afraid.

Business, eh? Tsh.

Anyway- enjoy BTDT. Have a download of Cruxade as well - I know it's a block-dropper, but it's surprisingly good fun. Like Lumines, only BETTERER.

;)

EDIT: out of interest, why have your forums censored the word 'pine' 'apple'? That's an unusual thing to have done. Do I win a prize?

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Had to be done. Things were getting out of control.

Oo, you got the guy who did the totally fantastic music for Gibbage to do totally fantastic music for this! I just wish there was more ambient music, it's pretty quiet most of the time. And the cartoony Gibbagey graphics are back too, yay!

The game has been really funny so far, but I'm not too far yet. I'll report more later.

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Hey, haven't you plugged this game over at Adventure Gamers? What's up with that? Huh?

EDIT:

Maybe I'm too much of a fucking atheist or something, but I can't do the church puzzle! Can't find any logical sequence for the passages. Ack, how about a puzzle where you insert a round peg into a round hole? I could do that.

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Done! It had been a while since I played an adventure game, and this is a pretty good one :

  1. I said it before, I'll say it again : perfect introduction
  2. Awesome character design and pretty good animation
  3. Very good character chemistry from the beginning
  4. Top notch dialogs and reactions : lots of them and all very good.
  5. Original tone : You managed to strike the perfect balance between 'all public' humor and the profanity
    for example, the 'HAVING A VERY LARGE PENIS' line was so unexpected and so off the character that it genuinely felt funny and I tell you, it's been a while since I truly laughed at a dick joke.
    Kudos to that.
  6. Really nice music even if infrequent

Some stuff I didn't liked :

  • The background art didn't do it for me. I think I get what you tried to do but even if you had a few successful locations in the style (outside the church, the iced subway, the 'before' room of the museum), it felt lazy. I know it's not the case, but that is how it looked like to me.
  • There's a bunch of bugs and hindrance related to the UI, the most obvious af all being that one has to use the TAKE icon to go through doors and stairs. A dozen of other issues are frequently making the game less enjoyable
  • Too much 'use this on that' and not enough character driven puzzles (it really felt like you'd use the superheroes in the museum or the King in 'UK,US', but they were useless) or enigma puzzles like the one with the candles
  • No real climax - the games end with two pretty dull puzzles - but maybe that might be intended

I'll be making a donation during the month:tup:

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Hey, haven't you plugged this game over at Adventure Gamers? What's up with that? Huh?

EDIT:

Maybe I'm too much of a fucking atheist or something, but I can't do the church puzzle! Can't find any logical sequence for the passages. Ack, how about a puzzle where you insert a round peg into a round hole? I could do that.

I won't have the time to look at this for a while, but you really should plug it over at AG. The Underground forum isn't as lively as it maybe once was, but it's still good to have it there because people there still check it out.

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Thanks for all the response!

You'll be glad to know that there's a news item up on Adventure Gamers now.

@ brkl: It's a shame we couldn't get ambient Mike Watts music throughout the game, but that would have involved paying him, which we couldn't do with a budget of zero! We tried to put a fair few ambient sound effects in to make it less quiet, though...

@ vimes: I can see your point with a lot of the stuff you didn't like, but in the end, we were writing it as freeware in our spare time, and couldn't polish it forever... Regarding the beginning, we were inspired by the beginning of Day Of The Tentacle, which eases the player in magnificently - great intro, find-a-door single-room puzzle, great cutscene, find-an-item whole-house puzzle, great cutscene, open up new character and whole game. I hope at some point we'll be able to get Tim Schafer to take a look at Ben There, Dan That, especially with all the DOTT and Full Throttle references in it.

Anyone else played it yet?!

Edited by bbX1138

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Hurry hurry hurry! A Londoner such as yourself will get extra enjoyment out of it, I'll warrant.

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Broke my golden rule of not having any games on my Laptop and downloaded this a couple of days ago and have very much enjoyed it so far. As soon as my Mastercard clears in a couple of days I will definitely be paying for it.

I've only gotten as far as the First three doors on the Alien craft but so far the humour has been spot on and the reference to the rubber chicken with a pulley in it right at the beginning made me grin.

I'd agree withh Vimes about some of the UI stuff, having to scroll through the different possible actions is a little annoying especially without a mouse (are there any hot keys for instant skipping to these actions?). It is, however, a very minor gripe and I've enjoyed everything else so far.

Rock Paper Shotgun have also endorsed it so hopefully you are getting a fair bit of interest.

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Glad you're enjoying it, twmac!

There's now an updated version at www.zombie-cow.com/btdt with keyboard shortcuts and a few other little improvements/fixes. Possibly not worth your re-downloading if you're quite far in, but then again it wouldn't take you too long to get back where you are now, and enjoy all the benefits of hotkeys.

We've hit the 5000 download mark, which is great, and hopefully we'll get a lot more people playing it off the upcoming PC Zone coverdisc (not the updated version though, sadly).

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Today I thought "fuck it" (again!) and played this. It brought back some of that good old-time adventure game feeling only Sam & Max have been able to lately. I missed an awesome final puzzle where you sort of "line up" all the weird superheroes to do some crazy shit in combination or something, but it was still good fun.

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Glad you got round to it Toblix!

You'll be glad to know that the sequel, 'Time Gentlemen Please' will definitely have some kind of exciting, epic final puzzle.

Ben There Dan That has had over 15 000 downloads, not including magazine coverdiscs, and shitty download sites like Gamershell stealing it without permission, so after that success we're really trying to make the sequel more polished and tightly constructed...

PS - What puzzle would you have designed that involved the superpowers of all the superheroes? :erm::crazy:

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What, right of the top of my mind? I have no fucking idea. I'm sure one would be possible to think of something if one were an adventure game designer, though, especially since you could then change the super powers of the guys to fit the puzzle. I'd imagine something LucasArts-like -- like trying to get into a contest, but there are three guys ahead of you, each with some special characteristic, and then you'll nonlinearly have to do some shit to get them all disqualified or something, I dunno. Anyway, I'll definitely get the sequel.

Also, the three guys with all the sketches and different plans also smelled of such a puzzle to me. I kept trying to figure out what I was supposed to do, and was a tad disappointed when they were just... nothing. I thought maybe I'd have to get them to try the various plans in order to get me into the castle or some shit.

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Aw, I was hoping you'd come up with a brillo idea. Hmmm, maybe the player would have to attach a smooth piece of wood (after giving it to the sandpaper guy) to the running guy, which the ants would chase because...um... ah, I got nothin'.

The three guys were actually a cameo by The Triforce which, I'll admit, did get a little self-indulgent. A remnant from before we realised how many people would end up playing! Still, better to have too much dialogue and detail than too little, I always think. At the very least, it adds some red herrings! EDIT: I went through a similar thing with Governor Phatt in Monkey Island 2, actually - I tried every item three times each on those damn food pipes!

Edited by bbX1138

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Great game! I love how many random jokes there are when trying to combine inventory items. The puzzles were all pretty logical, and the only place I got stuck was when I didn't notice the rope near the end. Looking forward to the sequel! :grin:

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You have to burn the rope.

I'll give this a download, I might knock up a feature or perhaps review for Thunderbolt in the next week or so.

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Thanks for the bump and the attention, guys! Glad you enjoyed it, noyb. Check out the zombie-cow site for updates on the sequel... I'm writing dialogue for it right now. Here's what I just wrote for 'talk to pile of straw':

cBen.Say("I can't talk to it, it's not a straw man.");

cDan.Say("I disagree, you can talk to things other than straw men.");

Not sure if the gag comes across...

gdc, a feature or review would be ace! Let me know if you need anything, and enjoy the game!

You might spot Tremors and Shaun Of The Dead references, a Day Of The Dead reference, but no The Terminal or Dawn Of The Dead references....

Edited by bbX1138

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Sweet game so far guys. Very funny dialogue and awesome art style!

Refreshing to see the puzzles are pure logic, even after Ceville, a fairly moderate game in that respect.

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