Home Gone: The 9th Guest of the 12th Hour

[elmuerte]

So a kickstarter for a sequel.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1559170459/the-7th-guest-3-the-collector

 

I'm not sure. I enjoyed the 11th hour, a new series of puzzles of proper difficulty would be great I guess.

[Roderick]

I couldn't even get through the 8 minute FMV trailer, unfortunately. I don't know if they're shooting for deliberate badness all around, or if this is genuinely the extent of their writing (and acting) skill.

 

I feel like you could definitely take The 7th Guest into a nice nostalgic direction, but this doesn't feel right from the start. It almost needs worse chroma keying, lower resolution and choppier compression.

[dium]

I don't think the writing and acting is all that bad. Well, it IS quite bad; I mean I don't think it's inappropriate. I would be disappointed if there wasn't stupid puns in hammed-up "spooky voice". That's basically what 7th Guest is about.

 

But I agree in general, it doesn't feel right... modern technology does seem to be a disservice to the 7th Guest vibe. The original game (I never played 11th hour) was campy, but in a very unique way that was (probably unintentionally) augmented by the limitations of FMV tech; this trailer felt campy more like amateur theater is campy, and seemingly just because I can see the actors more clearly.

 

I'm not sold. I have a lot of nostalgia for the first game, but I haven't even gotten around to 11th Hour yet, why would I invest in yet another sequel?

[Tanukitsune]

Jesus, at this rate even Orion Burger will get a Kickstarter... All I remember about these games is how much I hated the microscope puzzle.

[Brannigan]

Eh could be worse, somebody could be kickstarting Boogerman!

[toblix]

That video was uncomfortably hard to watch, as I couldn't tell if they were being ironic or not.

[feelthedarkness]

i haven't watched the video, but i'm old enough that these FMV games represent to me a critical downturn in the quality of games i liked for a few years. Adventure games got dopey, particularly the Tex Murphy games, and wing commander turned into the mark hamill made for tv movie hour. everything looked like and starred what looked like softcore porn people but they never got down to BIZNESS. 

[TheLastBaron]

i haven't watched the video, but i'm old enough that these FMV games represent to me a critical downturn in the quality of games i liked for a few years. Adventure games got dopey, particularly the Tex Murphy games, and wing commander turned into the mark hamill made for tv movie hour. everything looked like and starred what looked like softcore porn people but they never got down to BIZNESS.

Are you saying that you didn't Kickstart Tex Murphy?

[elmuerte]

I think the shitty quality of the video is just a resource/time constraint. Or at least, I hope. 11th hour's production quality was much better. Graphic and audio wise at least. The story and acting has always be B-movie level.

[feelthedarkness]

Are you saying that you didn't Kickstart Tex Murphy?

 

I would have kickstarted another MEAN STREETS or Martian Memorandum or even Countdown!

 

It's such a bummer they ditched this fully function 3D car flying sim for pg softcore. 

 

Also, 

 

[thorn]

Geoff Keighley wrote a lengthy article about the clusterfuck that was the development of the 11th Hour (via Wayback Machine). I haven't read it since, oh, 2005, but from memory all the video footage and a significant chunk of the gameplay of the third game had been completed before it got cancelled. That's probably why the video looks so old-school - because it actually is.

 

EDIT: Scratch that. I just re-read the article and it's more ambiguous than I remembered about the state of the game when it was cancelled. Certainly Landeros was working on it and enough of it was completed to have screenshots, so I suspect that what was shown in that video does still date from the late '90s.

[syntheticgerbil]

I remember despising this series yet sometimes playing out of boredom. I can't believe anyone wants to Kickstart this badness. It was never good.

 

I don't even think it's a problem with FMV games, it's just the type of slogging adventure where you move from one tired individual puzzle sequence to the next. Then you fill in the gaps with terrible long winded dialogue and bad actors. We don't need this shit anymore now that we have Professor Layton.

Also I don't know if you guys are seriously making fun of Tex Murphy, but Tesla Effect seems to be shaping up to be some awesome B-movie fun.

[TheLastBaron]

I'm not making fun of Tex, I love all the games and backed the new one.

[Merus]

Yeah, at the time I thought the 7th Guest was interesting (though too much for my weak, unburdened mind) but going back to it now, it has real problems. It's infamous in the interactive fiction community for its lazy puzzle justification - to this day, a puzzle that's clearly put in the game to give the player something to do, because no villain anywhere would actually build something like it, is called a Soup Cans puzzle.

 

I don't know if there's anything inherently salvageable from the concept, especially when you still have terrible actors. For all its faults, at least Myst, at its highs, had the concept of building a world and having the puzzles be a test of your understanding of that world. (And at least Cyan decided to do something new - they didn't set the world on fire but their Kickstarter's on track to be funded.)

[Tanukitsune]

Does anybody know anything from Trilobyte games that isn't the 7th Guest? They made Tender, Loving Care, infamous for it's cheesy acting and Clandestiny, which is just the 7th Guest with cartoons and an Irish setting.

 

 

Frankly, I don't care enough about this series to fund it... if it makes I'll buy it on sale and that's about it...

[syntheticgerbil]

Ah so they dabbled in the art style of the Zelda CD-i games too? Great! Such range!