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Grim Fandango being remastered for PS4 and Vita

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Sooooo, Just curious....

How many people worked on this project, and for how long? Was it a team of 4 people that got this remaster gold in the space of six months?

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If Manny is holding something in his hands, is there a way to get him to place it back in his pocket without opening the inventory? I've played this game something like ten times, which means I must have opened and shut that inventory a few thousand times by now.

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It strikes me as very odd that the control for cycling Manny's focus isn't mapped on the gamepad layout as far as i can tell, and there's even unused buttons in that mapping. Getting Manny to look at the right hotspot on a shelf full of objects is quite laborious without it.

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I can't say anything about the pipe puzzle. The pipe puzzle is the only thing I still remember from 14 years ago

 

I finished Grim, and trying to really see through any kind of nostalgia.

 

The puzzles themselves were comparatively easy and logical, and I still like them. I consulted a walkthrough in the middle part because I thought there was a bug - based on the occurrence of other bugs in the Remaster before. So there's that, which is frankly bad for a 16 year old game. It wasn't a bug eventually, I had just missed a hotspot. Which is all too easy when the hotspot name is not displayed on mouseover (a huge design flaw e.g. in Broken Age too) and is adjacent to another hotspot. *Sigh*

 

There's still a lot of work to be done on the point & click controls. The inventory icon is often displayed when it shouldn't - leading to a crash when you click on it. Sometimes only the tank controls will bring you out of a given scene because the P&C do not give you the opportunity.

 

After going through the concept art gallery, it is of course striking how boring and sterile the background renderings often look in comparison. This would have been THE opportunity to improve Grim Fandango, frankly. The initial design is brilliant, but the execution failed 16 years ago already. Hand painted backgrounds or at least something approaching it would have added more soul to the whole thing. Not much could have gone wrong there, I insist – a real pity that it didn't happen.

 

On the whole, I'm really glad that I'm now in the possession of a functional version of Grim Fandango again. But apart from the somewhat functional point-and-click, one really has to treat this as the mere re-release that it is.

 

The Double Fine logo upon starting the game is undeserved.

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I've given this a spin on both the PS4 and computer now, and I think that those with a console should seriously consider that version if they can't connect their computer to a TV. I guess that the quality of your TV is a factor here, but for me there's just no comparison: the game looks a lot better at TV-viewing distance because it hides the incongruence between the quality of 3D models, backgrounds, and cutscenes. The backgrounds are particularly striking; on my monitor I just couldn't stop noticing their low resolution compared to the 3D, whereas on my TV I'm barely noticing at all.

I must say that the lighting is wonderful, and really completes what is still an attractive-looking game. Unlike Vainamoinen I have no desire to see the game's backgrounds remodelled, seeing that as somewhat comparable to Pixar remodelling everything in Toy Story when releasing it in 4K — a potentially endless debate about where to draw the line, as we've seen with Star Wars. I would definitely have liked to have seen some of their fidelity improved, but I accept that those art assets are long gone.

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Sooooo, Just curious....

How many people worked on this project, and for how long? Was it a team of 4 people that got this remaster gold in the space of six months?

The project came off the back of this fan effort to add mouse controls:

 

http://forums.residualvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=623

 

Dates on that were February 2014 to June 2014.

 

After that is where Double Fine stepped in on the timescale you refer to.

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I've heard lots of complaints about different elements of this Remastered game. I'm just glad that Grim Fandango exists and is almost totally functional on modern OSes for a reasonable price.

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Also, speaking on the game itself, there's been quite a few points where the story gives Manny no clear motivation to be doing anything he's doing. You're left kind of randomly clicking into place events that have no clear connection to the objective you may or may not have, simply hoping to find the story again. You're almost never presented a convincing image of a character who could be acting with a clear objective in mind, given the arbitrary and piecemeal tasks he's setting himself on.

I feel the same way. I think this was normal at the time, but modern times have moved game storytelling forward somewhat, and I would be disappointed if a newly designed game had you discover crucial puzzles by noticing some minor detail that you can't really care about.

 

Why would Manny care about the server room in the beginning? There is a cut-scene that tries to make it relevant, but fails to really motivate Manny to explore it. So, since it's really long since I last played it, I missed the fact that

Domino's tube

is interactive and was wandering around aimlessly. Manny is kind of separate from the player, having more knowledge than him or her, but he never tries to motivate the player to do anything, leaving everything to the player -- collecting background info, sorting the relevant from the irrelevant and come up with motivation and an action plan that is not necessarily very in sync with what is going on on the screen.

 

I think the puzzles are definitely not up to modern standards. In the beginning, there's also the thing with the rope... there's an implication that you can use it to find some new area, but no real indication that it's just too early. I kept trying to do something with it again and again.

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The project came off the back of this fan effort to add mouse controls:

 

http://forums.residualvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=623

 

Dates on that were February 2014 to June 2014.

 

After that is where Double Fine stepped in on the timescale you refer to.

 

It didn't come off the back of that fan project, Double Fine had been looking into doing this for years. They did ask the creator of that mod to consult with them so they could add the same functionality to their Remastered version. Here's an article about it. As far as I can tell, they started talking to Sony specifically about it in 2013.

 

Judging from the making of vids, I'd say it was more than 4 people working on this, but I'm not sure...

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Why would Manny care about the server room in the beginning? There is a cut-scene that tries to make it relevant, but fails to really motivate Manny to explore it. So, since it's really long since I last played it, I missed the fact that

Domino's tube

is interactive and was wandering around aimlessly. Manny is kind of separate from the player, having more knowledge than him or her, but he never tries to motivate the player to do anything, leaving everything to the player -- collecting background info, sorting the relevant from the irrelevant and come up with motivation and an action plan that is not necessarily very in sync with what is going on on the screen.

There are a few dialogue hints here and there as well. When you look at Domino's door, Manny says the following. It definitely could have been hightlighted more, though.

post-7393-0-59973500-1422821940_thumb.jpg

 

Incidentally, I can't believe they removed the stored HTML dialogue files. Made it so much more difficult to find the exact bit I needed.

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There are a few dialogue hints here and there as well. When you look at Domino's door, Manny says the following. It definitely could have been hightlighted more, though.

attachicon.gifgrim.jpg

 

Incidentally, I can't believe they removed the stored HTML dialogue files. Made it so much more difficult to find the exact bit I needed.

 

Did they? Shame, that was quite a cool and original feature. I do have a general reference of all the dialogue (triggered or not) here if it ever interests you:

 

http://www.grimfandango.net/game-info/dialogue

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Judging from the making of vids, I'd say it was more than 4 people working on this, but I'm not sure...

 

Yeah.. I think even if you don't count the people behind re-recording the music (or the entire Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, for that matter) or anyone involved in recording the director's commentary (and subtitling it in the different languages) I'm pretty sure there were still more than 4 people working on this remaster...

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Yeah.. I think even if you don't count the people behind re-recording the music (or the entire Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, for that matter)

 

 

After playing the entire game, I'm pretty certain that "the entire Melbourne Symphony Orchestra" was needed for the intro bit mainly, somewhere between two and five minutes of recorded music total. :blink:

 

I'd really love to have a comprehensive list about what tracks were changed and in what way... wouldn't be a long list in any case. : (

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After playing the entire game, I'm pretty certain that "the entire Melbourne Symphony Orchestra" was needed for the intro bit mainly, somewhere between two and five minutes of recorded music total. :blink:

I'd really love to have a comprehensive list about what tracks were changed and in what way... wouldn't be a long list in any case. : (

There's about 50 minutes of cutscene music in the game, much of which is orchestrated. I haven't gotten far enough to know, but I'd have assumed that most if not all of it was re-done?

I did notice the orchestra creeping into the in-game music while I was playing a small section of year one. For example, the DOD parking garage music and Manny's office have had instruments redone. Of course, it's possible that McConnell used higher-quality synthetic samples for some stuff, and worth bearing in mind that various live instruments were used the first time around.

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If you look at the making of, in addition to the orchestra McConnell replaced synth stuff with instruments played in a studio.

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There's about 50 minutes of cutscene music in the game, much of which is orchestrated. I haven't gotten far enough to know, but I'd have assumed that most if not all of it was re-done?

 

Yeah, this is what I assumed they did. It'd be pretty silly to get an orchestra to record only one of the many orchestra pieces in the game..?

 

EDIT: Just listening to the differences via Let's Plays, the cutscenes definitely are recorded with an orchestra. It's subtle, and the original soundtrack already sounded pretty great, but you can hear more instruments and they don't have that sample-y sound to them.

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Much of the orchestral music was re-recorded live, and what wasn't was re orchestrated digitally by Clint Bajakian! Apparently none of the original midi synths remain-it's all either live or updated with modern, far superior synths. So if you think you're hearing the original tracks with no extra work, in most cases you're probably trusting your memory too much.

Also I'm glad Bajakian was involved.

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I'd still be thankful for some kind of detailed tracklist with changes. Nothing DF will hand out, I guess. ^_^

Especially if no one asks them about it.

You could try the DF forums. Even if the staff are too busy, the community can probably still come with a decent list.

(However, if you are only interested in the length of the list, it is probably not worth the effort.)

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I bet they didn't use any re-orchestrated music! They just recorded it all and decided it was inferior!

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I have the original soundtrack burned into my memory so much that I could probably tell you exactly what's different while listening, in fact most people could if they listened to both versions of each track in turn. If it's something you're so curious about then surely you could do the same? Just get both soundtracks up at once and burn a couple of hours on it.

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That may be the problem. The 43 minutes of the regular LAEC soundtrack, engraved in my brain. But the cutscene music? If that's what DF's changes focused on, I find it quite understandable that I'm a bit underwhelmed.

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Grim Fandango Remastered gets the Vainamoinen stamp of Disapproval! Double Fine Logo... Not Earned! :tup::tmeh::tdown:

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