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A Haunted Pug
Aug 10, 2007

Discworld Noir was a game i LOVED when it was first out because, well, on one hand Pratchett was a really important figure to me, on the other hand they really really knew how to write a Noir parody that was actually a Noir story. Kinda like how Hot Fuzz is actually a great buddy cop movie and whodunnit.

I say that and just a few years after it was released I remember replaying it and groaning way too much at how SLOW a lot of the game was. Not the plot, not the timing of any game events - no, it was about the Curse of being an early-ish 3d game. I specifically remember how frustrating it was talking with the sculptor because he would not reply until that dumb animation was over. Agh!

Hopefully at some point there will be a good way to play this without any of the annoying bits (even if it is just "let me fast forward here"), then it will be an almost perfect game. Almost. They made Vimes an rear end in a top hat, grrrrrrr

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Fil5000
Jun 23, 2003

HOLD ON GUYS I'M POSTING ABOUT INTERNET ROBOTS
I found Lewton's voice incredibly annoying. I know what Brydon was going for but it doesn't land for me even slightly.

moosferatu
Jan 29, 2020

A Haunted Pug posted:

I say that and just a few years after it was released I remember replaying it and groaning way too much at how SLOW a lot of the game was. Not the plot, not the timing of any game events - no, it was about the Curse of being an early-ish 3d game. I specifically remember how frustrating it was talking with the sculptor because he would not reply until that dumb animation was over. Agh!

Yeah, that really tested the patience even when I was younger and had a much higher tolerance. I'm curious if it would break me now, but I don't have a way to play it.

ja2ke
Feb 19, 2004

People will probably be mad at this as some newfound form of censoring the game, but with the Sam & Max remasters we’ve been trying to reduce the Adventure Game Wait Time as much as we can without it intruding on the experience - making UI transitions quicker, or have them overlap game moments instead of queue up after them, not have enter and exit animations BOTH show the door open and close, that sort of thing. I think games like Curse of Monkey Island started the trend (“we CAN animate this, so we should, and it’s beautiful so people will love looking at it, and we are using the whole computer to render it so nothing else can happen anyway), and 3D games took it over the top.

Captain Hygiene
Sep 17, 2007

You mess with the crabbo...



I'm on board with that, my interest in respecting the originals is far outweighed by my impatience

Veotax
May 16, 2006


ja2ke posted:

People will probably be mad at this as some newfound form of censoring the game, but with the Sam & Max remasters we’ve been trying to reduce the Adventure Game Wait Time as much as we can without it intruding on the experience - making UI transitions quicker, or have them overlap game moments instead of queue up after them, not have enter and exit animations BOTH show the door open and close, that sort of thing. I think games like Curse of Monkey Island started the trend (“we CAN animate this, so we should, and it’s beautiful so people will love looking at it, and we are using the whole computer to render it so nothing else can happen anyway), and 3D games took it over the top.

Can't wait for the door closing restoration mod!

Gnome de plume
Sep 5, 2006

Hell.
Fucking.
Yes.

GhostDog posted:

Thanks.

Also, lmao:

Somehow that's perfect.

NO MORE KINGS

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Gnome de plume posted:

NO MORE KINGS

They'll probably be down one relatively soon at least, with the rate Charles and his literal magic potions are going.

boofhead
Feb 18, 2021

ja2ke posted:

People will probably be mad at this as some newfound form of censoring the game, but with the Sam & Max remasters we’ve been trying to reduce the Adventure Game Wait Time as much as we can without it intruding on the experience - making UI transitions quicker, or have them overlap game moments instead of queue up after them, not have enter and exit animations BOTH show the door open and close, that sort of thing. I think games like Curse of Monkey Island started the trend (“we CAN animate this, so we should, and it’s beautiful so people will love looking at it, and we are using the whole computer to render it so nothing else can happen anyway), and 3D games took it over the top.

i got ADHD and i gotta say, thank you

even medicated and as an adult, there are a shitload of games that im sure i would love but there are just some really aggravating playspeed choices that make me X out and uninstall. not mad at the game or anything, just.. this does not spark joy

cant skip dialogue, cant fast travel between screens, player walks like an ent on keta, etc etc

e: or "i forgot what im supposed to be doing now or what the current puzzle is or even how to play the game at all" if i take longer than a day between sessions and then it becomes impossible to pick it up again so i eventually just uninstall, because spending the time relearning that poo poo is incredibly anti-dopamine release

boofhead fucked around with this message at 09:25 on Feb 20, 2024

MockingQuantum
Jan 20, 2012



At least with 2D Sierra/Lucasart style PnC games, I get genuinely annoyed when "double clicking at the edge of a screen transitions you immediately to the next screen" isn't the default behavior, I feel like that first appeared sometime in the 90s and it's criminal to not include it at this point. No walking animation is so beautiful and enrapturing that I don't at least want the option to skip it after the first hour of the game.

Captain Hygiene
Sep 17, 2007

You mess with the crabbo...



Oh yeah, I love that. It's one of LucasArts' hidden crimes after they switched to 3D, can't double click to skip walking because you don't have a mouse :negative:

Nobody Interesting
Mar 29, 2013

One way, dead end... Street signs are such fitting metaphors for the human condition.


ja2ke posted:

newfound form of censoring the game

You'll show opening doors?? But not closing them?? Opening like eyes??

Sam and Max gone woke

moosferatu
Jan 29, 2020
The Feeble Files is a great game, if you enjoy ponderous walking.

Casimir Radon
Aug 2, 2008


I played a little tiny bit of The Black Hawk. Not enough to get any real impression of the gameplay. I was a bit shocked to see they actually went through with copy protection you have to go to the manual to for. I figured it was a joke and typed “gently caress you” in. I was then subjected to a lecture and then the game booted me back to desktop. It makes you refer to the manual every time you start it up. Not sure how I feel about that.

MockingQuantum
Jan 20, 2012



Casimir Radon posted:

I played a little tiny bit of The Black Hawk. Not enough to get any real impression of the gameplay. I was a bit shocked to see they actually went through with copy protection you have to go to the manual to for. I figured it was a joke and typed “gently caress you” in. I was then subjected to a lecture and then the game booted me back to desktop. It makes you refer to the manual every time you start it up. Not sure how I feel about that.

That sounds like something that's kind of funny and cute the first time but needs an immediate "don't make me do this again" checkbox after you do it

Rocket Baby Dolls
Mar 3, 2006

Normally I don't make aesthetic criticisms in other peoples' homes, but that rug looks like a beaver exploded. If meat is murder, then that rug is at least a severe beating.

moosferatu posted:

The Feeble Files is a great game, if you enjoy ponderous walking.

It makes the stealth section even more... fun.

John F Bennett
Jan 30, 2013

I always wear my wedding ring. It's my trademark.

Casimir Radon posted:

I played a little tiny bit of The Black Hawk. Not enough to get any real impression of the gameplay. I was a bit shocked to see they actually went through with copy protection you have to go to the manual to for. I figured it was a joke and typed “gently caress you” in. I was then subjected to a lecture and then the game booted me back to desktop. It makes you refer to the manual every time you start it up. Not sure how I feel about that.

As someone who only plays adventure games on Steam Deck these days, it seems like this feature won't work well on a Steam Deck? I guess you could open up the manual on a phone but this all sounds very unnecessary.

Captain Hygiene
Sep 17, 2007

You mess with the crabbo...



Casimir Radon posted:

I played a little tiny bit of The Black Hawk. Not enough to get any real impression of the gameplay. I was a bit shocked to see they actually went through with copy protection you have to go to the manual to for. I figured it was a joke and typed “gently caress you” in. I was then subjected to a lecture and then the game booted me back to desktop. It makes you refer to the manual every time you start it up. Not sure how I feel about that.

MockingQuantum posted:

That sounds like something that's kind of funny and cute the first time but needs an immediate "don't make me do this again" checkbox after you do it

Lol, wow. I only just now realized this is the game that came out a week ago, not something older. Yeah, that's a one-time gag if there ever was one.

Nobody Interesting
Mar 29, 2013

One way, dead end... Street signs are such fitting metaphors for the human condition.


John F Bennett posted:

As someone who only plays adventure games on Steam Deck these days, it seems like this feature won't work well on a Steam Deck? I guess you could open up the manual on a phone but this all sounds very unnecessary.

It's cumbersome but if the manual is a pdf or something, you can open the web browser at the same time as the game, so I guess there's that. I hate typing on the Deck though.

macnbc
Dec 13, 2006

brb, time travelin'

ja2ke posted:

People will probably be mad at this as some newfound form of censoring the game, but with the Sam & Max remasters we’ve been trying to reduce the Adventure Game Wait Time as much as we can without it intruding on the experience - making UI transitions quicker, or have them overlap game moments instead of queue up after them, not have enter and exit animations BOTH show the door open and close, that sort of thing.

Only registered members can see post attachments!

macnbc fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Feb 21, 2024

ja2ke
Feb 19, 2004

MockingQuantum posted:

At least with 2D Sierra/Lucasart style PnC games, I get genuinely annoyed when "double clicking at the edge of a screen transitions you immediately to the next screen" isn't the default behavior, I feel like that first appeared sometime in the 90s and it's criminal to not include it at this point. No walking animation is so beautiful and enrapturing that I don't at least want the option to skip it after the first hour of the game.

I hate double click to skip even though I get why people like it. I think it’s an immersion breaking feature and only got added to the genre because all the gameplay animations became insanely slow. This is to say, I’m glad Curse of Monkey Island has double-click to skip, but I’m only glad of it because the act of walking around in Curse of Monkey Island feels bad. If that was fixed, and the act of moving through the game world felt good, I don’t think double-click would be as needed.

YMMV with this take I’m sure, but I find that the games with double-click to skip, what I start doing is… skipping! And then the game starts feeling like Myst, a bunch of disconnected hard cuts, which is wrong for most games that aren’t Myst, and I start ingesting the content like those scenes in TNG when Data is learning something by asking the computer to go faster and faster until it’s just blinking poo poo past him at impossible speeds. That cadence is not actually what I enjoy about adventure games, but it’s hard to resist the greased chute once it’s presented. I hear arguments about it being good for when you’re stuck or when you have to do too much retraversal or when it’s too slow to walk somewhere, but those are all game design deficiencies! The games should be built to not have those issues in the first place. If the reason double-click is good is “it helps me skip bad parts of the game,” then sure I hear it and sympathize, but it’s a guarantee that means you’re skipping some of the good stuff too, probably unintentionally, which sucks.

ja2ke fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Feb 21, 2024

Nobody Interesting
Mar 29, 2013

One way, dead end... Street signs are such fitting metaphors for the human condition.


ja2ke posted:

YMMV with this take I’m sure, but I find that the games with double-click to skip, what I start doing is… skipping!

100% with you on this.

I'm having this problem with the Final Fantasy 8 remaster. It has a built in FAST MODE because the mechanical pace of the game doesn't sit well with modern audiences (I guess?). On the Steam Deck it's just a case of clicking down the left stick, so super easy to activate. I switched it on to spin around in circles and quickly get some levels but I've found that simply because it's there, I'm using it to traverse the world map and get through dialogue. FF8 has a lot of wide expanses and the loving world map you're asked to traipse around on, and once you've tasted the forbidden fruit of FAST MODE it's hard to go back.

It's a good example of the point you're making - games should just be designed well so that we don't need band aid solutions like fast mode or skipping. Design games that don't induce the desire to skip in the first place.

But...skipping is a good thing to have. If a game crashes, the last thing you'd want to ask the player to do is sit through all the unskippable bits again, just because of a crash or bug or whatever.

Also hosed up because I actually enjoy Old School RuneScape but the grind in Final loving Fantasy was too much for me?

Rocket Baby Dolls
Mar 3, 2006

Normally I don't make aesthetic criticisms in other peoples' homes, but that rug looks like a beaver exploded. If meat is murder, then that rug is at least a severe beating.

ja2ke posted:

People will probably be mad at this as some newfound form of censoring the game, but with the Sam & Max remasters we’ve been trying to reduce the Adventure Game Wait Time as much as we can without it intruding on the experience - making UI transitions quicker, or have them overlap game moments instead of queue up after them, not have enter and exit animations BOTH show the door open and close, that sort of thing. I think games like Curse of Monkey Island started the trend (“we CAN animate this, so we should, and it’s beautiful so people will love looking at it, and we are using the whole computer to render it so nothing else can happen anyway), and 3D games took it over the top.

These are the things that I'm grateful for with certain remasters. The Broken Sword remaster was a bad example of how to do it, but that was really just a mobile phone app port with a remastered tag thrown onto it.

Edit: I usually do the double-click to skip scene transitions if I have to backtrack to areas or if I've missed something and need to engage in pixel-hunting. Otherwise, I'm happy to just dawdle around.

Rocket Baby Dolls fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Feb 21, 2024

feedmyleg
Dec 25, 2004
Maybe it's sacrilege to say, but I would adore PNC remasters or even SCUMMVM to all incorporate the Return to Monkey Island item highlight circles and screen exit points. Pixel hunting blows. I don't want to skip anything, even walking animations, I just don't want to waste my time during gameplay itself.

ja2ke
Feb 19, 2004

feedmyleg posted:

Maybe it's sacrilege to say, but I would adore PNC remasters or even SCUMMVM to all incorporate the Return to Monkey Island item highlight circles and screen exit points. Pixel hunting blows. I don't want to skip anything, even walking animations, I just don't want to waste my time during gameplay itself.

That would be really cool. I like that ScummVM aims for accuracy, but I’d also like it if they took advantage of being a reimplementation of the engine interpreter (as opposed to running the literal engine like DOSBox or DREAMM) and go freak mode. Give me nice affordances that make the games easier to deal with in 2024. Hell, givr me a build of ScummVM that crops the verb bar off the old games and runs at 16:9. Put that stuff in a tray, or streamline it down to a coin like Curse (or even just left and right click like Return). It’s not running original game code anyway, you could conceivably hack in all sorts of weird poo poo. Especially now that DREAMM is already out there doing the job of attempting machine-accurate emulation using the original binaries.

Gravitas Shortfall
Jul 17, 2007

Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.


I like the double-click to speed up walking animation, it's a nice halfway point between just a hard skip and waiting forever for the sprite to meander over to the exit.

MockingQuantum
Jan 20, 2012



ja2ke posted:

I hate double click to skip even though I get why people like it. I think it’s an immersion breaking feature and only got added to the genre because all the gameplay animations became insanely slow. This is to say, I’m glad Curse of Monkey Island has double-click to skip, but I’m only glad of it because the act of walking around in Curse of Monkey Island feels bad. If that was fixed, and the act of moving through the game world felt good, I don’t think double-click would be as needed.

YMMV with this take I’m sure, but I find that the games with double-click to skip, what I start doing is… skipping! And then the game starts feeling like Myst, a bunch of disconnected hard cuts, which is wrong for most games that aren’t Myst, and I start ingesting the content like those scenes in TNG when Data is learning something by asking the computer to go faster and faster until it’s just blinking poo poo past him at impossible speeds. That cadence is not actually what I enjoy about adventure games, but it’s hard to resist the greased chute once it’s presented. I hear arguments about it being good for when you’re stuck or when you have to do too much retraversal or when it’s too slow to walk somewhere, but those are all game design deficiencies! The games should be built to not have those issues in the first place. If the reason double-click is good is “it helps me skip bad parts of the game,” then sure I hear it and sympathize, but it’s a guarantee that means you’re skipping some of the good stuff too, probably unintentionally, which sucks.

I largely agree with what you're saying here, I still prefer it to exist because I'll be honest, seeing a cool new environment is great the first time I encounter it, but I'm not that interested in being forced to wander through the same screens over and over regardless of the walking animation pace, sometimes I know what I need to do next and just want to get to it. I think there are probably some P&C games that suffer more from skipping because they're a more narratively driven experience, sure, but I don't think they really effect my "immersion" per se since it's already a game genre that is built on a whole structure of contrivances in some ways, so I don't know that I've ever felt that much immersion in most adventure games in the first place, though that can vary by the game.

I do wholeheartedly agree that the problem is most often a game design one at the core, and that adventure games are, for whatever reason, the biggest culprits when it comes to design decisions that probably had a practical or artistic justification behind them, but ultimately just waste the player's time.

I felt that the most when I was playing Grim Fandango last year--the environments are sometimes laid out in very strange ways that make them take way longer to navigate than is strictly necessary, there are often way more screens and locations than needed and it isn't always clear how that benefits the experience, it's sometimes unclear what you're able to interact with and fiddly to interact with the thing you want, and some areas of the game are interconnected in pretty asinine ways that make huge sections of the game extremely tedious to complete, if you ask me. I'm sure it didn't help that I was playing on PS4 and using a controller, so everything took way. too. loving. long, but I walked away from the experience feeling like it was an interesting story and cool characters with some neat puzzles that was absolutely kneecapped repeatedly by some truly awful design choices that made it genuinely a pain to play a lot of the time.

feedmyleg
Dec 25, 2004

ja2ke posted:

That would be really cool. I like that ScummVM aims for accuracy, but I’d also like it if they took advantage of being a reimplementation of the engine interpreter (as opposed to running the literal engine like DOSBox or DREAMM) and go freak mode. Give me nice affordances that make the games easier to deal with in 2024. Hell, givr me a build of ScummVM that crops the verb bar off the old games and runs at 16:9. Put that stuff in a tray, or streamline it down to a coin like Curse (or even just left and right click like Return). It’s not running original game code anyway, you could conceivably hack in all sorts of weird poo poo. Especially now that DREAMM is already out there doing the job of attempting machine-accurate emulation using the original binaries.

Yeah, I absolutely adore when I see someone make a LUA script that's all about giving some NES game a quality-of-life improvement, like the original Metroid getting a map screen and such. I would love for those kind of options and add-ons for classic PNC games. I would play a lot more Sierra games if a little popup sprung up and said "If you leave this area without picking up an item you missed, you won't be able to finish the game. Are you sure you want to proceed?"

Nobody Interesting
Mar 29, 2013

One way, dead end... Street signs are such fitting metaphors for the human condition.


ja2ke posted:

That would be really cool. I like that ScummVM aims for accuracy, but I’d also like it if they took advantage of being a reimplementation of the engine interpreter (as opposed to running the literal engine like DOSBox or DREAMM) and go freak mode. Give me nice affordances that make the games easier to deal with in 2024. Hell, givr me a build of ScummVM that crops the verb bar off the old games and runs at 16:9. Put that stuff in a tray, or streamline it down to a coin like Curse (or even just left and right click like Return). It’s not running original game code anyway, you could conceivably hack in all sorts of weird poo poo. Especially now that DREAMM is already out there doing the job of attempting machine-accurate emulation using the original binaries.

They have actually started locking features behind an "Enhancement" boolean, so certain features and bug fixes can be thrown in. https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=SCUMM/Game_Enhancements

Nothing quite as drastic as coin interfaces for Indy4 but the framework is there for that kind of thing now.

ja2ke
Feb 19, 2004

Nobody Interesting posted:

They have actually started locking features behind an "Enhancement" boolean, so certain features and bug fixes can be thrown in. https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=SCUMM/Game_Enhancements

Nothing quite as drastic as coin interfaces for Indy4 but the framework is there for that kind of thing now.

It being behind a boolean is a reminder that what scummvm needs more than anything is a good frontend. I don’t think the team will ever do it though, as they still seem to infight about whether it benefits most end users to show the debug console on launch. Many mass-accepted open source projects have moved out of this grognard squabbling space, but scummvm is extremely comfortable living there still. It’s a great piece of software but I wish it was better, but I don’t think the team is interested in even having the conversation.

Edit: today is the day I dump my adventure game takes in the SA thread I guess.

ja2ke fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Feb 22, 2024

Nobody Interesting
Mar 29, 2013

One way, dead end... Street signs are such fitting metaphors for the human condition.


ja2ke posted:

It being behind a boolean is a reminder that what scummvm needs more than anything is a good frontend. I don’t think the team will ever do it though, as they still seem to infight about whether it benefits most end users to show the debug console on launch. Many mass-accepted open source projects have moved out of this grognard squabbling space, but scummvm is extremely comfortable living there still. It’s a great piece of software but I wish it was better, but I don’t think the team is interested in even having the conversation.

Discord makes referencing very hard, but I've been idling in theirs for a while and there definitely have been discussions about the UI. The Thimbleweed Park engine is even being built (at sev's suggestion) with ImGui for providing an easier debugging frontend. Sure that's not usability for an actual player, but that's an important move for encouraging new engine devs to come in.

I think we are seeing a shift in attitudes but it's a slow thing. sev has always been a little like Linus Torvalds in how he runs and communicates the project, but I'm hopeful things are changing. I just wish I could have something to show for it other than "yeah i definitely heard this"

Rocket Baby Dolls
Mar 3, 2006

Normally I don't make aesthetic criticisms in other peoples' homes, but that rug looks like a beaver exploded. If meat is murder, then that rug is at least a severe beating.
I would still prefer if anything remastered\enhanced were optional, if possible. As much as I enjoy UI and QOL updates to games, even restored content, sometimes I want to revisit the original game for nostalgia. But then again, I have DosBox and PCem, and there are plenty of emulators for older systems so if I truly wanted to have that then I could just play the original releases on those. One of the things that I enjoyed about the remastered releases of the first two Monkey Island games is that you could switch between versions with the press of a button.

ja2ke
Feb 19, 2004

Nobody Interesting posted:

Discord makes referencing very hard, but I've been idling in theirs for a while and there definitely have been discussions about the UI. The Thimbleweed Park engine is even being built (at sev's suggestion) with ImGui for providing an easier debugging frontend. Sure that's not usability for an actual player, but that's an important move for encouraging new engine devs to come in.

I think we are seeing a shift in attitudes but it's a slow thing. sev has always been a little like Linus Torvalds in how he runs and communicates the project, but I'm hopeful things are changing. I just wish I could have something to show for it other than "yeah i definitely heard this"

That’s good to hear, though yeah that isn’t end user focused really. I know the most important scummvm end users are the developers who have fun working on the project. That’s cool, again in a very old school OSS way, but as a non-programmer user (and sometimes software interface designer) I would love it if some folks in the project had fun thinking about ScummVM as a product and not just as a bundle of code and settings windows.

Rocket Baby Dolls posted:

I would still prefer if anything remastered\enhanced were optional, if possible. As much as I enjoy UI and QOL updates to games, even restored content, sometimes I want to revisit the original game for nostalgia. But then again, I have DosBox and PCem, and there are plenty of emulators for older systems so if I truly wanted to have that then I could just play the original releases on those. One of the things that I enjoyed about the remastered releases of the first two Monkey Island games is that you could switch between versions with the press of a button.

Of course those versions were also altered, with things like references to brands like Nintendo, Visa, even Guybrush calling himself a “ghost-busting stud” being removed, even in classic mode, but it “felt” original, with the old art and mostly-accurate old music. I liked the convenience, and loved that in 2’s SE you could mix and match voice and classic art, but I think at this point I prefer when I just get an unaltered archival original copy to go along with the new release.

ja2ke fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Feb 22, 2024

Rocket Baby Dolls
Mar 3, 2006

Normally I don't make aesthetic criticisms in other peoples' homes, but that rug looks like a beaver exploded. If meat is murder, then that rug is at least a severe beating.

ja2ke posted:

Of course those versions were also altered, with things like references to brands like Nintendo, Visa, even Guybrush calling himself a “ghost-busting stud” being removed, even in classic mode, but it “felt” original, with the old art and mostly-accurate old music. I liked the convenience, and loved that in 2’s SE you could mix and match voice and classic art, but I think at this point I prefer when I just get an unaltered archival original copy to go along with the new release.

To be honest, I hadn't even known about those until you pointed them out. That is disappointing and I thank you for saying so.

I guess if you really do want to experience the original then you really do have to go back to the original versions.

ja2ke
Feb 19, 2004

Rocket Baby Dolls posted:

To be honest, I hadn't even known about those until you pointed them out. That is disappointing and I thank you for saying so.

I guess if you really do want to experience the original then you really do have to go back to the original versions.

It’s a little weird that the changes never really got called out. But also maybe not that weird? I think gamers didn’t rise up over these changes because they were benign and not very woke. I feel insane writing that out but it’s probably true. You can’t make a frothy YouTube video or twitter thread about them because it’s not tied to politics (unless you want to be mad at copyright law and capitalism, which people do, but not in the way that makes you start a subreddit that eventually has to move to another site).

Edit: the weirdest MI2 SE change is replacing a Doonesbury reference with “Kyle Katarn” https://scummbar.com/trivia/00025

Edit edit: I’ve just discovered The SCUMM Bar’s “trivia” pages are actually pretty great, full of esoteric stuff I didn’t know. Here’s the ones for Monkey 1 and Monkey 2.

ja2ke fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Feb 22, 2024

Rocket Baby Dolls
Mar 3, 2006

Normally I don't make aesthetic criticisms in other peoples' homes, but that rug looks like a beaver exploded. If meat is murder, then that rug is at least a severe beating.

ja2ke posted:

It’s a little weird that the changes never really got called out. But also maybe not that weird? I think gamers didn’t rise up over these changes because they were benign and not very woke. I feel insane writing that out but it’s probably true. You can’t make a frothy YouTube video or twitter thread about them because it’s not tied to politics (unless you want to be mad at copyright law and capitalism, which people do, but not in the way that makes you start a subreddit that eventually has to move to another site).

Edit: the weirdest MI2 SE change is replacing a Doonesbury reference with “Kyle Katarn” https://scummbar.com/trivia/00025

Edit edit: I’ve just discovered The SCUMM Bar’s “trivia” pages are actually pretty great, full of esoteric stuff I didn’t know. Here’s the ones for Monkey 1 and Monkey 2.

I appreciate the links. I'm not sure why I glossed over the MI remasters as I've been fairly hot on changes to other re-releases over the last few years. But after typing this I've done a quick check and it's been 10 years and 1 day exactly since I last played the remaster of the first Monkey Island and the second one isn't that far behind. I wasn't in the clearest state of mind back then.

John F Bennett
Jan 30, 2013

I always wear my wedding ring. It's my trademark.

The most welcome QOL change for modern adventure games, is the previously mentioned 'highlight all interactive objects'.

Recently I went back and (re)played some Sierra games, and not even the cursor lights up on hovering over an interactive object. When I'm stuck, it's almost always because I missed an object in the background.

Pixel hunting sucks on Steam Deck.

Rocket Baby Dolls
Mar 3, 2006

Normally I don't make aesthetic criticisms in other peoples' homes, but that rug looks like a beaver exploded. If meat is murder, then that rug is at least a severe beating.
I've just finished The Mystery Of The Druids and it's definitely a game that I have mixed feelings with. It's a bad game on many levels to the point of absurdity and he main character is also an unabashed sociopath which makes things even more interesting. The puzzles are a mixture of interesting, mundane and absolute bonkers. It's been a fun game to play for a variety of reasons and I can see why it has the reputation that it does. It's definitely not the worst adventure game that I've played but it's certainly been one of the most interesting. I had a lot of fun with it though and that's what matters to me.

I'm going to resume The Walking Dead again soon, I still need to finish off the last couple of seasons.

Tombot
Oct 21, 2008
So what is everyone's opinions on this game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1709730/Beyond_The_Edge_Of_Owlsgard/
Edge of Owlsgard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXeHb_dN9qo
I've added it to my wishlist for a while now and it has a decent amount of positive reviews but I don't think I've ever seen it discussed here. I'll also say that just from the screenshots alone it captures the old MSdos "Gobliiins" style graphical limitations pretty well. (It may also be related in some way to a Doom mod named "Rise of the woolball" based on one of the screenshots but that's just me speculating).

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Megazver
Jan 13, 2006

Tombot posted:

So what is everyone's opinions on this game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1709730/Beyond_The_Edge_Of_Owlsgard/
Edge of Owlsgard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXeHb_dN9qo
I've added it to my wishlist for a while now and it has a decent amount of positive reviews but I don't think I've ever seen it discussed here. I'll also say that just from the screenshots alone it captures the old MSdos "Gobliiins" style graphical limitations pretty well. (It may also be related in some way to a Doom mod named "Rise of the woolball" based on one of the screenshots but that's just me speculating).

I played the SteamNext demo and thought it was cute and polished enough that I Kickstarted it, but I haven't gotten round to actually playing the final product.

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