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Poor, poor Tom Hall. The guy is an excellent comedy writer with some decent game design ideas, but he has an amazing knack for hitching himself to stars just before those stars burn out or go supernova. He was a key man in the early days of ID Software but got thrown out by his business partners because he kept pushing to give Doom more story elements. Masters of Doom outright states the famous hanging Commander Keens in Doom 2 were a parting gently caress you to the guy because the ID in-house artist wanted to revel in being able to draw blood and gore. He injected his trademark brand of humour into Duke Nukem 3D (and DNF later showed us what the game would have been like without it, holy crap). Then he worked on the first version of Prey while that got stuck in development hell. So Romero drags him (somehow, given his past firing) into Ion Storm and he's caught up in that clusterfuck. The leaked Ion internal emails pretty much paint him as a struggling yes-man caught between a wannabe rock god and a predatory con artist. But he finally got given the resources to make the game he wanted. And at least he got Anachronox out - or rather, a third of the intended game. After it was gutted by having most of the devs transferred off the project to get Daikatana finished. He tried and failed a few Kickstarter retro projects, and was last seen making Facebook games. A tragic figure who probably had some serious masterwork in him if he hadn't kept signing on with delusional arseholes and letting them handle "the biz stuff".
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Mar 26, 2017 13:39
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anilEhilated posted:probably with the exception of that godawful RTS they bought unfinished Oh, Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 had a name attached too, Todd Porter just thought he was a big celebrity.
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Mar 27, 2017 19:41
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I can see why the designers felt they should have cut back on the opening. This draaaaaaaaaaags and we have no real objectives right now beyond wandering around.
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Mar 29, 2017 23:40
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Kemix posted:I'll be disappointed if there isn't more Black Comedy in the future, because it's doing a fantastic job with it. Don't worry, there's lots and lots of that stuff in Anachronox
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Apr 6, 2017 00:31
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anilEhilated posted:I'd love to see a proper sequel with modern mechanics; the world and writing are fantastic but combat drags it down so much. I wonder if the combat was a casualty of Ion's internal politics; if you think about it, a big part of the battle system seems to be based around wacky environmental interactions to break up JRPG line-dancing. That means people have to think up and code a string of unique arenas...which clearly didn't happen. I'd dearly love to read Anachronox's original design document. I bet so much of this weird design will make sense once we see what it was supposed to tie into.
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Apr 9, 2017 22:15
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I'd comfortably put this part of the game in the same gritty cyberpunk box as the original Deus Ex...if it weren't for the fact we just quested around after someone's sock.
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Apr 12, 2017 23:41
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Tom Hall seems to like turning game mechanics into character traits. It gives the game a fun playground vibe; like the whole thing is one giant game of Let's Pretend.
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Apr 16, 2017 22:38
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Anachronox's writing and humour are top notch, and really help carry the game at times.
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Jun 4, 2017 20:19
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