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I don't know whether to be disappointed or relieved that you didn't climb the ladder in the bookshop. The result was the second most quoted line from this game among my friends. I recently got around to playing through the remake of this game, and it's interesting to see what they changed and what they didn't. One major change was not introducing Grandma Knight until considerably later in the game, when you might have more reason to want to poke around in the attic and find the secret of the clock. The sketchbook was relocated, I think to the bookstore, where it makes a bit more sense to find it early on. It's hard to say whether that's much of an improvement, though, because it also introduced a terrible puzzle that isn't in the original version, makes no sense at all, and I hate it.
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Mar 21, 2021 22:09
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 23:50 |
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mateo360 posted:What can you tell me about Voodoo? No, but "Do you know anything about snakes?" was definitely top five, along with at least one of the topics we haven't heard yet. The top entry in the list is one that we haven't heard yet, and won't likely make much sense until we have, but you'll know why when you hear it: "Thanks for everything! I had a lovely time!"
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Mar 22, 2021 23:38
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mateo360 posted:it's actually spelled Schattenjäger That's the word used in the game. It's not the word they're talking about.
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Mar 27, 2021 04:10
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Probably the third most disconcerting change in the remake is that they pronounce many of the names differently. "Loa" is particularly noticeable, with the emphasis on the second syllable rather than the first. You get used to it, though, which makes going back to this version feel that much weirder. Also noticeable is that the narrator in the remake doesn't pronounce the H in Times-Picayune. One of my favorite things about this game is that Gabriel does, in fact, record the lecture, and if you listen to the recording, Hartridge does actually trail off mumbling about butterflies and fireflies. Another is the amount of detail in the seemingly inconsequential interactions. You can often tell who was in charge of a specific Sierra game, or a specific part of a game, by clicking a random cursor on a random object and seeing whether you get just a generic message or something relevant to what you did. Jane Jensen loved that kind of detail.
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Apr 21, 2021 02:04
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Ah, this episode opens with that puzzle I mentioned that became so much worse in the remake. For whatever reason, once you have the hundred dollars from selling the painting, Willy Walker will raise the price of the crocodile mask to $120. I think he just does it to spite Gabriel, which makes complete sense, but you do still need to get the mask, and buying it with the money you have is no longer an option. So... just take a guess what you have to do. In fact, take as many guesses as you want. You'll never figure it out. As for learning that Sam is a retired jeweler, I'm pretty sure the bartender tells you that at some point. It kind of comes out of nowhere because it needs to. This is another thing they "fixed" in the remake - you learn about Sam's profession by reading an ad in the newspaper, which is both the lead that opens Napoleon House on your map and also makes it seem very strange that he takes so much convincing to do any jewelry work. Why is he buying ad space for a business he no longer runs? I do love Gabriel's fake Irish accent, as cheesy as it is. As a kid, I was impressed that he could perform a fake accent performing a fake accent. Now, I think it's kind of bad, but in the way that it should be.
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Apr 27, 2021 15:05
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Schatten is "shadow", actually, as I believe there are more opportunities to learn. But it is a good question for Wolfgang at that point. He doesn't know much about New Orleans or what's going on there, but of course, everyone tries to answer whatever Gabriel asks them, no matter how farfetched. A couple of interesting things about this part of the game: It is entirely possible to miss your opportunity in Mosely's office after sending the beignet guy to the police station. If you leave and return, Frick is back at the desk and full of beignet, and the vendor will never return. You're not screwed, though... Frick will nod off at his desk, and you just need to sneak through while his head's down. It's one of the most ridiculous things in the game by far, and the novelization skipped the beignet puzzle entirely. The alternate solution that it uses was also migrated to the remake. I never knew you could write such a short message on the tomb. My friends and I always copied the form of the original "DJCONCLAVETONIGHTBRING" note, which was easy because you just copy most of the note and then fill in the name you need. But Sierra games tended to be pretty good about recognizing solutions that are close enough. I don't know when Gabriel ever saw "sekey madoule" spelled out, though. Also, since it's too late for it to be of any use, I'm pretty sure you can just use the phone book page while you're using the phone to have it on screen so you don't need to memorize the number. You can't do the same thing with Wolfgang's number, but if you have that selected, it will be in the top bar and you can just about read the number from that.
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May 9, 2021 16:20
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You can be strangled to death by the snake in the museum, definitely, and there are a few ways to die at the ritual site if you haven't prepared properly or give the wrong names for the Loa. But for the most part, there are no early fail states, and the game won't move from day to day until you've fulfilled a list of events, many of which may not be obvious at the time. I think it's possible to skip past some of the mummy puzzles if you set the speed way up. I remember finding out about the vine thing years later and being very surprised (in fact, I'm pretty sure I read about it in the novelization and was surprised to discover that it worked in the game), because my method for getting through that room was to return to the previous room once the mummies had started moving, then charging through at full speed. Gabriel knocking down the mummy just seemed like a shoulder charge. There is also an alternate ending if you don't try to save Malia at the end. And popping back a bit, I think all of the names in the Ritter library are puns of at least some type. I didn't get the first one until watching your video, but Loel Caley is clearly a pun on "locally". Anyway, the point is that Wolfgang's theme is one of those pieces of music that have been stuck in my head since I first heard them, and then I'd go through a period where I'd forget where I heard them and be obsessed with tracking them down. I don't remember quite how it sounded the first time, but on my old PC with its no-frills Sound Blaster, it had a haunting quality that I don't think any of the more accurate versions manage to capture. A lot of soundtracks I heard first on that computer sound weird to me now, but this track really stands out. Pardon me dumping a bunch of links, but I spent time searching for the Sound Blaster version, didn't find it, and want to make something of my results. Roland sound font - This was the brand of sound card you got if you wanted to hear games the way the developers wanted them heard. Sound Blaster AWE32 - Closer to what I remember, but you can still tell that there are actual different instruments in there. Gravis Ultrasound - This is the closest I was able to find. I think they tried to make up for the lack of variance by increasing the volume, but there are still too many distinct sounds. Chiptune - This one's an artificial rendering that I just thought was neat.
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May 17, 2021 00:46
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Ah, the FMV era was fun times. And by fun, I mean games were already spilling way over what a single CD could hold, and FMV, even at small sizes and poor quality, ate that space rapidly. Phantasmagoria was particularly notorious, at least in my mind, for being seven discs long with almost no unique content on some of those discs because the common FMVs seemed to fill most of the available space. This game minimized the common elements pretty effectively, so you get a lot more substance per disc, but the need to switch discs between chapters could be annoying. At least this game is linear - some games split their content by area, like Riven, so you were constantly swapping discs as you moved around. As long as the game could boot into any disc, you could just load your saved game and only swap discs when you went to the next chapter. Just hope you never needed to reload in an earlier chapter. The wooden quality of the acting is a common complaint in a lot of the FMV games, but I'm pretty sure that was an intentional decision. The thing you need to understand is that, in contrast to earlier games, where variations in dialogue just meant changing the text and sometimes recording a few alternate voice lines, which digitized into nice, small sizes, alternate takes of dialogue in FMV games meant a completely different filmed clip, which in turn meant another lot of video stuffed into the disc. Sprites and dialogue, even voiced, don't convey as much obvious emotion as live action, so most of them fit into whatever context regardless of at what point in the game you talk to a character. Repeating the same line, even several plot points later, is just expected. The FMV games wanted to feel more true to life, so you'll notice that in most games, they don't let you repeat conversations where it wouldn't make sense in real life. However, most of the dialogue, while intended to be heard in a certain order, could potentially be viewed in any order the player chooses. Aside from certain dialogue options that are only activated at specific points in the plot, there's little guarantee that the player will have viewed any particular line before any other. The relationships between characters can change dramatically based on specific conversations, and depending on what the game demands, that character may still have important information to convey that could technically be completely unrelated to their mood relative to the plot. In other words, the player could be asking to borrow that pen either before or after asking whether the character would be willing to perform some humiliating task. If the studio isn't willing to film two takes of the line, then they need one that would work on either side of that independent interaction. All that said, you've probably noticed how carefully Gabriel, in particular, tends to return objects to exactly where they were when he's done with them. Obviously, this is so that they don't have to account for different possible placements of that item when rendering the non-FMV scenes, and equally, so they don't have to film alternate takes of any FMV scenes with those items in other locations. You may notice strategic angles in some scenes to avoid having specific items on camera, just to get around that limitation for items that might or might not be present in those scenes. (The most notable example that comes to mind is a set of dialogue in Phantasmagoria 2, where a character who isn't speaking in those lines may or may not have left before you see those clips, so the camera angles are particularly tight to the characters who are known to be present.) The same applies to dialogue clips, except that the objects in this case are the actors and their apparent moods. Everything needs to begin and end in the same neutral position and tone, so the clips can be viewed in any order without it standing out too much that you've done something out of an intended order. Maintaining that neutrality throughout the scene helps keep things uniform so that, again, viewing the clips in a different order doesn't break the flow too much. The end result is actors who are generally pretty proficient at emoting having to deliver very tone-neutral performances, which feel really unnatural.
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May 22, 2021 17:32
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I do remember reading somewhere about some of the random things the actors would do while posing for the idle animations. Apparently, some of them made it into the game as rare Easter eggs, but I don't know where any of them would be. Other than that, I don't remember anything in this game feeling out of place in the FMV genre as a whole.
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May 23, 2021 02:51
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Professor Duck posted:Also, I guess I didn't mention it, but I knew about the West Germany thing. I had been trying to figure out why the heck they were still using "West Germany" for everything, even though it's 1995 (according to the lawyer's letter), or 1994 (according to the newspaper). That's another thing--the year isn't consistent in this game--unless the wolves escaping from the zoo is a year old, but Klingmann says they've only been missing 2 months, so somebody screwed that up, too. Europe uses weird time zones.
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May 30, 2021 04:46
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I could swear there's a fast way to cross screens like Marienplatz. Either you right-click while the character is walking to zip to the far end, or in that screen in particular, I think there's a different arrow at the top or bottom of the edge that takes you straight to the opposite side. I imagine Gabriel didn't want to show Doktor Klingmann's hunting license to Ubergrau because attorney-client privilege probably doesn't cover questions like "Why are you in possession of another man's hunting license?"
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May 31, 2021 22:34
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I choose to believe it's a coincidence that I spent the hours leading up to this video marathoning a bunch of Lock Picking Lawyer videos. I don't even watch the channel regularly or anything. I just clicked a few of them on a whim. As for the acting... even when I was too young to understand what it was they were yelling about, I could tell that particular scene was cheesy even for an FMV game. I have no idea why they decided to assassinate Grace's character so much in this game, but it's a big departure from the way she reacted to Malia in the first game.
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Jun 1, 2021 23:45
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Well, sure, but I took it that she was upset in the first game as well, and she targeted her anger at the appropriate people. We've gone from "Gabriel is a lout! I mean, he's out," to "The existence of this secret passage that was clearly built into the castle centuries ago PROVES that infidelity is happening and that makes you a horrible person!" I mean, does she think the workers built that staircase in the past few years? I'm not saying she doesn't have any reason for lashing out the way she does, but it's not a GOOD reason, and I don't like what it says about her that she'd intentionally violate Gerde's privacy, find no actual evidence of anything wrong, get caught in the act, and consider that a good time to try to turn the tables.
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Jun 2, 2021 18:48
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The relationship between Gabriel and Grace was pretty much the prototypical sitcom relationship of its time. The man being openly creepy and the woman being disgusted (but not enough to create any actual distance between them) was how you knew two fictional characters were effectively in a relationship and just didn't acknowledge it, because that's not how stories worked back then. The implication seemed to be that Grace put up with the sexual harassment because there was mutual attraction, and she just didn't make any moves on Gabriel because that's not what fictional women did. As best I understood it, she felt like Malia was getting between herself and Gabriel, but she just huffed about it and warned him that she seemed like bad news. And they WERE sleeping together. Can you imagine Sins of the Fathers Grace yelling at Malia if they bumped into each other in the back room of the bookstore? She'd probably just shrug and say "Whatever. You're each other's problems, not mine." I don't even think the idea of Grace having given up her future for Gabriel is new to this game. Didn't she talk about how her parents wanted her to go to a prestigious university instead of whatever it was she was doing? And we know she wasn't getting paid back then. At least at this point, Gabriel can afford to pay her for minding the bookstore. I guess the conversation they had when Gabriel went to Rittersburg and Grace didn't go with him might be illuminating, but surely, there must have been some understanding between them at that point?
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Jun 2, 2021 22:02
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The double-arrow was definitely in the original version, because that's the only one I've ever played. (I still have the original CDs, and last I checked, they worked acceptably on DOSBox.) I'd be very surprised to learn that they're not in the GOG version, since that should be essentially identical to the original. Maybe you haven't hovered the cursor in the right spot?
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Jun 4, 2021 23:47
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Professor Duck posted:If it's there, I haven't seen it yet. I'll mess around and see if I can trigger it. It only works at the very edge of the screen. I think if you're on the left, the trigger is in the top-left corner, and on the right, it's in the top-right. Not the most intuitive place to look for it.
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Jun 5, 2021 01:00
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Professor Duck posted:I can't imagine that they could've taken any more space without the thing getting even more expensive. Note that, for example, Herr Ubergrau tells Gabriel to address him more casually during their first scene in this chapter. Now they've got an excuse to use a different scene for entering and leaving the office (something that you have to do way too many times, even if you know what to do to avoid unnecessary visits), but it's carefully timed so they don't need to include both scenes on any of the discs. This is something Phantasmagoria really could have benefited from - a seven-disc game with so many common scenes that a few of the discs only had about a dozen unique scenes on them. I've been mulling over checking out some of the recent FMV-style games, but haven't taken the plunge yet. It would be interesting to see what happens to the genre when file size and storage media are no longer an issue.
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Jun 9, 2021 21:35
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I was thinking of games like Her Story and Erica. I don't get the impression that they're trying to give the same freedom of movement as this game, but the technology has definitely developed to the point where I'm sure they could do interesting things with the style. As for making the notes you take individual inventory items, the first game did that too. It would be weird not to, honestly. If you collected a bunch of phone numbers in the same item, you wouldn't have an easy way to specify which one you want to call. They'd probably have to do something like show you a sheet with all the numbers, and add numbers as you collect them. That shouldn't be too difficult, but it might look strange, particularly if you get the numbers out of order and wonder why there are big gaps between the numbers Gabriel's written so far.
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Jun 12, 2021 17:44
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It seems like all of the Sierra series that were still active around this time tried to become 3D action games - Mask of Eternity, Quest for Glory V... from what I understand, it was marketing pressure from a new publisher, and some of it was probably trying to build interest in Half-Life, which I think Sierra were publishing at about the same time. The problem is that neither 3D nor action meshed well with what those games were about. This game at least kept the general adventure game idea, but the puzzles in Gabriel Knight have always been designed with selling hint books in mind, and what little I remember of this one didn't fix that.
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Jul 19, 2021 02:29
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 23:50 |
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I don't remember y'all mentioning this along the way (and I rewatched the end of the last video of 2 just to check), but I've been binge-watching How I Met Your Mother recently, and I'm just at the finale. Would you believe the tarot-obsessed lady from Rittersburg is at the end of the series telling Ted that it's his destiny to talk to his future wife? Can't believe I didn't recognize her the first time through. In fact, she's got lots of credits, including many from after this game.
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Aug 21, 2021 16:08
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