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I don't know if the translation of that poem is going to be plot-relevant, but it's odd how off the English is. Maybe it's supposed to be done by a non-native English speaker, or by Gabriel himself? I imagine Jensen wrote both, so there may be a reason for it. Here's an off-hand translation of my own: Three dragons creep into my sleep My soul they want to gobble whole with fiery breath and forked tongues enjoying every meal. In the second line the phrase 'zum Fraß' carries a clear connotation of bestial eating ('devour' works too), so 'repast' is odd. And while 'die Seele' could mean 'the soul/spirit', the context here implies 'my soul' (but that could be an ambiguity the game is intentionally obscuring; it's also the object of 'wollen', not the subject. The third line in German is a bit odd, since 'feurigen Atems' means 'of/belonging to the fiery breath', and maybe is meant to connect with the previous 'Fraß'? I'm not a native speaker, so I may be missing something idiomatic here. Scheißjäger could mean one thing, but scheiß- is often as not used that way as an intensifier (something like 'the drat hunter') or it could also mean 'the lovely hunter'.
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Mar 26, 2021 23:09
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 11:52 |
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What do you know, it is them!
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Mar 27, 2021 23:27
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Nidoking posted: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. It's fairly obvious. You start a fire in the store that causes 'smoke damage' to the mask, and then you convince Walker to give you a discount. To start the fire, you need to get a cigarette, of course. That's done by talking to the teenager in the park, who wants you to buy him a pack of cigarettes. You do this, but in addition to taking his money, you also have to steal one cigarette out of the pack before giving it to him. Then you can start the fire in Walker's shop. However, first you have to disable the smoke detector, or else Walker puts out the fire. (Actually, you don't disable the smoke detector, you steal the fire extinguisher; the detector goes off anyway). To steal the fire extinguisher, first talk to Walker about snakes, then get the fake rubber snake that Grace keeps in her desk and scare him with it.
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Apr 28, 2021 06:56
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They had to throw in the Fraktur (old-fashioned print typeface) but at least they left out German cursive (Kurrent) which is quite tough to decipher. Also I guess the Berlin Wall never fell in this world, since it's 1993 and the envelope still said 'West Germany' on it. Or maybe Gabriel just isn't aware of the reunification. Here's another quick-and-dirty translation of the article, as best as I could read it. It kind of feels like it was translated from an English-first version of it, so this is less literal from the German. Some of the words are odd or maybe just hard to read. Spoilered because it might contain information we haven't learned yet. Free State of Bavaria News, 17 March 1994 posted:KILLER WOLVES FROM ZOO STILL AT LARGE *Prince-Regent Square. My speculation based on this is that Gabriel could be the foreign source of help, since I thought I saw Det. Leber among the crowd at the house. Also, I was wondering if this place was real, and Munich’s zoo really is in Thalkirchen, but it has a much cooler name: https://www.hellabrunn.de/en/ (apparently known for being one of the first zoos to be set up with habitat zones as opposed to just putting animals on display wherever).
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May 26, 2021 18:27
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I think maybe John Tesh has been stalking Grace. It's been going on so long she's forgotten that not everyone hears that music. Honestly I do kind of find it sad that both Gabriel and Grace seem to have downgraded their characterization, and it's not just bad acting. It's almost like the sort of exaggeration you end up with on sitcoms, except we're only on the second episode.
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Jun 9, 2021 06:34
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Contradiction is a modern (2015) FMV game more in the adventure game mold (possibly influenced by this game even), where you have a choice of where to go and who to talk to, although the setting is small-ish which is about the only way to really make it work well. I think it's also something you'd have a blast LPing since it has some very silly moments. I don't know that there's much beyond the cinematic FMV games which are more visual novels, really. Although the Dark Pictures (technically not FMV, just faithful mo-cap with rendered sets) add a bit more to spruce up the interactivity and branching paths. edit: https://www.videodoubler.com/combo/saved/2362 Kangra fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Jun 15, 2021 |
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Jun 15, 2021 06:58
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I also realized that while it isn't Kurrent, you still had some German cursive thrown in. Here's what the notebook said, which isn't much:quote:Ich muß mit den Leuten reden There appears to be a stray mark on the u in the second 'muss'; it sort of looks like an umlaut but that wouldn't make a word. Translation in spoilers just to be fair, but as said this is almost intentionally vague. (Also whatever year this is, it is prior to 1996 so muß is acceptable for muss and not necessarily a sign this was written by a 400-year-old werewolf.) I have to talk to the people so I can finally get my thingy. I have to ?? the number of the **** American (woman) Kangra fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Jun 16, 2021 |
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Jun 16, 2021 22:40
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That conversation in German from the priest was pretty hard to understand what with his terrible acting and the music swelling around it anyway. Would have been nice if it had a hidden hint about what to do with the flower. The gist of it seemed to be "Pretty lilies? -yeah -even though it's so cold! Take one as a gift from the Madonna -ach nein -Please take it; it's so cold at night and this might make you a little happier." This game seems to be really taking its sweet time getting to the obvious mystery. In the first one at least there was a greater sense of urgency, as at every stage some of the characters seemed dangerous and the murders felt more serious. This time around we're apparently delving into historical fiction with the present-day threats a lot less apparent.
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Jul 9, 2021 08:26
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I wonder if Gabriel being a werewolf will help him or hurt him in the hunt to take down the vampires. I was mildly surprised there wasn't some comical exchange in the last game about 'who' was the werewolf, maybe involving Grace and Leber. (The joke is that the German word for werewolf is Werwolf; the word wer means 'who' in German and the second part is 'wolf', and so as in English, it's a word that is a question. And they even had the silliness of a real werewolf on stage with the fake one, which could have been a great source of additional confusion.) Also it wasn't until this game I noticed that they say 'Nakamura' (common Japanese name) but write it 'Nakimura' (a name used by no Japanese families).
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Jul 27, 2021 06:58
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I had a strong suspicion from the title of the game, and the fact that it turned out to be a Holy Grail story, that this is going to be relying on the book The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail as inspiration. This is the same source that Dan Brown drew on for The Da Vinci Code. A lot of what's in THB&THG, especially the Templar connection, is based on a very elaborate hoax perpetrated by a man named Pierre Plantard. He's also largely responsible for spreading stories about the treasure of Rennes-le-Château. While Plantard and his collaborators were in the business of fabricating evidence, the authors of THB&THG seem less like charlatans and more overly credulous, especially when it fits their preconceived notion (which includes trying to find anything at all negative about the Roman Catholic church). There's an entire website devoted to debunking the claims surrounding this story. The site has a lot of good information, but is kind of scattered in bits and pieces. This timeline is maybe the best point of reference if you really want to know more. Of course Gabriel Knight is clearly staying on the side of being fictional. Even the name 'Wolfenbach' seems to suggest a fictionalized grail story (though the name's clearly based on actual medieval author Wolfram von Eschenbach). With the poetry we saw, I'd speculate that we're dealing with some of these characters being in the Jesus bloodline, and the 'vampires' being in the Satan bloodline, or something like it. I wouldn't be surprised if this child is somehow the first in history to be descended from both.
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Aug 8, 2021 07:04
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They're mixing a lot of the real world 'mysteries' (which are largely myths, forgeries, and speculation) into the game world, and I hope it doesn't go too deep into it for your sanities' sakes. It's sort of interesting how well they were able to make it sound both insane and plausible, in the way that much of this material often is. There was one bit in the passage that I didn't quite get. Kind of a spoiler to highlight it, although they basically gave you the answer to the puzzle already. The line 'et in Arcadia ego _ _ _ ' struck me as odd. Why are there blank spaces there? This is a famous from a 17th Century painting by Nicolas Poussin that depicts a tomb with that inscription, but there is no need for blanks. It's simply 'Et in Arcadia ego', meaning word-for-word 'And in Arcadia I', and taken to possibly mean "I [death] am also in Arcadia", or "I[guy in tomb] lived in Arcadia" or even "I am [now] in Arcadia". (Arcadia is figuratively used to mean an idyllic, unspoiled place). The phrase is technically missing a verb, but poetry doesn't demand it, and the ambiguity of it is what makes it interesting. The answer the game implies is Et in Arcadia ego _sum_ , which makes it a complete sentence but only in the present tense — "And I too am in Arcadia". Why would anyone care about that, though? It turns out that one of the theories is that this painting is actually a riddle. To figure it out, though, you have to conclude that this inscription, being 'ungrammatical', needs to have Or something like that. I'm not totally sure what the goal of the riddle solution is supposed to. I should say that The Holy Blood & the Holy Grail authors actually didn't come up with that one, but they had a similar idea. They didn't need to add a verb, though. Their anagram version is "I! Tego arcana Dei" which they take to mean "Begone! I hold God's secrets" although that 'I!' exclamation is a pretty clear sign of an iffy anagram. Also, Pierre Plantard claimed 'et in Arcadia ego' was a family motto or maybe the motto of the Priory of Sion. Here's some good background info on the painting as well as the anagrams. I have come to the realization that the bizarre theories that underlie this plot are there because their logic makes absolute perfect sense to an adventure game creator. Kangra fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Aug 19, 2021 |
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Aug 19, 2021 17:16
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I'm kind of hoping that "Le Serpent Rouge" ends up being a complete red herring, and Other things I've noticed: Everyone's body is kind of weird, but Moseley really has some T. Rex arms going on in some scenes. The music that plays in the lobby sounds a lot like Moby's "Porcelain".
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Sep 20, 2021 00:01
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 11:52 |
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The series really did have a remarkable decline in quality, didn't it? It feels like in GK3 that you did a lot of kind of interesting stuff and solved puzzles, but the connectedness and purpose of it is missing since it's assembled so poorly. Nothing actually seemed to matter except to advance the plot, such as it was. I also didn't realize that, like Dan Brown, the game would so blatantly take its ideas from the hoaxers and quasi-conspiracy theorists in real life. I guess I was accidentally posting spoilers since I had never played the game. Incidentally, the one actual good piece of media that was inspired by the Priory of Sion/Jesus bloodline theory (and the only one I've read in its entirety) is Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It's about what happens when people start to take their own speculation way too seriously. Thanks for another great LP series!
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Oct 9, 2021 12:05
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