Walrus Pete posted:

I assume the West Germany thing is meant to be read from the return address on the letter, which would've been written long before the reunification of Germany.
...The problem is, if we assume Grandpa was still alive to receive the letter, it almost certainly had to have been written before East and West Germany were divided in the first place!
I just spent too much time thinking about this.

Good luck with the LP! I love the first GK game, and I'm looking forward to revisiting the second and discovering the third .

Nidoking posted:

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.

Dewgy posted:

Well I don't think we locked ourselves out of it so maybe we can backtrack a lil bit.

Xander77 posted:

Aww. I was hoping you'd suffer through the remaster. Video is really the right format to show off all the weird animation issues it has.

Edit - you've linked flamedrake's playthrough twice.

Dewgy posted:

I am entirely OK with this.

Kangra posted:

What do you know, it is them!

Dewgy posted:

Hel posted:

St. Louis Cemetery #1 was actually a grain silo built by aliens.

Dewgy posted:

I know we gave the sponsorship slot to the subscription box, but I still think there's some money in those bacon-scented firelogs...

Nidoking posted:

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.

Kangra posted:

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.

OneWingedDevil posted:

You had an actual German guy on the phone, and you didn't ask him about the Schattenjager! He even used the term at least twice in conversation! I'm disappointed.

Though from context, I assume it translates to "witch hunter" since we know "jager" is "hunter" and the journal specifically called Gunther a witch hunter. It probably had points attached to it though.

Nidoking posted:

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.

Dewgy posted:

That’s pretty fantastic. This game really is a lot more fair than other Sierra games.

Dewgy posted:

All’s well that ends well! Except that really didn’t end well for just about anyone involved, but hey whatever.

I’m actually pretty curious since we didn’t talk about this in depth, but are there any ways to die that we missed? Those mummies seemed like the first lethal thing we came across, and it’s surprising how late in the game they were.

If that’s the first time you can die, a no-save run of this thing has got to be a gigantic pain in the rear end to attempt.

Kangra posted:

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.


*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).

Nidoking posted:

Europe uses weird time zones.

Dewgy posted:

The acting in this game is pure RiffTrax tier across the board, it’s pretty impressive. I briefly wondered why only the first game in the series got a remake a few years ago, and... well, now I know why.

whitehelm posted:

On the Steam version there's a special double arrow icon if you hover near the top left/right corners that jumps you to the other side. I'm not sure if it was in the original version though.

Nidoking posted:

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?

whitehelm posted:

If it really annoys you the Steam version is only $6. Who knows, maybe it'll fix the crashing problems also.

Nidoking posted:

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.

Kangra posted:

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.

Nidoking posted:

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.

Kangra posted:

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

Dewgy posted:

I'll never not be grateful to all the actors in this game for giving us an endless series of great screenshots for preview images. Usually I have to upload one myself or get lucky when YouTube auto-generates one from a good frame, but for GK2 they've all been pure gold so far. It's so hard to choose.

Dewgy posted:

For real though, was there something that would have led us to toss the flower in the lake? Like, in Day of the Tentacle you can get a tiny hint about car washing causing rainstorms when you play as Bernard, but I don’t recall anyone or anything saying a drat thing about lake flowers in this game.

I mean, I haven’t been taking notes or anything, but I don’t feel like that would have helped either.

Kangra posted:

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.

whitehelm posted:

If you're talking about the one puzzle, it's not representative of the game and I'm pretty sure I remember reading in an interview it was forced in by Sierra. I'm not saying there aren't other issues though.