Udvarnoky

I thought Ghost Pirates was of comparative quality to AVS. In no way did it feel like a Monkey Island ripoff to me. And yeah, that was all they put out. AVS2 got stalled by the publisher and Bill was forced to take other gigs since then. This prequel is Autumn Moon's first project in awhile.

The humor marred it, but overall I'd call it a very good, deliberately old school (the gameplay is Monkey Island 3 straight down the line) graphic adventure game. The atmosphere is terrific thanks to the background art and the above average soundtrack. I think Bill's studio has the potential to turn out something truly stellar if they could put out more product and hone their writing skills, but from the sounds of things all graphic adventure work he's been doing since Ghost Pirates has been on his own time. I just want to see more games from this studio, and my fear is that there won't be an opportunity to see that if this isn't successful.

I've gotta say, I don't think there's one bad handheld Zelda (or console Zelda, really). I'm pretty excited to see the Oracle games getting a second life, and you bozos who are all at Minish Cap mystify me. Replay and repent.

They also at one point were ruminating on a LTTP remake. Perhaps they conflated the ideas?

I'm kind of disgusted, but Majora's Mask 3DS is still possible, I suppose. (EDIT: Or maybe not, I think the decision was between the LTTP project and MM3DS. Between this, Wind Waker HD, the happy decision to bring the Oracle titles to their online service and the guarantee that there is a new Wii U title in development, Nintendo has probably greenlit all the Zelda projects they're going to for awhile.) What the hell does "takes place in the world of Link to the Past" even mean? The world of that game is the same one of at least 50% of Zelda games: Hyrule. Are we to understand that it'll be the same map? The same timeline? It feels like they're just trying to coerce a connection to what is traditionally considered the most popular installment. Direct sequels work better when less than twenty years intervene; make a game that's original both in content AND name and spare it the baggage.

A devastating blow to the forces of evil.

So what becomes of the surely ponderous filing cabinets of priceless artwork, and more importantly which of you will be risking your freedom to preclude their fate? I'm imagining the Ken Macklin/Jim McCleod/Iain McCaig background paintings for The Dig 1.0 inexorably conveying toward an incinerator a la the ending of Toy Story 3.

Evidence? I know they decided to make DeathSpank 3 without his knowledge, but my understanding was that he left Hothead on good terms exactly when he wanted to. I'd imagine he left Double Fine under similar circumstances. I think in both cases Ron had a game he wanted to make and needed the resources of a studio to actually do it.

An absent UI is in fact the default presentation for Grim Fandango. You have to hold down the tab (I think?) key to overlay object names. The designers' interface-free ambitions no doubt played into the decision to just cut to Manny's coat for inventory cycling (and by extension limiting the items to a reasonable amount) as opposed to using some sort of pop-up as Escape from Monkey Island had to do when it recycled the engine to accomodate its franchise's traditional inventory overload and combination possibilities.

Well whaddya know about that!

The Last Story is now out in North America. This is probably my final Wii purchase and from what I've read it's a fine one.

I dislike repeating this, but since the railing against the Meat Circus never seems to take a powder, I hafta say...it's not a very difficult level. Granted, it's way more demanding than anything that came before, but you know, I never did understand what was supposed to make the inclusion of "serious platforming" in the last level of a platformer such a mortal sin. I'm not some aficionado of 3D platformers, but I've played several and in terms of frustration or the demand for precison Psychonauts is the kiddie pool all the way through compared even to Mario 64, which I always assumed was universally played and beaten. It kind of blows my mind that it was actually thought necessary to patch the level to lesson the difficulty. I guess I'm just one of those guys who thinks the last level earns the right to be a bit vicious, and I don't know if I'd describe the Meat Circus as that, particularly. (If you played the PC verson without a gamepad, that's another matter entirely, since the game wasn't intended to be played with a keyboard.)

In elementary school my friends and I would spend our recess time using Hypercard (when the computer lab had Macs) and later PowerPoint (when they upgraded to PC) to make these interactive cartoon thingies. Being able to draw shapes, poach clipart and have control over the timing of, uh, slide propulsion was a sufficient framework for making these stories where characters walked, talked and got obliterated in alarmingly violent ways. We were kind of competitive and basically were motivated to keep one-upping each other. Once we discovered action buttons we were able to make "games" by forcing decisions when the character would reach an Important Moment, and even requiring the player to click an object (like a flashlight prior to walking into a dark cave) before it is too late. It's still kind of amazing to me that we just instinctively saw this business presentation software as a sandbox for making cartoons that didn't require drawing skills and games that didn't require programming. I envy the ingenuity I've clearly lost in the intervening years. Oh, and an high school I made this program where you were simply prompted to type in your name and a unique dialog returned that greeted or mocked you in a really specific way that could only have been contrived by someone who knew you personally. The notion was that I'd eventually get literally everyone in the school accounted for and freak them out. I'm kind of amazed at how little I've dabbled with hobbyist game stuff since adolescence considering I'm a programmer by trade. In college I enrolled in a game course where we were split off into teams and tasked with making a 3D game using a provided environment (don't remember much about it except it was called Electro and the scripting was in LUA), and our team won, which was cool. At one point I tried to amuse myself by writing a typing game, and I once embarked on an ambitious text adventure based on a unique coworker of mine that I got pretty far with. (It would have been given to him, specifically.) I'm also guilty of that traditional disorder we should not beat ourselves up over of involving myself with some fan games over the years. And I know I've at least played around with the likes of Adventure Game Studio, Klik and Play, that other popular free game-making software from ages ago that I can't remember the name of, and various modding tools in moments of vicious self-delusion.

I feel like that one's a really underrated level. It features I think the most ambitious and dark character work of any of the asylum patients presented in a really unique way that is equally parts funny and tragic. And then the level's second half on the catwalks is just some enjoyable, super-straightforward platforming. And it's got my favorite boss fight.

Miyamoto says they're debating between Link to the Past 3DS or Majora's Mask 3DS. C'mon, we've already had A Link to the Past remade. It was called Ocarina of Time. Go for the moody deviant!

Oh man, I thought Minish Cap was the stuff. Zelda II is great, too. Please have your parents see me in my office on Monday.

I was rather hoping they'd announce a Majora's Mask 3DS remake that everyone seems to agree is an eventuality, but I suppose I'd prefer a new game to take precedence over that.

Maniac Mansion wasn't particularly nuanced in this regard. Basically it came down to certain kids being able to do something with one or two items that others couldn't. Whatever kid's talent you relied on played into the solution of one of the last major puzzles - getting past Purple Tentacle to enter Dr. Fred's lab.

That was Shelley Day, producer on such games as Monkey Island 2 and Fate of Atlantis who founded Humongous/Cavedog with Ron. After a failed attempt to buy back Humongous from Infogrames, they formed Hulabee Enterainment, and I think a lot of the original crew followed them. The game you're thinking of might be Moop and Dreadly.

Have you guys heard that The Last Story is getting a North American release as well, in June? The folks behind Operation Rainfall must be Snoopy dancing. Between Zelda and these belated JRPG localizations, it's nice to see the Wii going out with a bang.

I haven't played this series since Sim City 2000, my love for which is physical and savage. I'll be following this.

I don't think comparisons to Majora's Mask and Psychonauts would be completely off-base either. There are touching moments and some all around nice character stuff in Majora's Mask that's downright graphic adventure-y, and the list of action/adventures that achieve (or indeed, pursue) that kind of depth isn't ponderous. It is not an entirely peerless phenomenon to observe a second installment take a series in a new direction (and not necessarily unsuccessfully), or is at least not a clone of the original, and then for installment #3 to reactively revert to the formula of the original, retroactively making installment #2 a black sheep. In movies I can think of the second Nightmare of Elm Street and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as apt comparisons. A Link to the Past and Last Crusade are fantastic, but it ain't Adventure of Link/Temple of Doom's fault for not being a rehash. In a world where only the first two Indiana Jones movies exist, Temple isn't breaking the formula for not having Indy looking for a Judeo-Christian artifact or not showing him at the college or not having Sallah and Marcus as sidekicks. There was no formula yet! And you're right on about Majora's Mask being different in unique ways that have nothing to do with the presentation. When Majora's Mask was announced, it was ostensibly a cash grab, an endeavor to squeeze out one more N64 Zelda with the exact same engine and even some of the same assets (Termina being an "alternate world" is the excuse for re-using many of Ocarina's character models) before the console's life cycle came to end. And hey, maybe that's exactly what it was from a business standpoint. But the team handled it with such brilliance and originality that it doesn't matter.

Weren't there legal issues, or at least some bad blood, that resulted from Humongous' use of SCUMM?

I liked DeathSpank a lot, but I didn't find its dialog particularly great.

The original manual pretty much tells you where the second dungeon is, and I don't think it's considered cheating to reference it.