Brütal Legend overload...!

[vimes]

  ThunderPeel2001 said:

It's listed for me... possibly because I've already downloaded it?

Maybe... because it's not appearing anywhere for me.

[Erkki]

  vimes said:

Mmm, apparently EU Gold Members still need to wait till Rocktober 1st to get their hands on the demo. I wanted not to get hyped, but this minor drawback do sting a little bit.

What the fuck for do they have to do that? Aargh.

[Thrik]

Guh, that European thing is shit. Can anyone actually confirm it, just for clarity?

[Erkki]

  Thrik said:

Guh, that European thing is shit. Can anyone actually confirm it, just for clarity?

Confirmed! (if you meant confirming I can't download the demo)

[Horticulture Tycoon]

Not one conversation tree? Fuck this demo.

In all seriousness, you guys aren't missing all that much. It's the game's tutorial, I blew through the thing in about 10 minutes.

The menu is pretty sweet though. And are those Tim's hands?

[twmac]

Just played the demo, it is pretty sweet, the art direction and voice acting is top notch. The gameplay looks good so far but like Tycoon said it is just the tutorial and so it is hard to say much other than that.

The moment at the beginning with the 'metal' band summed up a lot of my feelings on a fair few modern emo bands.

[ThunderPeel2001]

For those that have played the demo... what do they think of the character of Eddie Riggs? I know it's too early to tell, and no doubt ultimately I'll end up loving him, but he's not what I expected (which could be a very good thing).

[twmac]

It is hard to say but already he seems pretty likable. Jack Black actually nails the need to switch between Metal badass and then the kind of immature metaller that metal badasses can be as all they do is sleep, eat and breathe metal and as such aren't very in tune with anything outside of that world.

And there are already many humorous moments in the demo than there are in the whole of of most other games (sorry Eat Lead, this is how you write comedy).

[Shakesbeard]

  ThunderPeel2001 said:

For those that have played the demo... what do they think of the character of Eddie Riggs? I know it's too early to tell, and no doubt ultimately I'll end up loving him, but he's not what I expected (which could be a very good thing).

He's certainly a lot more subdued than I think a lot of people might be expecting from Jack Black. There's a nice balance hit between the disillusioned old roadie Riggs and the adolescent excitement that would come through in anyone that woke up in the land of metal with a magic guitar, sweet battleaxe, mysterious ladyfriend and a badass hot rod.

The thing that really hooked me was the facial expressions, which are spot on and frequently hilarious, so it wouldn't really matter who voiced him or what his motivations are because when a Video game dude has that much personality in his movement alone, I can't help but like him.

edit: oh for the love of...

[Thrik]

Yeah, he's done a good job — yet I've seen quite a few bastards during the past few days being all "Huh I won't touch this with Jack Douche in it, I hope it fails".

I think marketing Jack Black is kind of a double-edged sword for EA, because on the one hand he is an extremely good voice actor who can completely change his tone easily, but he's played a bit of a metal-themed love-or-hate kind of character in a couple of films and people are synonymising Eddie with those characters.

I wonder if the same people would refuse to watch Kung Fu Panda because of Jack's involvement.

[ThunderPeel2001]

That's cool. JB is definitely a lot more subdued, which will take me some getting used to, but I think it's because *shock* he's actually acting, not just being OTT comedy man. Which is pretty awesome.

As for the personality of Eddie Riggs, I'm not totally enthralled -- he's a bit too confident and almost sleazy. But thinking back to Grim Fandano's and Psychonaut's demos, I didn't really "know" or care for those characters back then, either... and I've come to love them both now.

I think it's really interesting to be back in this place: Incredibly excited about a game which I don't fully comprehend what it's going to be like. Having played a demo which was not really indicative of how cool the game with most likely be. Not wanting to get my hopes up too high so I can just enjoy it as if I didn't know it had come from the mind of Tim Schafer...

Does anyone know if the cut-scenes were done ingame or using video? I'm sure I remember Schafer talking about how he preferred video but he wanted the look of the game itself. Very odd choice when games like GTA have shown how slick ingame cut-scenes can look these days... but he did the same with Psychonauts, too (rather pointlessly in my opinion -- it looked worse than ingame graphics and now looks weird when you're playing widescreen). But with BL it looked incredibly crisp, exactly like ingame animation -- was it?

[ThunderPeel2001]

  Thrik said:

Yeah, he's done a good job — yet I've seen quite a few bastards during the past few days being all "Huh I won't touch this with Jack Douche in it, I hope it fails".

Loud minorities, I'm sure... Plus EA are kind of downplaying Black's involvement. His name isn't mentioned in the trailer, or the demo - I think, nor on the game's advertising or the cover. I'm guessing they would have had to pay a lot more to use his name in that way (or maybe Black didn't want his name used in that way), but it's probably a good thing.

[toblix]

I've noticed a bunch of games using cut-scenes that are pre-recorded but rendered in-game. I guess it's because they can turn up the quality and still maintain the frame rate.

[ThunderPeel2001]

  toblix said:

I've noticed a bunch of games using cut-scenes that are pre-recorded but rendered in-game. I guess it's because they can turn up the quality and still maintain the frame rate.

That's the thing: Schafer was saying how he didn't want to up the quality... He wanted to use the ingame models.

He did the same in Grim Fandango and Psychonauts (both irritated me as both feature close ups with jagged textures for no good reason), but Brutal Legend looks really good.

[toblix]

  ThunderPeel2001 said:

That's the thing: Schafer was saying how he didn't want to up the quality... He wanted to use the ingame models.

Yeah, but with all settings on max (regardless of the graphics settings used in the actual game), and possibly other graphical effects and post-processing.

[ThunderPeel2001]

  toblix said:

Yeah, but with all settings on max (regardless of the graphics settings used in the actual game), and possibly other graphical effects and post-processing.

Nope. His main point (and I'll have to dig this out) was that he wanted it to look exactly like the main game.

Edit: I can't find this quote... perhaps I dreamt it?

[Thrik]

To me it looked like they took the Metal Gear Solid approach to the cutscenes, in that it was rendered in real time using the game engine but they had higher-poly models for the close-ups and obviously spent a lot more time fine-tuning the effects.

I didn't really see any evidence at all of them being pre-rendered, although I do remember them being anti-aliased. I don't remember if the main game was, though?

[MrHoatzin]

Grim Fandango had higher res models in the cutscenes. At least the hand models were completely different.

I didn't play the demo on a particularly fancy TV, but I didn't notice any difference between cutscene and gameworld, whereas the Psychonauts cutscenes more often than not seemed lower quality than the game itself. Maybe they bought a better compression method this time around.

[80's Bad Guy]

The resolution of Brutal Legend or its cutscenes are about as relevant to the experience as its water density ratio.

I was going to buy Uncharted first and Brutal Legend later, but the demo has complicated things. I really felt like I was experiencing a slice of a grand adventure crafted by a master. Almost as if I were a little boy again, playing in the lap of an elderly kindhearted man on a Sunday afternoon. Ok, that didn't sound quite right...

[Hyetal]

You people are making me really sad that this isn't coming to the PC!

[Erkki]

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Red-Bull-North-America-1050844.html

woohoo!

[ThunderPeel2001]

  Kingzjester said:

Grim Fandango had higher res models in the cutscenes. At least the hand models were completely different.

Now they weren't... Only in a few close-ups. Even in the opening cinematic you see that Manny's hands are made of 'X's

[ThunderPeel2001]

  AkuMifune said:

The resolution of Brutal Legend or its cutscenes are about as relevant to the experience as its water density ratio.

[snappity]

I thought this post by Mr. Schafer was pretty funny and inspiring. Here's to another 20 years!

http://www.doublefine.com/site/comments/twenty_years_only_a_few_tears/

[SoulChicken]

I really enjoyed this excellent (albeit very short) demo. I had lost interest in this game, because I had no idea what it was, with all the RTS talk and such. I still don't understand what's going on with that but now I am intrigued. The demo was funny throughout. The fighting was fun. Strange that I didn't have an indication of how much damage I was taking. Jack Black was actually really good because he wasn't just being Jack Black, if you know what I mean.

Looking forward to finding out what exactly this game is!