A Vampyre Story - Playable demo available.

[Scummbuddy]

I've read on Mixnmojo that her English voice is more tolerable in the game, than that of in the demo. Perhaps it is that you just get used to it, but I can say I too was put off a bit by her striking voice. I do plan on picking up the game though.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Mixnmojo is full of crap .  Her voice is identical in the full game, so why would it be any easier to tolerate?

Fwodewick my nowse is cowd!  Where is that wascally wabbit?

[Snarky]

People have been saying on the AG Forums too that her voice sounds different in the full game. Same actor and same accent, but not as high-pitched or something.

[Snarky]

.

[GarageGothic]

It could be that the demo uses harder compression which makes her voice sound more whiny. But I think it's also a matter of getting used to it when playing the full game. I still don't like the voice casting though, and skipped most of the audio as soon as I had read the text (annoyingly, some lines of dialogue are too long to display, so you have to wait for the line to be said so the text scrolls down).

[Secret Fawful]

You know, so far I've gone through the full game and I'll say this, I think you are all being way too harsh on the game. Some of you have complained that the first part of the game is just an escape from the house puzzle, and oh wait a minute, did you happen to forget she was trapped there by the vampire's curse? So, would you suggest it just skips over that and allows her to leave as she wishes?

Adding more obstacles is called...oh...puzzles...if I remember right. And her voice isn't really all that annoying? What makes it so annoying? I think it fits the character. She's not exactly smart. I mean she thought a drawing of herself taped to her mirror was her reflection! So yes, she's an absolute dolt, and I think her voice matches perfectly.

What I find strange is that once an adventure game comes along with a good sense of humor, or what tries to be anyway, you all treat it as if it's trash and the absolutely most horrible product you could have gotten. The first LA style game out there, a few things are off and we suddenly rate it 1/10? I call that a case of butthurt. Oh, and uh, don't respond by saying, well I rated it a 4/10 or whatever. It's an example and that reply would be a straw man.

Now am I saying the game is perfect? No. But it's no so bad as to garner the extreme amount of hate it has been getting. The humor plays as if I wrote it. All right, that basically means it's about moderately funny with some gems here or there. And the voice work is really good as far as I'm concerned. The 3D work wasn't absolute trash. It was yards ahead of Escape From Monkey Island at least I can say. What do you want? Fallout 3? The puzzle structure was sound, and the puzzles fit. However the game has the same feeling that a lot of the later LA games such as GF and CMI has. I think this is it's problem. It doesn't have a magical or atmospheric feel. It's more of an interesting setting with funny characters and situations, but no heart. There's no heart in this game, that is the main problem I would address. Without heart it's just a fun time, but it's no Secret of Monkey Island. However, it's no Escape From Monkey Island either.

Give the game the credit it deserves for being the first adventure game in years to at least rank among some of LA's last greats.

FT  10/10
GF 10/10
CMI 9/10
AVS 6/10
EMI 3/10

Keep in mind TTG's first outings were not nearly as great as the current ones such as Strong Bad and Sam and Max Season 2. Like all baby companies, this one just needs to find it's footing before it really takes off. I won't compare it to a large scale company, because time doesn't mean a whole lot when a company has as many problems as AVS had.

In a years time I bet AME will really gain more respect and experience.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

What I find strange is that once an adventure game comes along with a good sense of humor, or what tries to be anyway, you all treat it as if it's trash and the absolutely most horrible product you could have gotten. The first LA style game out there, a few things are off and we suddenly rate it 1/10? I call that a case of butthurt. Oh, and uh, don't respond by saying, well I rated it a 4/10 or whatever. It's an example and that reply would be a straw man.

1.  Good sense of humor is your opinion, nothing more or less.  It seems that most people here so far disagree with you, however.

2.  I don't think anyone said (though they would be well within their rights to do so) it's the worst thing ever, but people who have paid for it are (and rightfully so) airing grievances about the variances in production values, voice cast, and bizarre/broken puzzle design.

3.  Don't tell people how they can or cannot respond to your statements, that's just trying to head off any criticism directed at your comments and it makes you look childish.

4.  The old 'strawman gag's' a bit played out, I think.  We need to come up with something else to use to try and win arguments, like supporting statements. 

5.  I disagree that the 3d is yards ahead of Escape From Monkey Island beyond what improvements modern computing offers.  The 3d look for Vampyre Story, in my view, lacks personality and suffers from Bland Syndrome.  Shrowdy (post-undeath) in particular looks terrible, and his cloth tatters move in a jaggy, poorly animated fashion.  I never felt visually cheated by Escape, but tastes vary.

6.  One point we do agree on is that the game lacks any kind of center, a heart, the energy to make the player feel the game is more than the sum of its parts.  Tales of Bingwood, for its clear lack of production values, also clearly showed me that heart went into the design. 

7.  Why should anyone have to give Vampyre Story credit?  And what does it exactly deserve credit for?  There's absolutely no way I'd ever rank it among some of Lucasarts fine games because it falls so short in so many categories, the most important for me being fun factor.  Hell, I absolutely love horror themes in games and I was completely unimpressed by every aspect of this adventure, and when it comes right down to it, Vampyre Story was just a total bore for me to play.  When you spend time just grinding drawn-out puzzles with pointless backtracking to move on to the next puzzle you realize there's just no story here, or so little they had to pad it with their special memory interface.  And I wouldn't consider trial-and-error puzzle design ever to be a sound structure.  You should not have to progress through a game by way of failure first, and too many of the puzzles in the game seem written by someone who thinks they're too smart for you; so smart indeed that you can't possibly figure out the solution yourself, so what you need to do is fail first.  Sometimes repeatedly.  I've mentioned a couple of these in a prior post.

Another issue you bring up is Mona's actual character.  Yeah, they do portray her to be somewhat daft, but other times she appears clever, and then sometimes it appears she wasn't daft at all but is living in denial - so which is it?  All three?  And yeah, I found her voice intolerable at times, and sadly, it did not grow on me or become cute or otherwise forgivable.  Her voice is a strange mix of pseudo-french stereotypes and Elmer Fudd and the result just isn't very good.  And in spite of the whole Peter Lorre impression being done to death, Shrowdy's is one of the weaker attempts I've heard in awhile.  If you want my honest opinion, I think Grundislav did a much better job of pretending to sound like an irate chinaman in Limey Lizard than Mona does of sounding like a ditzy french opera star.  He also does a damn fine Walken impression, but that's another story!

I don't have much to say about the music because it's so subtle and underused that there really is nothing to say, and I think that goes for the game as well.  Nothing about it particularly stands out or grabs me and says 'you must play this game!'

[Misj']

Hell, I absolutely love horror themes in games and I was completely unimpressed by every aspect of this adventure, and when it comes right down to it, Vampyre Story was just a total bore for me to play. 

You thought this was (going to be) a horror themed game?   

That's weird....

[SSH]

You thought this was (going to be) a horror themed game?   

That's weird....

What a fool for thinking a game about vampires would be horror themed!

[Eggie]

I've always used horror-themed to mean 'themed around things which are associated with horror without actually being in the horror genre' so AVS fits that term rather neatly in my opinion.

[LimpingFish]

What I've seen of AVS, aside from some nice art, doesn't make me want to play the full product. Not because I don't like comedy-horror, or cartoony art, or games that ape LucasArts, but because it strikes me as a distinctly average game. People may tell me the full game is better, but if that is the case, why put out a demo of the worst part of your game? I get the impression, based on other opinions in this thread, that the game won't be any better. Just longer.

This is clearly enough for some people.

[ManicMatt]

And it's not like I was ready to shoot this game down in flames, because I was genuinely interested in this game and had high hopes for it. So if anything, my disapointment comes from high expectations.

AVS story's 3D characters would only appear better than Escape from Monkey Island in the same sense that Tomb Raider underworld looks better than Tomb Raider 1 on the psone. So that's a rather silly comment to make.