Ben There, Dan That!

[thezombiecow]

Thanks guys. I'll look into that 'walk to on open door' thing, it might be possible for the next fix as it's something a few people have reported.

Also, if you love it, please vote on our game page. Somehow we're languising under 90% at the moment.

Also, I'm afraid there will be no sequel whatsoever unless we get enough cash through donations to justify it, so if you can plug the game anywhere, please do...!

[olafmoriarty]

Just finished it. An interesting game with tons of great dialogue. I particularly liked the fact that it seemed as if every inventory item had its own "vocabulary", so that I very rarely ran into a boring "I can't use this item here" message but instead got hilarious messages about how I don't want a dead man's hand to handle this thing or how I don't want the top hat to smell like other people's wee. This is one thing I think many game developers would be better off doing, so I liked it a lot.

What's the point of complaining so much over "low scores"? They're not that low, seriously. I voted for it, and I voted that it is a recommended game that people should put on their to-play-list. In my ears, that's a pretty good thing to say about a game, and still I managed to pull the average score DOWN with that vote. So having the game at just below 90 % is pretty darn good, isn't it?

I have no idea how the AGS Panel works and evaluates, but three cups isn't THAT bad a grade, is it? I haven't played many four-cup-games, but I seem to recall that I've found most of them great, even better than this one. So three ain't that bad.

All in all, a good game. The downside is that it's somewhat repetitive in the way that every puzzle is about unlocking a room and entering it to find the key to the next room (which, sadly, is one of the most over-used puzzles in the adventure game world) and I also think it could have been better with less forth-wall-breaks. The upside is tons of hilarious dialogue and darn cute drawings throughout the entire game. 4/5 from me.

[LimpingFish]

(Oh, man, I hate playing the bad guy...)

I liked this game. I laughed out loud, which is something I rarely do. But...

...it isn't that great a game. BT, DT!  offers the player a fun time, no doubt about it, but unfortunately it's weakest link is it's gameplay. The writing is great, the situations are funny...but in all honesty, you could remove the game part altogether, and still be left with an excellent cartoon series.

It may sound all Killjoy McWetBlanket, but, in my opinion: "Ben There, Dan That!: The Story" = Excellent. "Ben There, Dan That!: The Game" = Good, not great.

I also liked Gibbage, and I enjoyed following it's progress in PC Zone. I look foward to seeing BT, DT! in next month's issue.

As for generating income, well...fork, we'd all like to suckle at the teats of that particular bovine (zombie or otherwise)! But as Dave Gilbert famously once said "There just ain't no money in it!"*

*(Not actually said by Dave Gilbert, ever, but I like to think he once uttered that very lament. I'd ask him to say it it now, but he has so many swimsuit models on his yacht that he can never get a clear mobile signal through all the silicone and spandex...)

Hooray! I made it all the way through this post without sounding like a total condescending cock. Just half of one. A cocklet.

[olafmoriarty]

Thanks, LimpingFish, for finding the words I was looking for. I agree with everything you say.

In cases like this one, it feels particularly hard to open one's mouth to say "Yeah, this game is really good, but it's not THE BEST GAME EVER CREATED". I don't know why, but it feels so harsh and insensitive, especially when everybody else is praising the game and the game creators seem to be very disappointed with a sub-90 % rating (when, according to these statistics, only twenty of 470 games have a ranking of 90 % or higher (and that puts BTDT in the top 5 %!)).

Like I said above, I liked this game. And in some ways, it was excellent. But I don't understand what all the fuzz is about, either. And I can't help wondering why that makes one feel as a bad guy.

Anyhow, just had to write this to make it obvious that I agree with LimpingFish here, because I know it's so much easier to give criticism when someone agrees with you. And if people stopped criticizing, the world would stop improving. And I assume that would lead to its implosion.

[monkey0506]

Does the Load feature work in this game? I saved my game, and have the save file...but it doesn't show up in the Save/Load lists.

[olafmoriarty]

Strange. The load feature worked perfectly here.

[Grundislav]

How DARE you say such terrible things about America?! I'LL SUE YOU!!!

Seriously, though, I enjoyed the game.  The dialog was funny (if a bit long) and the puzzles were clever.  I liked the whole running gag about

Spoiler

Ben killing practically everyone they met

[close]

The art style was nice too, and yes, the walk cycles were great.  Nice work!

[paolo]

I've just finished this game and I thought it was great fun. Lots of humour, even if some of it won't be understandable outside the UK. Just to repeat what olafmoriarty said, I really enjoyed messing around with deliberately wrong interactions just to see what the characters said.

It's always great to see a game that has been worked on so thoroughly to make sure everything is working. I did spot two small bugs though:

Spoiler

* When I gave the Underground technician the moonshine, all that happened is that Ben walked to the left (past the turnstile) and then to the right, past the technician. It worked, but this seems to be a weird way for the character to carry out this interaction.
* The only typo I found was "clammering" - this should be "clamouring". And I think the past participle of "smite" should be "smut".  That would be far more appropriate. Only joking.

[close]

So excellent job, guys. I'm off to give you nice big fat top marks now. Hm, what do you have to do around here to get four cups, I wonder?

[LimpingFish]

So excellent job, guys. I'm off to give you nice big fat top marks now. Hm, what do you have to do around here to get four cups, I wonder?

Fuck it. I've put on the Crown of Cocks once, I may as well wear it to good effect.

I've yet to hear anyone explain to me just why this particular game deserves four cups. Not "It's better than some of those four cup games!", but actual concrete examples of this games superior quality. The quality that the panel looks for when rating a game. All areas of the game. So help me out, here. Give me examples of the excellent gameplay mechanics that lift this game above the rest. Because, cock hat or not, I played this game before I saw it's cup rating, and I came to the same critical conclusion. No big conspiracy, no vendetta. Just some guy quietly thinking to himself: "That was a good game. I like it.".

It seems you can't even call a game just "good" anymore without the hounds being let loose.

[MashPotato]

It seems you can't even call a game just "good" anymore without the hounds being let loose.

The thing is that according to the official blue cups rating description, 3 cups = "a decent game", and 4 cups = "a good game"... so technically, if you think it's a good game it should deserve 4 cups in your eyes

I've yet to hear anyone explain to me just why this particular game deserves four cups. Not "It's better than some of those four cup games!", but actual concrete examples of this games superior quality. The quality that the panel looks for when rating a game. All areas of the game. So help me out, here. Give me examples of the excellent gameplay mechanics that lift this game above the rest.

I don't want to take this thread entirely off-topic, but I was under the impression that different areas could compensate for others when assigning a rating.  For example, looking solely at the graphics, Trilby's Notes doesn't look like a 5-cup game to me, but I assume the gameplay and story make up for that (haven't played it, so I don't know from experience).
Anyway, I think BTDT does excel in areas of immersion and the overall fun-quotient

And please, just so that no one misinterprets me, I'm not arguing with the board rating; I understand that, in the end, it's a person's opinion, just like mine.  We just happen to differ in this case

[SSH]

So excellent job, guys. I'm off to give you nice big fat top marks now. Hm, what do you have to do around here to get four cups, I wonder?

It would help if the took 5 minutes to release a version with easier ways to jump to cursor modes... its definitely the worst gameplay feature, although a double-click to run to speed up the sometimes too-slow walking would help.

[LimpingFish]

And please, just so that no one misinterprets me, I'm not arguing with the board rating; I understand that, in the end, it's a person's opinion, just like mine.  We just happen to differ in this case

Indeed, it's only an opinion.

And your right; BT, DT! excels in a number of areas. But like I said earlier, it's weakest link is it's gameplay. And the one thing a four/five cup game must have is strong gameplay. Other areas can only compensate so much.

It's just hard to understand the apparent "hard sell" approach to an otherwise unremarkable game, and the implied notion, though slight, that the game was somehow being mistreated.

I've been with the rating panel since it's inception, and the only reason it holds any interest for me, is that it allows both myself and the other panel members to offer a largely untainted (by popular opinion, by personal ties to the developer, whatever) opinion on the games that get added to the database. And to offer a more stable/reliable alternative to possibly misleading user ratings; a situation, it has to be said, not helped by campaigning for overly positive voting, deserved or otherwise.

This is all very weird for me. I like the game. Hell, I'd support Ben and Dan in their future game development endeavors. BT, DT! is a good first game, far better than most first games. But it has it's faults. I didn't rate it, but I agree with the rating it received.

And it makes me feel like a shit to play Captain Bringdown and the Buzz Killers, but that's the way I see the situation.

[monkey0506]

Strange. The load feature worked perfectly here.

Seriously?...I'm not sure how far I got really...but a couple of the puzzles did take me a little bit to work out:

Spoiler

At first I didn't realize you could click all three sections of the pillars. I knew the candles had to do with the Bible references...but I only had 2 verses!

[close]

I got as far as say...

Spoiler

Britain...talking to "the King"

[close]

And I'd talked to most of the other people there...just not looking forward to having to start over again.

[olafmoriarty]

I've yet to hear anyone explain to me just why this particular game deserves four cups. Not "It's better than some of those four cup games!", but actual concrete examples of this games superior quality. The quality that the panel looks for when rating a game.

An excellent question to which I have no good reply. The reason I personally said I gave the game a "4/5" was that the dialogue in my opinion was hilarious enough to pull the whole game upwards, but honestly I don't expect the Panel to think in the same way. The game was hilarious, and the artwork was cute, but from a trying-to-be-objective point of view I completely understand that the complexity of the interface and the similarity of the puzzles pulls the score down.

Anyhow, I'm still of the opinion that a 3/5 is a pretty good grade.

The thing is that according to the official blue cups rating description, 3 cups = "a decent game", and 4 cups = "a good game"... so technically, if you think it's a good game it should deserve 4 cups in your eyes

Decent is just a degree of good. The description also says that three cups equals "give it a go". I don't tell people to give a game a go if I don't think it's good.

a couple of the puzzles did take me a little bit to work out:

Spoiler

At first I didn't realize you could click all three sections of the pillars. I knew the candles had to do with the Bible references...but I only had 2 verses!

[close]

I figured that one out right away, but I agree that it could have been done better, especially when taking into account the inconsistency:

Spoiler

With the candles themselves, one clicks the chandeliers and not the single candles, quite the opposite of the way one had to click on individual verses on the pillars.

[close]

The most confusing puzzle in the game, by the way, is in my opinion

Spoiler

getting the can-opener from the museum. Not because it is difficult to get the can-opener (it's not), but because the dioramas really look like paintings. Examining them doesn't really reveal that they're dioramas, either. So when I needed some kind of item to cut a lamppost down, getting the can-opener from the museum was the last thing I thought of -- not because it doesn't fit with the game's bizarre logic, but because I assumed that the can-opener was painted on the wall!

[close]

The worst part is that that frustration could have been resolved with a simple @OVERHOTSPOT@.

[Lufia]

It's too bad that as far as I'm concerned, the dialogue is the only strength of the game. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it was too long or displayed to fast. No, it was bloody hilarious throughout and just perfect.

But every other aspect of the game just falls short of getting my unconditional fangirl-ish drool-soaked approval.

The gameplay quickly becomes annoying because you always have to right click your way through every action to do anything. And if you're like me and have a very bizarre fondness for clicking on mouse buttons very rapidly, this system becomes eye twitch worthy.

The graphics almost deterred me from playing at first. Then I tried the game out and had to admit that they worked fine with the game's tone. Still, they're not great. I don't think they're even cute. They just serve their purpose without inspiring any awe. Well, they did inspire an arched eyebrow, but for all the wrong reasons, I'm afraid.

The puzzles quickly get repetitive. I thought the one with the candles was really neat, but after that it went "find object to stick into next very obvious place" and even "try random object on random stuff" at one point. The can opener point, actually.

But even with all these problems, the game remains so damn entertaining, and isn't that the one thing that we ask for? So yes, I enjoyed playing it, yes I laughed out loud at various points, especially in the museum shop, and yes I do think it's a Good Game and I'd recommend it to my friends. But I won't go back to play it again some day in a fit of nostalgia. Because as Good as it may be, it's not Great.

[ouch]

h t t p : // w w w.thetriforce.com/forum/index.php?topic=7421.30'

"I'm so pleased everyone seems like like this (bar a few snooty humourless cunts at the AGS board). Gibbage sort of split people down the middle between those who liked it, and those who couldn't get it to run, so it's nice to see 99% positive comments.

It won't go on XBLA because it's written in AGS, which is a fairly-shitty pointy-clicky generator. If we get a million downloads, we might take the series further and look into doing somethng more mainstream with it (FAO Jonathan: I think this would be a perfect non-LEGO project for TT, FYI)"

[LeChuck]

I actually loved the gameplay and interface, but found the absence of ingame music a little disappointing. But only a little.

edit: whoa this thread just got ugly

[olafmoriarty]

"I'm so pleased everyone seems like like this (bar a few snooty humourless cunts at the AGS board).

Dan is clearly joking here, as I take pride in being the first snooty humourless cunt to write in this thread, and I didn't do so until six days after he wrote it.

[Kweepa]

it's written in AGS, which is a fairly-shitty pointy-clicky generator.

Your AGS review: 3/5 cups?

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Dan is clearly joking here

I almost find it amusing how someone can write anything they want, no matter how offensive, and say it's just a joke lol and people should just nod their heads and dismiss it all.  Yes, funny.  Very.  To be honest, this kind of thing carried into the game in spots where I found myself annoyed by some of the anti-American comments, and normally I'm never annoyed by any good-natured ribbing at all.  Some of it just didn't seem good-natured at all, but that's just how I interpreted it.

However, I think the topic's derailing a bit here onto cup ratings rather than opinions of the game itself.  There's already a thread for complaining/praising the cup ratings ;\.