Anybody speak Czech?

Meowster · Mon 05/01/2004 00:47:24

I know this review isn't gonna be too kind, and maybe I am best off NOT knowing what it says, but... Oh man, now I've gone and aknowledged its existence and I can't ignore it or curiousity will eat away at me. So can anybody translate this Goddamn Czech Article on BR for me?

Unilin · Mon 05/01/2004 02:35:15

I speak a bit, so I'll do my yearly good deed and give you the gist. The gist because I'm tired and don't feel like typing that much.

He finds it to be an interesting game, and feels that a lot of effort was probably put into it, but that it's a shame that the art is not only so derivative, but badly derivitive, to boot. He feels the character art is about average so far as amature games go, but the animation is sketchy.

The plot, he says, is cliche and the characterization thin. He finds it hard to identify or empathize with the PC. The writing itself is nice, though, and he does like the interface and dialog trees. The puzzles, he finds, are mostly either illogical or overly simplistic.

It also refers to the Defenestration of Prague, but the context confused me.

shbaz · Mon 05/01/2004 03:53:26

Derivitive of what, exactly?

Pff.. I liked the game.

jaz · Mon 05/01/2004 11:10:55

Hmm,

I do speak Czech and I have translated a couple of reviews from BonusWeb for people who asked for it (Conspiracy of Songo, Postman Only Dies Once, Apprentice, WWTLF) and I have seen a thread in which someone translated Little Johnny Evil. So it seems this topic pops up every now and then.

I have read Unilin's post and I cannot agree with his "overview" since meaning of this article is almost completely different. It's quite a positive review. I will try to translate it for you ASAP.

jaz

jaz · Mon 05/01/2004 12:25:57

Here we go:

Beyond Reality â€"world of beautiful dreams and terrible nightmares

Ian is an adventurer. But the his last adventure may be too much for him. Rescue mission into dreamworld to save kidnapped girl turns into fight against nightmares in this nice Lucas Arts style adventure .

Today's point 'n click game Beyond Reality is one of the most recent novelties from ever spreading AGS scene. It offers an interesting story, sympatic main character and its graphics and sound are, excellent at many places. â€" but unfortunately it's not free of bugs.

But let's have a look at the plot first. After one of his many exhausting adventures, our hero, Ian, gets into a nasty storm. He gets lost and has to seek a shelter in a nearby hotel. After a little conversation with receptionist lights went out for a while. Then in the darkness, an old man confuses a box of pills and has a heart attack. But even worse, the door open and strange voices could be heard from the outside. Ian rushes out only to see hooded Dream Demon with giant lollipop luring old man's granddaughter out. Abduction is succesful despite Ian's effort and mother of the girl, a member of secret brotherhood and keeper of gates between ordinary and dream world comes late.

After short conversation Ian as a true hero, offers himself to rescue the kid from demons hands. The keeper agrees. Dozens of sleep pills do the job and Ian is ready to discover both, world inhabited by likes of him â€" people who just fall deep asleep, the world created by dreams of thousands of human beings, and, separated only by a thin border, realm of nightmares and creatures from the worst dreams and â€" politicians like Mort Kittensoft. This man was elected a governor which freed his hands to carry out an evil plan. To capture souls of innocent yet esoterically sensible children, which is first step to open a timespace gap which is needed for jump into somewhere between dream world and real world in order to take over both and introduce tyranny. Will Ian be able to prevent this to happen?

Yes, of course, the main premises of plot are not overly original. Journeys into dreams have been there before, as well as saving little child/world scenario is a bit clichÃ©. But story is presented in a very interesting way and at a high level.. Dreamworld has been created with a lot of fantasy so absence of plot innovations doesn't matter at all. Game is pleasantly long, offers numerous locations and interesting characters (rock painting man, guard with arachnophobia) and the puzzles are entertaining (Bag jumping puzzle has been influenced by MI's spiting contest for sure, but it's not a bad thing at all) As for the graphics, roughly half of the locations are excellent, the other half is a bit worse but even those are far from being ugly. Music is excellent all the way and, regarding instalation file size, there is a lot of it.

So, standing ovations so far. But, unfortunately, this game is far from being perfect. But it could have been if only the incredible amount of program and scripting bugs was fixed. When the game was first released, about a month ago, it wasn't even possible to finish it. But one has to be careful even now - some combinations of items could make game freeze which situation only can be solved by loading. So you should save quite often. Game also tends to crash unexpectedly, especially when anti â€" aliasing is on. Then it's not possible to skip cutscenes with Esc â€" game crashes to Windows immediately. Enter some locations in this mode could be problematic as well. I don't recommend to run BR in normal mode under Win XP at all, since it's stable only under Win 95 compatibility mode. But on the other hand, why miss a beautiful adventure game with excellent atmosphere and gameplay because of bugs that can be avoided by frequent saving and occasional glance at a walkthrough which is also available at Plne Hry.

Maybe unilin read another review by a mistake...

Anyway, congrats, fix the bugs and you will be The Ki... The Queen.

jaz

Las Naranjas · Mon 05/01/2004 12:56:56

I might as well jump on the band wagon and say I'd be glad if either Unilin or jaz could tell me what either of these say.

http://plnehry.idnes.cz/adventure/novomestro.html

http://plnehry.idnes.cz/navody/novomestronavod.html

I'm 90% sure they're negative, since I don't think the joke would carry over the language barrier.

Actually, I think the second is a translation of the walkthrough I wrote once, since it mentions Cthullu, unless they're refering to Novo's lack of limbs.

jaz · Mon 05/01/2004 13:47:38

Okay, there is a similar thread somewhere on the forums called "Foreign AGS reviews" or something like that. It was even called "Anyone here speaks Czech?" before. (surprise, surprise)

So if any moderator reads this, it may be a good idea to merge the two threads together, since content is the same.

Las, I will try to translate it for you if you're ready to bite the bullet. It's not much of a positive review...

Meowster · Mon 05/01/2004 17:24:00

Jaz, you're a hero of the AGS forum, you know that?

Okay, I'm not too sure how to spell this, so my teacher always said that if you don't know how to spell something, you should spell it FO-NET-IC-ALI. So I'm gonna give this my best shot. I'll probably look really dumb, but my teacher warned me about that too.

VAKCLAV HAVE-EL RULES!

I don't really have any idea what I just said, as I was repeating my ~~mother~~ business associate.

Peace out!

Goldmund · Mon 05/01/2004 18:44:43

QuoteVAKCLAV HAVE-EL RULES!

As far as I know, his term ended quite a long time ago.
So, no.

edit:
Las, are you sure you want to know what the reviewer says about NM?

Las Naranjas · Mon 05/01/2004 23:25:23

Hehe, it sounds like it's what I expected it to be, so yes, I do want to hear. Please.

Matt Brown · Mon 05/01/2004 23:27:42

this site has a ton of AGS games..where I can search to see if they did one of mine?

Inkoddi · Mon 05/01/2004 23:48:39

The weird thing is that Novo Mestro got 9/10 and 10/10 ratings...

jaz · Mon 05/01/2004 23:51:22

OK, Las, but it's gonna take some time. It's 0:45 AM now so I guess I will translate it tomorrow (hmmm, or later today in this case) But I will.

Panda: there are two boxes in the upper left area The top one is what you are looking for "hledej v člÃ¡ncÃch! - search in articles. Enter name of your game into "hledanÃ½ vÃ½raz" field and click on "vyhledej" - search.

Las Naranjas · Tue 06/01/2004 00:01:34

No worries, I'm in no rush.

jaz · Tue 06/01/2004 12:33:36

Get ready for cold shower, Las:

Novo Mestro â€" an artistic freeware game?

Novo Mestrois an pretentious freeware adventure game which claims to be artistic and have other than entertaining qualities too. What do you think Is it possible or is it just an advertisement guff?

For some time I've been defending an oppinion that games should rank amongst art just like film or literature. Unfortunately nor critics nor ordinary people accept the existence of â€žinteractive artâ€œ. But how should we rate titles like Myst, Atlantis, Ring or Syberia, not to mention an awesome epic TLJ?

The abovementioned titles are fully commercial products. Today's Novo Mestro is a freeware The author proclames that the goal of this game is to be more art than a game on his website. Let's see if he succeeded.

Novo Mestro takes place on three screens and doesn't have a classic story line. You can't finish this game as well and it's not a game actually. Interactivity consists of walking the character across the screens and choosing which of his two friends to talk to first. We can say that controls are true point 'n click classics. RMB changes action, LMB executes the command. Thank to AGS engine saving/loading works fine and this originally DOS game runs well even under newest Windows.

Why should anyone be interested in this game? Art may be a certain reason. Ermmâ€¦ I don't know what's so artistic on scrawls ten years kid would draw better. In any case, graphics was a huge disappointment for me. It was messy and, well, I'm not afraid to say, ugly.

Last thing to mention is testimony given by main character and his two friends â€" Jesenice and Maribor, some report on the end of the world an transition of humans to more or less energy based lifeform.

Even the last chcance to be artistic had been wasted. Who wil understand Maribor's metaphysical and seemingly profound but bland and utterly boring explications, will lost all the patience during maybe even longer monologues of Jesenice. And not all is explained, only a rough outline of apocalyptical vision of end of the mankind is presented, without any conclusion. Player has feeling of unfinishedness (is thi a word??? â€"probably not, jaz) He doesn't get to solve the outlined problem. Someone might object that Novo Mestro's goal is to raise questions to think about and to come to own conclusion and he might be right. But personally I know better ways of self-reflexion than concentrated boredom of this strange game/game?

To sum it up â€" I don't think that the author has succeded to complete his goals. Novo Mestro is really not a gameâ€¦ it's not an art . Nowo Mestro is one big fat nothing. Who wants to feel intelectual can download it and pretend he understands Maribor's and Jesenice's nonsenses but he won't gain anything as Novomestro will be a bitter dissappointment for him.

On the other hand the game got high marks from people (90%) so WTF.

Las Naranjas · Wed 07/01/2004 00:01:11

Hehehehehehehehe.

He half got the game, but not the other half.

He's right in that it's pretentious, it's not art but pretends to be, and that the pseudo intellectual conversation is but sophistry and platitudes.

Which is more than many people understood.

It's sorta sad [but more funny] that he didn't understand that it was meant to be like that, but I guess that the innumerable "spoofs" of www.realultimatepower.net show that it's hard for many people to distinguish.

Anyway, thanks alot Jaz, it's been a great experience nonetheless.

Meowster · Wed 07/01/2004 00:47:24

Maybe he didn't get it because he's foreign

They had to rewrite a lot of the Monkey Island 1 Insult Sword fighting thingies, because they didn't translate well, you know.

jaz · Wed 07/01/2004 15:33:28

It's a bit different... somethimes I have a good laugh playing some game or watching some movie in English, I get the joke but it's just intranslatable. Word by word translations just don't work thus you often have to change the meaning a bit. But if you're at a certain advanced level in some language, you mostly get pretty much everything.

I haven't played Novo Mestro but as I mentioned, people rated this game high despite of the review. Maybe it's just a matter of taste.

jaz

Las Naranjas · Wed 07/01/2004 23:03:47

I also think a few forum members were having a laugh with the ratings there...

Dave Gilbert · Thu 08/01/2004 15:20:26

*Psst* - Hey, Jaz...

I looked around the site and found Czech review of another one of my games. Could you check it out and do the honors? Pretty please?

http://plnehry.idnes.cz/adventure/bestowers.html