A Vampyre Story - Playable demo available.

Started by Misj', Mon 17/11/2008 14:44:08

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Misj'

From the website:



17.11.2008 | Midnight surprise: the demo is here!

Today marks the first release of "A Vampyre Story" in it's first territory. To mark the occassion, we are proud to release the official demo, to allow everyone to get a sneak peek of the game.

In the demo, Mona and Froderick are in trouble: They are on the Vlad's Landing Graveyard and Picknick Grounds, looking for Mona's grave, in order to retreive some grave dirt that Mona needs to put in her coffin for travelling.
This short slice of the game gives a short glimpse of how versatile and multi-faceted the puzzles can be - as well as presenting the athmospheric art and music and humor, of course!

The demo features English and German language. The game will be released on the 24th in the UK and soon in the US and on any decent download retail service, like GameTap, metaboli and GamersGate.

You can download the demo from worthplaying.com: http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=57552

You can also click on the German flag in the tree to get to a list of Mirrors....



I haven't had the time to look at it yet (I'm at work at the moment). But I'm sure most of us are exited...



(Why did I choose to post this in the general discussion and not in the Adventure-related talk and chat-thread? - I dunno...)

Eggie

It definitely had some nice graphical touches and the characters seemed fun; the writing might be a little weak, though. Being locked in a cosy cottage hardly screams 'peril' and what's with the giant exposition about how Froderick and Mona met?

I'll come and have a proper play later, I'm sure it's good enough fun.

(Hoestly, though. I think the descriptions of vampire-based magazines in my vampire game were wittier)

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

#2
Wow, Mona's voice is incredibly annoying.  What's with all the wascally wabbit talk?  She's supposed to be French, not Elmer Fudd.  The bat sounds like Max from Sam and Max Hit the Road, which isn't a bad thing.  The person doing Shrowdy is trying too hard to sound like Peter Lorre, though.

The 3d is a bit amateurish in parts, especially the 3d sequences with Shrowdy (he looks horrible).  I normally don't mind 3d, but the early 2d designs they did looked much better than this and fit in with the backgrounds better.  The puzzle was pretty interesting, but the dialog is rather flat.  I'm not sure I get the 'remembering items for later' thing.  It seems like an attempt to make the game more realistic so she can't carry tons of stuff, but she's a vampire so why should realism be an issue?

I'm not sure it's a game I'd buy or play based on the demo.


ildu

Yeah, the voices are a bit weird. Froderick is fine, and pretty characteristic (albeit very stereotypical), and I don't mind the Peter Lorre impression - he is one of my favorite villain archetypes. However, Mona is quite honestly terrible. You get used to her pretty quickly, but boy was it a shock at first. She's supposed to be French, but she comes off as a bad American impression of a european, i.e. all the stereotypes put together, and yes, sounds very much like Elmer Fudd. It's weird as well, since she is the main character, and her voice is easily the weakest in the demo at least.

The graphics were a bit tame, to be honest, with all due respect to the talent of Bill Tiller. First of all, viewing the 1024x material on 1280x resolution looks pretty dull (I noticed this after having played the demo and then seing the materials in their original size). Some of the details are also a bit underworked, which is apparent for example in the close-up screen of the barrel. Technical issues were abundant, as well - lots of depth layer glitches, clumsiness, text freeze-ups, etc.

Writing was a bit flat, but it got better towards the end. The puzzle was good, though I didn't understand initially why you would need to use a shovel on the door, before heating the ice and after having already wedged it with the pickaxe. I actually liked the 'remember things for later' thing, though even if it's not obtrusive, I'm not too sure how much it actually adds to the game.

One good thing here is that if you don't like the graphics, you can change them yourself. If you look in the game data, you'll find all the textures and bgs, as well as dialog lines and such, available for editing. I'd try my hand at a improved texture pack, but I'm too lazy. It worries me a bit that the texture work is quite frankly very poor. Especially the low resolution of a lot of the textures makes me wonder.

All in all, the demo doesn't bode too well. I just hope they've done a huge lot of beta-testing and optimizing since building the demo.

Sam.

#4
to avoid trawling through a million links

http://files.filefront.com/AVampyreStory+Demozip/;12377546;/fileinfo.html

EDIT: Wonderful demo, crashed without seeing anything at all. Black screen then frozen.

Beautiful.
Bye bye thankyou I love you.

Matti

#5
Quote from: Misj' on Mon 17/11/2008 14:44:08
You can also click on the German flag in the tree to get to a list of Mirrors....

Where do you see a german flag there? All I see is an english, a french and a so called "russish" one...


EDIT: Ah, nevermind. The linked site is already german so there's no need for that flag...

EDIT 2: But nevertheless it's called "russian" instead of "russish"..

ildu

Quote from: Zooty on Mon 17/11/2008 18:48:15EDIT: Wonderful demo, crashed without seeing anything at all. Black screen then frozen.

Yeah, it's got startup issues as well. Had to try a few times myself before it started working properly. Also, I have double 19" screens and for some reason it started the game up on my secondary screen, which never happens with games.

ManicMatt

Hmm this doesnt sound very promising.. Then again anything commercial seems to be under critical scrutiny around here...  :-\

Although technical problems IS worrying.

I'll be definetely trying the demo before buying it.

Ozzie

The german voice acting is pretty good, actually
Seems to be a fun game. I should buy it when I have some money to spare...
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Sam.

Is there anything in particular you did Ildu? I run it, and main.exe crashes. I am running vista but I have tried compatibility mode.

There is no troubleshooting that I can find for this demo. I have a pretty basic, non gamer, laptop. But it has a gig of ram and 2.ghz core duo so i dont see why it isnt running.

:(
Bye bye thankyou I love you.

Layabout

Quote from: Zooty on Tue 18/11/2008 01:50:19
Is there anything in particular you did Ildu? I run it, and main.exe crashes. I am running vista but I have tried compatibility mode.

There is no troubleshooting that I can find for this demo. I have a pretty basic, non gamer, laptop. But it has a gig of ram and 2.ghz core duo so i dont see why it isnt running.

:(

I have exactly the same problem.
I am Jean-Pierre.

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

Wow, this game is buggy and has walking deads, so be careful.  If you alt-tab, sometimes the bink videos will mess up and the audio will be caught in a loop. 

Also:

Spoiler
if you convince the hooker to go talk to the conductor BEFORE talking to the children about a musical score the game is effectively broken because Mona refuses to leave the area until she has the music, which you haven't found out about yet and can't get.
[close]

There was another one as well but I forget where.  The puzzles are a mixture of interesting and purely trial and error, so in spite of knowing what you need to do you'll often have to try something else and fail first.  A few examples:

Spoiler
When you read in the vampire for dummies book that black repels holy stuff, it's not a leap to imagine you can use the gypsy ink on the snowman to block the holy crest, but you still have to throw a regular snowball at it first and fail.  Examples like this fill the game, like not being able to wrap the blanket around the bucket in spite of it telling you it's a good idea until you find out the stew gets cold on the way.
[close]

The other thing that is infuriating is how Mona will use her vampiric powers at random, making certain puzzles pointlessly difficult.  Someone needs to tell Bill Tiller and company that when they make a super powered character they are really painting themselves into a corner when they have her able to carry a coffin or push a wagon full of dirt on her own but be physically unable to do something like bend iron bars or fly around pointless barriers.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Sam.

This is a dissapointing release so far, unless the forums open up at AutumnMoon for troubleshooting or someone can proove to me that the actual release doesnt have the bugs of the demo, i.e. it's complete non-runability, I won't consider buying the game.
Bye bye thankyou I love you.

ManicMatt

I had high hopes for this game, but after playing the demo.. meh.

"These logs are too heavy to pick up" She says. Only to suddenly be revealed shortly after that she has super human strength. Yes I see what you guys mean.

And yes, I think Mona's accent is supposed to be vampire + french but is ear-piercingly high and annoying to boot.

She then told me what I suggested was a good idea, and she'd remember it, but it's not useful now. Except that it was the very next thing I was supposed to do, leaving me stumped for a while.

As a non-technical artist, I liked the backgrounds, and thought the 3D characters other than mona were quite poor in this day and age.

And i didn't laugh... which for me renders the whole thing pointless as it's a cartoony adventure game. I've found Ratchet and Clank on ps3 far funnier in the cutscenes, that game had me replaying scenes cos they made me laugh so much.

m0ds

Oh dear, five years or so in the making & it's not floating many people's boat! I've seen the trailers, but neither have particularly enticed me - but that's mostly because the setting doesn't really catch my appeal, in fact it never did when Tiller first came out with it. Didn't really want to tell him that though :-X Perhaps they should fix it all up and wait until Halloween to release it. I've not played the demo but you guys have some pretty good points as to why there's a reason to skip it. Maybe part of their plan is to get feedback from the demo, but then you say there's no where to get troubleshooting help? What a shame! Tiller is still a hero in his own rights and he will always do great art, but it looks like they need to refresh their creative team a bit! Now a 3D sequel to The Dig wouldn't go a miss, Mr Bill! ;)

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

I was talking about the full game, actually.  The full game is every bit as bad as the demo.

ildu

I have to mention that the full game itself is a lot better than the demo made it out to be, at least for me. I haven't played that much of it (and I'll have to replay some, too, because it crashed at a time where I hadn't saved in a long while :D), but so far it's quite good. There are obvious things that bother me, but I'm prepared to look past them.

ManicMatt

That said, the game is only £14.99 on Amazon, so I think it might be priced just right. I felt So Blonde was a bit dear at £24.99 for an adventure game.

LimpingFish

Quote from: ildu on Fri 28/11/2008 01:04:44
There are obvious things that bother me, but I'm prepared to look past them.

Why?
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Ozzie

It sounds like the writing is the worst aspect of the game. I hope Bill Tiller will either improve drastically or, even better, find someone who can write good funny dialogues.
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