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I finally found the time for a tasty little bite of the bake sale goodies, and just finished gobbling up this bit of pixel-pastry. As a Barn Runner fan I was certainly not disappointed. It's very late, but I can't get no sleep (to quote the classic), so a little review follows:


The game was shortish as could be expected, but neither the story or any other aspect of this production felt in any way rushed or unfinished. The mystery/detective setting is an interesting departure from the Barn Runner norm. Character graphics are well drawn and (intentionally) garishly coloured, the low-res backgrounds are simplistic but effective and the soundtrack consists of a selection of midi tracks. It's all nice and familiar to those who have played other entries in this long running series, and any fan of low-res adventure gaming is sure to find the style unique but easy to digest.

The story, taking place in the confines of a single, ritzy restaurant, is fresh and well paced. It manages to include a diverse mix of characters, every single one with their very own distinct personality and a clear place in the story. No shallow fillers or extras here: Hollywood, take notes please. Some familiar faces as well, with a few of the luscious femmes us fans of the franchise have grown to know and love sporting all new glamorous looks and costumes.

But the highlight of this game, just like all the other Barn Runners, is the wonderfully written, side-splittingly funny (and delightfully abundant) dialogue. I mean there's loads upon loads of it, which for some utterly mind-boggling reason some players seem to think is a bad thing. In fact, the first thing I did was to enable the "Naughty bits" and "Director's cut" in the options so I wouldn't miss a line of it. And then I made sure to talk to everyone about everything and show every single object to everyone, even when I knew exactly what I should be doing to advance the story.

If this was a real review, I'd do a bit about the story, but this isn't, so I wont. So there.

Summary: Great game made for a great cause. You might object to the sheer amount of dialogue if you're part of the ever-growing tl;dr crowd or your English isn't quite up to par, but even if you just click away and skim it all, you'll be sure to enjoy this quirky and somewhat naughty little retro sci-fi gem.

My indescribably awesome wife just bought me this oven-fresh batch of gaming goodness. Isn't that simply the most romantic thing a gal can do for her big ol' adventure game nerd of a hubby?

I'll thank her by giving her a rare couple of hours of peace and quiet while I get my pixel-jollies off with these beauties.

The Sinc (Lanczos3) interpolation option in Gimp tends to preserve sharp edges better than the other algorithms. Although, depending on the type of the original, you might often prefer the smoother result of Cubic (or bicubic) interpolation.

This is mostly relevant to the earlier discussion on resizing and edge sharpness, but let's pretend I'm just "fashionably late", ok?

Apart from the fact that Linux users detest .rar files [SNIP]

Why? I certainly don't. The linux version of the official rar extraction utility unrar is free and extremely easy to install in modern Linux distributions, and all the graphical archiver frontends I've tried support it out of the box.

Take physics, the study of the most fundamental, basic parts of the universe, and what do we humans have to say? Schrodinger's cat, entanglement, and more: it doesn't work. The universe is impossible. Take mathematics, the basis of all structure, organization, order, and what do we humans have to say? Godel's incompleteness: it doesn't work. Math is broken.

Your examples (like Gödel's theorems and Scrödinger's cat) do not necessarily mean that the sciences are broken, but that our current understanding of them, the theories we've come up with so far have flaws. Actually Schrödinger used his famous thought experiment pretty much to say that quantum mechanics are damn confusing, and that our understanding of them is far from complete. In any case it's not really a paradox or proof of anything of the sort you describe.

Push anything far enough, and you'll find everything is flawed. Nothing makes sense. But that only matters if you decide it does.

Push anything far enough, and you'll find it confuses the hell out of you. But that only matters if we're talking about everyday things like brushing your teeth or making an adventure game. Let's leave the hard stuff like quantum physics and female psychology to the Einsteins of the world.


PS: Sorry about dragging this even further from the topic.

Hey, watch it there.  :

Sorry, couldn't resist the setup.

Is it really true that Aliens Anal Probe humans when they get on their ship??

Is that a retorical question? How can anyone answer that, since nobody has been abducted?

Hey, why don't you just let the poor guy fantasize?

The station looks good. The stars would probably look nicer if their brightness varied a bit more, and you could make the empty space more interesting by adding a colourful nebula or something to spice things up. Maybe you could show (part of) the gas giant you mentioned?

Aren't more power and increasing ease of use irreconcilable?

Not in software. Ease of use comes down to good interface design, which hasn't got much to do with the "power" of the underlying software. Unless you consider a program with tons of options to fiddle with more powerful than one that simply does the right thing where applicable.

Admittedly in this case they probably cannot completely ditch the need for scripting and other "hard" stuff like that for any serious game project, but they could do a lot by using clever automatic code generation with visual tools and similar gimmicks (though being a bit of a perfectionist and a bit more of a programmer I can't help but cringe at the idea). That said, I have a hard time believing Stencyl will live up to the marketing speech.

Fun little game.

There's already an excellent computer adaptation called Shufflepuck Café I used to play on my Amiga 500 back in the good old days. There's a free clone available for windows and linux called TuxPuck, but it's only got two opponents and even less of the fun. Feels more like a demo actually. It would be awesome if someone either picked up development of TuxPuck and got it on par with the original (and/or added multiplayer via network) or created a new game of similar quality. And by quality I mean fun gameplay; pretty graphics and sound are nice but come second in a game like this.

OT: KhrisMUC, I think he might have meant "reminds you of something".

Funny thing how everyones guns are pointing to the right always, except for the suicide gun. Wonder if there's a reason to it.

Basic gun safety, you know. Always point the muzzle away from your avatar.

Awesome thread by the way.

- tube, why do you thing German language kills a mood? I find it actually a lot more interesting than English (in songs), because you know, almost every song out there is English...

Just a matter of personal taste I'm sure. The harsh phonetics and the rather convoluted grammar are part of it, but the psychological damage made by all those years in school trying my best not to learn German probably do not help either. :

I like it despite the rather flat and "garagey" sound. The song itself is fun and the singer is spot on. Even the German language doesn't manage to kill the mood.

I've only played for a bit but I'm loving the game already. I've always been a sucker for witty dialogue.

..."the cabinet file disk1.cab is corrupt." and it stops installation prematurely.

I got the same error. Redownloading the game fixed it. Something wrong with the server? Seems like it occasionally corrupts the data it sends out or something.

Just completed it. I liked the story and the music (except for the weird Toten Hosen cover in the end ) and the graphics weren't bad either. I noticed a few typos here and there but nothing too serious. The game was rather easy and short.

The only thing I found almost too frustrating at times was the painfully slow walking speed combined with the way solving every single puzzle seemed to involve lots of trudging back and forth between the rooms. It almost seemed you were desperately trying to make the game longer in this way instead of adding puzzles and/or other meaningful content. This wasn't bad enough to stop me from completing the game, but seemed very unnecessary at times.

All in all a very nice first game. Well done and good luck with the sequel.

PS: Please find another mirror. Pop-up ads must die!

Well, an ultra plasmic awl, a thermo fusion chisel,junk mail(that might have been), a headache, a lack of tea, a thing your aunt gave you.. pretty much every item that's gonna be an item in HHGTG hasn't existed in another game..

But they were inventory items in the original guide, right?

I haven't burned anything in Windows for ages, but I've heard good things about InfraRecorder. Should be worth a try at least.

Well done! What an excellent choice by the judges!


I hope this means you'll keep on creating those awesome games for us drooling fanboys to play.

A Barn Runner fan game in the works?

Jokes aside, I like this background very much. To give some actual value to this post, I'll second Andail's suggestion that maybe you could add a hint of grassy texture to the light green foreground. Also the tree might look better (less flat) if the leafy part (foliage?) cast shadows on the top parts of the trunk.

His legs seem disproportionately long and thick, which makes his upper body and arms look too small/short.