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Congrats to stylez75! I missed voting, but I suspect I'd have a hard time choosing between Stylez75's more pixelated entry and Potajito's entry. Aside from stylez75's more adventuresome entry, I think all three of our entries (and even the palette in general) contributed to an interesting oppressive/dark atmosphere BGs.

I'm not going to be able to finish this in time, so just posting as is:
[imgzoom]https://i.imgur.com/njlRIYY.png[/imgzoom]

Note to self: Relearn everything you've forgotten about colour usage.
EDIT: Took some more time, added a lot of extraneous detail instead of the window and gargoyle that I should have.

Alan v. Drake has been working on a game with a similar aesthetic: Wretcher

I also don't agree that some outdated pages or articles means that nothing is getting updated. It just means those pages haven't been kept up-to-date (quite possibly because hardly anybody actually uses them). One possible implication of that is that we should cut down on the number of things that need to be kept up-to-date.

I guess there's a difference between how the average AGS user interacts with AGS vs someone who comes in newly. For example, I usually directly go to the forums, and almost never visit the main site, but for someone newly introduced to AGS, they'd:
Go to the main website, maybe tap DOWNLOAD AGS or MAKE GAMES or "Find out More"
At which point they access a page where they can download the software. After doing that, they may want to look at some learning resources on the same page, and they'd have access to:

• A broken link to a set of video tutorials from 2008 (I think youtube changed how linking to playlists worked since it was posted)
• A tutorial focused on AGS 3.0
• A broken link to the bugs and suggestion tracker
• A broken link to the Beginner's FAQ (although it redirects to the main AGS wiki page, which has a link to the beginner's FAQ, which was last updated in 2014
• A link to SSH's blog, the last entry of which was in 2014
• A non-technical FAQ that is from the perspective of an unnamed Chris Jones "Why don't you reply to my mail? I have a life outside of AGS" "Have you made any games? Only demo quest"
• A link to MrColossal's kafkaskoffee art tutorials, which don't exist anymore
• A page on engine and editor plugins that is too advanced for me to understand, but says it is from r4 oct 2009
• An archive of AGS resources from 2006

Literally the only usable resources on that page are the links to the AGS downloads itself, the link to the forum page for the latest version, Sylpher's insta-game pack (thankfully updated from pcx to png back in 2015), and a page of fonts.

I understand that all of these are hard to maintain and keep up to date, so my suggestion would be to get rid of all of them completely, and make the link to the forums much more prominent.
I undertstand CW's frustration at the lack of activity in keeping up the site and the community resources, and I'd love to help, but as someone who hasn't coded seriously in years (I understand it is easier now, but when I downloaded the AGS source a couple years ago, I wasn't even able to set up all the requirements) and someone not involved in the direction that AGS is going, I'm not sure how I could help, even though I may want to: I'm not qualified to rewrite the technical wiki pages. I guess I could mark or delete everything that happens to be old, but that's it.

McPixel and Reventure come to mind

Hmm, it sounds vaguely familiar to me. Like something from a Mega Drive game I played once. 

The first games that come to mind are: North and South, Cannon Fodder, Rampart, and Risk. But I can't verify that it belongs to any of those. The starting drum part is very similar to Rampart, and listening to the music on the DOS version, there is definitely a similarity. Maybe the music for the DOS version of Rampart was done by the same people as this song? (That's Bitmasters by the way.)
Whatever the case, if I have heard this song before, I definitely haven't heard it in its midi form.

Considering it is recorded from an AGS .vox file, that doesn't seem likely

I don't think it is fair to call it a point and click adventure, the game calls itself an interactive storybook.

But out of curiousity, how, specifically, would you have changed it? You mention adding puzzles and challenges, but how would you fit that into the goal of teaching people about how an opera is made? Taking all the information that the game wished to pass on, how would you pass it on differently? Would the director asking the conductor for the key to his cupboard to get his stage plans to give to the architects really be the best way in this case?

A silly and intrusive request, but would you care to draw up a short design doc/puzzle doc/script about how you'd go about it?
It could even be a bit of a different ruleset for a future MAGS...basically make a better implementation of that game.

Interesting! What are you looking for feedback on?

1 hour video! Hahah...no.

But I get the idea that adventure games are stuck in the past- they do seem to be inordinately obsessed with nostalgia. Someone mentioned they were using Day of the Tentacle as an example, when it came out in the 90s, but the game was remade recently.

My take on the state of adventure games today?
I spent most of the 2000s catching up on classic 90s adventure games I had missed, and playing ones released here. I gave up on "commercial" adventure games at that point (last contemporary commercial adventure game I physically bought was possibly Syberia?).
It's undoubtedly true that adventure games are more in the mainstream now than they were then, but there's still this nostalgia attachment that needs to be shaken off. One of my most favourite (despite how buggy it was for me) adventure games I played last year (sorry AGS  ) was Wandersong. I still need to get around to Call of the Sea, too. "Commercial" stuff that still tries to ape games of the past end up really sucking for me- see Daedalic's entire catalogue (especially including the Deponia games).

The "Superman is a horrible concept to write for" idea.
The idea that a protagonist that is morally upright and invincible can't have good stories. To me, that just smells of excuses for not being skilled at writing, and I thought pop-culture as a whole had moved beyond that argument, but I saw it recommended to me as a video again recently.

Hey again eri0o! I'm still abusing the module for purposes it hasn't been intended. It turned out that as you said, it doesn't work with the default dialog, but I don't have the know-how to figure out how to make it.

My question this time is is if there is some way to simply have the cursor iterate through all the interactives, rather than the player having to visually figure out which direction key they need to press. So for example, just continuously pressing a key (down?) would just take you through all the items on the screen?

Isn't that setup bad for ventilation?

The question is, why wouldn't you do that? You're supposed to keep Windows up-to-date, like any other app or OS.
Just turn on automatic updates.

I bothers me immensely when I'm just doing regular stuff, and then suddenly my computer demands to be restarted, with no other option.
Plus, I have to redo the removal of lots of the inbuilt windows spyware after every single update.

I want to make games . And...I just checked, and I realised I've been here almost 18 years.
I need to make games. Sometimes I wish for a magic shortcut that bypasses all the hard work.

Also, of course they were all laughing at the same sexist and homophobic jokes, it's called reading the room. Trust me, you don't want to be the one guy to point out that this joke (or comment) is sexist, homophobic, or racist, in the middle of a friendly conversation. You aren't going to change them, you're just going to piss them off, and probably even make them worse (I'm not kidding, it's a psychological effect that happens).
I mean sure, if it goes too far, step in, but otherwise keep your mouth shut. 
You don't stop that stuff by highlighting it every chance you get.

You don't need to do it every chance you get. Most people are normal enough that if you say it once, they won't repeat it in front of you specifically. And if just a second person from the same group says it again, then they'll usually be "Oh, I guess I shouldn't publicly make these sort of jokes".

The dropbox url works for me (even if not signed in).

About the image itself, I think the problem with higher res for this style is that there is more empty space, and the lack of specific details creates a greater dissonance- the grey part at the base of the building looks really weird to me, especially where it meets the grass and intersects with the door. Perhaps you could have different outline colours to represent shading- the outline on top would be lighter because it is more likely the sun would hit it, as well as shading on the grass at the base.

You don't need a mod to do that. Just go to this link: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?action=profile;area=account
And change your name

While in games with good-looking male protagonists, you play as that "type" (Broken Sword is another example, although it tried to copy Gabriel Knight anyway), in games like Tomb Raider the protagonist also has to wear sexy clothes... I think it would be far more difficult for male players to play as Gabriel Knight if he was walking around shirtless or with much more skin showing 

Depends on the author's intention and what they wish to evoke. Conan the Barbarian would be a lot more palatable than Conan the Stud-muffin.

I'm not disputing the overall point that female characters are often designed as eye-candy for men and that it can get distasteful and ridiculous. But I also repeat again that the sort of one-to-one comparisons between male and female characters that Sarkeesian makes in that video are highly demagogical. A big butt and swaying hips isn't a representation of a stereotypically sexy man, exaggerated V-shape and swagger is. This isn't a fair gender-swap of this, this is. This is an actual example of a character designed as eye-candy for women (apparently).

I think it is more accurate to say that is the example you gave is an example of character designed as eye-candy for women that is also palatable to men. I'm certainly not an expert, or a woman, or anything other than mostly straight, so I can't speak to this with any great level of detail (hopefully someone better suited will pipe in), but the level of uncomfortableness a woman (and non-teenage men) might feel at overtly sexualised women such as the Prince of Persia character I posted earlier, imagine that, but gender-swapped. I'm having a hard time finding examples, because even searching "hot guy" and "sexy guy" on the net focuses more on what is so for gay men rather than women. The reason I used that specific nurse picture is because that's the best example of it I could find.

Oh Gods, we've fallen to the Anita Sarkeesian level of nonsense! Abort! ABORT!

As for how women need to dress in videogames to appease everyone, there isn't a solution to be had. If you have any sliver of bare skin visible, some tier of feminist will complain it's titillating for men and thus wrong, and if you cover women up another tier of feminist will complain we are hiding women from sight and thus nullifying their presence.

As for guys, aside from that loud and obnoxious "muh hobby muscht be kept pure of the cootiesch" -crowd, they are usually just happy to have female characters around.

Did you expect her not to come up in a discussion about sexual discrimination in video games?
And I repeat (for the 3rd time?) it isn't about amount of skin visible in the game. It is about how the game authors seek to portray the character. Take the two videos I shared. I haven't played Just Cause 3, but in Just Cause 2, I aspired to be Rico- I wanted to jump out of a jetplane, hookshot into an enemy on the ground at the last second (thus negating fall damage), pull down radio towers and explode statues. It was awesome. And that was absolutely the game developer's intent- they designed the game to elicit such feelings.

I DON'T have the sort of connection Blondbraid had with Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, but what little I played of the recent games (and even the ones a generation back), aside from very, very few and inbetween moments (swinging about, shooting a bow), I didn't want to be Lara Croft. She's a well defined character, but to me, it was mostly like that video I shared- curvy bum, curvy bum, look at how I highlight my curvy bum. Oh look, I've been speared with a wooden stake through the skull. So much do I suffer. In the games from the last generation she was portrayed as a sexualised for my titilation bad-ass, in the newer ones it is toned down (but still there), but they replaced it with "suffering" as a character trait.

Perhaps I'm being unfair because I didn't like the game (or the ones from the last generation, which at least had less "look at me suffer, oh, I got a stake through the skull"). An example that went the opposite way with a female lead that I'm kinda enjoying these days is Horizon: Zero Dawn. Third person game with a developed character that is not unattractive, but it isn't obsessively focused on her bum (or sexually objectifying her), lots of fun gameplay that DOES kinda make one aspire to be her.