Messages

Yes, thanks for the tip you both!
Adblock do block most of the worst offenders,
which just proves how useless those ads are.

Who thought such a thing was a good idea is an absolute mystery to me.

Speaking of brightly colored garbage, I don't know what grind my gears most,
free to play games with a ton of micro-transactions and terrible gameplay,
or the kind of people who actually spend real-life money on such things.

I saw micro-transactions on Candy Crush for up to 10 US dollars! Don't they know how much real, actual and edible candy you can get for that sum?

Popup ads grind my gears, along with auto-play video commercials and animated GIF-banners.

I mean, who on earth has ever in the history of planet earth clicked on those things for any reason other
than frantically trying to close them down before those ungodly noises and flashing lights give them a seizure?

And did someone actually think that "I know exactly what will sell our generic product, people love flashing images and stolen sound effects ground into a hideous mess!"?

Because noisy and/or animated ads doesn't make me want to see what they are selling.
Noisy and/or animated ads make me want to see how fast I can hit Alt+F4 without breaking my keyboard.

Nice one, but how come the picture is laying on it's side?

[Secret Files]

I'd recommend the Secret Files series by Deep Silver, which has both weird cults and aliens.
The first two games and the spinoff may not have very deep or thought-provoking stories, but they are entertaining and fun.

But you can skip the third game, the story is a rushed mess and the puzzles nonsensical even by adventure game standards.

Thank you everyone, I'm so happy for your votes!

And yeah, cool trophies, Blondbraid! Although I can't tell, are they also based off classial paintings?

I made them look like classic portraits to go with the theme of the contest, but I didn't base them on any particular paintings. In general I just tried to draw pictures that would look good in small size, but pixel-art isn't really my strong point, so I just made larger images and scaled it down.
I do hope you like them!

Awesome! All this looks so exciting!

Nice one Creamy! Is it painted by hand?

I have also made trophies now:

CONCEPT: (2) Creamy (Is ti painted with watercolors? Eitherway it looks nice, very Victorian. Is this detective searching for Jack the Ripper? )
PLAYABILITY: (3) Yitcomics (Looksready to be implemented into a game!)
ARTISTIC EXECUTION: (3) Creamy (Again, hand painted!)

Ok then, an angsty emo teenager with a really deep voice. Have you heard what he says in game?
He says things like"You find treasure, but it's hollow and meaningless, like life." which I'm half expecting to be followed by "I'm going to cut myself again."

I didn't mind the frustrating gameplay mechanics, those are fine. After all I play and enjoy Dwarf Fortress which is 10x more frustrating (until you get used to everything).

Regarding your long rant, well...

Spoiler

You can always turn the mechanic for corpses off in the options menu. I found it annoying too, but I switched it off early on and it haven't bothered me since!

[close]

As for the narrator being emo, yes, he does say mostly depressing things and seems to be in constant contempt and despair. The narration is full of purple prose and bent on making you feel like powerless and small in a cruel and uncaring world, and everything you do is futile. But then again, so is much of Lovecrafts writing.

And there is Darkest Dungeon, and it's more of an RPG than an adventure game, but the narration an art style is wonderfully Gothic and closely inspired from Lovecraft.

I've played Darkest Dungeon, I definitely do not recommend it. I'd say why, but I'd probably just go on a long rant (as a matter of fact, I already have somewhere else entirely).
But to put it in as few words as possible, it's like playing an overly complicated yet more limiting (and thus more simplistic and boring) version of Pokemon, while an angsty emo teenager berates everything you do.

I don't get the Pokemon comparison, but I can see why some might dislike the game. It has some punishing gameplay where a single bad move can easily snowball into a major setback, and it can get rather frustrating at times.

I however, quite liked the game and found the mechanics for insanity most interesting. And I think the narrator for the game is about as far from an angsty emo teenager as you can get.

Thanks, Blondbraid! Yes, you are right in your guess. I avoided posting what it was to figure out if people could guess, but then I saw you had mentioned a link in your rules, so I've added one now.

Great! I guess if anyone else want to make people guess first, you can put it under a spoiler tag.

Hopefully recognisable!

Beautiful! Is it a Girl with a pearl erring by Vermeer?
Please remember to add a link to the painting you based your sprite on, or if you can't find an image that fits,
at least add the title and name of the artist to your post so that people can compare the two.

But otherwise, it's some very nice pixel-art and it's hard to believe that you only used 14 colors!

There's Sherlock holmes and the call of Cthulhu, though it's more Sherlock Holmes than Lovecraft in my opinion.
And there is Darkest Dungeon, and it's more of an RPG than an adventure game, but the narration an art style is wonderfully Gothic and closely inspired from Lovecraft.
And this game is a point and click adaption of his novel The Outsider.

Superman with a Santa beard and shooting two clones of Hitler with the most impractical gun he could find.

EDIT: Hmmmm... I had to give up after the game wouldn't let me simply:

Spoiler

Blow up the crystal I placed on the rockfall with my phaser...

[close]

Maybe this is a bug? But if there is actually a different solution then the game needs to explain why the simpler solution doesn't work...

Actually, Grok put that in intentionally.
The trick is to:

Spoiler

Don't stay too close when the crystal blows up or you'll die in the blast. Try standing a bit further away before you shoot the crystal. Also, the phaser is a little slow and some objects require you shooting at it for a while before any change happens.

[close]

I hope that this tip helped and that you'll give the game another go.

I love adventure games, but I think a problem with many of them is that they are preaching to the choir so to say,
they are made by and for those who are already fans of the genre, which tend to be rather forgiving on most of the flaws.

Part of the problem is that the genre is so closely associated with byzantine and nonsensical puzzles that either makes the player stuck,
or makes them lose patience and just look up a walkthrough instead. That's probably why Tell Tale have been praised for revitalizing the
genre, since they have focused on telling a good story and only use puzzles when it works with the story.

I also think graphics play a huge role, since the golden age of adventures ended about the same time lots of developers switched to 3D,
pretty much all the early 3D games have aged terribly and Grim Fandango is the only one that still looks good, but those characters were supposed to look like origami puppets.
Many adventure games today are in 3D, but in many cases they just look like cheap attempts to imitate the graphics of big-budget RPG's and FPS,
and many other games use in pixel-art. Now don't get me wrong, many of those pixel-art games look beautiful an you can really see all the work and effort behind them, but it
can lead to some players thinking that it's just another game trying to cash in on 90s nostalgia, which is a shame, since a lot of those games are pretty good.

I wish more adventure games would try to experiment with beautiful 2D art, since I think it's one of the genre's greatest strengths, and some games, such as Memoria and The whispered world have some of the most beautiful imagery that I've ever seen in a game, looking like a picure-book come to life. However, both of them did have problems with that byzantine-puzzles stuff I described earlier.

Something that worries me about Brexit is that it's toted as "the will of the people", but from what I've seen on the news, not only was there an exceptionally low participation rate in the voting, many people have come forth and said that they weren't sure about the consequences of what they were voting on and have since changed their mind. I wonder how the results would be if another vote on Brexit was held today.

At the same time, I can see what some of the criticism of EU comes from, since it wasn't originally constructed to be a union for all of Europe. EU started off as the European Coal and Steel Community after WWII, and its main purpose was to prevent another war between France and Germany by making West Germany and France share their market for steel and coal. Europe also looked different then, with the cold war and iron curtain and people wanted to stand united against the eastern bloc.

Now however, many more and different countries are part of the EU, and most of them have very different socio-economic systems from one another, and what might be beneficial to some of them have been detrimental to others. One such example is environmental and health-regulations on food and agriculture. EU have imposed restrictions that prevent the use of some dangerous pesticides, which have been an improvement for many former soviet-states, but at the same time, the same regulations have led to many previous forbidden pesticides and substances being made legal in the Scandinavian countries, which before entering into EU had much stricter regulations on such things.

And I think all can agree on that switching to Euro haven't worked out too well for Greece.

[1. Contain enough elements so that the sprite is recognizable as an adaption of the original painting.2. Contain an image or link to the original painting.]

Hello everybody! I've had a really, really hard time to decide a theme for the sprite jam, but I hope you find this challenge interesting:

The sprite shall be an adaption of a character from a classical painting!
You may re-interpret the figure or remake it in your own style, but the entry must:

1. Contain enough elements so that the sprite is recognizable as an adaption of the original painting.

2. Contain an image or link to the original painting.

If you feel short on inspiration, I couldn't resist including a few pictures of some of my favorite artists:

From left to right: "The little foot-page" by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, "The Bewitched Man" by Francisco Goya, "The temptation of S.t Anthony" by Max Ernst, "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" by Caspar David Friedrich,
"Lot and His Daughters" by Albrecht Dürer, "The witches' Sabbath" by Francisco Goya and "Algerian Women in Their Apartments" by Eugène Delacroix.

Good luck and hope you have fun!

Winners get these trophies:

Gold:

Silver:

Bronze:

Ooh!  But I think all of those entries would be great in future AGS games, I admit that.

If anyone wnts to use the Axololita sprite, be my guest!