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Sounds great...I'll try to compose a few new tunes over the week or so, and look through my MIDI backlog for appropriately QfG-style pieces (probably not that many). Then I'll e-mail them on over to you and you can decide whether you'd like to 'recruit' me.

It was Prince Of Persia in around '91, one of the best platformers IMO. I think it invented the ledge-jumping gameplay, and although it became frustrating when it resurfaced in the mid-90s with Tomb Raider, I don't remember it being that annoying back then.

Likewise the swordfighting system was extremely simple but I still had a lot of fun with it. It just had a bunch of great cinematic moments like *just* getting through a slamming stone door in time, Indy-style, or the tense moment of wondering, mid-air, whether you're going to be able to cling on the other side.

They've made a few 3D sequels now, I played the demo of the one from a few years back but it wasn't that exciting, perhaps because of my old computer though. The first (2D) sequel ('Sands Of Time'?) had some fantastic stuff though, I remember thinking the rooftop/docks escape intro was bloody brilliant.

Anyway, after PoP1 I moved onto The Secret Of Monkey Island, and adventure games became my true gaming niche.

Well I've really starting digging QfG this past year, it was all new to me, so a spin-off like this is exciting. Hopefully it'll be more than just a parody kind of thing and a really fun game in its own right though. It sounds ambitious but of course it's possible, if Tierra can manage something as staggeringly big and professional as KQ2VGA+.

I wanted to offer my help, but I can't really commit to doing backgrounds of that kind of standard. But if you wanted original MIDI music for this game I'd love to be involved in that in some way. I think I could manage some QfG-style tunes, perhaps with a more evil, dark feel like the game concept seems to be.

Well I didn't know you could kill Sophia by leaving her in the cell, that's news to me. But she's cool, she beats Willie from ToD and that nasty Elsa from LC, I wouldn't want to kill her. And the Indy-Sophia kissing animation is kinda funny, I liked to see that - the way her leg goes up.

The only Indy girl better than Sophia is Marion, who can't be beat. As for Mei Ying from Emperor's Tomb, that's a great game but she's not a brilliant character like Sophia, who, like everything in FoA, is done with the same brilliant depth as the stuff in the movies.

OT: I got the DVD box 2 weeks ago BTW, it's super. The films look/sound great and the bonus disc is packed with interesting info and footage.

Very nice. On first listen it sounds like a mix of a sci-fi TV show theme or something (the synth bass does it I think) and the lovely 'Ghost ship shuffle' from The Secret Of Monkey Island'. Great MIDI work.

I saw it on the news last night when they were still trying to save her...ever so sad that they couldn't. She seemed like a nice woman and there is just no reason for this terrible violence. As I think the Swedish prime minister mentioned, it's a tragic abuse of Sweden's very open, trusting and usually peaceful society. I'm just very sorry to hear that it happened.

Hmm...I have the original UK floppies Indy FoA release and I can't see that much special about the manual. It had the awesome box art on the cover, but inside it was the usual LucasArts manual of the interface, getting started, game design philosophy, etc. There was extra stuff for explaining the many arcade/puzzle sequences in the game (camel-riding, surveying, the submarine, the car chase, etc.), and at the top and bottom of each page were the sun/moon/earth-stone drawings for copy protection. The only slightly special thing was a bilbliography relating to Plato/Atlantis in the back.

Maybe the US or European box contained a better manual though...great game in any case, but I never played the CD version yet

Looking forward to Buccaneer II, keep up the good work Hobbes

In my eyes, France came out of that sorry mess of a build-up to war looking far less 'pathetic' than the US. They stuck to their guns, and they've been vindicated because they didn't contribute to creating the Iraq we're looking at now. The UN failed because the US somehow decided it was for the greater good. If it had been used as it was meant to be, nobody would be pointing the finger at France and Iraq wouldn't be in this state.  Also, IMO, we would all be a bit safer than we are now, and a lot less people would have died.

As for 'crawling back' to the UN, the UN should never have been ignored, but now the damage is done, I'm glad to see some sanity prevailing. Iraq needs to be sorted out, and the UN is probably going to have to be involved for the job to be done well.

As for Darth Mandarb's quote in DG's post:
"The UN failed. Actually, I don't really blame the UN. I blame France. I'm disgusted by France's unwillingness to help the US. The 56,681 Americans who died liberating France in World Wars I and II are rolling over in their graves."

That's ridiculous...the World War comparisons that sprung up at the time of the war and are still kicking about now are totally irrelevant. It's as bad as the one about if Churchill had appeased Hitler. It's a totally different situation. You can't imply that countries have some kind of debt in blood to one another either.

And considering it is a FIRST production, its like a smack in the face for people like foz, smearing what I regard as a fine first production.

There's nothing wrong with giving an honest opinion about something. If we all said we liked stuff we didn't really, AGS games wouldn't get any better.

Vel's e-zine is partly made up of reviews, and so he actually has to say what he thinks. Obviously not everyone will agree. Vel didn't happen to like 'Flashbax' that much, and gave it a middling score. He doesn't claim to be the 'official AGS authority' with his e-zine, its just a thing he does for the community, he doesn't mean 65% is set in stone.

Foz, I don't think it's necessary to be so retaliatory, with comments like "so yes you can say you don`t like my adventure game music.....HOW MUCH HAVE YOU EARNED WITH YOUR MUSIC...not much i guess" and "what games or graphics or music or anything have you done and we`ll all take a look and see what we think." Vel just said what he thought about various aspects of the game. If you're going to put out a game like this, you have to be far more thick-skinned. It's not going to be for everyone (myself included).

Without a doubt, 'Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge' for me. Maybe it's me nostalgia-trippin', but whenever I replay that game I still get so much out of it. Everything about it is near-perfect I think. I love the graphics, the humor, the puzzles, the plot (which is dramatic enough to excite the player yet still quite light-hearted in parts), and of course the excellent MIDI music that runs throughout the whole thing. It can't be beat.

Respectable runners-up: 'Day Of The Tentacle', 'The Secret Of Monkey Island', 'Grim Fandango', 'Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis'.

Notice it's all LucasArts, but they were the best IMO.

Another cool e-zine from Vel. It's good to have regular things like this that keep the major announcements, releases etc. documented. I don't necessarily know everything that's going on so it was a good read. The Buccaneer review was spot-on, it is a great example of a short but involving AGS game. Don't be too harsh on m0ds for missing his deadlines though!

I have all my old games in a wardrobe in the house. There's every LucasArts adventure in its original packaging, since Secret Of Monkey Island came out on those ancient 5 and a half inch floppies. Some of the games like that I couldn't even install anymore if I wanted to, no longer having that type of drive (lucky I kept them on my hard disks all this time), but its the nostalgia of having the boxes that makes me not want to part with them.

My mum is pushing to get rid of them all to save space, I don't know how I'll get round it really.

First of all, I like your MIDI a lot, my first attempts were terrible, whereas this is quite impressive. I like the build-up, it has a nice dramatic feel and would probably fit  well in a very heroic style of game, one like Quest For Glory or King's Quest. Not meaning to pigeonhole it too much, of course. You used plenty of instruments, but whereas it's tempting to overkill with the amount of instruments, all of them here serve a good purpose and work together very well. The timpanis are probably my favourite touch, and the use of the strings too.

I use Cakewalk Home Studio 7 to compose my MIDI. It's a few years old now but it does the job. With my Cakewalk I work with a music notation staff, in treble, bass, and percussion clefs. You choose a note value and click it into the staff, where you can have a snap grid to ensure it falls on the right beat. Right-clicking on the note shows properties like velocity (useful for slipping in especially loud or quiet notes that add expression to a piece), value (you can specify very precise note lengths if you want), and of course pitch. It's very straightforward really, even if you're not a great fast reader of notation like me.

There are other methods. Some programs allow you to create MIDI through guitar tab, and Cakewalk actually has a 'piano roll' view (hard to describe really) which I don't find too useful for writing in, but maybe some do.

And also of course you could get MIDI-compatible keyboard, plug it in and record into something like Cakewalk. I've never done that but I think the creators of Monkey Island 2's music (IMO, the best game music ever) did that, for a more 'natural', less synthesised, feel to the MIDI in that game.

I can see where you coming from, yeah. This all really hinges on what you're good at making, and what you're into in adventure games. Some people will concentrate on giving the player lots of fun, stylish animation, others will like to work on great original puzzles. That's either because of great talent at doing those things, or hard graft working at it to come up with the goods.

The idea of a 'manifesto' does interest me. In a way we did kind of have one with the ongoing Tips article from the LEC designers (can't remember which 2 it was) on adventuredevelopers.com. I didn't agree with all the points, but mostly I thought it was a really good guide to do's and don'ts in making adventure games.

I do like Full Throttle a lot, I think it rocks, but if we're looking at great adventure game design, it's probably not a shining example - even if you take arcade sequences and there not being enough 'bang for your buck' out of the equation.

FT's appeal lies more in things that reward the player, that we mere AGSers would find it hard to achieve - i.e. very cinematic FMV sequences, rich animation, extremely professional, polished voice acting, music and sound effects.

At its basic adventure game roots, the puzzles and structuring, it's weaker than most other LucasArts adventures.

If some AGSer came along and released a game with all the undeniable 'cool' of Full Throttle, it'd probably be about the best AGS game so far. People, myself included, would surely love it. But it's hard to produce a game like that without the resources of a massive company like the 1995 LucasArts. You have to look back to games with more limited technology, more on the level of the games most of us can make in AGS, that really delivered.

If we're creating a manifesto for the *ideal* adventure game, I think going along the FT line of puzzle theory would be a step away from it.

So I've hit that age where I'm getting nostalgic for games I played "back in the day" and wishing that the genre hadn't up and died.  So, like most of you, I've decided to go ahead and make my own game.  While doing so however, I've made a few design decisions based on an examination of myself as a target audience.  I thought I'd share them and see where people agree/disagree.

Damn straight. I think a lot of us are here because something's just missing from today's games. Trying to recapture it is like the Holy Grail for us, and any fresh ideas are welcome...I picked up on a few of your points below here:

1. I remember challenging puzzles that required all manner of lateral thinking and hours of trial and error to solve pre-internet before I could just look up the answer.  Now, I don't have the time to play it out anymore, and with the info at my fingertips, I'm more likely to just google it if I'm minorly stumped.  So, goal number one, make it easier to solve the puzzle than it it is to just look it up.  The way I intend to do this is to make the puzzle respond well to any attempts to solve it.  Give hints, and have at least two methods of solving every puzzle.  Judging from my own experience, I'm not really going to care if the puzzle is too easy if I get a decent reward for solving it.  That leads us to:

I'll admit I actually *like* to be challenged in a game, but only if the solution is possible to work out without a walkthrough, and if the reward is sufficient. I quite liked it when an adventure game was a little bit tricky. When I played SoMI (my first ever adventure game) when I was very young, I spent a fair bit of time on Melée Island, very gradually working through the puzzles. That made it seem a huge payoff for all that puzzling when I got a brand new environment in Part II, and then Part III after that.

Nowadays it's true you might not be 'stuck' for more than 10 minutes before you're tempted to a walkthrough on the Net, but I think it's one of the most satisfying things about adventure games when you overcome a slightly tricky puzzle without help, AND there's a reward there (as you touched on in point 2). Obviously I don't mean REALLY tricky, like some of the Discworld puzzles, but just ones that push you a bit.

Otherwise I think you can end up with Full Throttle - it's a great story and really cinematic, but it becomes like watching a film, because the puzzles are really easy. As an adventure game it's really flawed. I finished it in a few days. At 10 years old, having eagerly paid 40 quid of hard-earned pocket money for it (after DoTT and Sam And Max, it had to be worth it!) the week it came out, I was a bit gutted. It was fun, but all over too soon, with no replay value. With free AGS games most of us don't have to worry about dissatisfied paying customers, but it's a consideration if you want a game to feel like a real adventure. Yeah, the old-skool games sometimes took no prisoners - I always though the SoMI 'How to get ahead in Navigating' leaflet puzzle was pretty hard to solve yourself (rather than using trial-and-error), but it's a happy medium that you have to aim for. Most of the time they got it right in the old days, IMO.

3. Integration of puzzles with the story is a good way to both keep the game internally consistant, and have them not require insane leaps of logic to solve.  The puzzles should advance the plot, not hinder the advancement of the plot.

That's a very good point. Sometimes puzzles feel tacked on to lengthen the game and keep you in one location. e.g. You've got the call from the office, you need get down there now, but where did you leave your keys? Sometimes this sort of thing is innocently done early in design, but often it feels very artificial. There's not going to be a big reward when you do find the keys, it's just hindering the plot, and virtually all players are going to want to get down to the office. If the game's fundamentals are short, best to keep it short, because a tight quick plot is better than the same plot drawn-out with frustrating irrelevant puzzles.

When I played Monkey Island 4 I thought it was great, but I came to realise, when I replayed the originals (as I often do) that it was, as many have already pointed out, a great adventure game, but lacking in the Monkey Island feel.

I think CMI had it, most of the way through, whatever quibbles there were with how it continued on from MI2's ending. Blood/Skull Island oozed atmosphere. Plunder was a pretty good idea for island, and although the map/ship/crew structure might be quite obvious, it definitely felt fresh to me at the time. Also the host of great new characters like Murray, Kenny Falmouth, Edward Van Helgan, Slappy Cromwell, and Goodsoup, to me seemed totally inkeeping with the spirit of MI. It's just a shame that the last few parts of the story seemed a bit lazily (quickly?) thrown together, and the theme park idea was taken to excess - it didn't feel like MI anymore.

But EMI was where they really lost it in terms of feel. The music, as ever, was superb (though MI2's memorable iMuse MIDI score is still tops for me, if just for nostalgia kicks). But in most other aspects of the MI atmosphere, it felt strange. The 'mock consumerism' had been present in the first three games, but not often overbearing - there was a Grog machine here and there, but the surroundings were generally piratey (in the 'swashbuckler' sense of course, not historically piratey). But the EMI creators went ahead with things like the Lua Bar replacing the Scumm Bar, and Jambalaya Island, which has 'Starbuccaneer's' and 'Planet Threepwood'. It was all too much. The Church Of LeChuck and a logflume ride on Monkey Island was a really bad move too.

Even when all that wasn't detracting from the Monkey Island feel, Melée and Monkey Island just didn't look much like the places from the first game. I don't want to blame 3D for that but having seen Bill Tiller's painting of the SCUMM Bar I think a CMI look would have done just fine. I don't know about commercial viability, but the atmosphere of MI would have been far more intact.

From a puzzle perspective, EMI is sometimes top-notch stuff. The game sort of takes off with the visit to Lucre Island, proving your innocence and catching Pete is IMO packed with clever and interesting puzzles. And then great stuff on Jambalaya like the diving contest puzzle, which has many parts to it. Unfortunately, the puzzling does take a turn for the worse when you get to Monkey Island, from then on in the game isn't really satisfying. I didn't feel compelled to see how the story ended like I did with SoMI and MI2.

In conclusion, EMI is a pretty decent game but ultimately it misses the style of MI. CMI I find leaves a bitter taste with the bad ending they gave us, but I like to think it redeems itself with the rest of the game being spot-on with the MI feel and still offering some originality. EMI couldn't do that without going crazy, sadly.

A few that spring to mind, can't quote the second one exactly as I don't have  a savegame near there.

'The Secret Of Monkey Island', Guybrush goes to visit Meathook (a bald pirate with hooks for hands):

MEATHOOK: Who are you?
GUYBRUSH: I'm a pirate, cannonball-head, who are you?
MEATHOOK: My name's Meathook...And I think you've got a little attitude problem.
GUYBRUSH: Well, I think you've got a little hair problem.
MEATHOOK: Geeze! You just don't know when to quit, do you?
GUYBRUSH: Obviously, neither did your barber.
MEATHOOK: Why you... (chases Guybrush out the door)

'The Curse Of Monkey Island', Guybrush and Goodsoup in the hotel on Blood Island.

GOODSOUP: So it's my job to keep up the family tradition, booking rooms, mixing drinks...
GUYBRUSH: That's stirring.
GOODSOUP: Oh alright, stirring drinks.

It downloaded as a .mp3 for some reason, but I changed the extension to .mid.  The opening notes were some weird organ voice on my computer, and when I opened the midi in Cakewalk I found that there weren't any channels set for the four instruments. I think most people's soundcards set channels automatically and MIDIs will play without them assigned, but mine is dodgy like that. I think I've got the wrong drivers or something. But once I set 3 MIDI channels for guitars and bass it played fine. I really don't know that much about the technical side of MIDI, but I think that Guitar Pro MIDI exports don't have set channels so they can end up sounding weird for people like me. (If anyone can help me out about my MIDI playback, much appreciated BTW)

Anyway, onto the MIDI itself. I agree with Andail about Castlevania. Also I like the way the bass builds the song up and then it crashes into that section where the drums really kick in, about 50 seconds in. It's a simple trick but always a nice touch. The use of percussion throughout is pretty well-done, with nice cymbal work especially. I like the section which is just the bass drum being quickly pounded, and the cymbals crashing over it, and them gradually the toms are worked into it.

You've managed to make the song nicely evolve into different sections too. I often find with my MIDIs that I get about 2 ideas to fit together but then the piece doesn't go anywhere. That gets boring fast - and irritating in a game. This MIDI is really good because it has a lot of different moods. The time signature changes help there, although the one at bar 174 was a little bit sudden after the big build-up, but maybe that's the intention.

The outro is really great, a nice guitar riff and the gradual tempo drop is a lovely way to end it. Very good work overall. You said that it probably wasn't for use in a game, and I think it's hard to see how it would fit in. As general background music, I'd guess it's mostly too erratic and heavy in parts. It could work great for dramatic cutscenes though, but not many game cutscenes will be 5 minutes +.

Look forward to hearing more.

It sounds like a good idea, I'm not sure that you can write off LucasArts approach of making it impossible to make mistakes though. What you're saying probably would apply very well to Sierra games, which were often rather harsh in killing the player off for mistakes.

But LucasArts adventures were very different - the focus was on the storytelling, rather than complex realistic problem-solving. The whole premise in most of those games was pretty unrealistic and fantastical, so to try to bring realism to that world, to me would seem a bit misguided. LucasArts were mostly very linear, and you just unfolded the story in the one way you were meant to, but I think that's the way that worked best for that kind of tight storytelling. I still think their Game Design Philosophy was spot on, it went perfectly with the stories they were telling.