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Saywhat? Does ScummVM actually have built in support for the Discworlds now? Last I saw it was just one crash-prone build could run the first one...

Need to take a look at this..


EDIT: Hot dawg! 98% compatibility, a higher rating than for any other game.. maybe I can finally get my copy of the first one running smoothly?

As far as I know it's impossible to get voice working on XP/Vista, unless you download a specially modified 'abandonware' version of the game somebody made - and I've had nightmares trying to get THAT working.. I'm also not sure if that version's available, anymore, as the site I found it effectively closed down.

Similar story with the great DW2, except that it's impossible to get any voice with that one.

I actually now own a Windows 98 computer strictly for running games like these - brought about when I found that to play The Feeble Files on ScummVM I would need to manually convert nearly a hundred files into a different file format using several weird apps I'd never heard of...

Cool. I'll put it in the sidebar of my blog with a caption saying "AGS user" as a sign of solidarity.

Bear in mind my blog is viewed by 4.5 fellow misanthropes and I give the link to nobody, so it will do absolutely nothing to raise awareness for AGS. I'm just hoping to show off and maybe start a mini-trend..

There's nothing I love more than seeing a screenshot that looks like it's from a c1991 lost gem...

My main peeve about KotCS was the overuse of the crystal skull itself as a deus ex machina. Seriously, if it had been an adventure game you could pretty much have gotten through it with the skull as your only inventory item:

You are attacked by a swarm of giant fire ants -> Use Crystal Skull with Fire Ants
You are threatened by a tribe of angry Aztecs -> Use Crystal Skull with Angry Aztecs
You are standing in front of an ancient stone door, it is locked -> Use Crystal Skull with Ancient Stone Door

I'm sure there's even more examples.

Cate Blanchette's overracting is pissing you right off > use Crystal Skull with decapitated alien.

Interesting question: which was better: The Mummy 3 Or IJatLotCS? Both had their dire moments.

Assuming Mummy 3 is the one where Jet Li appears to play a CGI character who does nothing but roar angrily - there's no question at all for me. I could watch Cyrstal Skull. From beginning to end. Okay, I'm not a big Indy fan so I could just switch my brain into Neutral and laugh at how ridiculous it all was. (Though even as a braindead CGI action-fest it was sub-par...)

Mummy 3 was unholy in it's badness. A turgid combination of writers with no good ideas at all, a director who seemed to have only the vaguest notion of what a film is meant to be, and the worst editing EVER - every single frigging scene seems to last for 30 seconds. It's okay in an episode of Scrubs but this is meant to be a bloody film! Not even the 'action' could sustain my interest in the slightest.

To put it in perspective, I had never before walked out of a movie. I walked out of Mummy 3 twice. (My friends wanted to go to the movies, but there was no way I was watching The House Bunny with them, so I plumped for Mummy 3 seeing as nothing else was on - the film got too awful when they met the goddess in the cave and I figured they must have been through - but they weren't. So then I went in and watched some of the retarded final battle scene until I JUST COULDN'T TAKE IT ANY MORE.)

Just remembered another great, yet fairly obscure game I loved - Iron Storm. I can see why it didn't take off, because aside from the parallel universe angle the game was sold on a gimmick of "Hey, this game is INSANELY HARD!" but to me that adds to the appeal. Nothing was more rewarding in my gaming life than gruelling my way through this game.

Basically, anyone can shoot you once and kill you instantly if they're a good shot. Hence, it's realistic. But you're given a list of objectives to rival most Medal of Honour games. Oh, and you can only carry three guns. With pretty limited ammo. It's kind of like a war-hero sim.

Hmmm, maybe I'm a complete masochist gamer...

Cool to see a game set in Australia and I love the style.

It's Tracer Tong from the ending where you

Spoiler

blow up Area 51.

[close]

I gather not too many people were drawn to that ending, though...

Sounds like Interstate `76.

Hmm, I'm not good at remembering game quotes. The best I can come up with is "Now we are free! Find us, J.C! Fiiiiind uuuuuus!"

Hmm, my one contribution would be either (or both of) Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive or Robin the Hood: The Legend of Sherwood for being dismissed as 'Commandos clones' that, for my money, are much better than the game they're supposedly ripping off.

Desperados has a very manageable learning curve, plenty of action, an interesting narrative and very memorable characters. (Anyone who has played this game will enthuse about Sanchez) It's nice and lengthy, too and has buckets of atmosphere.

Robin Hood is very similar in a lot of ways, but has different levels of difficulty and some extra challenges to the player (strategic planning of a civil war, for one!) to give it a fair bit of replay value, as well as boss characters, training for your men, recruitment, etc. One of the few games out there where the player is actively encouraged to avoid killing, as well.

Neither are perfect, but even though I like the original Commands series, I think those two games by Spellbound are a LOT more fun. Damn shame they never made any editors, though...

I'm getting a weird crash extremely occassionally in a game that uses pretty much the standard Sierra GUI (inventory screen has an extra button but that's it, really) that closes the game when I press the inventory button on the main GUI bar. It seems to happen about only one in a hundred times when I click on the inventory, and there doesn't seem to be any pattern to events prior to the crash to make it occurr.

The message gave me this:

An exception 0xC0000005 occurred in ACWIN.EXE at EIP = 0x00502BCB ; program pointer is +379, ACI version 3.12.1074, gtags (3,22)


This is the first time I've had to report one of these so I'm not sure if I'm doing it right..

The first thing to jump to my mind was Captain Horatio Hornblower. He performs the deeds of a true hero, but it's all actually fuelled by a massive inferiority complex having grown up as a lower-middle-class guy with no idea what he wants to do with his life. He joins the navy as one of the oldest new midshipmen around and instantly gets a reputation as 'the midshipmen who was seasick in Spithead'. His fear of failure drives him to near suicidal bravery and resourcefulness when he sees any oppurtunity and his deficit of any ego makes him refuse to acknowledge most of these as successes. He's a royally messed up character, and that's without going into his lovelife. Most of this came across well in the Granada adaptations starring Ioan Gruffud (though purists felt the TV version was too confident)

Personally, I think there are more male leads that have depth to them out there, usually founded on psychological perspectives. They seem same-y because Hollywood prefers a certain kind of ultra-Alpha archetype - guys who want to screw every woman they like and kill every guy they hate and generally will by the end of the film. If it's toned down they'll put in a tokenistic 'softer side' for the character, like the disgustingly cute kids they love so much or something like that. Because movies are so influential this has creeped into some other media and people largely accept it, but it's a long way from being universal.

Hmm, I'm not sure where the hell I stand on these things. I've lurked intermittently since around the time Rob Blanc II and The Treasure of Drunk Island were released, whenever that was, but only recently got an account. I spent years trying to get into AGS, saying it 'sucked' in frustration, giving it up, trying it again, giving it up again, waiting for Glumol in a vicious cycle.

From my casual perspective it seems much of a muchness myself.

Well, the new episode features a unique item that you can pick up at least twice and Guybrush behaving as if a character who's left the scene is still there, which I guess are pretty major in the world of AG bugs, but they're relatively out of the way so you're not likely to encounter them unless you get stuck (as I was)

I played through Episode 2: The Siege of Spinner Cay yesterday, and I have to say I like that they're doing some new and interesting stuff with the characters and that the puzzles were well thought out. A couple of cracks are showing, though, which I think indicates that the short production time makes things tough for little ol' Telltale.

There are a few bugs that show up if you explore an island after you're meant to have done everything in the area (but there isn't anything specific to tell the player this is the case), a couple of typos in the subtitles, and it's becoming more obvious that there are a handful of models for the bit-part pirates that are simply getting new skins stuck on them.

This new episode will probably also annoy people who disliked the more fantasical development of Escape, though the game has a foundation of evil zombie pirates in the first place so I coped with it. I'm hoping they know to keep a clear divide between ToMI and Sam 'n Max in terms of wackiness, though - something I especially thought of because aspects of this episode got me thinking of Moai Better Blues.

I still have to say, though, that the greatness of new Monkey Island is my dominating thought and I'm happy with how things going. There still isn't much of an over-arcing plot, though, so things can go wrong from here. (Still a bit scarred by how massively Escape went downhill after the halfway point, ya see...)

Wait... the 'double-pack' gives me TGP and BTDT at a low price? Is there some sort of BTDT special edition I haven't heard about until just now?


EDIT: Hmm, I just clicked on the 'top-sellers' tab and it gave the Time Gentlemen Please pack as #3. Considering that the list includes Assassin's Creed, Prototype, GTA 4, Mirror's Edge and Batman Arkham Asylum underneath that placing I'm not really sure what to make of it..

The cloak's so shapeless at this stage that we're really seeing a cloak rather than a character. For a start I think more of the face should be visible, to a point where we can make out some degree of expression, which would mean giving him a larger head, and maybe some texture to the cloak.

A common piece of design seen is to pad the shoulders underneath a cloak and have the cloak taper inwards, to emphasise the shoulder area of the wearer, suggesting a large muscle mass and making him an imposing figure.  I also like the idea of a tail that Oliwerko suggested - the way the tail looks (spikey, thick, dangerously twitching etc) could be a straightforward way to bring some menace to the character.

It's already a great looking sprite, though, as others have said.

I usually don't crit at all, but I was struck by the lighting on the right-hand tower. It looks distinctly odd. The shadows along the front to me only look like they would make sense if the building was on an angle, which isn't suggested by anything else in the picture. And the left-hand edge of that tower looks like it's in direct sunlight, when it's actually facing the complete opposite way. The consistency of the lighting on everything else also makes this really stand out when you look for it.

In General settings, set "Handle inventory clicks in script" to true, then add this to on_mouse_click:

Code: ags

  else if (button == eMouseLeftInv) {
    inventory[game.inv_activated].RunInteraction(mouse.Mode);
  }

Thought I'd best mention for the record that this was actually the very first thing I tried with mine and it didn't work. So I don't think this is foolproof.

I'll be keeping an eye on this one - and I don't say that to all the developers!