Messages

Jared, but right and wrong is a notion that only the society you live in can provide.

I would dispute that thoroughly, as I believe that the perspective of the individual is often underestimated in a lot of arguments.  I also belive that just as a culture is half of the influence on the individual, the religion is probably half the influence on the culture, if that. There are far too many factors to attribute one responsibility for all the end products.

What IS innate is humanity belief in God(s).

Again, debatable. Although religion is seen as a universal trait of all humanity until quite recently in history, this is simply because of the power of churches and the control they had over states usually with their laws that the people had to follow their churches. The population of England universally see-sawed between Protestantism and Catholicism for decades - how truly did the survivors believe to convert between the two so readily?

It would be an interesting experiment if there ever is a lunar colony, to raise the children without ever mentioning the concept of God, and thus see if they would idolise things within their reference point or create a similar concept of their own initiative. 

Maybe in 100 years time the Catholic Church will be nothing but some ridiculous cult, absorbed by science evolution and technology,

I'm not sure exactly how they could be absorbed by abstract movements of society. And if they were a ridiculous cult, they would of course be the richest ever in history unless their trillion dollars gets put on a horse sometimes soon. (That probably isn't hyperbole. The Catholic church's investments in just the sharemarket of Australia is around 50 billion dollars - the point being they aren't going away any time soon)

but so far, and we have come very far, 2000 years later I can't find a better organization to deal with humanity need of believing.

I respect your right to believe in such, and hope that that is reciprocated in my right to not believe. I've never taken issue with somebody's religious beliefs, only through people who use religion as an excuse or even as a shield for abhorrent politics and actions.

Oh, and people who use 'religion' as a synonym for 'Christianity'. There's more than a couple out there.

Of course, that "innate" sense of morals stems at least partially from what we've been taught in our childhoods (plus some instincts), which probably involved at least slight amounts of Christianity (I know mine did). So you figure it out. 

...you, erm, forgot to add "and/or Judaism, Islam, or Hindu".

Also, the idea that people have absorbed religious ideals via osmosis in their youth as the basis of their morality... well I'm not going to diss it outright but it definitely hasn't sold me on anything. I'm more morally upright and ethically minded than a lot of people I know (...yeah, I say so myself, I know) but I'm as atheist as is acceptible, raised by thoroughly atheist parents in a small patch of New South Wales where atheism(/agnosticism for those who want a slipper in both camps. Wimps) is very much the community norm. Until Year Four there was no scripture at all, and I can't say the messages it taught were particularly clear. By that stage a sense of right and wrong had very much developed. It continued to develope more maturely through high school, where I used notes from my parents to avoid scripture entirely.

Generally the feedback from my peers who took scripture was that 'it was awesome' because it was 'an easy class you could bludge for 40 minutes'. I doubt they were taking away much in ethical terms.

Dang. That last post was also my thesis. Does this mean I'm not a real doctor?

(those initial two backgrounds were early ones made by Big Brother).

Ah, okay. DC brought up your name so I was thrown off. And momentarily confused because I thought you generally posted character sprites for RoN. Sorry about that.

Anyway...

Krysis Style = good
New template = very good, considering that the old one does not work (without a lot of screwing around at least)

Yeah, an understatement isn't saying that something is smaller than it really is (as the term may suggest) but rather a statement that seems to inadequately describe the truth of the situation.

So to carry on from your example, "That pizza is a bit small" would be an understatement if the pizza was actually the size of a biscuit. Or "The pizza seems rather large" if the pizza had enveloped your entire house.

Understatements aren't really a grammatical device, though - it's purely subjective from one person to another if a term describes something adequately or 'understates' the facts.

Misunderstanding there, DN - I support the Krysis style and greatly look forward to the first game to be made with them as they're clean, crisp yet quite simple to work with; especially since the reason it took me some time to get into RoN was the fact the games were so unattractive (apologies all round, but I'm sure it's been said before..) and I think it's likely to be more of a barrier now. I was just thrown seeing the ProgZ style in the example shots. All credit to ProgZ, he is a wizard with those pixels, but there's a select few who can emulate his good work when it comes down to it.

Nevermind though, I see all is still well in the world...

Quantum? Of course! Quantumn mechanics! By observing the train you are changing the results! The answer is to close your eyes and turn away. Nobody dies. Six people and a train are there. Open them and there is one and no train.

You then lock a cat into a lead box with a canister of nerve gas and thus allow it TO LIVE FOREVER!

It's Winter here in the Southern hemisphere. But quite nice today.

[Changing market]

As with most things, I think there are a lot of factors that need to be taken into consideration, although simple explanations can be given...

Changing market - Obviously there are more PCs around, more people using them and broader range of interests - with the game industry targetting an exponentially larger customer base they aim firmly for what they see as middle-ground options and safe tactics by following genres that, by median, sell the best.

Ironically, the larger market is also the exact same thing helping AGs come out of the doldrums now, because as the market grows larger, smaller niche markets emerge within that become very profitable, and so a company like TellTale can be feasible.


Difficult to design - Adventure games, in spite of being seen sometimes as a lesser genre because of the passive gameplay, are in general harder to make than a lot of games from a design point of view. They contain by far more dialogue than any genre aside from RPGs, the spotlight is right there on the story, a feasible reason is needed to resolve most conflict peaceably and work out alternatives where necessary, there aren't any hard-and-fast conventions for interfaces and structure, and lot of thought needs to go into those damn puzzles. And if you want the user immersed into a game you need to program for a lot of possibilities.

With all the factors in design it's very easy to make a poor adventure game, as shown by a lot of people who have managed it. This goes hand in hand with the fact that these factors also make adventure games costlier than most other games - because players will have a lot of time to sit there and look at it graphics and music are meant to be brilliant, you need a good voice cast to perform the 10,000 odd+ lines of dialogue and other such diversions to create a true classic.  It's telling, for example, that Blizzard, one of the richest and most successful studios around, decided simply to cancel their near-finished game than release it at a time when they didn't sell. Whatever AGs are, they are not cheap.

(Combined with this is a lot of blunders trying to translate all of this into a 3D environment at a time when the PC technology to do so was quite limited, which set the AG back a long way in the eyes of publishers..)


Personality driven - With their emphasis on plot and character, adventure games are highly personality-driven products. When people talk of the 'golden age' games, odds are they know the designer. We all know Monkey Island was Ron Gilbert's baby, that Leisure Suit Larry was driven by Al Lowe's unique brain and that nobody but Tim Schafer could create Day of the Tentacle. However, PC gaming was becoming big business at the time, and big business men and philosophies took over, to whom the individual is often of lesser importance - this had some bad effects on ongoing series.

Space Quest V and VI are widely seen as inferior entrants in the series - one was made without the knowledge of co-creator Scott Adams, and the latter he was brought in purely to straighten out the disaster left behind after a co-worker quit the project. Plenty of other series have had similar controversies, especially since game companies themselves retain the rights to a series and the characters within rather than the actual creator. Notably the recent Leisure Suit Larry games have proven unpopular with... virtually everyone.


So I guess I agree with most people. Expensive games mishandled by executive bungling in a constantly changing marketplace - which gets misinterpreted by a overly sensationilist press as a 'dead genre' and becomes a sort of self-perpetuating myth for a good six years creating financial poison.

Obviously Guybrush is a young fellow, otherwise he wouldn't get asked for his I.D all the time.

I like the finished sprite, though I'm not quite sold on the colours. My first thoughts were also Jedi I have to say.

Erm, maybe I'm a step behind everybody else but don't those graphics used in the screenshots go against the idea of RON to a degree, which I understood was about making it as accessible as possible? I definitely can't make any bgs that look like that. Props to ProgZ and Zaidyer for being so worryingly talented, naturally, but I thought the 'Krysis- style' (sp?) was agreed on for this reason.

Hi-res template for advanced AGSers or something like that?

EDIT: Oh, wait, looked at the second one properly and I think that's one of the Krysis backgrounds in it...

Yeah, but I clicked roughly 300 times whilst pressing every button on the keyboard. The game's working now, but I've no idea how. I'll post some actual feedback when I've played it a little longer...


EDIT: On that earlier note, I did actually get the same error again. Seems to happen one-in-two or so times I start it up.

Anyway .. I walked away really liking the game and the idea. I'm surprised that I haven't come across any similarly postmodern cyberpunks before, but I suppose it's a fairly new genre so a big congrats in beating them to the punch. The loveable ragtag band of slackers in the dark, gritty megacorp-ruled mega-city really struck a chord with me, and the fact that they're life-and-limb struggles were purely over arcade games just added to the quirky appeal. I admit the plot was thin in the ground in this first part, but what there was was definitely an intriguing start.

Music and art were great, by my personal standards anyhow, and the puzzles all made sense. My main qualms are reasonably petty design things, as they usually seem to be with games on here: I didn't quite 'get' the variable music volumes from location to location and found it a bit irritating, I thought we could have used a double-click instant-exit function given Jakob's slow walk speed and the large rooms, the personality-chip-snatching puzzle seemed unnecessarily fiddly and pixel-hunty (though my biggest laugh came in the dialogue right afterwards) and... well, that's probably it... oh, a couple more verbs in the text parser section would have been nice.

Probably not too fussed about it, but one of the first times the pizza shop is mentioned in dialogue (I've forgotten the name now...) they say "Slice snd" instead of "Slice and". Thought I'd better mention it because I know a lot of people get anal about typos.

Hmm, after reading the harsh criticism here I'm wondering if I'm going soft in my.. erm, early twenties, or if I've just been so starved of Monkey Island I'll be happy with anything because I thought ToMI (or part one, at least) was terrific - in spite of a few qualms with the puzzle design, everything else was strong to me. Loved the music, graphics, dialogue, voice et al. (I was atually excited at the news Alexandra Boyd was back as Elaine, one of those moments where even I start to consider myself too nerdy)

I also went in sceptical knowing that Mike Stemmle was attached because I really didn't like just about anything involving Escape From Monkey Island, but it felt like the lessons had been learnt to me.  Aside from one glitch to drive a gamer insane - the dialogue choices as mentioned. There is no better way to piss a gamer off then to give Guybrush a hilarious line to say - and then he says something entirely unrelated. Who thought that would be a good idea? Fortunately it doesn't happen quite enough to drive you insane. (Outside of convos with Voodoo Lady and Pickerninny(?))

I also think Sam 'n Max and Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures are very good fun as well, so bear that in mind...

Wow, great looking game, I'll be sure to download soon and try it out. One of my many prospective game ideas is for a fighter and it's good to see it is fairly practicable in AGS.

(incidentally, while I'm here, is anyone interested in the idea of a game where sci-fi characters of varying obscurity duke it out - eg. Ender Wiggin v River Tam? Or is even putting together a roster and thinking about what Street Fighter graphics to paint over, as I have done, a waste of time?)

So... nobody else has got an error where the opening credits just loop endlessly?

(Downloaded the mirror, btw)

What gets me with the piracy issue is the simple fact that people who download en masse to the point where it's noticeable are people who just don't like paying for stuff and/or don't care much about the games. If there was no piracy, in that allegedly wonderful hypothetical world, those people would just be bludging and borrowing the games off others. I think for most games the losses from piracy would be around 1-10% of the figures that companies like to speculate on.

I speak as somebody who knows a lot of people in the warez scene who probably only play a tenth of the games they download, if that.

Wooo, indeed.

Bless, Ivy. All you need is one screenshot for all the boys to be wooing you.

Hey, it turns of Maniac Mansion was out the year I was born as well.

I played it for about ten minutes when I found it in DoTT, and didn't really go back to it after Bernard got locked up by Nurse Edna. And... something happened to another character which I can't remember.

The game didn't really draw me in at all. I've had some trouble with the early Sierras as well, though I'm proud of myself for finishing Space Quest III with barely any walkthrough. Damn that's a good game..

* Segregation of plot and gameplay - "I will tell you everything you need to know about your father - if you find me this potion". The player should follow clues to find out about their father - not just play their way from one info-dump to the other.

* Main characters who are idiots - when the player comes up with a brilliant puzzle solution and the main character screws it up, this is annoying. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, I guess, because Guybrush pulls it off, but Brian Basco from Runaway is a very bad example. I can't remember the exact puzzle but he assembles something incorrectly so then you need to find a tool to take it apart so it'll actually work. What makes this even worse is the player can try to do it the right way in the first place - prompting Brian to say that way would be a waste of time. AAARGH!

* Items that come from completely illogical puzzles - the player should know what they're setting out to accomplish. If you break into a tower that's meant to be filled with gold and all you find is a crowbar that you need to open the boarded up door to the plague house but didn't know where to get one then your game is plain retarded. The player will stop thinking and just try anything, it makes the world seem less real and so the story suffers. Or, another Runaway example, I didn't mind-wipe that guy to get three magical marbles. What the hell?

* Big puzzles for mundane items - why the hell can you only get one broom when you walk all over the entire world in Discworld?

*Bad writing - obviously. So subjective it's hard to go into detail. But it's cousin is:

*Bad translation. I take pride in my English skills and I wince everytime I see dialogue like this, from a game I downloaded - "Ok so maybe its true my life is a shit". Or any line of dialogue from the game The Treasure of Lost Island - I actually felt myself getting a headache trying to work out what the characters were meant to be saying. This isn't a racist thing - how can you expect people do be immersed in a story where nobody can talk properly? Unless the game's set in a remedial class or an asylum, it isn't going to work.

* Lack of hints

* Too many flags - you can't do x until you've done arbitrary thing y. Also one that Runaway has a reputation for, although commonplace. Not inherently bad but massively annoying if used too often. It isn't fun wandering around to find out what may have been unlocked, after you've done/seen something.

* Lack of direction - at the start of a game you should know what you're doing. This doesn't have to be anything major - some games it's just going to a place. Monkey Island - you need to talk to the pirates in the SCUMM Bar and the game unfolds from there. And the game should use scope to keep this interesting. Maybe you need to avenge your father, but to begin with you don't know who killed him so you need to find out?

* Excessive cutscenes - ... okay I'm ragging on Runaway a lot but COME ON! The game can't keep anything mysterious for over a minute. Whenever the player is uncertain about what's happened to Brian we're sure to be treated to a ten-minute cutscene explaining everything that was going on - with thrilling scenes such as one of his friends talking to a librarian for a minute. A lot of European games seem to have this flaw as well, I've noticed.

* Taking the player out of the moment - Connected to the above and the segragation of gameplay and story. Escape from Monkey Island was one of the worst examples for me - hey! I've finished the game. Now all the badguys kill one another without me having done anything to stop them. WTF?

* Compulsory minigames - unless they're both fun and easy, like the ones in Sam & Max and some of the Sierra games, these are always a bad idea as noted many times in this thread already. I think these are especially problematic because adventure game designers traditionally haven't had much to do with other types of games, so may tend to produce minigames that are quite lacking. Stooge Fighter in Space Quest 6, for example, is incredibly un-fun.


That's the main ones off the top of my head at the moment.

The homepage was the very first place I went, as you could imagine. They don't go to any great pains to explain how exactly the program works, though, and a lot of information on the site is conflicting. I also do have the latest version.

Thanks for the link, Leon, I'll see how it works...

Okay, I've recently got into MAME and I'm greatly enjoying the world of ye olde arcade games - but I've hit an odd speedbump. Because MAME is one of those odd little things online that is spruiked all over the net but doesn't seem to have much decent documentation anywhere I've found myself a bit stuck and having to go Google crazy trying to find what I'm looking for, and failing horribly.

Basically, I'm trying to run Street Fighter III in MAME through the command-line version and it doesn't even seem to recognize it as a game in its library. Interestingly, the windows version DOES recognize it as a game.. but refuses to play it. It also refuses to play any of the other games in my collection, which play fine in the other version. Not sure what to make of that.

Everything I've read online when looking for help goes on about something called .CHD - no idea what this is, if I have it (it isn't an extension on any of the files) or where it fits into the equation. If anyone could give me some straightforward answers or a link to a good site where I can find them that would be great.