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Would they sit and wait for you to log back on?

Great entries so far everyone, and nice work on that mockup anian.

[you]

You've just come off the phone with the head of a major studio. They're considering turning one of their movies or TV shows into a game, and after discovering the AGS forums they've decided adventure games are the future! Now they want you to show them a mockup of what it might look like!

Take a famous movie or TV show character and turn them into an adventure game sprite. You'll get serious bonus points for a mocked up screenshot of the game in action.

No restriction on colours or size, as long as it's something AGS can handle.

Really great entries this month. Spoilerific feedback/reviews below.

La Sol

Spoiler

I loved all the little effects you'd put into the game - the splashes when walking, the changing lighting, the floating trash, the water level on the save slot, the changed walk cycle when the water gets too high... all very impressive and they really added to the atmosphere.

On the whole the voice acting was on the good side of amateur. The main character was probably the best, the Eastern European guy sounded like they were focused on keeping the accent up (both voiced by you?).

I think you were right not to give the option of toning the difficulty down. On a longer game it would be annoying to have to keep restarting, but La Sol was short enough that I didn't mind. I completed the game on my 4th playthrough, though I was about 3 seconds off winning on my 3rd. I liked the way you actually ended up with two simultaneous puzzles - trying to escape while also trying to buy more time. Giving alternative solutions (duct tape works - badly - on the pipe, but you can turn off the valve and save the tape for the door) was great as well.

I didn't pay too much attention to the story, from the way the game started I suspected that I'd only be shown a smaller part of a bigger plot, and that a lot would be left out/to the imagination.

The only other real issue I had with the game was the ending, it wasn't clear (until reading this thread) that I'd got the best one. It doesn't sound a particularly 'good' ending, and you get roughly the same amount of outro as you do for the other endings.

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Beacon

Spoiler

Very, very good looking game. I love your art style and it fits well with the atmosphere of the game. The game was short, but felt quite professional and polished. The puzzles were pretty logical, and aside from a few pixel hunts on the puddle and switch I didn't have much trouble with it. Nice animation on the fish and robot too. I feel bad not being able to write as much about this game as La Sol, though I can't think of much in the way of criticism, so that's a good thing.

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In the end I voted for

Spoiler

La Sol, because I found the gameplay unusual and interesting. Beacon was a nice, polished game with amazing visuals, but more standard adventure game play (which isn't a bad thing, but in this case I liked the risks La Sol took).

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Both really good entries though.

Oh wow, wasn't expecting that with all the other great sprites. Thanks! I'll start a new jam when I come up with a topic...

I thought there was something a little odd about the visiting African dignitary.

x1
x3

Spoiler

Genuinely the first thing that came to mind.

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Was there a demo of this doing the rounds?  Because I'm 90% sure I've played this, but pretty sure I never bought it or downloaded it... not a full version anyway.  I mustn't have thought much of it if I've forgotten it so easily.

http://lastexpress.markmoran.net/demo.html
Doesn't seem to cover much though.

Also, I think Ben There, Dan That! is on Steam as a freebie, if I remember rightly.

Ben There, Dan That! and Time, Gentlemen, Please! are sold as a double pack (Ben There, Dan That! being freely downloadable elsewhere). So it's sort of free, but only if you buy Time, Gentlemen, Please!.

Yeah, the first special edition felt a bit rough to me. Some of the new backgrounds have places where you can clearly see the scaled up pixels of the original art that someone forgot to draw over. There's also at least one place where the walk behinds haven't been done properly and some of the character art is a bit odd (Guybrush's hair and Herman Toothrot are particularly bad). Still, I got it cheap in a sale so I'm not complaining. Much.

Nearly everything was improved for MI2:SE though. The art is better, the animation is really smooth (far more frames in the special edition), the interface is easier and the commentary is a really nice touch. I preferred the original* art of MI1 over the special edition, but I think the MI2:SE backgrounds improve on the standard ones. I was never much of a fan of the hand painted, colour reduced originals though.

*Ok, not really the original. The 256 colour versions.

What is run > sndvol on XP sp 3? Yay

sndvol32

Why is that not the case?

Just guessing, but my theories...
1 - You slide on ice because the surface melts and provides a thin layer of water which acts as a lubricant. Maybe the cloth absorbs the water.

2 - The cloth provides a larger surface area, so more friction. The tyre is full of groves which aren't in contact with the ground, so aren't providing any grip. (The purpose of a tyre tread is to carry away water from rain or ice, to stop the tyre slipping. A bald tyre actually has much more grip than a tyre with a tread because more of it is in contact with the road, but as soon as there's water involved - rain, snow, ice - it starts to slip. If I'm right about guess 1, that wouldn't be an issue for the cloth).

3 - On a cold winter's day the rubber in the tyres is much harder, and won't mould itself to the ground (this is why winter tyres are better in the snow - they're made from a different compound that stays soft in the cold). The cloth can mould to the ice and provide more friction.

@Mods
Sounds pretty bad. I haven't come across that error, though a game that's 'incompatible with Vista' should never kill a PC, especially not to this level. It does seem like a hardware error if you're getting a messed up Dell screen.

Does the computer have an onboard graphics card? If so you could take your current card out and switch to using the onboard one for testing purposes (should be automatic, but if not there'll be a setting in the BIOS to change between them). Alternatively can you get another card to put in it (though don't put in anything you care about - if the motherboard's fried you might kill the new card as well)?

I'd also run through the Dell diagnostics before trashing the PC. Instructions here, but the gist is hit F12 on bootup. If you've reinstalled Windows you might have removed the diagnostics partition, so you'd need to re-download it and burn a boot CD or put it on a USB drive.

You could also try a Linux boot CD, just to see what you get with a different OS.

Really nice game, looks like a lot of work went into it. Love the atmosphere and you've made great use of sound to enhance it, which gets overlooked too often. Good animation too. A few areas that would benefit from some polish, but others showing a lot of effort. I'm looking forward to seeing how the story plays out in the following chapters.

Looks like some chunks have reverted to an older state. One (I think 16x16xprobably 128) area we were building last night has completely gone, yet part of a tunnel I dug is still there. Not got my hopes up of you being able to restore it though

Just a few more blocks...

When I first joined the server it kept crashing after a few minutes with Java null pointer errors. Fixed that by setting my draw distance to normal (it was far). Since then it's been perfectly stable apart from freezing on me once, which was fixed by restarting the program.

Do you always get the same error?

Children of men

Twelve Monkeys.

Seconded and seconded. Also Pan's Labyrinth.

Music works fine for me. Did you check the volume of your synth channel? I used to have have problems with MIDI music in AGS games, but they'd play fine in Windows Media Player. Turns out that when I played a MIDI in Media Player it would set the volume of the synth channel to max, and as soon as I stopped playing it would set the volume to zero, meaning AGS MIDI music was essentially muted.

Nice little game. I played the MAGS version, but I can't remember it well enough to comment on how much of an improvement this is. Still, quick and fun enough for a second play-through.

Maybe someday...

M0ds was working on one too.

Have you installed this driver? If you haven't, install that and see if you still have a problem after a reboot.

If you're still having issues try changing some settings. You should have a new touchpad icon in the notification area (by the clock) - double click that to open the touchpad settings. If that icon isn't there browse to C:\dell\drivers\R275830\ then either Vi32 or Vi64 (depending on whether you're running 32 or 64 bit Windows 7) and run the DellTPad program. Have a look through the settings there, I've got a Latitude rather than an Inspiron so mine might be different, but the most obvious option is TouchCheck. Still, I've got that set to the middle setting and enabled, and I've never had a problem.