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Switch "movies" for games, "Star Wars" with "Monkey Island", and "the original trilogy" with "the first two", and that little rant could've come from me! Except it probably wouldn't be fair to blame George Lucas in that case.

As for Star Wars III, i'm still looking forward to it! I don't think I feel anywhere near strongly enough about Star Wars in general anymore to really have any passionate positive or negative feelings towards the new film. Whatever my feelings turn out to be, I'll make sure not to explain or defend them in any way, just because I'm so goddamn sick of talking about Star Wars in anything more then a general way.

A lovely copy of the CD version of Loom cropped up on ebay recently. I figured I'd have a go at grabbing it, planning to allocate ten of my fine English pounds to the cause! This evening, with two minutes of the auction to go, it was still only at £2.50, so I assumed I wouldn't have too much trouble getting it. And then what happens? Then THIS happens:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=8191182382

I guess some people really do love that game!

Which leads neatly into this thread: Does anyone else here except me (and those two excitable rich bidders) enjoy this game as much as me? Like Zak and Last Crusade, it's one of the Lucasarts games people hardly ever seem to talk about.

I only played it for the first time a few weeks ago, and I thought it had a great elegant atmosphere and was generally a top notch afternoons entertainment. A lot different from anything else Lucasarts ever tried to do, and all the more interesting because of that. Yeah it's short, but I *like* short games when I'm not paying a fortune for them. Reading about the binned sequels on Mix'n'Mojo makes me a little sad that we'll never see any more of the game's odd universe.

Also, it's probably the most collectable Lucasarts game ever, what with it being in so many different versions and all. One day I must own the gorgeous-looking CD-vocal version, not to mention the apparently excellent FM-Towns version. The latter seems to be impossible to find in any form though.

I know some here like it, I know some here hate it - any thoughts on this game either way?

One of my all-time favourite films is Tornatore's "The Legend of 1900" with Tim Roth. It's probably not strictly fantasy, but I think it's got the kind of 'feeling' you're talking about. It's whimsical and sad, and the music (by Ennio Morricone) is just wonderful. A lost classic, I think.

The thing is, I don't have a problem with people not liking the new films - lots of people have valid, intelligent arguments explaining what they feel the problems are and I respect that and agree with a lot of them. Hell, I thought episode 1 was a horrendous mess for the longest time for a lot of sensible reasons, and don't feel all that differently now.

But it just gets so boring reading the same old obvious complaints again and again and again. I kind of lost most of my interest in Star Wars years ago, and then when I watched the prequels for the first time in ages, not really caring either way, I realised that there's plenty of stuff to enjoy in there.

Not as much as there is in Return Of The Jedi, though. I love that film! I was pretty shocked when I found out how much all the hipster geeks out there hate it. And hipster geeks control the world!

I'm probably one of the few non-hardcore Star Wars fans on the internet who'll admit this, but I still find the first two pretty enjoyable despite their lapses into awfulness, and I think they're more interesting and creative then they're usually given credit for (to shatter my 'net cred' even more: I reckon Empire is overrated and like Return Of The Jedi best out of the first three), so I fully expect to enjoy the crap out of the third one. I doubt it'll blow my mind or anything, but I'll be amazed if I don't enjoy it a lot.

I get the feeling a lot of it comes from being so damn sick of seeing people's bitter whinings about the prequels all over the internet that I end up wanting to like them.

Er, yeah sorry about that little rant before, it was kind of out of the blue and irrelevant. I think I was just in a mood and felt like moaning about whatever came along. I don't actually have much of a problem with drugs at all!

I hate people associating imagination and originality with drugs. "Hur-hur, what was the creator ON??". It's like all anyone knows how to say these days when confronted with something that doesn't come from a template.

Agreed. Over here we have a load of nostalgic tv-shows where 'hilarious' pundits make comments about old childrens shows, and when it comes to supposedly 'psychedelic' stuff like the Moomins or whatever, they're all crawling over each other to be the first to say " Everyone who made this must've been... ON DRUGS!!".

I think this is a load of balls mainly because it's such a lame and cliched joke at this point, but also because it's another examle of this stupid trend where people seem to feel the need to reject the idea of people being geniunely talented and imaginative on their own, instead 'blaming' it all on drugs as if your average man on the street only needs to take some combination of chemicals and he can come up with some work of imaginative genius without putting any thought or work into it at all.

I've seen people try to 'explain away' the goodness of countless bands and even comedians like the Pythons through their use of various drugs. Obviously some of those people did take drugs, and that probably did have some influence on what they did, but I don't buy the idea that drugs can create, or even significantly expand, someone's creativity in a way that couldn't have been achieved without. In the case of most genius drug-users its usually pretty clear that they'd have come up with great stuff no matter what they did or didn't take

When Morgan Freeman filmed his role in The Shawshank Redemption, he was in fact only seven years old. Fact!

I used to totally love the text adventure when I was a kid. It might even've been my first intro to Hitchhikers. I keep meaning to set some time aside to go through it again.

It is practically impossible to finish on your own, but my version had all the hints built directly into the game, so it didn't matter. The thing is filled with just a ridiculous amount of detail and tiny jokes and things. The hint thing I had gave you a big list of all the guide entries and fun things to try in the game, but they don't seem to have put those online, the churls.

Aha, all I needed to do was rename the tracks "Track5" etc and it figures out the format by itself - i'd been writing .ogg afterwards. Thanks for trying to help, though. I didn't want to try out the game properly without it being in its best form, and now it is.

Now all that's left to do is track down the FM-Towns version of Loom!

A bit off topic, but seeing as people are talking about Japanise versions of Zak... Has anyone managed to get the FM-Towns version of the game working in ScummVM, with proper OGG sound? I can get the game working, and I got the OGG files from Soundfont island, but I can't get them to play during the game even after renaming all the files like they say. Any ideas?

Also: is Zac McKraken actually any good? It's the only Lucasarts adventure I've never properly played, but no one seems to feel the need to talk about it much.

The moment when the main theme tune kicks in was definitely a chills-down-the-spine moment. The So Long And Thanks For All The Fish song was pretty catchy as well. And excellently reprised in Divine Comedy form at the end!

^^ good points.

Personally I wasn't bothered about 'accuracy', things being changed or shortened in principal, I was bothered by the fact that most of the big changes and additions didn't really make the story any more 'cinema-ready' or coherent, but also didn't add much in the way of good comedy. It just seemed to have a couple of new subplots thrown in there for no clear reason at all.

There was still enough good stuff in there to make it a basically enjoyable film, but I wish I could look back on it and go "yeah they really nailed it with that Hitchhiker film they did", instead of "Hm, not too sure about that one".

So did anyone end up catching Hitchhikers? This forum seems to have an odd habit of getting excited about things then not actually talking about them when they finally come out.

I mostly enjoyed watching it and thought it was more-or-less consistently funny all the way through, but I was pretty disappointed on the whole. I have no problems with new additions in theory, but most of the new stuff in the film just didn't achieve much at all, and a lot of the original stuff wasn't handled very well. The whole thing was just choppy and muddled as all hell.

Even though I'd say the visuals and casting (aside from Arthur) were generally weaker in the old TV series, that's still the place to go if you want something that mostly 'gets' the tone and humour of the radio/book versions. You do miss out on the delightful Zooey Something O'Rother if you skip the film, though.

Any thoughts?

From the interview:

"The games industry can't afford to lose its brightest minds"

Kind of a sad quote, because in reality I think it probably can and will afford it just fine.

I love Tim Shafer: he doesn't like how things are going, but he doesn't give up by selling out or hiding away in a marginalised nostalgic niche in some dusty corner of the industry. Instead he tries something new to show how his creative ideals can be housed in fresh, exciting forms. But he'll never make any money. Double Fine will surely go under eventually, and that will be a dismal day.

I deem a scale that classifies Battle Royale as a bad film to be a curious scale indeed.

So has any consensus been reached on the quality of this game yet? After all the pre-release fuss everything seems to have gone a bit quiet about it.

Speaking of which, I can't help suspecting that the seeming complete lack of awareness about this game from the percentage of the population who're unable to recite Tim Schafer's entire career biography on command is a less then promising signal of this game's commerical prospects.

Not surprising, but sad if true.

Confession: after dismissing Nanaca Crash my housemate took a liking to it and I promptly got addicted also. Yesterday I got just a notch under 18000 thanks to some bouncy force field bonus, though my pc doesn't seem to have saved the score. Also I've been wide awake for 24 hours and counting rushing my most important essay ever and my brain is fast ceacing to function. but Zoo keeper eases the pain.

If you think that's bad, I was one of the apparently minute percentage of men who TheSpark.com's gender test misidentified as a woman.

All I can say is: yikes!

I can't get past the level where the monkeys start appearing (level 7?), but that game is insanely infectious. Almost 'Dr. Robonic's Mean Bean Machine' infectious. It's so damn infuriating when you know there's a move to make, but you just can't spot it.

The other one seems a bit too random and infused with anime lunacy for me to really take to.