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Game of the month? That's awesome!

Do you perhaps have a scan of the second page as well?

They did *not* include the original game extras, like the manual.  :p  The 'encycloalmanactionaryography' which is practically necessary to finish the game, but I still had a copy from my original purchase of the game.

This sounds highly dubious and probably illegal. Sierra isn't stupid enough to publish games without the necessary copy protection codes.

so when do we see part two in this game!!?? hehe

Larry Lotter and the Prisoner's Secret Goblet of the Deathly Phoenix Prince?

Looks overpriced.

Our knowledge about phsyics tells us they don't have hyperspace technology? WRONG! Our knowledge about physics tells us WE don't have hyperspace technology.

No, in fact you are wrong. Our knowledge of physics tells us that faster-than-light travel (aka hyperspace) is, on a very deep level, entirely impossible. Not that "we'll figure it out in a few decades" but that it really, truly is impossible.

Cryostasis isn't hyperspace. Cryostasis is wildly impractical for a large number of other reasons.

Ah ok, so on an AZERTY keyboard, pressing an A or a Z does correctly register them as A and Z in the game?

This might cause confusion for keyboards that e.g. use the WSAD method for moving something around - although I don't think there are too many of those.

Is there some way (within AGS) to detect whether the keyboard is QWERTY or something else?

Recommended reading: Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card.

Recommended realization: in Star Trek, every alien is conveniently a human-sized biped with some silly make-up. Actual aliens are highly unlikely to look like any of that.

If they are "resource hungry", they have no reason to come here - on a galactic scale, there aren't any resources worth mentioning on planet Earth.

And, as Nacho says, they can't practically reach us. Astronomic physics tells us that interstellar travel takes decades or centuries. Now contrary to popular belief this does not mean "it can be done faster but we don't know how yet", but it means that it is, on a very deep level, completely and utterly impossible.

Those AXE commercials are funny sometimes. Imagine how many disappointed teenage boys out there are dousing themselves with it in the hopes of getting attacked by adoring girls and women? lol

Actually, yes. Turns out that this has lead to a minor but significant increase in sales. My brother works for the competitor and they did a survey on such things...

Oh don't get me wrong, I do enjoy graphical adventure games a lot. I just also like text parser games. Plus I'm took a class in college studying their back-ends.

The most advanced parser ever is surprisingly old. Try anything by Infocom, really. Most of them are downloadable for free, if you google them.

Wishbringer is good for beginners. Enchanter/Sorcerer/Spellbreaker is an excellent trilogy (note that the third part is really hard). Then, there are a lot of indie games in the genre, with a yearly contest (where you do get graded on literary qualities). Good games include The Meteor, The Sherbet and the Long Glass of Ice Tea (weird title, I know) and my personal fave would be Slouching Towards Bedlam (which is not really recommended to beginners).

The company Legend was founded by an infocommie, and borrowed their parser. Spellcasting 101 and (esp.) 202 are very nice, as is Eric the Unready. These are probably available on eBay or in bargain bins.

Finally, although they have somewhat less advanced parsers, three classics that are worth trying are Zork (aka Colossal Cave), The Hobbit, and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (all of which should be available for free, and the Hobbit has graphics albeit low-res ones).

Fave AGS games? I suppose it would not be humble to point out my own (see signature)? I haven't played any AGS games with a text parser, I don't think it is used much. Good games that come to mind are Larry Vales (for the humor), Spooks (for the main character) and Cirque de Zale (for the overall gamingness).

IMHO, of course. You owe me a penny for my thoughts

[Voice Pack]

Well, it took a bit longer than expected, but the Voice Pack is finally here! Listen to your favorite AGS colleagues as they take on the roles of drunken slacker Larry Lotter, evil creep Darco Alloy, and absent-minded professor Mumblemore.

Also including loyal sidekick Rob Greasley, fanatic study-head Calliope DeRanger, and scheming potioneer Devius Drape. And last but certainly least, everybody's favorite (as in, only) helpful blue cup, Cuppit!

Thanks to Tiki and Nikolas for voice editing and direction, and Fawfulhasfury, Grundislav, The Ivy, joelpage, Scummbuddy and spacepiratecaine for the voices.

Available here.

People who havent tried it can easily claim that people who eat shrooms are just hallucinating so strongly that they think they have seen something wise. I can say that's not true but of course i have no way to proof it in internet. Only thing i can say is that read about people's experiences.

I'm sure that some people who take shrooms have a marvelous learning experience. It does not follow, however, that all (or even many) people who take shrooms have such an experience.

So is the AGS parser "one of the good ones?"

Unfortunately, not really, although you can help by filling it's synonym table.

What makes a good parser is being able to "put all books except the green in the big suitcase then lock it". No, I'm not kidding.

Okay, see, just for the record, this is what I don't like about text parser games.

No, this is the fallacy that people always bring up when talking about text parser games. Any decent parser, which includes just about everything by Infocom and Legend, won't have you verb hunting. The problem is that the parsers people are most familiar with, i.e. Sierra, are abysmal in quality.

But text games tend not to take you "by the hand" as much as most contemporary games. Sandboxing hath its charms.

'The point' is that psychedelics let you see the world in completely different angle and every trip teaches a lot about the world and yourself.

That's a nice romantic notion, but that hardly applies to everybody. Effects are highly subjective and personal; I am reasonably certain that most people do not take drugs to learn about the world, and also that this doesn't actually work that way for many.

Oh btw "professional" tends to mean that you make money from doing it.

Where I live, the legal age for alcool is 'olny' 18, that we deal well, but every Springbreak drunk US fratboys make the news.

Yep. Reminds me of my first weekend on the Chicago campus. Us international students knew what alcohol was, and the American freshmen did not. So they tried it, in vast quantities. The results where either hilarious or really sad, depending on how you look at it.

[How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?]

How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?

Giving the players more options tends to make the game more fun for them, and encourages them to think. Note how LucasArts games have between nine and fifteen options, not three. If a puzzle can be lazily solved by simply clicking on every hotspot, that's no fun.

Of course, if you have multiple interactions in your game, you are pretty much obliged to give interesting responses for most of them.

Do I really need to worry about the 286s in the audience?
It's not as bad as it sounds. An AGS game (even a 100-Mb one) will run on a 350 MHz machine, and will only show marginal slowdown in 800x600. I know this because I used to write such games on such a machine.

How comfortable are you with me tainting the Adventure Game format with other genres?
If you're making an adventure game, a minigame or two in it are nice but it shouldn't be overdone (and many people think any kind of "action" sequence should be skippable).
If you're simply making a different-genre game in AGS, people will probably play it for the novelty, but it goes without saying that there are plenty of Shmups already and an AGS shmup probably won't be among the most interesting of those. The key word here is "probably". If you are a good designer, you can write a good shmup, regardless of the platform.

Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead.  Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre?
Heh. Depends on what you mean by "advancement of the genre". People are very much divided over whether certain changes are "advancements" or "drawbacks".

LucusArts-style trumped the verb-clouds, the verb-clouds trumped the type-ins, type-ins trumped the text-onlys.

That's actually false. Check out Legend's text adventure games, for one. The only reason why type-ins became unpopular is because Sierra (the only company that was big on type-ins) had a horrendously bad parser. People still make, play, and enjoy text-only games. I'm not sure what you mean by "verb cloud", anyway.

Actually, no, many of the tourists are "such amateurs" and don't realize the consequences of psychedelics. These are people who come to Amsterdam to do things that are illegal or unavailable in their home country - just like e.g. Swedes who come to Denmark because alcohol is more easily available there. Unsurprisingly, such people sometimes cause trouble.

Can anyone describe it to me in one word? It might motivate me to take the time to download this.

One word? For a 100-Mb game? Not really

But here are links to half a dozen reviews of the game.

Try for T ratings...

Also, do the Master Challenge for a couple thou extra RP. It's quite feasible if you have Forgetfulness.

Well. I wanted to join this MAGS because I enjoy parody, but I don't watch TV often enough to do anything meaningful with characters from a well-known show. So I guess some other time.

Your worst enemy moves you from rank 10 to rank four on his Yourspace hitlist. Do you

A: call him up straight away and demand an explanation
B: call him up straight away and tell him his momma so fat
C: drive over to his house with assorted high-powered laser rifles
D: drop a nuklear bomb on his house
E: taunt him by moving him to rank three on your own hitlist