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I, personally, don't care for the music of Lennon or the Beatles.  And yet, I mourn the loss of somebody taken before their time by a person who deemed it their right to pass judgement.  I sympathize with many of his ideals and a couple of interviews I've read and heard with him have been, for the most part, quite interesting and somewhat edifying. 

For the fans, I'm sorry for the loss of an influential cultural icon.  For those that aren't, at least mourn the loss of one more peace-loving person who represented the antithesis of his demise. 

I find it too distracting from the storyline in more serious games.  Seeing +5 points in GK3 when I manage to obtain some cat fur would be an annoyance (or at best, ineffectual).  In comical games, it can be a nice humor device.  I always liked the score in Sierra games.  It was also my gauge for seeing how well I did while replaying it.  Since it's so simple to implement in AGS, there's no reason not to have it if you're going to use it.  If it's not useful for seeing positive/negative/humorous actions, then why waste the time figuring out how many points you get for using the oven-mitt with a hot teapot?

DG, if you keep your tongue pushed against your cheek like that, you're bound to become malformed.

I did for a time (having been suckered into it by friends).  After finding it didn't get along with a lot of standard HTML for customization purposes and finding 99% of the people being too irritatingly empty-headed, I ditched it.  If the only people I communicate with on MySpace are people I can speak with on the phone or in person (or, for that matter on the forums or IRC), why bother? 

and yet again I have to say:

Time Out

Oh yeah, that very nifty trailer for a hypothetical concept for a game.  It's being worked on?  Awesome.

In other news...  \o/

BJ game!

My living room is nearly as empty as that.  Seaduck would make a horrible bachelor. 

He's got an excellent point on the colors though.  While I've seen blue carpet used well with US Southwestern styles and Art Deco style furniture, it's rarely that bright a blue.  Consider a blue more like the color of the forums, the carpet now is so saturated it creates some glaring color clashes. 

Maybe it's a culture-clash, but I haven't seen a TV nor an entertainment center that's shaped like that one-piece thing.  At the very least, I'd assume we'd see some cords coming from the back or off the side. 

I do like what you've done with the lighting and the halos (though banded) seem to hit about where they should.  The largest problem is with the contrast.  It makes the light look incredibly bright and the left-most wall looks dark enough to have been painted a different color.  The effect is more subtle on the chair, perhaps too much so.  I can almost imagine it being a diagonal piece from the top down 2/3 of the way with a sudden drop-off. 

The table's colorings lead me to believe it's marble or plastic (since I've seen speckled patterns like that with those materials), but the base and top are so thick I'd have to assume the latter - otherwise it'd be enormously heavy and probably very expensive (something not in keeping with the stark style of the room). 

I like the picture a lot.  The simple style's very clean for animation and sprites and the light, shadows, and prespective show a lot more grasp of physical reality than a number of backgrounds I've seen.  A little refinement and corrections here and there and I'd say it's ready to be Room #x.

The picky side of me wants to treat this like the Critic's lounge and suggest more saturated colors for the BG renders.  Every other bit of me screams, "Hell, yeah!"  I dig the story's potential and it looks to be carried out with a great deal of skill.  Best of luck with your endeavor and your optimistic release date. 

I, for one, have no problem paying for a game if it's got a lot invested in it. 

<George Romero fan raises his hand>

Indeed.  "Rui raises his hand only to have it savagely ripped off by a zombie thread muttering, "Help M3 Mak my Gaem!"

Whether 2D or 3D is preferred, the 3rd in the series was a pretty worthy addition (apart from the obvious: "We're in 3D, we need 3D-style puzzles!" problems).  Yep, 1up seems a little slow and dragged me into the abyss of forgetfulness with them.  3D seems the way adventure games are going.  Hopefully, they learn from past mistakes and manage to avoid 3D platformer tedium.

Makes it that much easier to pin-point your location at a given time.  Make sure your overnight-abduction bags are packed and ready to go, please. 

Increator's start of the day sounds an awful lot like Dirk Gently's.

Pixar's connections to Disney aren't precisely severed.  The contract expires with the release of Cars (ending the preset number of films obligation), but the changing of staff at Disney makes for a less stressful potential relationship.  It won't be as Disney-weighted as the last agreement.  The Disney Toy Story sequel sounds crap-tastic and there are attempts to get a Pixar script in the works rather than have Disney crap one out. 

I'd love to see an Incredibles sequel too, hopefully Pixar jumps into that one instead of Disney grabbing the option (one more advantage to renewing agreements with Disney). 

Back on-topic, look forward to X-Men 3, despite not being much of a comic book reader I dug the first two.  Kelsey does seem the perfect choice from the little I've read/watched of the series and they've got a more interesting assortment of characters pending this time around.

I think it's more the advent of website/trailer.  After all, many games (adventures too) have been announced but never gone anywhere.  I had totally forgotten about the previous BS4 thread, just as I eventually managed to forget Sam and Max: Freelance Police and FT2 (Not to mention the quickly-canned potential press release for GF-2). 

Admittedly I forgot about the previous thread (despite posting in it), but who wants a bunch of unburied zombie threads roaming around anyway?

Regardless of some of the quirks that came with the departure from glorious sprites and animation to the somewhat tepid 3D, the last Broken Sword game was a damned good game.  In particular, it filled the gap nicely after the lack of adventure games recently. 

THQ's announced Broken Sword: Angel of Death.  There's a small announcement at 1up.com with a link to the newly-started website with trailer (no gameplay revealed, sorry).  It looks to the be the last of the series, but I consider it substantially better news than having Sleeping Dragon be the last. 

That day (Petteri's) sounds similar to my routine.  However, I found I could save rushing-around time by skipping breakfast and waking up only early enough to shower and leave.  After a few years of this, I decided to wake up earlier so I could work the important stuff back into my routine - namely, coffee.  Now I wake up 3 hours early so I can drink more coffee, still skip breakfast and still run out of time. 

This aforementioned lack of time is what caused me this morning to: Bark my shins on a coffee table (thankfully blood doesn't show much on black pants), spill hot coffee on my lap (with nobody to sue but myself), and arrive at work in the nick of time only to be told I'm working 12 hours intead of the usual 8 due to a sick call-in.  I actually typed all of this before, with more detail but Safari (Mac browser) crashed spilling all those beautiful letters into the abyss. 

Must be something in the air today.

Dig the style very much.  Take some Sierra Dr. Brain influence and toss it into a Toonstruck kind of character and voila!

You mentioned it was a stupidly early drawing, but here's a nit-pick for the hell of it: Anatomy - While I'm sure it'd be different in a final draft, the length of the pinky is distracting (unless that glove's hiding a cocaine-nail) and the left foot looks lifted slightly and rotated outwards.  The right arm's longer than the other and the right shoulder and neck share lines too close to each-other so it gets a little visually confusing.  Ha, ha! I got to critique the picture before you do a final and there's nothing left to critique.  My masculinity is enhanced!

I'm intriqued by the Cold War era scientist idea.  Maybe something a little more Tesla? Or a touch more Dr. Wily (a-la Megaman)?  Interesting prospect either way (+2 to kick-ass points if he's wearing a cylindrical furry hat into which his bulbous noggin doesn't quote fit). 

You seem to be pretty good with your strokes - either firm strokes with definite purpose or miscellaneous less-defined lines for form or volume.   

One thing you've got to try (if you haven't) with your new tablet is vectorization.  Yeah, it's cool to have a sketch done on a computer that resembles what you used to do on paper, but with vectors, you can tweak the hell out of it without degradation.  Even with SVG drawings (I muck with Inkscape sometimes) it has definite potential as you can tweak the lines later as you see fit. 

On size, I think an A6's about perfect.  I used a 3x4 Graphire 2 for awhile and did quite a few drawings, but didn't like the inability for long strokes and difficulty with fine detail.  I'm now using an Intuos 12x18 and hardly use it.  It's so bulky I haven't got convenient space for it and it doesn't rest comfortably on my lap so I think I've used it three, four times. 

A hearty welcome fellow Nor-Calian.  I'm prodding my brainish bits for names from Ez-board that didn't transfer over, but didn't frequent the boards much then.  Based upon organized thought, realistic expectations, and post readability, I think you could safely sneak into at least the nearly-adequate newbie crowd.   It's posts like that that make me want to get off my ass and get to work on half-started projects.

Not sure what I can add that hasn't been said.  Great atmosphere, good sound (though agreed on repetitive fire sound).  The walkcycle was a little awkward but it didn't distract me.

The character seemed perfectly sized for some areas (like in far-off staircases) but miniscule in others (compare her height to the cannons, for example).  Aside from some size issues and, perhaps, somewhat sticky walkcycle, I thought the character blended nicely with the renderings (which seemed to be your primary concern).  Once it's fleshed out with objects, NPCs or whatnot, I doubt it'd stand out too much. 

Some of the textures seemed too tiled.  One room with brick walls and floor had good-looking texture and the (displacement, I assume) mapping added a lot to the "genuine" feel of it.  However, the stairs rather obviously had the same brick texture applied and it looked pretty artificial by comparison. 

The areas where the light-value of the character changes in shadow were helpful for blending in, I missed it where it wasn't done.  Thank you for sharing the tour as I rather enjoyed exploring the (20-ish?)rooms you'd laid out.  It was only frustrating that there wasn't an actual game to play.  Great work.  I'm keeping an eye out for a Game In Progress thread so I can bookmark it.

It's really not a bad alternative for people who don't already have photoshop or psp.  It's more the bugs and shortcomings that tend to bug me after awhile.  Getting layers and some of the more advanced tools in a free program is quite nice though, definitely recommended over MS-Paint.  I'd probably choose it over Photoshop for spriting because of its simplicity, but it does have a few bugs, glitches and missing features I use (last used 2.5beta though).

  Good, smart, and intelligently written shows get overshadowed by some floozy with big cans.

What a world!

Agreed.  It's not a fair world when 50 cent catches all of the bullets.

I don't much care for beer most of the time.  In particular, don't like most of the more popular brands like Budweiser, Miller and Coors.  Corona can be alright, especially with spicy food (to kill off the semi-metallic taste of it).  When I drink it, it's normally Newcastle or Guinness, but I'm more partial to vodkas and rums.