Messages

Looks nice.  Simple, streamlined, and easy to navigate.  You should consider having a "home" or "index" page that people start at rather than randomly bringing them into the illustration page (which has some amazing stuff by the way).

Also, you definitely need to go into the html and change the title for each page.  Right now, you've got:

<title>Untitled Document</title>

And that's not a very descriptive page name.  You don't want that showing up on the browser's title bar.

What was that?

Check out the "Shooting Script"

I made a huge, life changing announcement to my family and friends on April 1st.

A completely factual huge, life changing announcement.

Then I let them pound their heads and squirm trying to figure out if it was true or not.

How about a BitTorrent file of the show?

I was always of the opinion that hot people are hot.

I'm not sure what's worse: my photoshopping job or MJ's nose job.

Even if this thread doesn't help dear Mr. Fmarais out, it'll at least drive a lot of search engine traffic to the site just by using the words "Asian fetish."  Well done.

I thought, at one point, about making a game involving those Magic Eye things.  You know, those little bits of nonsense mixed up pictures that if you look at just right, turn into 3D images.

I thought about using one as a puzzle (i.e. examine the painting on the wall, knowing that Mr. So-and-so likes to hide his computer password/safe combo in plain sight) or about doing a whole game with rooms in 3D... but then I saw something shiny.  And you know I can't resist...  Ooh, what's that?!?!?

The text links are annoying.  You have to actually be over a part of a letter for it to register as a mouseover/click.  To fix this, draw a box in the clickable area frame of the button symbols for each link.  It'll be way more useable.

Also, you probably want to embed the .swf file onto an html file instead of just linking to the .swf.  Though you may just not have gotten that far yet...

The novelizations usually come out a week or so before the films too.  I guess the games and novels tend to sell better when they can draw in the rabid fans who just can't wait for new Star Wars stuff. 

Good point about the dubbed version.  I don't go to the movies here much (upwards of 1600 yen for an assigned seat on the far side of the front row?  pass...) so I forgot about that fact.  It's strange that this country is so important that it gets its own dubbed version, but not important enough to get it on time.

I'm not sure how I'm going to stay spoiler free for over a month unless I do all my net surfing whilst blindfolded.  ("What?! Anakin is Darth Vader??!?!") I suppose I could just join the crowd and download...

OK.  This is not your usual "George Lucas broke my Star Wars" rant.

I knew that Star Wars was supposed to come out in the U.S. on May 19th.  I live in Japan, and being a Star Wars fan since I was just a little Vince, I decided to check out the IMDB site to see when it would hit theaters here.  These days, the really big films usually have simultaneous worldwide releases, so I wasn't too worried.

I did the IMDB search, found this page, and everything was looking good as I started scrolling down...

See if you can find anything strange about that page...

It's a very good GUI.  Here are a few suggestions:

--List items on the menu from most commonly used, to least commonly used, making sure that the cursor doesn't need to move as far for an interaction.  I'd suggest starting with "Interact" (or your dynamic choice), then "Look at," "Talk to," and finally "Walk to." (If you keep it... see next point...)

-You're aiming for simplicity -- streamlining, if you will -- so why have the redundant "Walk to" as the first choice in the right-click menu when you can accomplish it with a simple left click.  Why have it there at all?

-Confine the pop-up menu to the screen boundaries.  As it is now, you can click the far right side of the door and the side of the menu gets cut off, giving you the options "Wal...", "Loo...", "Tak...", "Tal..."...  You get the picture.

-Not on the GUI topic, but a general useability thing: I'd suggest increasing the character's walking speed. 

Other than that, looks and works great! 

...but seriously, getcho ass back to work on Troopers, man!

Re: Potch:   *cough* me too *cough*

Speaking of wacky naming decisions following Japanese-horror-film-to-American-horror-film transitions:

I'm sure you're all aware of and have adamantly avoided "The Grudge" -- the crap Sarah Michelle Gellar version of the (arguably) crap Japanese horror flick series called, "Ju-on." (or, more accurately romajinized [not a word] for Kinoko's sake, "Juuon")

Well...  After "Ju-on" achieved sucess here in the land of the rising sun, and the remake, "The Grudge" did quite well in America, they decided to fleece the Japanese people again by bringing Buffy's "The Grudge" back over with Japanese subtitles.  I just saw the poster at the theater the other week.  I couldn't help but laugh at the name.

"The Ju-on."

Great choice.

"Juon" -> English = "The Grudge"

"The Grudge" -> Japanese = "The Ju-on"

I ran a quick test and don't seem to have any problem implementing this kind of maneuver.

It may just have been cut out by your copy/paste job, but you are missing a "}" in there...

If that doesn't fix it, there may be an issue with this in a version of AGS that I'm not using...

EDIT:  ACK!  I'm an idiot.  Didn't see the "always" part of repeatedly_execute_always...

That's right, I forgot you can't run a lot of functions from r_e_a.

If you NEED to run it from r_e_a then I'm no help at this point.

Personally, I don't see why one man (or woman) couldn't write a perfectly good review for any game of any genre regardless of his personal disposition towards that particular genre.

If a game reviewer is responsible, he will review the game based upon its strengths and weaknesses as a game.  Sometimes these strengths and weaknessess are common to the entire genre to which the game belongs, but this doesn't mean they should be ignored (or overvalued) because you're a fan (detractor) of that genre.  The important thing is that these strengths and weaknesses are not reviewed based on the reviewers taste, but based upon their objective merits.

Unfortunately, I don't believe there are a lot of responsible, unbiased reviews floating around JA+...

I think one of the reasons for having a thread for submissions is, as DragonRose said, that each game is submitted only for the categories in which it excels.  This can help the panel when making their decisions and can also help some of those usually shoved aside games get the recognition they deserve in the areas that they do excel.  Take for example a hypothetical game that has crap graphics, no story, and some average gameplay, but has the coolest and most informative manual ever.  Normally, this game would be completely ignored, but if there were a list of specific games submitted for each category, this game would be considered entirely based upon the merits of it's manual, and not the rest of the game.  Which, I believe is how it should be.

Of course then we're encroaching upon the "bogged down by rules" area that DG was warning about.

You're right.  That shouldn't be desirable.

Perhaps offering year-round submissions would allow us to avoid this.  If a thread was open year round, only to be used only for submitting a game for AGS awards, the developer could submit his/her game at the same time of release (or maybe after a few weeks to see community reaction and allow some bug-fixing time).  Perhaps the panel could start early at dividing these games into 'no' and 'maybe' piles for later consideration...

    -Some developers may miss the note about needing to submit their games and some worthy games may be missed. [/b]
        Possible solution:
            -Allow year-round submissions

Now, the big problem here is that you have a small number of people who are responsible for playing a huge number of games...  The way they handle this at most big awards shows (like the Oscars) is to limit the entries by requiring the people responsible (developer(s)) to submit their product (game) to the categories for which they believe they have a reasonable chance of winning.  This submission may be a simple Email or PM from the developer with the game name and the categories he/she wishes to enter the game into, or it may be more complicated, like a web form including a paragraph on why the game deserves to win [insert category name here].

Anyway, what if people who feel they should get an AGS award in a particular category put up a post in a specific thread saying, as an example, "For your consideration, Other Worlds for Best Game" or "For your consideration, Leisure Suit Larry 2 Point and Click for Best Documentation."

This would A) make sure we're only looking at games where the maker is still around, B) increase the likelyhood of people checking out the forerunners, and C) encourage people to actually look at specific points of the game, rather than just saying "I LIEKS IT AWL!!!11!"

Sounds like we're on the same wavelength, here.   I definitely think it's a good idea.