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Party up yours!

No, but I've got one serious concern. Lots of people seem to write things like "I used to date your mum, but I didn't used to brag about it.", which looks completely wrong to me. Is this correct, or is it a strange automatism that comes from using the fixed expression "I used to" in a negative context?

Normally you should think "I didn't use to" was the right way to put it.

This reminds me a bit of the movie "Teenage Heavy Metal Fatso in Undead Fast Food Hell". Or was it "Meatball Meltdown - The Fortress Of Braindead Heavy Metal Zombies"? I'm always mixing those up...

Hey, I like that style! Fanart, now that's something!

I liked the music a lot too, and found the end song echoed Dylan singing 'Little boy lost / he takes himself so seeeeriousleeey'. Was that intentional? The story was about a little girl lost, so it sort of works as an allusion.

Yes, it was! Bob Dylan singing "seeeriousleeey" was in fact my starting point for that song. It took me a while to figure out it was "Visions of Johanna", though - I had mixed up the lyrics with "Queen Jane Approximately" in my head, and the line I wanted to allude to was originally: "And you're sick of all this repetition / won't you come see me, Queen Jane?", because I faintly remembered the last line before ended on "seeeriousleeey". Luckily, hinting at Bob Dylan lyrics can never go wrong!

So, there you have it - a good, clean allusion.

I missed it! Happy birthday 1 hour and 28 minutes late, bicilotti!

Well and good, I'd say!

In the German language you have a thing called cases (Kasus in German). It's a terror to learn when you're non-German speaking because there are 8:   nominative, genitive, dative, accusativecase, vocative, ablative, locative and instrumentalis.

Nothing to do with the game itself, which I found pretty comprehensive, but I felt I had to clear that up - In German, there are no vocatives, ablatives, locatives and instrumental cases. One of the few languages to use these is Czech, which I have been studying for quite some time now: It uses vocative and instrumental case and, to some extent after some prepositions, locative. The ablative case is property of good old Latin, though.

German might be pretty hard to decline, but it does not have eight cases, I can assure you.

Now I think it is finally time to say thanks to everybody who liked the music: Thanks!

This is very encouraging, especially because I had very much fun creating this soundtrack and did not think so much about genre restrictions and proper composition and whatnot, but simply played guitar and recorded the parts I liked - and obviously it worked out just fine!

I have been trying - to no avail, up to now - to create a CGA point&click rendition of the epic Troma classic Surf Nazis Must Die.

I have come up with an equally epic story involving the three gangs - Surf Nazis, Designer Wave and Samurai Surfers - the mayor and some dudes from muscle beach, and I have even created some pretty inoperative but nevertheless epic CGA backgrounds, like that one here:



Well, nothing came of it, yet.

One single and first piece of advice, no offense: Please don't call your zip archive "Compiled.zip", I have "Compiled.zip" 1 through 9 in my download folder and can't seem to find anything anymore. And now I will play it and tell you if the rest of your game is better than the file name of the zip archive.

edit:

Alright now, I played some. It is not bad, some typos here and there, and it does not very polished, yet (obviously because it is a demo), but I think it definitely shows some potential. The story is a little bit on the weak side. I liked the introduction, despite being very wordy and all, but then to be dropped near some random house and having to burgle was, well, I felt a bit let down by the game - building up tension and telling about knights and fairies and how this does not apply to him, and then just going east to invade some random guy's home - well...

About the graphics: I liked the style very much when I first saw it, but it gets in the way when playing the game - If you only have black and white, you leave the player hotspot hunting in some situations. I liked how you used the style very effectively with the desk lamp, though.

About the characters: They work, I guess. I liked the clerk in a way, and in a way I even liked the bum, although it was a pretty cheap way of undermining the "bum" stereotype. Larsen could use some fine tuning, though - is he tough for toughness' sake? Why does he know about tiger lillies? You know, that sort of things...

About the music: Quite nice. Jazz always works with black/white and crime and does not tire your ears all too soon. I was surprised you picked a tune with a drum solo, but all the better, it still worked well.

A relatively new one, but obscure enough to have gone by below most people's radars is Good Morning, Mister Gingerbread - in fact one of the few AGS games of the last year I played at one go without looking anything up, getting impatient or using every inventory item with the door.

The kids love it:

Wet Willy

A finger is placed into the mouth to create a very wet finger, and then inserted into one of the ears of the person caught off guard.


Bra Strap Snap

The act of grabbing a bra strap through the material of the back of a girls top, and releasing it with a snap. This is usually only done to girls in the training bra stage. The pranksters may say "North, South, East, West, Equator" while pointing out where those are on the back of the girl and then pulling back on the "Equator" (horizontal bra strap) and letting go of it so that it can be heard to snap.


Yeah, and starfish in the fruit bowl, that's about it.

Phew, I must have really missed something when I was playing DOTT the last time. But you're right, the puzzle does make sense, and now I also seem to remember George saying he'd only cut down cherry trees, at that point not collapsing with wild laughter but sitting still in sheer confusion, shaking my head at another joke that had been blocked by the language barrier.

And also: That grandma saying does not make any sense in German, which is probably why I remembered it in the first place. Conlusion: Good article, spot on.

Yeah, I guess I must have missed that bit of dialogue back then - but still: Why would they localize the German version like that? I guess it was a mistake on the translator's part then, not looking up the cultural context of the joke/puzzle.

[that he could not even cut down a cherry tree to save his own dying grandmother]

I just had brief read, and what the author describes as "excellent puzzle design" in Day of the Tentacle (which is true for most of the game) is in fact pretty evil puzzle design in his first example.

"Now, we know that George is reputedly fond of chopping down cherry trees."

Of course, American children might know that George Washington chopped down cherry trees by the dozen, I didn't look it up but I suppose it is some kind of mythical story. I played DOTT in English first, and I was so completely stumped by the solution of that puzzle that I had to get the German version and look how they managed to make this accessible. And they solved it in the most horrible kind of way: You have to insult George Washington in a dialog that he could not even cut down a cherry tree to save his own dying grandmother. I rarely resort to that kind of emotional release, but in this case I can not prevent a heartfelt WTF?

I have worked on some games now, and I have always considered compiling a German translation for them - but I've come to realize that it's just not worth the effort.
There's almost no serious coverage for Indie games in Germany, be it blogs or printed media, and although lots of Germans don't consider themselves fluent in English, those interested in the subject of independent gaming find their way around on English Indie gaming sites. And they can enjoy games in English as well.

Another point is: I'd much rather play a game in the original language than a mediocre or bad translation. In a sense, I'd even say I'd rather play a mediocre or bad original than a bad translation. Awkward language in English does not strike me as heavily as in my mother tongue, I guess.

Yeah, and being kind of a professional translator myself, I can tell how hard it is to compile a really good software localization, especially if it's about a text heavy and partly lyrical genre like the adventure game genre  - it's not enough to have a good grasp of the language you are translating from, you have to be absolutely skilled in your own language as well to make a translation work.

Basically: By all means, if you're creating a game in French or Russian or Spanish, get someone to translate it to English, the language of internet and computer games and everything since 1980. But before you let somebody go the extra mile of translating it to another language, you should first consider:

- is the game worth it?
(No offense, but translating a game that most people don't really enjoy in English is a pretty useless task in my opinion. There are exceptions, of course. And of course you change the whole game with a translation, fixing style errors, adding jokes and giving the NPCs more character, for example.)

- does the target audience really need this translation?
(As Pierre said: Most French people might welcome a French translation, and I think this is true for Spanish, too - but I'd argue that less Germans, Dutch and Scandinavians really need translations. More Germans than Dutch and Scandinavians, though. This is my pretty cliché English language skill table I have put together in my head at work, based on experience, from rather weak to rather good: France, Spain, Italy, Turkey --> Greece, Russia, Czech Republic --> Germany, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland --> Netherlands, Scandinavia)

These are only examples based on my experience, and I absolutely do not mean to offend anyone who considers himself a very proficient English speaker and is from France or Spain, and I also do not deny that there are lots of Germans who don't know a single word of English, but I hope you get the rough idea of what I was meaning to say.

I am a very soft handed person iwill touch every inch of body  i:will make love to you Let me      hold you all night long No limitall pleasure

Is this in any way directly related to your origin in Mississippi, Jackson? If so, nice town.

I played the game and I am pretty sure I won! I now have enough green papers to pick my oranges in peace until kingdom come.

The star artwork is fine in my opinion, but the gradient feels a bit out of place - I'd lose it completely, but maybe you could try another color to fade to from black, at the moment it is just this bland standard blue, not too exciting.

And the fonts don't match the picture, they look a bit cheap just placed on top of the whole poster - you could try giving them a light outline so they won't stand out so heavily above the gradient.  And combining two different fonts in two different types is not a very good idea most of the time - perhaps the lower one shouldn't be italic?

Blake Gallagher & His Two Famous Cousins