Messages

Hope this helps

Thanks Ben - the puzzle makes more sense now.

EDIT: Yay, I've just finished it!

I need some help with

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getting the ammunition crate open?

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Thanks.

Yeah, thanks. I had to think of Stephen King's book "On Writing". Could he have named it "About Writing" instead? According to your explanations, he could, so thanks

Yes, he could have, but there is a subtle difference, I think. "On Writing" sounds more scholarly than "About Writing". The title "On ..." is typically used for academic publications, whereas "About ..." would be a more suitable title for a book aimed at a more general market. That's the way I see it, anyway.

I'm stuck in the same place as FireOrange was (first posting in this thread), but

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the tricorder doesn't tell me anything about the yellow vial and the player character says he doesn't have any reason to read any of the books in the sick bay.

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Oh, hold on a sec.

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Okay, I improved my Italian and got into duct

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Let's see. :-) I bet there'll be more to come .

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still didn't get rid of JaJa

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It looks like you're making excellent progress.

If you have opened the grating in the bathroom...

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...then you will have access to two more rooms in the game, where there are lots (and lots) of new things to investigate.

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I think there is probably a lot more you have to do before you can get past JaJa. If I remember correctly, this is something you won't be able to do until much later.

You have the right ideas about...

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...winning the pool game - have you already done this? To get rid of the shrunken head, you need to dump it somewhere. Somewhere where someone else might... eat it.

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One other thing you might not yet have tried...

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You can leave the boiler room by a different exit from the way you came in. There are lots of things you can do in this room.

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I hope this helps a bit more.

I need some help with T-Rex and Muscle Sam.

I have done so far:

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hook in position, defeated Lord Chester

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But now I'm totally stuck.

How do I

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open the grating in the bathroom and the door in the editing room

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?

Heeeeeeeeeeelp.

Hi Jamol. Here are a few hints that should get you a bit closer to your goals...

Grating - basic idea:

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Getting this open is a good plan, because Sam can hear people talking on the other side and when you find out what they are talking about, a lot of things will start to make sense.

If you look at or interact with the grating (I don't remember which) you'll find that it's welded in place, so a screwdriver isn't going to cut the mustard here. You're going to need something more hardcore, like a welding torch or a flame-thrower.

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Grating - what you'll need in order to get it open

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Something flammable to spray, and some way of lighting it. Have you got into the women's changing rooms yet? Have you looked closely at Tim? He has something on him that isn't immediately obvious. To get both of these items, there is a fair bit more you need to do.

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Grating - how to get the first item

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Elena, who is in the garage, has a key to the women's changing rooms. If you have not yet managed to open the door to the garage, something in the men's changing rooms will help. You then need to help Elena, which will end up doing more harm than good, but on leaving and returning to the garage you'll find the key.

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Grating - how to get the second item

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Tim has something in his pocket. You need to distract both Tim and Butch. Talk to Tim to find out what his ambition is, and then find some way of achieving it for him (this should be quite easy if you've visited all the rooms you can so far). Butch won't let you near Tim, so you need to find a way of incapacitating him. Mental Man can help here, but there's more you have to do first, such as winning the game of pool, finding a wrestling partner for Pops and helping (or not) the police with their enquiries.

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Door in the editing room

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Do you mean the door to the cupboard on the right? To get this open, you first need to get rid of JaJa. Talk to him and find out what his ambitions are. Then see if you can help him achieve his dream somehow.

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As this is one of those games where to do X you first have to do A, B, C, etc, all the way down to W, it's worth going back to all the rooms you have visited and seeing what you can do with the people there and the inventory items you have.

Good luck! Post again if you need more hints.

The original post on that page sounds exactly like sleep paralysis, followed by bullshit about his mother seeing a ghostly figure walk past. Sounds like the friend had a real experience, and then made up the ending bit. I've had sleep paralysis before, and that's exactly how it is.

Agreed. At least two people in the thread mention that it is just sleep paralysis.

The guy who claims he had the "This Game" experience doesn't mention whether he is a mobile-phone salesman though...

That is an creepy story. However it's less a case of life imitating art, and more a case of unsubstantiated-internet-story imitating entertaining-freeware-game.

Heh heh, I like it. That wouldn't have made a very snappy title for this thread though

This thread on reddit contains a comment (the one beginning "This is one my dad told me.") that sounds awfully like some of the gameplay in This Game. Spooky!

@PuNKKoMmANDO77: Thank you for the nice comment!

I got a good chunk of work done over the weekend but there's still a lot to do. Realistically, I don't this game will be seeing the light of day until 2010.

Anyone remember Granny's Garden?

We used to have this on an old Acorn computer at school, with about 8 floppy disks to run it.

We were one of the first schools in the area to have BBC computers. Ben, you're making me feel old!

Hi Leon,

Leon, could you let me know what sentences are not translated? I thought I had got everything. One thing I do notice that has not been translated is the verbs in the verb coin... these still come out as "guarda" ("look"), "usa" ("use") and "parla a" ("talk to").

There are two errors I realised I had made in the translation after downloading the English version of the game: there appear to be two save buttons in the save/load dialog, but the button with the bench on it is actually the cancel button; also the characters talk in British English when they are supposed to be American... I started off using American English for the translation but later on misunderstood some of the text and thought they were supposed to be British... argh! I apologise to everyone for this cock-up. Hopefully it won't spoil your enjoyment of the game.

As for some of the other bugs you mention:

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- The remote control doesn't have an icon in your inventory? An as description it says: comando.. ?
- When Brick tells you he has to go, he leaves but the dialog still continues.

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I noticed these too and mentioned them to Punkkommando, but maybe he forgot to fix them or wasn't able to.

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- When you try to change the channel in the recreation room, the text that follows in black is completely unreadable...

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That's Gigi (or is it Jojo?) saying "Honk honk honk", so you're not missing anything important here, but black text (with a black outline) is probably not the best choice of colour.

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- Another weird one. When looking at the spider in your inventory (hold the mouse down on the spider and moving to the eyes) the inventory closes... ?

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I think what is happening here is that when you move the mouse off the edge of the inventory dialog it closes, so possibly this is what happened (and the mouse has probably moved off the verb coin too).

Whoohooo.... congrats also to Paolo for (t)his job!
Well done to all.

Thanks, Leon - I hope you enjoy the game as much as I did while I was translating it.

A quick update on the translation, folks... I reckon I've got about 75% of it done now.

@Leon: The font is different from the one used in Dovadula's Burn, but is similar - again it's one where lower-case letters come out looking like capitals, but this time it should be a lot more readable.

A further update... progress is slow because I can only work on the game from time to time, but a fair number of the animations have now been done.

Thanks for the comments.

The portraits are about half done now. I hope to get more done over the weekend.

Superb graphics! I'm looking forward to this one

Thank you!

It will be quite a while yet, I'm afraid. So far I have done the portraits for about a third of the characters... the one you see above is one of the most expressive with six different facial expressions. I have two-thirds of the walkcycle done for this character too. Lots more to do, but it is coming along, little by little.

Update...

I've decided to do the character art myself. It's not that difficult, just laborious and slow-going, but it's coming along slowly.

The game uses portraits for speech and these are now complete for a few of the characters. Here's a sneak peek of Tracey's main portrait...



The portraits for each of the main characters will have various expressions.

Anyways, one thing I'm curious about, when you say the word 'advertisement', what syllable do you stress, ADvertisement (I'd always do this) or adVERtisemet (heard people do it), is this an AmE vs. BrE thing? Also, issue, do you pronounce the 's' as in the word 'sure' (basically ishyou) or as in 'scent' (isyou)? Again I'd never even consider saying the second but I've heard it, even in American TV, I think.

ad-VER-tiz-m'nt (SAMPA: /{d"v3:tIzm@nt/) is the standard British pronunciation. I can't vouch for the US pronunciation, but AD-ver-tize-m'nt (SAMPA: /"{dv3`taIzm@nt/) is considered incorrect in the UK.

"Issue" (and "tissue", etc) is usually "ISH-yoo" (SAMPA: /"ISju/) in UK English but some people prefer "ISS-yoo" (SAMPA: /"Isju/), which I believe is an earlier pronunciation.

Similarly, British English is starting to see the "tyoo" sound at the start of "Tuesday" change into "choo" (standard American English has "too" here, so the change is not happening there) and "dyoo" becoming "joo" (as in "dual", now pronounced identically to "jewel" by some speakers of British English), but these are currently considered non-standard.

Well, the spellchecker in M$Word (2000, which I'm now using, don't know if this is fixed in newer versions) loves to annoy me with the green curly line whenever a sentence contains a 'which' and wants to force me into changing it to 'that' (no matter the language is set to UK or American English). I just ignore it and consider it stupid.

That's odd. Maybe it's just your application, but I've seen other word processors suggest replacing "X which Y" with either "X that Y" or "X, which Y". Do you not get the second option?

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It's frowned upon, yes, but there's nothing inherently wrong with doing it. It's really better to use a semicolon.

Ah, but that is what is wrong with it. Joining two sentences with a comma is incorrect; a semicolon, colon or conjunction should be used instead. So in this case: "I have a dog and he has a good sense of humour"/"I have a dog and that is funny" or "I have a dog; he has a good sense of humour"/"I have a dog; that is funny" (= it is funny that I have a dog).

"I have a dog that is funny." = "I have a dog, and he has a good sense of humour."

I would've written "...and it has a good sense of humour.", since animals are usually referred to as it. Do pets get the proper he/she?

See my reply earlier on in this thread. "He/she" is OK for pets.
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