flesk

I finally got around to watching the video. Really awesome stuff! You guys rock! I wish I'd had the time and recording equipment to contribute, but the end result couldn't have been any better. Do any of you know if they have seen the video yet, and if so, how they reacted to it?

Oh, come on, the Quake 4 gag was brilliant! "I knew it had a Q in it somewhere!" I was laughing my ass off. "That's ... not how I remember it."
 
And Fred's Cedric doll will haunt me 'til the day I die. You fucker. ;)

I want to thank everybody again who contributed to my little idea. It isn't even my idea anymore, I feel like I played such a small part in this. I said in one of the comments already on Facebook that I really didn't even feel like I knew what I was doing half the time, it just sort of developed a life of its own and that's entirely due to the content that you guys made. For my part, I know I'm not very funny and can't act to save my life, so I'm glad that I had so much great content from lots of other much funnier people than myself to hide my stuff between. I'm just glad I could stand alongside you guys.
 
This community really is the best. Thanks again.

Time flies by so fast these days. I'll try to watch this tonight. Awesome initiative and props to everyone who contributed.

Time flies by so fast these days. I'll try to watch this tonight. Awesome initiative and props to everyone who contributed.

Time flies by so fast these days. I'll try to watch this tonight. Awesome initiative and props to everyone who contributed.

Haha indeed! I forgot about the third option there. That does reflect well the future path choice.
 
Bit of SQ2 trivia. When we were making the remake we almost put together an entirely different experience for half the game. There was to be a fuel line detached from the space shuttle you have to clean at the beginning of the game. If you left it alone the game would proceed to Labion as normal with the crash in the jungle.
 
If you chose to interact with it Roger would attach the fuel line to the ship and you would still end up on Labion. However, instead of the hovercraft crashing in the jungle it would continue on straight to the mines where you were to be put to work. What followed would have been an adventure of escape from the mines culminating in exploring your way through an alternate route through the jungle ending back at the landing platform from the mouth of that ancient statue into the pool. You would have had all the same items by the end and the asteroid portion would have remained the same.
 
It wasn't going to be obvious or hinted at in any way. But for those who just love clicking and interacting with everything it would have been a nice surprise. :) There were a bunch of backgrounds made for the mines but not finalized, IIRC, but the whole idea was scrapped because it would have taken too long. It would have been awesome, though. It would have been a faithful remake with sort of SQ2+ thrown in at the same time!

You can actually change that in ScummVM. To make the screen relative instead of touchpad you need to check in the adlib box in the settings. It's oddly hidden, but it works well.

I've gotta give them some major props for still doing a shout-out for Larry after what happened. Now that's class. :wub: :y:

I can totally relate to not feeling like you have enough to share, or stuff interesting enough to share! In the past few months, the sheer amount of code I've personally written for Quest For Infamy has delighted me personally, but I'm not going to take a picture of it!
 
It's boring, plus this is the internet and some jackwagon would come along and tell me how my code sucks, and how because of that he wishes death upon me and my loved ones... or something!
 
I enjoyed this update, and I really liked the animation and music bit.
 
 
Bt

This was a good update too since, I felt, Chris's character shines through. He really is a class act. Looks like he knows when to get the whip out too ;). On the other hand... who's this Space Quest Historiaflopamajig? What's his handle? He (or is it a she? Can't tell with all that hair) sounds like some random brown-noser wet behind the ears trying to muscle in on something he doesn't have any experience in just for the money and the kicks. I bet he's never even played Space Quest! I call for public lynching! B)

Ok, I'm going to make a executive decision here and stop this before it goes any further. I think Paul has dug enough of his own grave. I don't believe this needs to go any further and I'm sure many of you agree with me. I don't want this place turning into Paul Trowe bashing central and I don't want this to be the place where worse news potentially breaks. I moreso like the higher road we've taken thus far and don't want to start resorting to slander. Mostly because its unnecessary. So I'm deleting posts associated with....that. Let's keep this in good form, guys. No hard feelings and nothing personal, I just don't think this forum needs THAT kind of attention. Please don't bring *that* topic up again here. If you want to talk about it please find somewhere else to do so. I don't feel right about this place being the place that people.....discover things. Especially seeing as this doubles (for the moment) as the Two Guys' official forum for SpaceVenture and their company.

There's a world of difference between expressing honest concerns and saying "they obviously ran out of money" when all you have to go on is a job ad and an update (Oct 1) with less info in it that you would have liked.

Fronzel is right. The people that Paul banned were people who donated their blood, sweat and tears to the game. They donated tens of thousands of dollars worth of cash, free labor, free promotions, moderating and trying to make himself better by making everyone else look worse. I know for a fact that Tom King himself did several months of programming and debugging. That's the kind of thing they pay programmers $5,000+ a month for.
 
It boils down to ethics. How you present yourself as a person reflects on the company. I myself didn't even get an official reason for being banned. I just was. I mean c'mon -- you're saying "well, he didn't kill anyone". No, but he tried to destroy one project then proceeded to try to rip SpaceVenture because Scott and Mark didn't join up with ReplayGames. Everything he did was to screw over other people and help himself.
 
Paul should not be given a pass on this. There's no reason for us to give it to him. Josh saw fit enough to leave. Al should design the next game without Paul. The one thing we don't need is a small Larry wannabe trying to hurt other adventure games in the series. When you talk about hurting the Larry franchise, what you don't take into account is that Paul is trying to hurt other adventure games franchises that we love. So sometimes it's a trade off, and we all know Spock's saying in Star Trek II, where the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

@PurpleTentacle
 
I'd agree with you, were it not for the fact that this bunch of people you mentioned pumped - literally! - thousands of dollars into the game, worked as moderators for Replay and did all sorts of free labor (artworks, beta testing and such). All that rewarded with a great big "Fuck you!", just because they dared to point out that someone is making a complete ass of himself. (Bear in mind that I consider myself mostly a neural party in this. Yes, I was also thrown out of the forum - presumably because I posted an animated gif of a guy munching on a bag of popcorn (!) - but I was nowhere near as involved in either the forums or the actual game as most of the other banned parties were.) Imagine if you had been the one who basically had given a year of his life to the project. Wouldn't you agree that this goes quite a bit beyond bruised egos and delves into the realm of, shall we say, exploitation?
 

That and, you know,...
 
- threatening Wisecrack with a lawsuit even though they had Al's permission
- causing a shitstorm obout this in the gaming press, claiming that it was Al who wants to sue
- impersonating Josh in one of the updates
- attempting to sabotage other people's kickstarters
- revealing rather intimate details about Scott Murphy's private life in this very forum in some desperate attempt to make himself look good
- leaking other companies' delicate information to the press
- the numerous instances of cyber-bullying
 
and so on and so forth. I agree about the inappropriate and rude part, though.
 
As for news about these recent developments hitting the Steam forums: Since it was the community who is basically responsible for getting this game on Steam in the first place (via the greenlighting process), I'd call it a classic case of poetic justice. Still, I had hoped that this would happen in a somewhat more refined and articulate way. People deserve to know what's going on, but I'm afraid just pasting a link to these forums might do more harm than good. But it looks like it's been removed anyway.
 
Sorry for not letting this topic rest (as I had promised earlier), but like I said a few pages ago: people ought to know why this is a big deal.

I don't know about the previous comment. Are people posting on Steam about this? Don't like that. I would hate to hurt the sales of this game. This was a labor of love by so many people. Encouraging people not to buy the game would probably hurt Al and the future of the series. Does N-Fusion deserve this?
 
I think we should be careful not to campaign against the wrong things, because then we'd be no better than Paul.
 
What Paul did (ban a bunch of people unnecessarily from the forum and trash another project) was inappropriate and rude, but it's not like he killed someone.
 
We'd be shooting ourselves in the foot by trying to harm the game sales. I wouldn't be surprised if concern for the game and wanting it to succeed is one reason why Mandel has kept quiet.
 
For all Paul's faults and quirks, he still seems like a hardworking and passionate guy. Let's not get carried away or pile on too much. And no one's perfect.
 
I want the game to be a huge success. If that means obnoxious Paul gets kudos and cash, then that doesn't bother me. He does deserve a lot of credit.
 
The game is getting its big retail rollout in a few days.
 
I would hope most of us could put aside our bruised egos and annoyances with Paull and root on Larry and wish the game the best!
 
At some point the backlash can be excessive. For example, I saw the official Himalaya twitter account even comment on this, and that sort of disappointed me since they are usually so professional and I wished they had just stayed neutral and not commented.

It has been suggested before that people alert other games to this whole situation on Steam, but I, too, agree that it may be going overboard. Well, I don't have a problem with it if it's not an organised effort; Mvalnor is simply linking to information that is publicly available and who am I to prevent gamers from boycotting it on their own? I certainly don't intend to buy it - I'll just have to show my support for Al and Josh some other way.
 
But generally, I rest my case; let's focus on SpaceVenture positivity and leave the actual petitioning/letter-writing to the people who got burnt. Speaking of SpaceVenture... who's looking forward to hearing how things are really going? :D

You handled that really well, Serena. Props to you. By the way, not only does Paul look like Leisure Suit Larry but he's way more inept than him too. (go ahead Paul. I'm a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. You try to kick me in the nuts and you'll see what happens).
 
The last ten days have reminded me that we as a community do need to stay together and tough through all of this. We know and love games together (LSL, SQ, PQ, KQ, etc.) and we all want to see these adventures succeed. The problem is when people who are bitter, vindictive and cruel (like Paul) let the power go to their heads. I will not respect any man who would be so petty, so trite, so banal and hoary as Paul to stop us from making the games and supporting the people who make them great just because he thinks he can do it and anyone who disagrees with him is automatically a loser.
 
We should pull Paul like a rotten tooth and replace him with the permanent dental implants, people like Jeroen or Tom, who not only have a clear direction for the games but a passion for making them as good as they can. That doesn't mean we should pull people like Al, Josh, Scott or Mark. They are all good solid characters who still want to make games for people who remember Sierra's heyday.
 
Anyways, back to SQ and SV. :)

I wrote this little thing up in support on my Facebook page. Thought I'd leave it here:

I heard from the horse's ass himself that the 250K units was how many keys he gave out to retailers. I have absolutely no idea on the number actually sold.
 
On a related note, I'm glad to have cut ties with him when I did. As Spikey said, Polyester Paul is death by association. I wouldn't care less if he was vindictive enough to pull my testing credits. I still want my star kept intact, though. I paid good money for it. I know Jeroen sent Al an e-mail and I plan on doing one myself. He needs to "break the chain" and pull free himself. I've got way too much respect for the ol' guy to see anything happen to his good name.

Your reports of Telltale's forum death are, as always, greatly exaggerated. ;)
 
I actually wish some subforums were a little less lively these days...
 
 
 

The adventure-treff news item is absolutely objective. That's why it's so short. I personally carried the news into their forum four days ago, and I certainly wasn't particularly objective.
 
 
 

Indeed, that is the way to go. The reaction of the adventure game community has to be disimpassioned, and there has to be just one voice. There must not be any kind of mob mentality, there must not be any kind of outrage. I don't think the single 'I want to get banned for insults too' kind of posts in the replay forums serve any purpose. Of course, not only the two guys were attacked, but the community as well, and that's where it gets really hairy. But it just means time to shine with reason, dignity and profound sadness over last week's proceedings.

Paul just must have not believed that he needed the community to succeed. What a wake up call this must have been. Or if he's still deluded enough to think otherwise, he'll find out soon enough. It's true, this really is too niche of a market and without community support to make it happen (and we could have made it happen) you're doomed to failure. You can't just treat your fanbase like crap and expect to make a profit or even break even if you're not a AAA developer.

I agree with the idea for a petition. Our mails to Codemasters would probably have been dismissed anyway as a handful of fans venting their anger over getting thrown out of a forum. They probably get mails like that all the time. A petition would give us the opportunity to truly stand together in this, make people realise who was involved, why this is such a great deal and get noticed.

Make the petition and I'll sign it.
 
By the way (this will probably be my last post about this matter, I'd like to talk about SQ), if you trot over to Mr. Trowe's forums, you'll find the number of posts are currently 6,281. Last week it was over 8,500. So all the people he banned accounted for over a quarter of all the posts. Talk about a real class act.

Maybe if we do a joint letter. I think mail bombing them is a bit extreme. But you will have my signature in a petition or in a letter for sure.