JubalBarca

I have to say that in general, fair enough that it's better to have actual clothes in public, but I think there are more exceptions than have been previously stated, most notably being Arthur Dent, or indeed anyone who is eccentric/mad/in a hurry enough to carry off the public dressing gown look. Also whilst in general I think it's a bad idea for people to not use real clothes, I'm opposed to regulating/restricting what people wear beyond perhaps a few very basic public indecency laws, it really doesn't affect me if someone wears pyjamas in a shop nearby. Also the line between nightwear and other clothing is actually really not awfully distinct.

I can code efficiently - though only in fairly lightweight languages, I'm not up to writing a decent game engine but I can script in Python or JavaScript pretty well. Graphics are a big problem though, particularly for something like this where the artist would need to be another hobbyist - since I'm pretty sure there's no commercial outlook for the project given the current market for text-heavy parser games.

Static images was the plan to begin with - I just can't find anyone to make them and don't have the necessary skills myself.

I might well end up doing so - unfortunately I didn't plan for that so I now need to disassemble the graphics display bit of the playscreen, which if not a massive job in terms of programming is still going to be a bit annoying to do. The combat system was also going to use the display area after my next upgrade of it too... I'll take another look soon and get back to you all when I've worked out what I'm doing. How big do you think the text-only community is? I mean, I know it's non-zero, but I don't really know where to find it on the internet in any numbers.

Thanks for the heads up :) But yeah, the fact people have wanted to do the add-ons probably underlines my point a tad. Back to the OP topic which I haven't even mentioned yet, I'm very much looking forward to hearing more about Ace Hardaway. I suspect he's the kind of guy I wouldn't necessarily click with if we actually met, but I think he'll be a fun hero to play with and as I mentioned I like the everyman-heroism which has been such a feature of the Two Guys' work.

I should really get back to it sometime... more artist hunting doesn't appeal much currently though. But yeah, at current stage there's about 30 locations, a few small quest lines, 3 character classes each with 4 levels, a load of skills, and towns etc to explore. It's fun to mess around with. :)

Yeah, I'm certainly not arguing that it should be banned, I'm just arguing it's kind of naff. I'm also not even arguing that it's not a true love story or that those are bad - just that it's a badly done and rather skewed true love story and the way it's presented grates on me personally. Also the specific bits I was getting annoyed at, as I was saying, aren't the bits that are age old or that everybody wants. I'd have no issue with you getting to the tower, using the amulet, and then having a cutscene that has a brief note that your relationship then blossoms and she later agrees to marry you- and rescuing someone from peril seems to me a not wholly unreasonable way of meeting prospective partners. I was solely focussing on the rather male-acquisitive way that tower scene is presented on screen (and I don't think you can draw a clear line that that's an adult twisted fantasy, whilst children may not be able yet to interpret that sexually yet they can certainly objectify gender differences, though I'd also clarify that I'm not doing the "games are a bad influence" argument which I think is crap - the game reflects the issue rather than causing it, but it's a reflection I don't much like). Or as a tl;dr for that paragraph - you can have a true love romantic fantasy without placing an activity/passivity action/object romantic gender distinction into your gameplay. I'm not arguing it's going to bring about the downfall of civilisation, but I don't think it would have taken too much to improve the plot a tad there. Also, self sacrifice? Which person are you arguing is being self-sacrificing? Because I'm pretty sure the mirror only told Graham about the princess when he decided he wanted a wife (which is pretty dickish on the part of the mirror, thinking about it, at least if we're going to be charitable to Graham and suggest that he presumably would have rescued her before he realised he needed a spouse). I should look into KQ2+, I've not seen it (and should thus clarify that all my comments above only relate to the original).

Wait, LucasArts actually got copyright for the word "droid"? That's nuts. Back to the thread title: so far, SQ2, but I still have 3 titles to go and suspect I may intuitively like the point and clicks less.

I am also on Twitter in two forms: @jubalbarca as myself, which I don't use thaaat much but has a cute echidna as profile picture and in my role as exilian.co.uk Megadux (Content Director - I'm a Byzantine history geek and I got to come up with the role names): @Exilian_Press which is possibly actually of interest to people - that account will post announcements about Antares IV, the various parser games being made on the site, etc. :)

I quite like some P&Cs (something like MOTAS for example), but I'd express a marginal preference for parser games I think, just because I like the challenge of them. I like the idea of a parser that lets you talk to the character; that could be a very neat game concept... I've been working on making a parser-based adventuring RPG game for quite a while (mock-humour-fantasy-ish, written in Python), though it's rather stalled because the original design (and indeed the engine) includes functionality for each location to have a static illustration and finding an artist has proven impossible. :/

I guess I should admit that I am a Man With Opinions when it comes to fairytales; which is to say, it's not really old-school fantasy either in the sense of following the giants of C20th fantasy writing or in the sense of having much of a basis in folk fairy stories. It's 19th century style sanitised upper middle class Victorian fantasy, which I just don't like much as a genre. I dislike the "thou gaineth a WOMAN" plot trope that makes the female character a barely-animate quest objective with no agency, and the original KQ2 ending is very, very definitely falling into that trap in my opinion. It's obviously a matter of personal preferences and I imagine it may be just me that thinks this, but I think a few simple changes to the portrayal could have made the whole thing feel a bit less bland and C19th-tacky whilst keeping the "this is a shiny fantasy story of shininess" theme wholly intact.

This one interested me in that I think the two you cite are very different... I dunno. I will admit that I've not played the LSL series, but that's mostly because the core character/game concept doesn't appeal to me at all (to the extent that I think I'd just find playing it kind of uncomfortable and odd rather than fun, even if the puzzles were good). Possibly at a big stretch they can both be described as flawed heroes, but I think the core message of the two characters is very different. For Roger, he bungles and messes up but the key thing is that despite himself he still acts on his good instincts (despite his apparent uselessness, he has sufficient presence of mind to personally invade a Sarien battle-cruiser, for starters) and does heroic things one way or another. Larry, on the other hand, has (to say the least) very morally questionable goals. If Larry Laffer arrived in Uluence Flats he'd probably never get out the bar unless Droids R'us had some particularly enticing models... as a tl;dr version the impression I have is that Roger is an everyman hero who overcomes his (many) inadequacies and does his level best to do what he can for others, whereas Larry is a morally ambiguous at best protagonist with pretty serious life/mental issues who just lives his inadequacies, wastes what he does have, and has pretty minimal respect for other human beings. Protagonists should have to overcome themselves as well as their external challenges and that's often something that's really important in making them interesting - but I prefer them if they're to some extent heroic, or perhaps comically villainous, or at the very least vaguely worthy of respect. I'm currently playing through the early King's Quest games, and I'm not much of a Graham fan from that thus far - he's kind of bland. Also the KQ2 plot annoyed me; if I'd been the princess and some guy had just walked in and tried to kiss me without asking, rescuer or no, I'd have at least given him a hearty slap...

I've read a lot of stuff on adventure games where people have singled out things like SQ and KQ with the idea that parsers were good for their day, but are now an outdated technology that we should be glad to be rid of. I, on the other hand, really like parsers and will often happily play purely text-based parser games with no graphics at all. I definitely prefer them to point and clicks, and I like having adventure games that are puzzles without all the 3d spatial awareness needed in modern full-3d game types. (Also this isn't just 1980s nostalgia in my case, I can confirm: I wasn't born until the mid-90s!) What do you all think of text parsers? Good riddance, cute but outdated, or actually still a fun way to play games?

Well, they carry short-rang bomb launching kit, so if you want a ) fireworks or b ) by "doing" the party you mean removing the invitees from the group of people not blown to smithereens they'd probably be able to provide... EDIT: Also, there's now a download link provided on the forum for anyone who wants to have a go. Bear in mind this is release 1 so it's far from perfected still. :)

I finally finished Space Quest 3 and reviewed it today :)