Akril

Shoot, I'm surprised I didn't notice this sooner! I'm definitely all for it, and hopefully I should be available for the Pledge Quest commentaries. (Speaking of fan games, an "extended" version of the fourth recent [and often overlooked] SQ fangame was recently released -- pretty good timing!)

That should work for me. Is the theme of this show non-Space Quest Sierra games, or has it been changed?

I should be free both Friday and Saturday.

Yikes -- I'm sorry for not taking a closer look at that link before posting it here. After clicking through the first few pages, I assumed that it was working, but apparently it wasn't. I reported the link as broken (the mirror link definitely is), so hopefully that problem should eventually be resolved.

Here's the game's page in the AGS database: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1029/

I may be a little late, but Happy Birthday nonetheless, Frans!

Well, it's been confirmed that the 2012 AGS Awards ceremony is going to be this Saturday at 8:00 PM UK Time. I'll certainly try to be there.

I should be available on Saturday (and yes, I do have a non-SQ Sierra adventure game picked out this time).

If the next hangout is going to be on the 2nd, I'll only be able to be there for the first couple of hours.

I'm still on board for today.

I'll probably be available for that date.

Well, the nominations are now over, and all but one of the SQ/SQ-related games released in 2012 made it! :D

I remember seeing a playthrough of part of this game a few months back, and I was blown away by how much stuff was crammed into it. Every now and then I had to pause the video to look at all the text on the screen to search for references. Most of them were LucasArts references (e.g., a paint store called Guy's Brush Paint, or something similar), but there might have been one or two Sierra references as well. And not only is that object next to the rocket a dead ringer for the escape pod, but the protagonist (the little guy in the blue and white suit in the center of the screen, I'm guessing) seems to have a golden mop as a weapon -- look at the icon in the upper left corner.

I'll definitely plan on doing that next time. For some inexplicable reason, when I was running Hoyle 3, the screen was positioned about 5 pixels too low in the DOSbox window. If I wanted to move a particularly small game piece, I'd have to click five pixels above it. And now I'm kicking myself for not bringing up The Black Cauldron during the "non-linear gameplay" discussion. It's probably the most non-linear game Sierra ever made -- multiple paths, multiple puzzle solutions and multiple endings as well.

I guess I could try to attend on Sunday.

I'm afraid I may not be able to make it this time -- at least, not for the entire session.

Seconded. These hangouts seem to keep getting better and better. (Incidentally, this is something I wish I'd brought up during that last topic.)

Well, I'm definitely not a morning person, but I'll still try to be there.

Darn it, you beat me to it, Datadog! Anyway, back to the topic: I know the "surviving a room with a floor receding to reveal a pit of acid" plot element has been used numerous times in fiction, but when this plot element appeared in an episode of MacGyver called "The Human Factor" (which takes place inside a computer-controlled underground base with a lot of sci-fi elements), it reminded me a lot of the acid trap scene in SQ2, mostly because the scene was actually played out in a humorous way. Not only that, but MacGyver's solution to surviving the trap -- I'm not making this up -- involves taking his pants off. While there's a woman trapped in the room with him. (This episode also first aired in 1986, which makes me suspect that this might not be a coincidence, especially since the early SQ games have several MacGyver-esque puzzles. At least they don't feel nearly as shoehorned-in as the ones in Lost in Time.) Another coincidence is a personal experience of mine: Earlier this year, I decided to listen to a few episodes of an old radio series called Quiet Please, a program with many episodes running the gamut from comedy to drama to horror to sci-fi, which would sometimes break the fourth wall in surprisingly original ways. Anyway, I decided to start off with the first episode, a sci-fi/horror story called "Nothing Behind the Door", which centers around three men who visit an observatory in southern California. At one point, the narrator (one of the three men) is describing the night sky, and at one point the Andromeda galaxy is mentioned, the name of which he repeatedly pronounces "An-dro-MEE-da" instead of "An-DRAW-me-da." I smiled a little at this, wondering how the producer could have let such a silly pronunciation mistake like that slip by. Then again, this episode was made back in the 1940s, so I decided to cut the narrator a little slack. The day that I was re-listening to this episode was -- again, not I'm making this up -- April 14th, 2012. Later that day, I discovered that this had just happened. Then I listened to this video, which was just the icing on this coincidence cake.

I can easily make it to LAX by bus, so I'll keep that option in mind. (Thanks!)

Since I live in California (southern California, that is), I'll definitely be doing my darnedest to attend this convention. I actually spent Christmas in Oakhurst a couple of years ago, so I can say with certainty that it really is a remote spot. Aside from Yosemite National Park, it's a pretty quiet little town. (The hardest part will be figuring out just how I can get to and from Oakhurst, since I don't drive.)

In case anyone is wondering: No, I haven't bailed out on this project. I've been trying to get some work done on walk cycles for Roger and Bea, and it's been a pretty lengthy process. Here are some turnarounds for them: The colors are a bit off (since I did most of the work on my laptop), so I've got a lot of tweaking to do. I also notice that Roger's head is a bit large in his side views, so I'll have to adjust it as well.

I'm not sure if this example counts, but the protagonist of Robert Sheckley's* short sci-fi story "The Minumum Man" at times seems remarkably similar to Roger in the earlier SQ games, though perhaps slightly more grounded in reality. The story sets Anton Perceveral (the protagonist) up as being one of the most unlucky, accident-prone men on Earth, yet just when he has hit the lowest point of his life, he gets chosen to go into space and help set up a colony on an alien world. The reasoning behind this decision is that in order for a planet to be deemed habitable for humans, a man with the most minimal chances of survival needs to live there for a certain amount of time, and if a man like him can survive life on that planet, then anyone can. Amazingly, after some time, Perceveral starts to adapt to his new life (after several injuries, accidents and illnesses), and he has a robot to help him out with some of the tasks that he is incapable of doing on his own. However, he soon realizes that some of the survival gear he was supplied with is in poor shape or non-functional. He learns that this was actually intentional in order to keep his chances of survival as minimum as possible. Things get worse when the robot starts malfunctioning, disobeying his orders and breaking things -- in fact, the more capable Perceveral becomes, the more clumsy the robot becomes (again, part of the same plan to lower his chances of survival). Anyway, one thing leads to another and the robot eventually goes on a rampage, apparently intent on killing Perceveral. Every trap Perceveral sets for it fails, and he ends up running for his life with the robot in hot pursuit. Then, just when all hope seems lost, suddenly it dawns on Perceveral that he has adapted so well to life on this planet that he has become the complete opposite of what he was before he arrived there -- an accident-proof man. He becomes so confident in his newly discovered invincibility that he scrambles up a sheer mountain face, avoids certain death numerous times despite all the odds stacked against him, and at the last second is able to trick the robot into tumbling down the mountain, where it gets buried beneath several hundred tons of rock. However, as he starts coming down from his heroic high, he almost has a nervous breakdown, then much later (when colonists start to arrive on the planet) confesses that he had no idea what came over him. *I cannot recommend this guy's work enough (though I'll try to keep my gushing to a minimum). His short sci-fi stories not only are full of brilliant ideas, but many of them have a very dry, acerbic wit that I suppose is vaguely Space Quest-ish (though I'd probably need a second opinion about that). His AAA Ace Interplanetary Decontamination Service short stories usually focus around a pair of men who end up stranded on uninhabited planets, and have to find solutions to seemingly impossible situations -- and these solutions end up being surprisingly creative (perhaps not the sort of things that could easily be developed into adventure game puzzles, but still very interesting).

Ah yes...fond memories of those contests, fond memories. I remember that page. It had some of the best Space Quest fan art I'd ever seen when I first discovered it back in the day. I've definitely got the first video. (Yep, I actually saved it all these years.)

Actually, there are mostly noxious gases, toilet paper and oblong lumps of organic material that usually aren't mentioned in polite conversation. (But also jellyfish. And pies. And fish heads.)