Akril

I think the only games I've gotten from GOG are ones I got for free in order to review them for a small adventure game site (and I already have all the freebies they're offering for download)): -Journey to the Center of the Earth -The Manhole: Masterpiece Edition (I prefer the original, thankyewverymuch.) -Sherlock Holmes and the Secret of the Silver Earring (timed maze? NO.) -Waxworks (I used to like mazes before I played this game.)

Actually, she's just leading/dragging him somewhere and he's trying to finagle his way out of the situation. She's supposed to be grabbing his hand, which isn't that obvious, since my hand-drawing skills were pretty lacking back then. There's no real story behind this drawing, I just sort of pictured these two being in a situation like this.

I think the only voice acting in the entire game is in the intro, and it makes the sound quality in SQ4 seem pristine by comparison. I played that game a while ago for "research purposes", and I think I've blocked out most of the worst memories of it by now. However, I still remember how they included two of the most maligned elements of adventure games and made them even more painful: a shooting sequence where a single hit meant death, and a timed maze sequence. But yeah, the graphics in Rex Nebular were pretty good.

I feel a little uncomfortable asking this, but...why?

I was digging through some of my old sketchbooks recently when I recalled that I still had a lot of old SQ fan art on my hard drive -- and some of it actually didn't make me want to pound my head on my desk screaming, "WHY...WHY...WHY!?" Some of the older ones might have gotten posted to the VBC's fan art section some time ago, but I figured I'd dredge up a few of them and post them here, for old spaces' sake. 2000: An old drawing I did of Stellar...and that's pretty much it. Cruddy Bryce 3D background and crudely drawn rendition of Roger aside, I still kind of like this piece. I can't really say the same for this one, though I do recall spending some time on it. 2001: I liked this image enough to upload it to DeviantART a few years after I first made it. 2003: I really shouldn't color in pencil sketches, slap a bunch of digital effects on top and hope no one will notice...but I did it here anyway. 2004: One of my first attempts at getting back into the magical world of drawing with colored pencils. This picture of the clerk at the software store in SQX didn't turn out as spectacularly as I'd hoped...but hey, real media, right? Perspective problems, blecchy vector art and little more than an excuse to make a picture with the name "Gravity Beckons"...but I still like it. 2005: An unfinished wallpaper featuring Roger. I think the blank space on the right was going to have a variety of quotes (mostly from SQ6) on it, but I never got around to finishing the whole thing. 2006: I think this is the best piece of SQ fanart I've done. My artistic skills may have improved somewhat over the past 6 years, but I still think this piece looks better than the "Spike Hug" one.

Thanks, pcj, and congrats to you as well! I was a bit disappointed that VSB didn't win more awards than it did and the latest installment of Barn Runner didn't win anything, but it was still a great ceremony.

Ah, right -- that game never grabbed my interest enough to play it. Egh...we'll never live that one down (though I think Future Wars comes a bit close to meeting those criteria as well). Interestingly, Rex Nebular does make a blatant jab at Sierra at one point, which almost makes it seem like they're deliberately thumbing their noses at them.

Eh...I figure when you're going to have that many people with such a broad age range and a wide variety of personal tastes gathered together in one place, there's bound to be some heated disagreements, even if the one thing they have in common is being fans of adventure games (a term whose definition seems to be gradually growing broader and broader). I personally don't mind deaths in adventure games, and having a "Try Again" as well as a "Restore" option after dying seems like a fair compromise to me. On the topic of a topic I recently raised, Rex Nebular really took the sting out of the various violent (and somewhat amusing) deaths in the game by automatically "rewinding" back to the point right before you screwed up -- not even a "Whoops, you screwed up! Want to try that again?" message, it just plops you right back to where you were before you died. What's the point of having a lovingly detailed animation of Rex getting jumped on, dismembered and eaten by a 400-pound cavewoman if you can't even sit back and bask in the schadenfreude for a for a minute or so? When it comes to dying in Space Quest, however, I have just one thing to say: "It isn't dying -- it's failing with style!" Sorry...I just had to say that at some point.

Wow, thanks for posting that picture that I made! (By the way, DanTooDee: now that the SQ7.org domain is back up and running, do you think there is any chance of reviving the SQ Fan Game site?)

I'm speaking, of course, about Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender. For those of you who haven't heard of the game, it's a sci-fi comedy adventure game by Microprose with a bumbling male protagonist that can die in numerous violent (and comical) ways. This description might lead one to believe that it's just a Space Quest knockoff, but upon closer examination, one may find that it's more of a Space Quest knockoff with a bit of a Leisure Suit Larry flavor and a bit of Microprose's own "unique" brand of humor thrown in. (It's no wonder that Sierra made a jab at this game in the beta version of SQ5.) I played the game a while ago and while it's not a bad game per se, it's certainly...weird. It's like the artists purposefully threw a bunch of weird things on the various screens (there's a fireplace on Rex's spaceship, for example) in the hopes that some of it might be interpreted as humorous. The humor tends to operate on the same principle (although what happens when Rex fails to cooperate with the doctor one too many times is pretty amusing, I'll admit). The backgrounds are gorgeous, and while the video used for the characters' walk cycles is incredibly smooth and lifelike, some of the FMV closeups may make you cringe and turn away. As for the bulk of the game itself, it's somewhat like what would have happened if the SQ4 designers had decided to delve deeper into the culture of the Latex Babes and attempted to answer the question of how a planet populated entirely by women would keep their population going. Well, that question is answered in Rex Nebular: they use a machine that changes the user's gender (title drop!) and the newly created "male" is used to impregnate one of a number of women designated as breeding stock. Inevitably, our hero becomes female for a short period of time (who interestingly, looks a bit like Roberta Williams). Unfortunately, this means that Rex Nebular beat Space Quest to the gender-swapping plot device (I don't think the drag sequence in SQ4 really counts). Still, it makes me wonder...is it justified to rip off a rip-off? You can view some footage of the game (complete with commentary from some of the guys on ThatGuyWithTheGlasses) here (and yes -- those arrows are actually in the game). Anyway, those are my thoughts on Rex Nebular...yours? (Oddly, while Microprose's only other (and far superior, in my view) adventure game, Dragonsphere, is available to download for free from GOG.com, Rex Nebular isn't.)

Eh, I've never been tempted to buy any of these new-fangled portable devices, but if making this new game playable on those devices helps to appeal to a wider audience, then I'm all for it (but, as Ferde said, as long as gameplay isn't dumbed-down on every platform the game is released on).

Excellent! I shall assault my piggy bank immediately. (I've been waiting years for an opportunity to use that line.)

An interesting idea, though I'm not sure if the time spent on the art, animation and lip-syncing would ultimately be worth it...

That would make sense (after all, I used a template made from Adventure: The Inside Job to make the sequel). I've also found graphics from other Sierra games mingled with various different titles (an LSL6 death animation in SQ6, a SQ6-esque scene in KQ7, a larger version of the temple from KQ7 in Torin's Passage, Laura Bow 2 animations in Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist, an FMV still from GK2 in Phantasmagoria).

Jane Jensen was one of the designers of Pepper's Adventures in Time (along with Josh Mandel and Lorelei Shannon). Mark Seibert was the producer, though. By the way, I had a listen to the unused SQ6 music, and 210.mid is actually a track from KQ7 (outside the Ooga Booga kids' house, possibly a slightly slower version)! Ironic, considering one of KQ7's unused tracks is the music from Cyberspace in SQ6. I wonder if there are any tracks from other Sierra games made around the same time mixed in there...

Hmm...I don't know... (And somehow, I completely forgot to mention that my webcam is on the fritz right now, which renders this discussion somewhat moot. :unsure: )

Wow... I noticed a newly registered member named "Wilcofever" yesterday and was thinking, "No way...it couldn't be..." Well, I sure was wrong there.

Aw, man...if I weren't so obnoxiously shy, I'd be tempted to give this a go. (Plus, I'd like to think that refraining from having the fandom endure my monotonous dirge of a voice is the least I can do to help make the world a better place.)

Podcast #2 was a great listen. It was great to hear the history of the SQ fandom as told by one of its earliest "pioneers". At times I felt myself wishing that I'd been born a few years earlier and had gotten into Sierra a little earlier than 1999.

People would take one glance at it and call it an Angry Birds ripoff. Sorry for the brief tangent, but since I may not get this opportunity again anytime soon, I hereby call dibs on the "Angry Astrochickens" idea. Because I'm working on...something. :ph34r:

Wow -- considering how much other unused stuff KQ7 has in its files, I'm not all that surprised to hear it has that much unused music (out of all the generic animations of Rosella and Valanice, only about 18% of them were used in the actual game!). I'll have to start digging through some of those MIDIs and possibly add them to my SRF page... You're welcome. I think Willy Beamish was a game where the protagonist just happened to be a kid and not a kids' game, per se. I'm not sure what the target audience was, but the game's tagline ("Imagine if you were nine again...knowing everything that you know now!") seemed to hint that it was meant for an older audience. But yeah -- aside from Mixed-Up Mother Goose, Sierra's kids' games were certainly no walk in the park.

Hey, Alistair. It's great to hear from you again. Those soundtracks do bring back memories (not too surprising -- I was doing the cover art for them). Hmm...I wonder how many other Sierra games have alternate/unused music tracks. I've seen a few unused tracks from KQ7 posted on YouTube, but other than that plus the SQ5 tracks that you mentioned, I don't think I've heard about any others.

Thank you...I suppose. :o

Some of you may remember those videos about unused dialogue from SQ6 that I posted several years ago. However, my lengthy descriptions/explanations of the dialogue were too long to fit in the videos' description boxes, so the only way these descriptions could be viewed was by reading the contents of an HTML file that I linked to in the description boxes. However, now that the YouTube's Annotation feature is available, I've gone through both of the videos and added descriptions to all the dialogue. Now you can have all those lines explained without having to toggle back and forth between the video and that page I mentioned earlier (and you can always turn off the annotations if you want to view the videos as they originally appeared).

Thank you! I've sort of been doing a lot less drawing in general, partly because 2010-2011 were spent mostly working on Adventure: All in the Game, and partly because I haven't felt motivated enough to create many finished pieces. :?