Datadog

To Akril: (Y) (Y) (Y) Ah, I see what you did there. (Y)

I may be mistaken, but SQ2 is the only game of the series that doesn't have one - right?

It still doesn't make sense that the game's whole plot is basically hidden inside what amounts to an easter egg. ;)

Holy cow, I remember you! Welcome back, Personman!

Diane's kind of disappeared off the face of the earth since her wedding. No e-mails, no Facebook - nothing. I chalk it up to her be too busy infiltrating the government on her rise to power. Either that, or she's still playing "World of Warcraft". I wonder if we can get Topper back? Which I will replay one of these days. As an off-topic comment, that game had some excellent writing and was a very fun experience once you get past the fuse puzzle. Okay, back on-topic!

I agree. Forums should have "like" buttons. Add it to the new Broomcloset! :)

Or make them bigger. It's all or nothing. Applied. Those man-boobs are going to be enormous. Just you wait and see. I myself wonder if they'll open their own forums. Their website certainly seems to be set up enough for it.

Then in that case, I'll have to get Jess to update it so I can re-open it (currently, only spam bots are allowed to post in it).

I don't know how to react anymore. This is crazy, crazy "we've been waiting over 20 years for this" news. Tim Schafer, Al Lowe, Jane Jenson... now the Two Guys. Do Roberta and the Coles want to jump in any time soon? Also, why hasn't SQ.net been updated since 2006? And why is the Virtual Broomcloset still closed?

So far, I think the Al Lowe games (Leisure Suit Larry 7 and Torin's Passage) made the best use of high-res cartoony graphics. Cartoony graphics just suit Al's games much better and I'm glad they're going in this direction for it in the remake. Although (and this has been nagging at me for some time) I'd really like to know where all the babes are in these promos. Larry's all about the ladies and yet all we've seen is the same overly-gory death of him getting splattered by a taxi. If I were Al, I'd grab a pen and paper, scribble up a stick figure with boobs, sign it, and then add it as a prize on Kickstarter.

Ha! Amazing!

I've already put up a link on the SQInc download. Thanks again! I'll put out a notification on the Facebook page as well.

...2009? ;) And I like to think Space Quest actually kicked everything off. Maybe not commercially, of course, but still. ;)

I think SQ6 would have been a lot more interesting if more of the game's story revolved around being inside the human body - more like the movie "Innerspace" actually. Get Roger inside Stellar sooner and see what other sub-plots can be cooked up from that. Somehow, I imagine at some point, it would turn into a "Weekend at Bernie's" situation where Roger would be using the motor control section of the brain to drive an unconscious human around to interact with the outside world. Being able to control things like sneezing and adrenaline levels would make for some very interesting puzzles.

I love you guys. In a way, this almost reminds me of Jeffrey Katzenberg. As the story goes, after he resigned from Disney studios on a sour note, he carried his grudge over to Dreamworks Animation and pretty much vented all his frustrations about the House of Mouse through "Shrek". While the Two Guys likely had a better relationship with Sierra Online, it was easy to see that they (or maybe just one of them) were equally venting their frustrations as well. Although Al Lowe also had a penchant for satirizing his own employers as well. Just look at how often Ken Williams appears in the Larry games as a ruling tyrant or running gag. I think this is what I really love about Sierra above all others. In a way, you can see the developers' relationships through their games. It really feels like they had a family back then. It's hard to say that about any other game company - especially today. A lot of modern game developers seem to turn invisible under the weight of their own games. It's not too surprising. CMI is one of Olzen's favorite adventures and there have always been a lot of parallels drawn between Space Quest and Monkey Island. A lot of people like to think VSB is full of parodies and references, but I prefer to think of them as Freudian slips. ;)

I'd just say some Xenonians are blue and leave it at that. Or maybe Sludge's family came from off-planet? Or maybe there's atmospheric radiation and -BLAUGH! Science-fiction loses its fun when we pry too much into the why. I like the Star Wars approach where science = magic. Don't forget we also inadvertedly knocked off James Cameron with the whole "reluctant space hero saves indigenous blue furries from simian alien oppressors." :) *demands more biscuits*

Gotta love it when a Facebook status delivers me a Space Quest forum to lay witness to the madness. Vohaul's skin: I just assumed he was always blue. We see him full-size as blue in SQ2, he's blu-ish on the SQ4 cover, and he's a blue hologram. I just thought it was safe to presume he's a blue alien. Now there's all this info about him being diseased and surgeried and Quirk's dad and stuff? I think I'll stick with the VSB canon here. Vohaul's blue, his brother is Dennis the Menace, and his parents are Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Somehow, that just seems more feasible to me. *takes a biscuit and eats it smugly*

Yeah, I'd imagine being hunted through a devastated home planet surrounded by zombie cyborgs and killer robots without any friends or chance of escape might be considered Roger's darkest moment. If it weren't for Gary Owen's narration, that game would be extremely light on the comedy. If anything, SQ5 was Roger's finer moment. He becomes a captain, gets the girl, makes lot of friends, and one-ups his rival. It's not the usual "Roger gets crapped on" fest that the other games like to play around, and lot of the comedy comes directly from the characters instead of the narrator.

That's true. Scott alone seems to tweet about everything except adventure games. But it seems he's recently started following me on Twitter as well, so an appreciative comment seems more than appropriate now. There was also a comment on the SQInc site left by someone claiming to be Mark Crowe. I've written back to Mark's actual e-mail, but haven't gotten any reply. I think I might have fan-gushed too much.

Yeah, we've reached the limits of exploring one-note planets (desert, jungle, ice, lava, etc.) It doesn't mean we couldn't amp it up. SQ3 features a purple desert planet covered in lightning and giant snakes, after all. And SQ5 features a giant tree planet with poisonous air. Just pick an old idea and expand on it. Roger could visit a frozen jungle planet where the people are made of fire and travel by tornadoes. I find shows like "Doctor Who" and "Futurama" are a very good example of how much farther you can take some of these ideas.

Hmmm. Never even knew we had a "Bard's Forum"! Done and done!

Everybody's been mentioning it so far. ;) Although there were many things I was willing to let slide (i.e. Stellar's forehead). For a while there, I wasn't even going to bring up the "uber-gravity" thing. I was just going to put gravity and air in space and leave it at that.

Yeah, that sounds about right. It feels like you're bothering a celebrity about something they hear a million times a day. And really, I don't think I could go thirty seconds talking to any of them without starting on about adventure games. The signals I pick up are that if they aren't actively joining the community and dropping in to say hi every now and then, then they probably just want their space. I know I would.

Six years ago, I would have been totally hyped for that idea. Now, I'm sort of all Space Quest'd out. :) The hardest part of doing episodes individually would be maintaining continuity. Everybody has different writing styles and different grasps of story-telling and puzzle-solving. I remember all the inconsistency issues that came with multiple writers on the original version of SQInc. Everyone would turn their simple side-mission into a "save the universe" scenario - and then bring back all their favorite characters and puzzles in the process. Even VSB had a similar problem with pacing because of all the writers. Just look at all the puzzles and locations crammed into the Monolith Burger memory compared to the other two more simplified memories. Even the intro was written by every single person who ever joined the team (and quit shortly after making their contribution to the now 20-minute intro). And you really wouldn't want me in there because I'd just try to commandeer the whole thing and end up pissing off everyone. I'd be all like "No! No Starcon! And no jungle planets! And for this episode, I want to see Roger deliver pizza in a collapsing building in the middle of a meteor shower!" I'd be a total liability. ;)

If you ever do, I highly recommend "short". I rather enjoy your "Adventure" series as it is, but I'd love to see more original work from you. I stared at them for half the game's development before it suddenly dawned on me one day... Roger has boobs. And forever shall it be since fixing them would take another year worth of re-renders.