Dat Engineer

"A POIOIOIOISONOUS HOT TUB!"

"I'm not going into that Hangout, Graham! I'll stay out here!"

Heh, you probably noticed, but your improvised conversation about Florida after Troels and I had announced we were leaving put the broadest smile on my face, cause that was just symptomatic for this Hangout. The man can talk for hours, can't he?
 
I sincerely hope I didn't come across as an ass who was trying to steal anyone's thunder by interrupting, but truth is, every time I thought Scott was done talking, he kept going. Love that he shared so much stuff with us, though, so my joking around with interruptions was certainly not supposed to offend anyone.
 
I will admit that I'm strangely proud of throwing Cedric into the mix, though ;)

The stream definitely got sidetracked as a result of Scott's surprise (but highly welcomed) appearance. :) We should definitely do this again.
 
Scott's a great guy, and I'm sorry I didn't converse more with him. But Troels was on a roll, I didn't want to interrupt him... ;)

Next time? I like the sound of that... :D
 
Jess

Designing by comittee sucks. Someone just has to do it.
 
 
Bt

I'm going to do a marathon this Saturday evening after work. Maybe a mini-marathon of sorts along the lines that someone else suggested; run through the games without burning a single savegame, or perhaps having only one savegame per game. Or I could play that dark horse of the Space Quest fangames - The Lost Chapter.
 
I heard that one was tougher than Orat hide.

I'm going to do a marathon this Saturday evening after work. Maybe a mini-marathon of sorts along the lines that someone else suggested; run through the games without burning a single savegame, or perhaps having only one savegame per game. Or I could play that dark horse of the Space Quest fangames - The Lost Chapter.
 
I heard that one was tougher than Orat hide.

Oh, let me know the next time you do something like this, I'm interested too.

If I wasn't so busy, I'd do one too on that same day and have a race against him.

I'm imagining six instances of the Skate-O-Rama theme all playing at the same time, with the intermittent "Restore, Restart, Quit" stingers. :lol:

I don't get it. There's isn't even a news bit about this Kickstarter going online. There's an older one from April about it, but nothing now?
Who leads a site where Portal is an adventure game but this doesn't even get in the news?

As opposed to "no other characters, no conflict, no puzzles, no chance of dying, and no interface"!

As opposed to "no other characters, no conflict, no puzzles, no chance of dying, and no interface"!

Pfft. Astro Chicken isn't hard at all once you understand how it works - it's a lot like that Lunar Lander game, only with more feathers. You have to use a light touch, like a guy who burns down a bar for the insurance money - take your time to line yourself up properly and take the descent niiiiiice and easy. ;) I'd record a demonstration, but I have no video capture software. Grr.
 
But yeah, I'm in the same boat as Troels, albeit for different reasons - while I never had any trouble with Astro Chicken, I didn't realize when I first played the game as a kid that the game had any *purpose* beyond simply being an entertaining diversion. It was there, and it was fun, but I didn't play it long enough to get the secret code screen - instead, I just moved on to Ortega, mostly because it was the only planet I hadn't explored yet.
 
I vividly recall one particular quote from this 'alternate' playthrough - when Roger looks through the survey scope at the shield generator on Ortega, the narrator posits that the device (which Roger doesn't recognize because he didn't get the secret message) might be "some sort of TV transmitter, beaming pay-per-view wrestling to the stars". :lol:

On the subject of deaths:
 
I vehemently, absolutely, completely, utterly disagree with the common consensus on TVTropes that Sierra games were unnecessarily hard and featured too many deaths. Really don't have much else to say about this matter, since I suppose it just boils down to personal taste. I'm of the school of thought that gamers are babied nowadays, especially in games like Call Of Duty or Heavy Rain, where the choice is essentially made for the player without an opportunity to interact.

On the subject of deaths:
 
I vehemently, absolutely, completely, utterly disagree with the common consensus on TVTropes that Sierra games were unnecessarily hard and featured too many deaths. Really don't have much else to say about this matter, since I suppose it just boils down to personal taste. I'm of the school of thought that gamers are babied nowadays, especially in games like Call Of Duty or Heavy Rain, where the choice is essentially made for the player without an opportunity to interact.

On the subject of deaths:
 
I vehemently, absolutely, completely, utterly disagree with the common consensus on TVTropes that Sierra games were unnecessarily hard and featured too many deaths. Really don't have much else to say about this matter, since I suppose it just boils down to personal taste. I'm of the school of thought that gamers are babied nowadays, especially in games like Call Of Duty or Heavy Rain, where the choice is essentially made for the player without an opportunity to interact.

I find it interesting that a decent chunk of the criticism on message forums and comment sections has focused on the Two Guys' promise to include SQ-style death sequences in the game.
 
I get the impression that, for a lot of younger gamers, deaths are essentially "what's wrong" with old school adventure games -- especially Sierra games. Somewhere along the way, the LucasArts model seems to have prevailed, making games that feature character deaths seem "behind the times" or "unfair" in some sense. In many ways, the Space Quest series' emphasis on gruesomely hilarious (or hilariously gruesome) death scenes makes it emblematic for what a certain segment of the audience perceives as a "broken" gameplay mechanic.
 
Naturally, as SQ fans, we view these death scenes as part of the charm of the series. For some, though, I think the tendency is to lump character death right alongside unwinnable states as an unpardonable adventure gaming sin.
 
Just a largely irrelevant observation...
 
Jess

Hey all! Just dropping in to say howdy and thanks again for your continued support exciting times just ahead.
 
Guys , wow! Iove what you've done to the place. The site is stunning. We may need your help help sprucing up
our two guys site.

Answering in the order asked.
 

That's first question answered in the podcast and aswered above, but I'm happy to repeat my response. I'm a producer on one of the world's leading MMORPGs called Rift, about which you can read on riftgame.com.
 

I'm not privy to what the Two Guys have planned, I'm sure it will be magical. And being part of that magic is something I find appealing.
 

You know, Colonel's Bequest was the first game I did for Sierra, and not something I talked about in the podcast, but because it was a Roberta Williams game, I was quite intimidated by what I imagined her music expectations were for the game. And I confessed to Mark Seibert that I had reservations that I was up to the task. Mark was very supportive and expressed complete confidence in me. So I started doing the music. I imagined a gumshoe noir detective style and wrote a piece with that style in mind.
 
Roberta hated it.
 
So I took Mark aside and got permission to spend my workdays during the coming week just researching music from the 20's, the period in which the game takes place. Fresno State had an amazing library of recorded music and there were tons of recordings on hand from the 20's. The first thing I wrote after doing my research was the opening theme that exists in the final game, roaring 20's flapper music.
 
As far as the tools, we used Voyetra MIDI Sequencer Plus Gold for the DOS operating system, and IMHO remains one of the best sequencing packages on any OS.
 
To edit sounds, we used a commercial package called SoundQuest, also for DOS which was a universal editing and sound library management software package. We used it to edit sounds for both the MT-32 Adaptive Synthesis device and the 4 operator FM synthesis sound cards from SoundBlaster and similar manufacturers. The 4 op FM sound cards were basically the innards of the Yamaha FB-01, which SoundQuest supported. Actually the software supported tons of MIDI modules, so when Sierra later began supporting other manufacturers, like Ensonic, IBM's Music Feature, and Roland's SCC-1, we already had the music tools to support them.
 
The Adlib card was a 2 operator FM synthesis card and had its own editor.
 
To process sampled audio, I think we use something called Sample Vision. We also had a Tandy PC in the music department that also had sample editing software built in. Sample Vision was great because you could zoom all the way into a single sample and smooth out a sample curve.
 
When I moved over to Windows, I used Cakewalk and SoundForge. In fact I was a beta tester for SoundForge 2, I think I'm even listed in the credits.
 
 

No, the music from Battlestar Galactica had no influence on any of the music I did for SQ4 or any other game. Stu Phillips is a fine composer and his TV themes for Buck Rogers, Knight Rider, Quincy and several other TV classics are quite good. But I studied the music and orchestrations of John Williams for the SQ4 opening.
 
I'm going over the music in my head right now and I think I know which musical phrase might make you think the BSG theme is being referenced, but, hand-on-heart, it's an utter coincidence. If it were the case, I would totally admit it.
 
We did spoof battle music from the original Star Trek shows for the hand-to-hand combat scene Roger Wilco has with some sort of alien cave monster, but I'm fairly certain Mark Seibert knocked out that one.

Hey, here's something most people don't know.
 
The pound sign on the phone keypad is actually called "octotherp" and the star key is "sextile". I learned this while doing the sounds for one of the SQ4 puzzles where you have to punch in a code on a number key pad. I just called Sierra Telephone and asked to speak with an engineer, told them I was working on this game and I wanted learn what frequencies that were used to generate the sounds you hear when pressing the buttons.
 
The engineer was eager to contribute and looked it up for me. As he read each key name and the frequencies, he used the word "octotherp" and I asked, "what's that?" Then he used "sextile" and volunteered that is was the asterisk key.
 
Little-known fact, now slightly less little-known.

Fixed that for you.

Fixed that for you.

:huh: