Troels Pleimert

I actually quite liked Inherit the Earth, but -- Jebus Kerrist, enough with the mazes, already! Two mazes in one (dog castle AND whatever the hell that underground maze was supposed to be), followed by ANOTHER maze in the human ruins! What the hell, game? Also, the isometric perspective was a fun idea, but pixel hunting for a fucking bucket in the bunny sanctuary was a real kick in the teeth.

This. And also this. Oh, so very this.

That was a great episode. Got me right in the feels. Jess, Fred and Pope made me laugh, Brandon brought teh rawk and Lucky China dropped some cool perspectives on what was ostensibly the topic. And, really, Gareth deserves a great big man-bear-hug for putting the whole thing together on short notice and being incredibly uncharacteristically sweet about the whole thing. But we all know it's not about the show or my life troubles. It is about ethics in game journalism.

I love Under A Killing Moon, but some of the pixel hunting is just insane. I mean, what's a fuckin' slingshot doing in the corridors of a medieval castle? Why is it stuck on the wall? And it's barely visible, too!

I'd say the original, too. Then play the remake to count the ways they screwed it up. ;)

I'm not scared of Prof. Jess.

That's very nice of you; I really appreciate that. I wouldn't be adverse to maybe have a Patreon thing rolling in the future, but -- as you say -- I also don't want to shortchange the many cool people who contribute to the show on a regular basis.

The computer's in the shop. There's still a chance. Just an ungodly amount of waiting time. Very sweet suggestion, though.

My friends, Due to a lot of circumstances, some more disastrous than others, the podcast is on temporary and involuntary hiatus. The biggest reason for this is that, currently, I no longer have a computer with which to record and mix the show. Sadly, I can't say when the show might resume its normal schedule at this time. My apologies.

Okay, you got me. I probably didn't bother translating the first message back then and that's why I got stuck. That, and I'm an idiot.

The clock puzzle is easy. Drei Drachen. Three o'clock. Grandaddy, you old fox. The writing-on-the-tomb shit, however, required such a specific phrase that I had to use a walkthrough. If only they had at least done a "I need to address my audience first" kind of hint system for it, like with the audio splice puzzle in GK2. As it stands, the tomb-writing puzzle reminded me too much of the juggling-cans puzzle in The 7th Guest. I agree completely with Fronz that they should have updated it.

Thanks for the suggestion! In my original proposal document for Fred (that sounds almost romantic), one of the suggested topics was "Walkthroughs: Cheating or not?". The subject of game difficulties in recent years would be hard not to broach in that regard. We haven't gotten around to covering it yet, though.

Bonus points for quoting I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.

I kinda do.

Hey, thanks, Suejak -- and thanks, guys! :) And, yeah, I'm still not sure what the format is, actually. It just sort of evolved around me and I was pretty much winging it all the way through season 1. For season 2, I realized I needed a better plan, so -- since the podcast had sort of organically evolved into having a central topic for each episode -- I planned all the episode topics in advance, so I would at least know what to talk about. The scripts are still usually written the day before recording, though. And, actually ... The Pope was kind enough to send me some stats a little while back. I thought I had maybe 10 or 20 listeners, most of them being you guys who were just tuning in because, y'know, we're friends and all that. But it turns out I actually average around 100 unique downloads per episode, and when the Guys check me in one of the KS updates, I sometimes spike into 300-500. That really rules, guys. So thank you for spreading the word and being cool early adopters. ;)

I think I forgot to mention it here, but Frede and I are doing a little podcast on the side where we bitch and rant about adventure games in general. It's a phenomenally low-effort kind of affair, so you may have to get used to the audio quality. It is quite literally produced by me calling up Fred, recording the call on my phone (using the Record My Call app) and then throwing the whole thing online without any editing. It does, however, boast a pretty kick-ass chiptune intro theme by MusicallyInspired. Check it out: http://backseatdesigners.podbean.com RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BackSeatDesigners It's on Stitcher, too: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/back-seat-designers (Sorry, no iTunes yet. Because I suck.) Please, feel free to comment on episodes here, or suggest new topics for us to cover!

Simple: The GK remake was in the works long before Activision dug up the Sierra brand from their back yard.

Roger's down to get the friction on, and with only one testicle he's also 50% more aerodynamic!

This is basically turning into a written episode of Back Seat Designers right here. ;)

I lol'ed. :) Okay, scary games. Well, for my money, you need the threat of death for something to be truly scary. Even if it's the sort of "zap! right back where you started" try again-type deaths. The psychological implications of just having gotten someone killed -- by extension yourself -- is the sort of primal fear that is so deep-rooted, it's a given. Okay, so you could conceivably imagine a game where you don't outright die, but are captured and either thrown in a dungeon or a pit, or horribly mutilated, or whatever. That still counts as a death scenario in my book. (And, for the record, Maniac Mansion had both!) If you take away the threat of incapacitation or death, stuff merely becomes creepy, not scary. That's not to say you can't do creepy without deaths -- I mean, The 7th Guest was pretty creepy, at least conceptually -- and you can't die in that game ... because, well, you're already dead. Oops, spoiler.

Brain ... spinning ...

So, Roger only has one testicle?

Time to unpack the pitchforks!

You did a great job, man. I loved the zooms and close-ups and such. It must've really taken a long time to put that together. Only thing I can fault you on is that your narration volume is much, much lower than the in-game volume.

HCH: Hey, thanks. :) Embellishment is my specialty. As for artists who worked on latter-day SQ games, that's not a bad idea! Back in my Wilco's Domain, I interviewed Michael Hutchence (artist on SQ6), and it'd be fun to get input from Sean Murphy (artist on SQ5) and Barry T. Smith (artist on SQ4). I'll take that on board and try to reach out to these fine folks. Thanks for the suggestion! Also, the Ray Trace joke in the SQ6 credits soooo went over everybody's head back then. I thought it was kinda obvious. ;)