Capn_Ascii

What's the difference? ;) The key to understanding the narrator's treatment of Roger is realizing that, for all intents and purposes, Roger and the player are the same entity.
 
In the early games, there basically was no "Roger", at least not as we know him now. He had no dialogue and no real personality beyond what characterization the story events (such as napping in the closet) and the narrator put on him. Although he started getting a little more characterization in SQ3 (mostly due to the increasing snarkiness of the writing around that time), it wasn't until SQ4 that Roger got any actual dialogue and personality. Up until that point, "Roger" was little more than an AFGNCAAP - an avatar for the player, with no real character of his own.
 
It's a holdover from the days of interactive fiction, where virtually all games spoke directly to the player as if they were the one personally interacting with the game world. It wasn't until adventure game protagonists started graphically appearing on-screen that designers realized they had to start defining certain basic attributes (gender, appearance, etc.) for the sake of designing character sprites. Over time, the trend continued, until adventure protagonists became their own entities.
 
Thing is, the second person narration ("You can't get ye flask!"), using "you" to refer to the main character, kept being used. Superficially, this would seem to indicate that the narrator is talking to the main character somehow - which of course is where the backtalk-the-narrator humor in many games (SQ6, the later LSL games) comes from. But on a gameplay level, the narrator is still talking to *you* - the person at the keyboard - which carries certain implications. ;)
 
Basically, when the narrator is snarking about how Roger is stupid, clumsy, useless, etc., he's not talking about Roger - he's talking about Roger as controlled by you. Think of Roger as a puppet (or a mech suit, if you're more of an anime fan) with you in the driver seat - everything he does is ultimately your doing. If Roger does something brainless (such as blow himself up with an unstable tank shell), it's because you were being stupid. If Roger blunders off the edge of a cliff, it's because you weren't paying attention or didn't have the finger dexterity to guide him around it. Akril's fanfic isn't far off the mark - it's basically a cute way to personify what would otherwise be an abstract game concept, impossible to portray in normal fiction.
 
Gary is ripping on Roger, sure, but only because Roger has the misfortune to be stuck with a shmuck of a player leading him around. ;) Arguably, if we were able to percieve a version of Space Quest where Roger acted of his own accord - one where there is no player, and no narrator - then we'd see him in his "natural" state - that of a lazy, clutzy, somewhat cowardly, but ultimately well-meaning average joe who's more dopey than he is dumb.
 
Then again, without the player's intellect to give him those sudden bursts of McGuyver-esque ingenuity and puzzle-solving insight, he'd probably have been blown up way back on the Arcada... <_<

Hmm...I think I'll throw my Official Bootleg Astro Chicken Flight Hat into the ring here. Although I'm not sure some of you will like what I have to say this time.
 

Mostly because of this. :mellow: I've seen the various responses in this thread as to why someone would rip/repurpose/alter original resources, but it strikes me as odd that the single *biggest* reason (at least, the biggest one I can think of) doesn't seem to have come up.
 
Maybe the reason they do this sort of thing is because they have no choice.
 
The fact of the matter is, not everyone is an artist. This is a fact that I am intimately familiar with - it's been the source of many a crushed dream and frustrated head-desk on my part over the years. :( I'm something of a dreamer, and there are plenty of ideas floating around inside my armor-plated skull, but thanks to a complete and total lack of artistic talent, I have no way to adequately express them. I can't draw for spit - on a *good* day, my best drawings look like something an 8-year-old did. The closest thing I have to a creative talent is the ability to write - which might be fine for some people, but not for me. <_< I'm a highly audio-visual oriented person who best experiences things viscerally - directly, through the senses - and to me the written word has always come across as half-assed compared to that. It's the difference between actually *seeing* a movie and having someone reading the script of said movie to you - can anyone here honestly say they'd prefer the latter over the former?
 
My point being, I know from first-hand experience the frustration of wanting to create something awesome for other people to enjoy, but not being able to do so due to lack of talent. Once, years ago, I attempted to make my own Space Quest fangame. It wasn't anything fancy - just a short little adventure that was more of a test of my own creative skill than anything else. Since I had no ability to create my own graphical resources, I had two choices: 'borrow' resources from existing games, or make something that didn't require graphics. I chose the latter route, and put together an interactive fiction game (read: old-skool text adventure). Or at least, I *tried* to -like many other would-be fangame authors of that bygone era, I got frustrated and never finished. (Ah, those were the days - a new fangame announcement every few days, and a new cancellation of an existing project just as often. ;) )
 
In my case, the death knell came when I finally realized that it was the game itself that was making me frustrated. Not because it was hard to make, or because I felt overwhelmed - but because the more I worked on it, the more it *mocked* me and my efforts. I could see all these places, characters, and ideas in my head as vividly as if they were real - but every time I tried to put pen to virtual paper to write the corresponding text descriptions, they came up short. Nothing I wrote could make my ideas *exist* in that virtual world the way I wanted them to.To this day, I'm still not sure if it was because I just wasn't that good a writer, or if I *was* good enough but was being overly critical of my own abilities, or if I was just so used to *seeing* things that trying to approximate sight with words felt horribly clumsy and half-assed from my perspective. :unsure: All I knew was that it wasn't working, so I cut my losses and walked away.
 
There are others like me out there - people who have ideas, who *yearn* to create, to share them with others, but who lack the technical skill to make it happen. I've been in their shoes, and I can tell you from experience that it's not a fun place to be. <_< I can understand 100% why someone would resort to stealing graphics, music tracks, and other resources to make a game - because for some folks, it's the only option they really have. The only other choice would be to not try to share their ideas at all - and in my book, that's arguably worse. :(
 
...sorry, didn't mean to go on a rant there. ^_^ I used to do sprite/pixel editing as something of a hobby, and I'm thus well-versed in the art of ripping and reworking graphical resources (and pondering the resulting ethical quandaries). Just a frustrated geek who feels the need to vent. :ph34r:

Hmm...I think I'll throw my Official Bootleg Astro Chicken Flight Hat into the ring here. Although I'm not sure some of you will like what I have to say this time.
 

Mostly because of this. :mellow: I've seen the various responses in this thread as to why someone would rip/repurpose/alter original resources, but it strikes me as odd that the single *biggest* reason (at least, the biggest one I can think of) doesn't seem to have come up.
 
Maybe the reason they do this sort of thing is because they have no choice.
 
The fact of the matter is, not everyone is an artist. This is a fact that I am intimately familiar with - it's been the source of many a crushed dream and frustrated head-desk on my part over the years. :( I'm something of a dreamer, and there are plenty of ideas floating around inside my armor-plated skull, but thanks to a complete and total lack of artistic talent, I have no way to adequately express them. I can't draw for spit - on a *good* day, my best drawings look like something an 8-year-old did. The closest thing I have to a creative talent is the ability to write - which might be fine for some people, but not for me. <_< I'm a highly audio-visual oriented person who best experiences things viscerally - directly, through the senses - and to me the written word has always come across as half-assed compared to that. It's the difference between actually *seeing* a movie and having someone reading the script of said movie to you - can anyone here honestly say they'd prefer the latter over the former?
 
My point being, I know from first-hand experience the frustration of wanting to create something awesome for other people to enjoy, but not being able to do so due to lack of talent. Once, years ago, I attempted to make my own Space Quest fangame. It wasn't anything fancy - just a short little adventure that was more of a test of my own creative skill than anything else. Since I had no ability to create my own graphical resources, I had two choices: 'borrow' resources from existing games, or make something that didn't require graphics. I chose the latter route, and put together an interactive fiction game (read: old-skool text adventure). Or at least, I *tried* to -like many other would-be fangame authors of that bygone era, I got frustrated and never finished. (Ah, those were the days - a new fangame announcement every few days, and a new cancellation of an existing project just as often. ;) )
 
In my case, the death knell came when I finally realized that it was the game itself that was making me frustrated. Not because it was hard to make, or because I felt overwhelmed - but because the more I worked on it, the more it *mocked* me and my efforts. I could see all these places, characters, and ideas in my head as vividly as if they were real - but every time I tried to put pen to virtual paper to write the corresponding text descriptions, they came up short. Nothing I wrote could make my ideas *exist* in that virtual world the way I wanted them to.To this day, I'm still not sure if it was because I just wasn't that good a writer, or if I *was* good enough but was being overly critical of my own abilities, or if I was just so used to *seeing* things that trying to approximate sight with words felt horribly clumsy and half-assed from my perspective. :unsure: All I knew was that it wasn't working, so I cut my losses and walked away.
 
There are others like me out there - people who have ideas, who *yearn* to create, to share them with others, but who lack the technical skill to make it happen. I've been in their shoes, and I can tell you from experience that it's not a fun place to be. <_< I can understand 100% why someone would resort to stealing graphics, music tracks, and other resources to make a game - because for some folks, it's the only option they really have. The only other choice would be to not try to share their ideas at all - and in my book, that's arguably worse. :(
 
...sorry, didn't mean to go on a rant there. ^_^ I used to do sprite/pixel editing as something of a hobby, and I'm thus well-versed in the art of ripping and reworking graphical resources (and pondering the resulting ethical quandaries). Just a frustrated geek who feels the need to vent. :ph34r:

What's the difference? ;) The key to understanding the narrator's treatment of Roger is realizing that, for all intents and purposes, Roger and the player are the same entity.
 
In the early games, there basically was no "Roger", at least not as we know him now. He had no dialogue and no real personality beyond what characterization the story events (such as napping in the closet) and the narrator put on him. Although he started getting a little more characterization in SQ3 (mostly due to the increasing snarkiness of the writing around that time), it wasn't until SQ4 that Roger got any actual dialogue and personality. Up until that point, "Roger" was little more than an AFGNCAAP - an avatar for the player, with no real character of his own.
 
It's a holdover from the days of interactive fiction, where virtually all games spoke directly to the player as if they were the one personally interacting with the game world. It wasn't until adventure game protagonists started graphically appearing on-screen that designers realized they had to start defining certain basic attributes (gender, appearance, etc.) for the sake of designing character sprites. Over time, the trend continued, until adventure protagonists became their own entities.
 
Thing is, the second person narration ("You can't get ye flask!"), using "you" to refer to the main character, kept being used. Superficially, this would seem to indicate that the narrator is talking to the main character somehow - which of course is where the backtalk-the-narrator humor in many games (SQ6, the later LSL games) comes from. But on a gameplay level, the narrator is still talking to *you* - the person at the keyboard - which carries certain implications. ;)
 
Basically, when the narrator is snarking about how Roger is stupid, clumsy, useless, etc., he's not talking about Roger - he's talking about Roger as controlled by you. Think of Roger as a puppet (or a mech suit, if you're more of an anime fan) with you in the driver seat - everything he does is ultimately your doing. If Roger does something brainless (such as blow himself up with an unstable tank shell), it's because you were being stupid. If Roger blunders off the edge of a cliff, it's because you weren't paying attention or didn't have the finger dexterity to guide him around it. Akril's fanfic isn't far off the mark - it's basically a cute way to personify what would otherwise be an abstract game concept, impossible to portray in normal fiction.
 
Gary is ripping on Roger, sure, but only because Roger has the misfortune to be stuck with a shmuck of a player leading him around. ;) Arguably, if we were able to percieve a version of Space Quest where Roger acted of his own accord - one where there is no player, and no narrator - then we'd see him in his "natural" state - that of a lazy, clutzy, somewhat cowardly, but ultimately well-meaning average joe who's more dopey than he is dumb.
 
Then again, without the player's intellect to give him those sudden bursts of McGuyver-esque ingenuity and puzzle-solving insight, he'd probably have been blown up way back on the Arcada... <_<

What's the difference? ;) The key to understanding the narrator's treatment of Roger is realizing that, for all intents and purposes, Roger and the player are the same entity.
 
In the early games, there basically was no "Roger", at least not as we know him now. He had no dialogue and no real personality beyond what characterization the story events (such as napping in the closet) and the narrator put on him. Although he started getting a little more characterization in SQ3 (mostly due to the increasing snarkiness of the writing around that time), it wasn't until SQ4 that Roger got any actual dialogue and personality. Up until that point, "Roger" was little more than an AFGNCAAP - an avatar for the player, with no real character of his own.
 
It's a holdover from the days of interactive fiction, where virtually all games spoke directly to the player as if they were the one personally interacting with the game world. It wasn't until adventure game protagonists started graphically appearing on-screen that designers realized they had to start defining certain basic attributes (gender, appearance, etc.) for the sake of designing character sprites. Over time, the trend continued, until adventure protagonists became their own entities.
 
Thing is, the second person narration ("You can't get ye flask!"), using "you" to refer to the main character, kept being used. Superficially, this would seem to indicate that the narrator is talking to the main character somehow - which of course is where the backtalk-the-narrator humor in many games (SQ6, the later LSL games) comes from. But on a gameplay level, the narrator is still talking to *you* - the person at the keyboard - which carries certain implications. ;)
 
Basically, when the narrator is snarking about how Roger is stupid, clumsy, useless, etc., he's not talking about Roger - he's talking about Roger as controlled by you. Think of Roger as a puppet (or a mech suit, if you're more of an anime fan) with you in the driver seat - everything he does is ultimately your doing. If Roger does something brainless (such as blow himself up with an unstable tank shell), it's because you were being stupid. If Roger blunders off the edge of a cliff, it's because you weren't paying attention or didn't have the finger dexterity to guide him around it. Akril's fanfic isn't far off the mark - it's basically a cute way to personify what would otherwise be an abstract game concept, impossible to portray in normal fiction.
 
Gary is ripping on Roger, sure, but only because Roger has the misfortune to be stuck with a shmuck of a player leading him around. ;) Arguably, if we were able to percieve a version of Space Quest where Roger acted of his own accord - one where there is no player, and no narrator - then we'd see him in his "natural" state - that of a lazy, clutzy, somewhat cowardly, but ultimately well-meaning average joe who's more dopey than he is dumb.
 
Then again, without the player's intellect to give him those sudden bursts of McGuyver-esque ingenuity and puzzle-solving insight, he'd probably have been blown up way back on the Arcada... <_<

Going to jump on this bandwagon ASAP.
 

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:

I miss feelies. :(
 

Have you ever actually *played* the LSL games? They're *supposed* to look like that. ;) Sometime after LSL3, during the Sierra-wide transition to 256-color graphics, Al and his Larry team realized that, while the other game series were heading towards more realistic-looking graphics, LSL could benefit from going in the opposite direction. Thus, the Larry games achieved an exaggerated, 'modern art' spin - specifically designed to make the games fun and entertaining to watch even when nothing explicitly funny was happening on-screen. It worked like a charm, and I wouldn't have LSL any other way. :D
 

See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. :lol: Part of the reason I love the LSL games is because they weren't afraid to emphasize the "art over realism" school of thought as opposed to other games of the time. The so-called "whacked out" (snicker) art style stayed mostly consistent between LSL games, albeit with slight tweaks:
 
--LSL5, as Spikey said, applied the art deco look to the then-modern-day world, with exaggerated architechture and characters.
--LSL1VGA did the same thing, except with a heavy retro feel meant to evoke the earlier 80s setting and the 70s mindset that Larry was mentally stuck in at the time.
--LSL6 kept the art style of LSL5 with regards to buildings and environments, but the characters (except for Larry himself) were made realistic again.
--LSL7 again kept the same environment design, but applied a layer of cel-shaded cartooniness to everything - lightly on the backdrops, more heavily on the characters. The remake seems to be emulating this style, which makes sense, as it was the style of the last classic LSL series game to be released.
--Magna Cum Laude, though not strictly a part of the original series of games, nonetheless sucessfully transitioned the exaggerated art style into 3D. Like LSL6, the characters are realistically proportioned, but there's a slight degree of LSL7-esque cartoonishness to the designs that keeps them from looking too photorealistic.
 
It should be noted that in *all* cases, a universal exception to the "art deco" design of the later games was the girls - all of the Larry babes in each game stayed as realistic-looking as possible, mostly because it's hard to find a Picasso-style cubist chick sexy. Unless you're into that sort of thing. ;) Speaking of which...
 

Saving the best for last, dude. LSL is all about girls, girls, girls - if we see all the hotties up front, what will we have to look forward to in the actual game? ;)
 
(Although they're going to have their work cut out for them to out-sexy some of the classic LSL girls. Eve VGA? Good *god*. :wub: )

HHHEEEEUUUUURRRRRRAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!! :shock:
 
Well, they did it. They finally did it. I was perfectly content to finally let go of my mental death grip on Space Quest and allow myself to drift off into the far reaches of the Internet. SQ would be nothing more than a memory - a part of my life whose time had passed, but whose spirit would always stay with me in my heart, warming my soul and carrying me forward to greater things.
 
And then hell froze over.
 
Suddenly, I felt a powerful pulling sensation - as if some unseen force was trying to snatch me away from my comfortable burrow in the dark corners of the Web. I tried to resist, tried to fight it - but it's no use. Space Quest is back...and so am I. :D
 
The long-timers will probably remember me - I'm that long-winded, vaguely annoying fellow prone to making long, wordy posts full of unsolicited opinions, unwarranted rants, unapologetically lame jokes, and an undeserved sense of self-satisfaction. I'm a pretty un-assuming sort of fellow overall, in fact. :P (See? There's one now.) All joking aside, though, it's fantastic to see so many familiar names on the forums, including some I haven't seen since long before the fall of SQ (Holy crap, Troels is here!?).
 
Now that there's actually Space Quest stuff to talk about again, you can go ahead and brace yourselves for the inevitable hurricane of prattle coming your way, courtesy of me. First on the list: an in-depth analysis of why exactly VSB and Incinerations are so freakin' awesome, to be posted in the near future.
 
And one final note: those of you who think the title of this post is just a trite phrase? Think again.
 
 
P.S: Hey, my old login from 2006 is still here! How cool is that? :D