Fronzel Neekburm

Sound advice for any publisher seeking to milk the next franchise cash cow. SquareEnix, take note!

Mobygames begs to differ: http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/kings-quest-mask-of-eternity/cover-art But, yeah, it is radically different. The predecessor was groan-inducingly saccharine kitsch. MoE I quit after stout polygon stud Connor decapitated a chicken, with the headless corpse running through the decidedly ugly scenery for a couple of seconds.

"Safeguards? Don't be such a weak sister. There ARE no safeguards! This is the fifties." Harvester is back and I'm loving every twisted minute of it!

Soylent Smoothee: Spit or swallow?

The dreadful overall experience I had with Larry Reloaded* - or, to be more exact, the drama surrounding it - made me decide to turn my back on Kickstarter as a means of providing for a brighter and better future in gaming for good. The news of their user data being hacked really is just icing on the cake at this point: https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/important-kickstarter-security-notice * The very game that made me sign up for Kickstarter, mind you!

I guess it depends largely on what you expect out of it. Personally, I liked it a great deal. If you're looking for a challenge, forget about it. One of the chapters in this game can be literally be beaten in four steps: go into town, give something to someone, go back home, watch closing cinematic. It's adventure gaming for simpletons (people like me). The puzzles themselves might dissatisfy hardcore adventure gamers, but personally, I prefer simple, somwhat realistic puzzles over a puzzle to which the solution is so obscure that they have to tell you the correct solution in the manual (the GK2 tape splicing comes to mind). What DOES work is the huge amount of exploration that can be done outside of the main plot. There's tons of little things that keep happening around the mansion. You don't need to trigger any of this to advance the plot, but it adds to the atmosphere and made playing this game hugely rewarding. Then of course, the game carried an adults only rating where I'm from, so that automatically makes it cool.

Yawn. I rate this 2/5 on the Trolling-scale. Should've spiced things up a little by adding "SpaceVenture sux! Who's this Chris Pope guy?" at the end there.

That's sad, I was looking forward to that convention. Hopefully, if anyone should decide to go ahead and holf the convention, they'll let us know in time. Wasn't there an idea tossed around at some point to hold a European adventure gaming fan convention?

Nah, no worries. Just compared the two versions and your names are still in the credits and all the in-game references are also there. (I wasn't able to make a more detailed comparison between the two versions of the credits, since 2.0 just crashes if you attempt to launch it with FRAPS turned on. Figures.) One thing I noticed is that one credit DID get removed. Billy Joe Cain is no longer credited as the Chief "Happy Ending" Officer.

Whatever they did, it's safe to assume that they never attempted to play it on a computer that wasn't connected to the Internet.

Just as an aside, since it is somewhat semi-relevant to this thread (and since I can't discuss it on the Replay forums for obvious reasons :D): To my great dismay, I found *this* on German amazon today: http://www.amazon.de/Leisure-Suit-Larry-Reloades-Edition/dp/B00FE95LI8/ Now, I'm not sure if any of you actually played version 2.0, but I found it to be an absolute mess that breaks more things than it fixes. So much in fact that I was glad I kept the setup.exe of the initial release. Language selection, achievements - that's all fine and dandy, but this apparently went through no proper playtesting whatsoever before it was released (not surprising, considering... you know...). A two-bit enterprise like Replay releasing this broken mess is one thing, but the real shocker here is that retailers (both online and "in the real world") picked this to be THE definitive version of Larry Reloaded (particularly so in the case of online retailers, where version 2.0 is the only version you can get). Makes you wonder if they ever tried the game themselves before they decided to put it in a box and sell it. Not to mention how fundamentally wrong it is to basically release a patch as a full-price-game... edit: Just a minor complaint compared to all the other things that are wrong with this release, but why are the colors on the cover artwork so off? It has this weird, ugly, yellowish tint. Not to mention all that other stuff they plastered all over Tom's artwork.

Didn't back it at the time, mostly because the logo looked like a cheap knock-off of the "DOOM II" boss, but I recently got a copy of "Shadowrun Returns" on GOG. And yes, it delivers (by Kickstarter-standards, anyway)! Abysmal reviews aside, I'll try to fetch me a copy of "Lilly looking through" at some point during the winter sale.

Only got wind of this a few days after the fact. Many a bag of popcorn was consumed that afternoon, let me assure you! I keep going back to the one question that kind of started it all: Well, there you have it, folks! There's your answer, right there on a golden fucking plate! BTW, I noticed the Phoenix-bashing on Corey's wall, but I seem to have missed out on the Jane Jensen-through-the-mud-dragging. Screencaps, anyone? I guess we can't thank Josh enough for not only delivering on the writing, but also for his tireless efforts in damage control. It's all too obvious now that without him delaying this inevitable meltdown for as long as he did, all this shit would most definitely have occurred waaay before the actual game shipped. God only knows how everything would've turned out if that had happened...

Am I the only one who thinks this quote should be trademarked? It's a tarantinoesque catchphrase waiting to happen! This could be printed on t-shirts! Despite that, sorry, don't feel I'm qualified to apply. I suck at everything (mostly at composing, idea helping and artist...ing).

How could I possibly forget? This is all kinds of brilliant! :) Nice to have it in higher resolution now. This goes straight into my SpaceVenture archival folder.

Never saw this before. Thanks for posting this, BlockMaster! Especially since Polysorbate LX happens to be my favorite SQ-location. Hey, could that be a TriOptimum logo on one of the buildings in the upper right hand corner of the screen? :)

Just found an alpha gameplay trailer for an indie game called "Routine". Aside from being smitten with one of the most nondescript titles anyone could possibly come up with, this looks quite promising. Like "Viscera Cleanup Detail" minus the janitorial duties.

Say what you will about Quirk, but that guy had the most amazing walk cycle!

Which reminds me of that wonderful poster that Troels delighted us with last year during the TGA-campaign. The one that said "Vote YES! on lobotomies for adventure game designers!"

Not giving a fuck, morelike. I'd guess they would use that kind of stuff until someone found out about it and threatened legal action.

SQ6 is the very reason I got into PC games. Some of the locations/music/writing remain my favorites from the whole seires. But yeah, 5 and 6 are definitely a departure from the earlier games (which is probably why I don't like those as much as the later games - with the exception of SQ3, which I loved... "Y'all come back now, ya hear? Alien scum!").

Laura Bow II, which made you guess Egyptian deities, was also pretty cool in that regard.

My favorite SQV-exchange would have to be: “What set of happy circumstances left the Eureka Captain’s chair open for me?” “Well, our last Captain blew himself out of the airlock...” “That’s too bad.” “If you say so, sir.” And yes, I was referring to the time pod codes. Didn't know what the hell else to call these... things.

I'll have to go against popular opinion and say that I disliked SQIV to such an extent I never even bothered to finish it. Storywise it's the best in the series, hands down! But in terms of gameplay, I found it an unnerving, endless barrage of dead-ends, trial & error and instant death for deviating even the slightest bit from the straight and narrow. Hell, even the copy protection manages to be bothersome to this day, thanks to those weird-ass hieroglyphs. I want to play these games for the fun, not for masochist kicks. The Alien dead end in SQII is actually the only dead-end in a Sierra game which I thought was memorable and fun. It gave me a nice feeling of "Should've seen that coming." instead of the usual "You've got to be fucking kidding!". Chalk me up as a big fan of SQV as well, some of the dialogue is just beautiful. Plus, the graduation theme played im my head each and every every time I received my annual report card and it said that I won't be held back a year.

Excellent work on the update! There seems to be some confusion as to how to put the SVRewards to good use. Here's an idea: Why not borrow one of the most enjoyable aspects of the Pinkerton Road campaign and release one or two pieces of music composed by Ken Allen for backers to download at the beginning of each month? Regardless of the reception of the demo, everyone agrees that Ken's music is absolutely brilliant! I don't know about that. IMHO, the best way to fine-tune swiping would be to get rid of it altogether, as all this valuable time wasted on an entirely superfluous feature would be more wisely spent in making other components of the game work. The only thing swipe controls did for me was giving me this creeping feeling that this game caters mostly to the tablet crowd. Not a nice feeling at all. And if I want to shove crates, I'll stick to Tomb Raider. Clicking-and-dragging would make sense in some ultra-annoying plunger-related minigame (Ace is a plumber, after all), but other than that, I really don't want to see any of it in the actual game. Even making it optional probably won't be enough, as the mechanic itself is likely to poison the overall puzzle design.