Fronzel Neekburm

She slept with the right people.

There‘s been some lively discussion over in the GK20 thread over which of the puzzles should have received a makeover. This got me thinking: Which puzzles would I change/dumb-down/streamline/straight up rip out of the game in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to make it not suck if I were to remake any of the old classics? Leave all your personal cat hair moustaches, spliced tapes and put gem in mouths here! My own personal least favourite: Police Quest SWAT „Pup, the LASH is not a toy!“ If only I had a dollar for every time I heard that! Fuck you, Daryl F. Gates!

Yeah, don‘t deflect now, ya hear! Besides, regardless of who‘s responsible for the fuck up, this is some top-tier internet drama. And it might get even topper-tierer, check this shit out. I think I just made an entitlement in my pants. I also have this crawling suspicion that the paying customers entitled kids that got suckered in by this little mix up will be the most business this this game will ever see. And now that they had their fancy new $5 toy taken away from them, I doubt they will be back to get the game proper at the obligatory christmas sale, even if the price should drop to a more reasonable amount. Customer trust can be a bitch sometimes. Oh well, easy come, easy go.

"Hey guys, I want to see Psycho for the first time, but I'm not entirely sure if I should watch Hitchcock's version (which I happen to have on DVD) or the Gus Van Sant remake first. Any suggestions?" Seriously though, stick with the original, all the way. The remake is rock solid for the most part (and therefore much, much better than I had feared), but it fails to bring anything new to the table.

Took the plunge into the firery pits of hell. I expected to find pain and misery, instead I found this: http://steamcommunity.com/app/319230/discussions/0/620696522120558904/

STUNNING FULL HD-GRAPHICS! HIGH-QUALITY VOICE ACTORS! The remake is out... Thoughts?

Is Broussard part of the new 3D Realms as well? The guy may have had his moment of fame, but he fell from grace with Duke Forever the only thing he‘s good for now are the comments he leaves on Hardcore Gamer about how point&clicks are totally "gay" (his words, not mine) and tweeting gems like "lol can‘t raise my arm and my speech‘s slurred haha I mighta had a stroke lol" (I wish I was kidding about that one, but sadly I‘m not.) I‘m tempted about getting the Anthology though. Too bad it‘s $40 now and they don‘t make physical copies, the cover artwork looks absolutely awesome and I‘d gladly cough up some dough for a proper, DRM-free physical copy. Oh well, I‘ll definitely grab a copy of Bio Menace for free. That one‘s by far my favourite from the old Apogee catalogue. I mean, the protagonist‘s name is Snake Logan. SNAKE LOGAN. Let that sink in for a while. He has a mullet and a mustache and he wears a garish green shirt. It also features the most over-the-top gore of all the old 3D Realms sidescrollers, with badly mutilated bodies strewn all over the place. And still the monsters in the game look like something straight out of a Pixar movie. It‘s one of the most apeshit insane things I ever played (and also one of the most unduly forgotten games) and it has a rockin‘ soundtrack. Do yourselves a favour and go play Bio Menace!

Okay, finished the game now and replayed the parts I already knew from the beta. I'm glad to see that the vase "puzzle" is just as fucking retarded in the final game as it was in the beta, only with more squirrel. When Frede brought up the squirrel, I thought to myself "Thank God, they've come to their senses and added a puzzle! Maybe I'll have to toss a peanut into the vase, so the squirrel breaks it!" You know, standard-fare mundane point&click shit? But no way, Jose! It's still the same "read all the plaques to make vase explode"-"puzzle". And the other new puzzles are probably even worse. Rule of thumb: If the most fun addition you came up with turns out to be the goddamn sliding puzzle, you fucked up royally! Other than that, eh, wasn't half-bad! I don't get why they used these unbelievably ugly looking speech bubbles for the cutscenes. The cutscenes themselves look pretty damn good, but the speech bubbles really tend to kind of ruin them.

Oh yeah... the lecture... I guess that would explain why I never picked up on that clue... Let's just say many a left mouse button was clicked during that lecture... :P Didn't have a problem with the Drei Drachen puzzle. Then again, I might've had a Heimvorteil with that one... And I completely agree with Frede about GK2's tape splicing puzzle. If you have to spell out the solution for the player in the game's manual, then that should be a subtle hint that your puzzle design is all sorts of screwed up.

I was actually surprised they didn't dumb down streamline the DJ-puzzle. That was the only one puzzle from the original game that I would have changed. Oh and one last word on the sketch in the Gedde tomb: That seems more useful as an acupuncture chart than as an instruction on how to cross yourself/hit a bunch of random buttons conveniently placed in a bunch of skulls.

Yeah, I noticed that sketch. It just adds insult to injury when you know exactly what you have to do and still can‘t get it right. After about three unsuccessful attempts, I figured my time would be more wisely spent complaining about the puzzle on this forum rather than actually solving it. :P

I had to look up "How to properly cross yourself" on wikiHow. This is what it has come to. These are the desperate measures my point&clickery has has driven me to. FML

I am a protestant and this puzzle triggers me! Seriously, my ancestors didn‘t join the wonderful world of Lutheran hedonism so I would have to make fucking crosses in a video game a couple hundred years down the road! Take your catholicism out of my vidya, you zealot fucks! And that‘s saying nothing about how utterly pointless and contrived this thing is. It‘s not a cool addition, it doesn‘t advance the story in any meaningful way (or in a non-meaningful way, for that matter), it‘s just a showstopper they decided to haphazardly shoehorn in. This kind of puzzle doesn‘t just ask you to suspend your disbelief, it demands that you drown your disbelief in sulfuric acid and then tapdance on its grave.

Motherfucker, these new puzzles! These new fucking puzzles, I hate them so! Hate! Hate! HATEHATEHATE!!!! There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for this fucking filler shit garbage at this micro-instant. Hate. Hate. The fuck is this shit? Myst? Dammit, Jenna Jameson, Y U have to do this to me?!

Actually, they did make one... sort of...

The mouse is coming to GOG, I did not think it possible. Great news!

Misread that as Five Inch Fails. This needs to be a band name so much!

Graphically, I don't think so. But interestingly enough, Jackson Square is the only part where they actually DID change some of the voice work, despite statements to the effect that the beta voice work was final and couldn't be changed. And thank God for that! The dancing kid was originally voiced by a guy trying to sound like a little kid. In the feedback thread I described the result as "truly abominable in a makes-me-want-to-brutally-rip-my-eardrums-out kind of way", "the worst voice acting I've ever had to endure outside of the original Deus Ex", "painful", "excruciating" and "utterly atrocious" among a few other things too vile to be repeated here. (If you think I'm exaggerating, that's only because you didn't hear it for yourself.) I guess they got the hint. At the time I suggested that they should "consider luring any 8 year old off the street into the recording booth (promising candy ought to do the trick) and have that kid record the lines". I'm glad they did.

Say, what part of the game is in the demo? If it's Day 1, I can assure you that GK's voice actor gets a lot better as the game progresses. That was something the backer feedback was unanimous about. Unfortunately, they didn't have the time or the resources to rerecord the early lines.

The magic of admin powers! Time for me to backpedal hard and blame your evil admin editing powers for every shitpost I ever left on this forum.

I... I... I just don‘t understand. Why this? Why now? It‘s been over a year since the shitstorm hit the fan. Many a bag of popcorn was consumed, but I thought that - save for a few disgruntled backers still waiting for their shit to arrive - this was over and done with. Did he realise that he ruined his career and reputation and figure „Well, if interwebz drama is all I‘m good for, then dammit, interwebz drama they shall receive!“

For real? Jeez, I can't even begin to... Just... WHYYYY? I guess Bobby Kotick is too busy counting the billions that Cowadoody rakes in to check the Humble Store, or else he'd know that the Linuxers are always the ones who are willing to spend the most. Just a short anecdote about tight leashes and Jane Jensen being awesome and such: When the Pinkerton Kickstarter was still going, I contacted them about whether the physical copies of their games would require Steam. And about five minutes later I get a reply from Jane Jensen herself that was basically two whole paragraphs. So not only did I learn that Jane Jensen can type lengthy, articulate and friendly replies at a superhuman speed, she also let me know very straightforwardly that while Moebius was going to be DRM-free, the situation was different for Mystery Game X, since a major publisher is involved. Now fast forward to two years later: Not only did she keep her word about Moebius, she apparently also managed to get the higher-ups to agree to not only release GK20 on places like GOG on day 1, but also convinced them to let her produce a limited, backer-exclusive quantity of physical copies of GK20. In her final studio update she said that she and Robert "fought very very hard for some things" and I would not at all be surprised if the DRM-free GK20 releases was somewhere near the top of that list of battles.

Sadly enough, that's a fairly accurate description of how I sound like in real life... :( Thanks to global warming, this is sadly also very close to becoming a reality. Ron Paul tried to warn us... But yeah, summers were still summers in 1993, so this is very much a welcome addition. Agreed! That's definitely one of the "Hey, Jane Jensen's still got it!"-moments for me. I'm sure they would have if they could. But in all likelihood their contract with Activision stated something to the effect of "Have game ready by Oct 15th or we'll have your assetts and your balls." It was very obvious that the game had to be completed in an incredible rush (like I said, the beta I played felt like it was a year or so away from release-worthy game) and I'm really amazed that the pulled off to make a pretty good game under such conditions. Damn, now I have to replay the beta version days! That squirrel wasn't there when I played it. I'll take at least partial credit blame for how that puzzle turned out, since I called the puzzle as it appeared in the beta version "complete bullshit" in Pinkerton's feedback thread. Here's how it originally played out: GK needs $20, checks every other place, goes to the cemetery, notices that he now can visit the family tomb for some reason, checks out the family tomb, BANG! vase asplodes, 20 buckazoids appear, The End. Like, it wasn't even a puzzle as such, it was just pixel hunting. Other people voiced similar complaints while there was also a user who argued that this gave the scene a spiritual quality - as if his family was watching over GK. I guess that spiritual quality is gone now (unless of course that squirrel was sent by the almighty himself to help GK on his quest to buy a crocodile mask :o ).

Checked out the metacritic site that penguinfan linked (gotta say, that metascore is quite a surprise!). Glad to see that there was at least one gaming rag that didn't shy away from the all-too-tempting "We iz moar progressives nao!" narrative. Such progressive! So critical analyisis! Wow! Note that these are the same assholes that gave Quest For Infamy a 3 bananas out of 10 score solely because of muh soggy knees. And do note that both with GK20 and QFI Strategy Informer is the only publication that gave either game a negative review. Also, lol, they misspelled Jenna Jameson!