Chefelf.com Night Life: Cowd - Viewing Profile

I think the whole concept of Somerset as the Prince of Destiny was pretty cool. Everything else was just 'meh'. They - well, he - could have made Somerset's part practically as is (maybe with less cheap manga antics) yet had the bulk of the game played as Trilbs.

This game was ok. Since I consider 5DAS and 7DAS great, and TN excellent, that makes 'ok' a disappointment. It was far from the Return of the King style gorgeous finale I'd been hoping for. I won't say it was as bad as the Matrix sequels but it was certainly off in that general direction. The scares simply weren't there. The logic gaps were too awful to pass over and really made me lose my suspension of disbelief. Apart from Red Robe, the new cast was largely unappealing, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. Even he made me raise an eyebrow when he first appeared with his cheesy pseudo-kung-fu-master ways. I remember thinking "Yahtzee's been watching too many bad Hong Kong movies". He made up for it in the whole you-play-as-Somerset sequence though, which was the only remarkable part of the whole game. The Trilby clones were especially awful.

In my opinion the game ought to have been set in the present day with Trilby as the main character. An older, slightly ravaged Trilby who would probably have to die at the end. Carrying on from the past in this way would have allowed a lot more dramatic impact.

You could have done better than this Yahtzee. But I'm still looking forward to your next offering. Also keep in mind that I'm holding you to a higher standard here than all other amateur and even a lot of professional game designers.

Well, I'd say Grim Fandango was just as good, although it was hampered alot by the neanderthal interface. IIRC it came out a year later.

I agree that MI3 was better than its reputation. I think MI3 is the best of the trilogy (number 4 doesn't merit counting)

You guys ought to play Leisure Suit Larry 7, if only for the interface. It's one of the best interfaces I've seen (and a good game to boot). It combines the Monkey Island 3 "verb coin" with a text parser. Essentially, whenever you click a hotspot, a list of verbs pop up. Usually, only the obvious ones are listed - look at, pick up, use [item] on, talk to (in the case of a person), turn on (in case of a button) and some other intuitive ones such as, depending on the hotspot, "smell", "taste", "wash", "sneeze at", "undress", "milk" (don't ask, play the game ) which all make the game richer and would be hard to include if you used an icon-based or DOTT-style interface. In addition, you can select "other", which opens a box asking "what do you want to do with Annette's underwear"? and gives you a text parser. The same system is used for dialogues.

IMO, this system eliminates the weaknesses of both the traditional parser (the tedium of retyping "open door" 74 times, the difficulty of knowing where the hotspots are) and those of a simplistic point-n-click interface (not knowing whether "hand" means open, push, punch, pick up or leap to your death, and the unwanted tactic of "unthinkingly trying everything on everything until something works").

I see you're pulling a Longest Journey twist aswell.

I take that the tree is Cabadath's soul, whereas Mr. Tall (someone photoshop that) is what remains of his body. That would be the meaning of the writing on the wall: "His body is here, his soul is not". What about his mind?

Nice that you made such a complex and (comparatively) consistent backstory for your game. In TN you managed to avoid pretty much all the traps (listed under the "make my game" menu in AGS), which, I believe, is the first time I've ever experienced that in an adventure game. Every single commercial one I've played has been marred by one or several of those things.

P.S. are you ever frightened by your own creations?