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I think there's some real sketchy puzzle design in Grim, but the broad assertion that all the good parts of the game are non-interactive is major hyperbole and part of a narrative (one that, as you point out, finds a lot of sympathy in the comments) that makes Jimmy's take more familiar than dissenting. That Grim would have benefited from superior puzzles is a far cry from "Why is it a game at all?" but the former is more the position I take on it.

Great work! I gave them the boutique treatment and filed them under their own galleries. That catchall EMI Press gallery is due for some cleanup. https://mixnmojo.com/media/galleries/Computer-Games-Magazine-Feature-September-2000 https://mixnmojo.com/media/galleries/Playstation-Magazine-Review-2001

That's what makes me so curious about what Iron Phoenix would have looked like had it actually gotten made. I suspect it would have been very close to The Dig, where the majority of the game would have inclined toward a relatively realistic style akin to Fate of Atlantis, but with the cutscenes being significantly cartoonier. The storyboards we have look a lot like the FMV stuff in The Dig to me:

Not as much as I'm looking forward to watching somebody with the requisite hardware play it! Probably we can all agree that video games are the way to go with Indy going forward. I'm still baffled that an animated series never turned up, though.

I don't think the failure of Dial had to do with the quality of the movie or the marketing (though I certainly question the expense of a Rolling Stones song as the calling card for the trailers and TV spots). As a movie property at least, Indy just doesn't have a lot of currency among people beneath a certain age, and Skull already Hoover'd up the "long-anticipated revival of a legacy franchise" money. Skull was impervious to word of mouth -- the last memory of the series was the beloved Last Crusade, so everybody wanted to see it for themselves to form their own opinion. In addition, the idea of Spielberg/Lucas/Ford joining forces again still kind of meant something as a marketing hook in 2008, even to younger audiences. Dial was in just the opposite position. In some respects, I suspect Dial was left to settle Skull's check. Besides which, Disney/Lucasfilm did practically nothing to keep the property active since Skull's release, whereas by contrast they've been outright overprinting Star Wars, with oodles of movies and TV shows. Left unexploited, Indy firmly became Dad Movie material, and there was no multi-generational Top Gun: Maverick situation in the wings because Skull already got to fire that bolt. Combine that with all the weird, manufactured internet narratives that began before the movie even started shooting, a box office era that has proven time and time again to be merciless to movies that skew older (and the demographic data showed that Dial did), and a COVID-inflated budget, and you have all kinds of fine reasons for this to have failed before you even consider the movie itself. I'm not suggesting creative moves weren't made that might have turned audiences off, but an audience has to see a movie before they can hate it. I for one am pleased that Disney made this financial mistake, because I think, arguments over quality aside, it finishes the series on a much more appropriate note than Skull did. Future marathons are going to be a lot more satisfying now. Disney's balance sheet is somebody else's problem.

I guess he's indicting the puzzle in Year Four where you have to set fire to the flammable packing foam to bring it to the intention of the demons as a fuel source. It calls upon information you learned in Year One.

Oh they're smashing idols today over at The Digital Antiquarian. The latest piece is on Grim Fandango, and it's a spicy one.

Always does. If anything from Staff of Kings merits reprisal, it's him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSjbjoPAsJM

I'd love to get AVS1 on Switch, but based on this response to a question about a Linux port it doesn't sound like the source for AVS1 makes targeting additional platforms easy. It's a little confusing, though, because I thought AVS1 got rebuilt in Unity as part of its re-release in the last year or so. Regardless, they'd have to do some revamping of the interface for gamepad support. In contrast it sounds like AVS2 is being built from the ground-up with a ReMI-esque interface and consoles in mind.

Interview over at Adventure Game Hotspot. https://adventuregamehotspot.com/interview/2811/a-vampyre-story-lives-bill-tiller-and-sarunas-ledas-share-a-bats-tale

Judging from the press release, it sounds like it will still be the originally-planned continuation but will be designed in such a way to make sure new players aren't lost. The fact that they're dropping the "2" from the title points to that being the general marketing plan. I see Bill has confirmed on his Facebook page that Rebecca Schweitzer is back as Mona. What's significant about this is back in the day Bill had indicated that he would recast the character due to some negative reaction. In fact, the replacement actress can be heard in the A Vampyre Story: Year One Kickstarter campaign video. Guess he's come back around.

A Vampyre Story 2 is re-announced. They did it.

I’d be curious to know exactly how stripped-down Tim’s original conception was. It sounds like he basically set out to do the RTS battles, but it’s a Double Fine game – it’s hard to believe they didn’t always intend to reserve ample real estate for the lore stuff. Maybe not though! The budget must have been a fraction of what it grew to if at the outset it was just the multiplayer with an accompanying tutorial. When the single-player campaign was greatly expanded at Vivendi’s direction, I can imagine Tim looking at the unplanned evolution as, “Well, now we’ve poured all this extra frosting around the cake – what’s the bad news?” But the way you experience it as a player, the frosting is substantial enough to be taken as the real thing, so when the first RTS battle comes around, you can easily feel as though a rug has been pulled out from under you, especially if you’ve really been digging the God of War stuff. My memory of the first time playing it was that I didn’t object to the swerve in that I enjoyed the stage battles, but I ended up slightly disappointed when the Zelda of it turned out to be somewhat shallower than I thought was being promised in the early going. Retrospectively it’s easier to accept the game as “a little bit of a bunch of things”, but there was a real failure to set expectations. If the entire open-world action/adventure game was ultimately meant to be the most overproduced tutorial ever, they did themselves no favors by leaving the player to find that out along the way.

Since we've got a 15th anniversary retrospective to promote, let's see if the game can justify a dedicated thread. Does anybody here have getting-killed-by-Tim-online on their resume?

With a little help from his friends, @Remi illuminated some Monkey 2 esoterica on the main site today.

So how do you guys want to celebrate the one year anniversary of this post?

A "new" interview with Skunkape that touches on some of the topics we brought up here.

Didn't think this quite needed a news post, but the same YouTube account also uploaded this clip last year:

15% off!

With an animated Bone adaptation going tits-up for what I think was the forty-sixth time, Skunkape needs to text "u up?" to Jeff Smith and get this show back on the road. I'll even make @s-island dig out @Gabez's would-be hosted site Th' Tavern from the archives.

Presumably NuTelltale (aka LCG Entertainment) owns the assets to Tales, while Lucasfilm owns the IP, and thus it can only be distributed under a license with them. That means you have two parties you have to come to terms with. I can think of a lot of prosaic ways that would fail to get traction when one of those parties is Disney.

Though it got the front page treatment, I would say this thread merits a bump in the wake of the epilogue episode that was released for the PyschOdyssey documentary a few weeks ago. @Spaff wants YOU:

The visuals for Strong Bad were a much better fit for the constraints of its target platform. The game needs to be made available again, but I don't know that it cries out for a new coat of paint. It doesn't feel compromised. Tales suffers much more obviously from being coerced into being made with a WiiWare SKU in mind. I'd love to see what redemption Skunkape could offer it now that it can present the most perfect qualifications imaginable. While we're pipe-dreaming: I wonder what it would take for NuTelltale to get Puzzle Agent running on Switch?

Talked it over with Remi, and it's in fact a bannable offense now if you can't produce a proof of purchase on command. Hey, we never claimed civil rights were a thing here.

Wow. Also glad Aric talked to you about his TEMPLE OF DOOM prequel idea that covers how Indy found the remains of Nurhachi. I had the privilege of getting to do a similar rap session (unrecorded) with him as part of the research for Mojo's Iron Phoenix article six years ago, and I remember that coming up. As you've learned, Aric freely goes on tangents and they're all worth it. I'm glad these stories are out there.