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My Review of KQ 2015 (spoilers)

Started by Numbers, August 29, 2015, 02:37:04 PM

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KatieHal

That's often the nature of these things. The more announcements you have about a game, the less attention and buzz each subsequent announcement will get. But I imagine by the time they get to the final episode, there will be a lot of buzz again.

Katie Hallahan
~Designer, PR Director~

"Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix." Christina Baldwin

I have a blog!

Birdy

As this new game's very Tumblr- centric fanbase is revealing itself more and more, I find myself more and more disso@lutioned with it.... I hope this doesn't turn into Homestuck...

GrahamRocks!

I doubt it.

Homestuck is so huge and convoluted and has a fandom so thick that I don't even know where to begin... @_@

Btw, been meaning to ask you Numbers, thoughts on the music and environment in the game? You never mentioned them.

Numbers

The hand-painted environments are fine; it's the character design I don't like. Kind of like KQ7, actually; good attention to detail in the backgrounds, but the more animated characters in the foreground are too simple and their movements too choppy for me to enjoy. But yeah, the dragon cave looked good, and so did the town.

I honestly don't remember the music. However, the "item get" sound effect was a nice callback to KQ6.
I have no mouth, and I must scream.

GrahamRocks!


Birdy

I don't think anyone could give this game a harsh criticism on the visuals, considering that's probably what they put most of their effort into... though I guess the character animation is up to personal preference.

Numbers

Evidently, they put more effort into the visuals than they did into the script.
I have no mouth, and I must scream.

GrahamRocks!

#47
*nonchalant shrug* :)

I found more problems with TSL than I did with this game. Doesn't stop me from loving them both, though.

Bludshot

#48
Finally played it. I really enjoyed it! I have to agree that I wish the game were a bit more serious but I can't pretend that the game is unfaithful to the originals since KQ as a series never really had a consistent tone. I do hope later installments have some emotional weight to them, now that the devs satisfied the need to make Wallace Shawn lose in another battle of wits.

Besides I thought it was funny. >_>

EDIT: I really hate the autosave feature though, it led to some really dense excuses to keep Graham from losing the tournament, there is something to be said about the old Lucasarts no death style of adventure games but this is KQ we are talking about, I need at least a little bit of the old moon logic death tension.
Deep Thoughts with Connor Mac Lyrr
"Alack! The heads do not die!"

GrahamRocks!

It's weird, I don't hate the autosave, but at the same time I wouldn't mind having a save function either.

Numbers

Kinda reminds me of KQ7's saving system. Very clunky, and much harder to work with than it needed to be. The previous game's saving systems were fine, no need to fix what isn't broken. MoE, of course, reverted back to the simpler saving system the earlier games had, but with the caveat that it would take you a friggin' year to reload a saved game from a different level.
I have no mouth, and I must scream.

Rock Knight

KQ8 was ten times better than this crappy, horribly cliched childish Princess Bride ripoff.

GrahamRocks!

RK, there's no need for that. I'm not in the mood. Please just don't.

Bludshot

#53
I suspect it makes the puzzles easier to implement. Autosave ensures you don't mess up and leave the game in an unwinnable state, and to be fair a lot Sierra games had cruel and nonsensical ways to mess up.

But the game's puzzles aren't that difficult so I would've preferred a system that added weight to the death screens. At least those pain in the butt MOE load times gave you a pretty good incentive to not die.

I suppose part of the issue is that "Save early, save often" is no longer an integral to adventure games.
Deep Thoughts with Connor Mac Lyrr
"Alack! The heads do not die!"

GrahamRocks!

*shrugs*

I admit that "Save Early, Save Often, Don't Overwrite Saves" would have actually been useful to me as a kid. Not in playing Sierra games, because I didn't grow up with them, but other games like the Nancy Drew series. I can still remember the very first time I ever got stuck in an unwinnable situation: it was a game called Mystery at Rosemond Valley. A spinoff from the Lets Ride! games I enjoyed as a kid, it was unique because it had nothing to do with horses whatsoever (hence the "Lets Ride!" title), and instead of starring Annie from the Rosemond Hill game, it starred her sister, Emma, who was a journalist who was on the case for some stolen diamonds from a museum. Said unwinnable situation was because I didn't know to show an old lady a photograph that I'd found in the attic to continue talking to her and get extra info for the case. As soon as you exit that house, you cannot go back in as the text says "No answer. Maybe she's sleeping."

Another example, just due to own stupidity was Nancy Drew: Danger On Deception Island. I misidentified the piece of wood I found, and I couldn't call up the person who identified it again, which got me stuck later on. I feel said dumbness because when I was looking at it closely, I could see that it was reddish brown, not brown brown... and yet I still said it was the latter anyway.

This is why I like stuff like Let's Plays and using walkthroughs. I don't care if it's seen as cheating or weak, I hate getting stuck, dammit! Heck, I've been introduced to so many game series through LPs, when otherwise I wouldn't have given them a second glance in the store.

Numbers

I'm amazed that Paw Dugan from Channel Awesome managed to pull off a Let's Play of KQ5 that got a perfect score on his first time through. Really shows you how savvy people who grew up with moon logic puzzles tend to be. His LPs also introduced me to the No One Lives Forever games, which I friggin' loved. He and Pushing Up Roses also worked together on another nostalgic adventure game franchise, Hugo's House of Horrors and its sequels. Though none of them are anything special, they're...nostalgic, dammit.

Speaking of which, the fourth Hugo game, which he didn't do, was not an adventure game, but a first-person shooter more simplistic than Wolfenstein 3D. So look on the bright side; MoE may be many things--a black sheep in the family, a KQ in name only, a franchise killer--but it wasn't a FPS completely devoid of adventure elements the way the fourth Hugo game is. And the strange thing is, this game (it's called Nitemare 3D if you're wondering) has a cult following.



It's possibly the ugliest FPS ever made, next to the likes of Hovertank 3D (which had the excuse of being one of the first FPSs in existence) or Extreme Paintbrawl (which had the excuse of being rushed out for release in only two weeks), and it's still being updated to work on modern systems and still being sold by its original creator. So bizarre.
I have no mouth, and I must scream.

Bludshot

I wasn't aware there was a way to beat KQ5 without a full score, pitfalls galore but all of them pretty much leave the game unwinnable, do you just avoid the cat and blue guy or something?

I just watched Roses LP of Dropsy, that game has a traditional save system AND a fart button so kudos for improving on an old system Dropsy.

GR....I think I did the exact same thing with the wood in that Nancy Drew game, I honestly forgot those games existed.  They were pretty silly but also surprisingly hard.

Also creepy, look at the ghastly visage of turn of the century graphics. Glad NOLF never went down this route.

Deep Thoughts with Connor Mac Lyrr
"Alack! The heads do not die!"

GrahamRocks!

We're? They're still making them, actually! Same company too. I feel a little sad that they got rid of Nancy's old voice actress recently, but what are ya gonna do? I have a ton of them, but haven't bought one of them in a while. Also, another infamous puzzle for me that I've never solved completely (and thusly never completed the game, though that does happen a lot when I play ND, sometimes it takes me years to complete them because I'm that fricking incompetent) was the Fox and Geese puzzle in White Wolf of Icicle Creek. Ugh!! Maybe if I knew how to play the game in real life, it'd be easier for me? But I've tried looking up walkthroughs for that on Her Interactive forums, but they're not helpful.

There's a fourth Hugo game?! I thought there were only 2?

Numbers

Quote from: GrahamRocks! on November 23, 2015, 02:34:37 PM
There's a fourth Hugo game?! I thought there were only 2?

3 adventure games, actually--one of which you play as Hugo's girlfriend rather than Hugo himself--followed by Nitemare 3D. You're not missing out on much if you've never played Nitemare 3D, and given the game's shoddy graphics, poor gameplay, boring level design, nonthreatening enemies, a grand total of three weapons to use when even Wolf3D (which came out earlier) had four, and a dissatisfying ending on top of all that, the franchise has obviously never been continued again.
I have no mouth, and I must scream.

Bludshot

Must've been some ending since the Hugo games weren't too plot heavy to begin with.

Can you at least throw chop in Nitemare 3D?
Deep Thoughts with Connor Mac Lyrr
"Alack! The heads do not die!"