This got me to play through Monkey Island 2 Special Edition finally. Love Tim Schafer. Really excited about Psychonauts 2. Still don’t think I’ll ever give Brutal Legend another shot tho lol
1 Like
was 4 any good
4 Likes
That article spoils something very amusing in 4.
I thought 4 was very good. Probably my top game in 2020. But you have to put up with (or maybe appreciate) a lot of old-fashioned game design conventions.
4 Likes
All Brutal Legend had to be was what its demo made it appear to be, which was a gormy not very exciting 3d action game, and instead it was… that.
2 Likes
My exact feelings. It is really wild to hear that it was first an RTS and then an action adventure game grew out of the need to make a tutorial for the RTS stuff…
I think on paper a story driven 3rd person action - RTS hybrid is like the imaginary video game i have absent-mindedly daydreamed about for years, but for some reason whenever anyone actually tries it it seems like it doesn’t quite live up to the concept. Has there ever been a good one?
1 Like
I think Overlord came close.
1 Like
Sacrifice was quite good apart maybe from all the turtling needed (at least for me) in later levels.
2 Likes
In general the video title “Tim Schaefer breaks down 20 years of Double Fine games” makes me laugh because I can’t see what the content of the video would be other than
-Sucks
-Sucks
-Sucks
Double Fine is my #1 developer for greatest how much I should like their games : how much I actually like their games ratio
15 Likes
Sacrifice is a perfect example of why this concept doesn’t work, IMO. It’s a good game when you play by its rules, but the fact that you can’t see the entire map can be extremely frustrating and encourages very cautious play (as noted by @Chevluh) . There’s not very many good ways to play this game since you can only be in one place a time.
Contrast that to the many ways to play Starcraft, and it basically means you have a meh RTS and a meh action game.
1 Like
everyone forgets about Battlezone
yeah tonally they’re obviously more cuba-bait than me-bait but even so I’m always surprised that they don’t have more of a reputation of being unable to execute
Nobody even remembers forgetting Uprising.
I was going to argue “at least Uprising got a port” but then I remembered BZ got an N64 version
2 Likes
I was gonna mention Battlezone but the post specified third person. If you include first person then you’ve also got Urban Assault and a bunch of other forgotten ones.
the thing about Double Fine is i think they’re like Tinkerbell: they run on belief. they’re able to weather a lot of circumstances that would have killed a developer their size based in San Francisco many years ago because so many people want them to succeed. they seem like they’re one of the last bastions of “the good guys” for many older people in the industry. somehow Tim Schafer has never learned how to effectively run a project, and he never will - he must remain eternally naive, living in a bubble of childlike wonder for the rest of his life.
also i remember Grim Fandango being one of those games that people talked about for years how it was a masterpiece and it was so sad that adventure games were dead and it sold poorly. and i think in that case… being a well-publicized, very noble “failure” helped eternally put him in a lot of people’s good graces.
15 Likes
Very good point, esp since Grim Fandango itself rode the wave of “the last adventure game” and was treated as some sort of apotheosis despite being overrated even at the time of release compared to other humorous point-and-click games.
3 Likes
That fucking elevator bug!!!
1 Like
Since we’re on the subject of LucasArts/Doublefine legacy adventure games, which should I play next?: Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango or Full Throttle?
Order of release imo
3 Likes