Slashdot Mirror

Monkey Island suffers against more recent games because it had no voice (and http://speechproject.mixnmojo.com/ is far from complete). The voice acting in DotT is as good as the day it was released and running under http://www.scummvm.org/ with hq3x filtering gives you brilliant graphics that are true to your nostalgic memories. Now a sequel would be cool...

Link to listen to the Outlaws theme:

http://soundtracks.mixnmojo.com/outl.htm

There's still one thing music can't yet do in video games: change styles in synchronization with the player's actions. Sure, music comes at important points, but it starts or stops then. You still can't have a dynamic score.

International House of Mojo reports that without a publisher, Psychonauts creator Tim Schaffer had to show the game out of his hotel room. Although that sounds weird, my bet is that it was a very funny hotel room, maybe as funny as some of those Korean booths at E3 in the warehouse near the restrooms.


From the Mojo:

Wonder why there is no Psychonauts news from any other media sites? Our own Doug Tabacco on the show floor explains:

That's because Psychonauts isn't being shown on the floor. With no publisher to host them and no time or space left to secure a booth of their own, Tim is reduced to showing it out of a hotel suite. We called him and tried to set up a meeting, but he said he's totally booked up. We take that to be a good thing, since it means lots of people (hopefully some of them publishers) are seeing the game.

Thre you have it folks... You heard it here first! Exclusive E3 News coverage. Come on you know Mojo still loves you. It does.

For those who don't know that with that interface it takes many hours to copy and decrypt two or three files (and there are no more objects in the system than maybe half a dozen, imagine a real filesystem with gigabytes of data in hundreds of thousands of files) download Beneath a Steel Sky CD Version or Floppy Version and play it with ScummVM. It's a great game, even though that interface is nothing but a joke, like most of things there.

Also, Tim Schafer, the Grim Fandango / DOTT / Full Throttle guy, who set up DoubleFine Productions and is working on Psychonauts for the X-box, which looks promising.

Dave Grossman, who also worked on DOTT and helped with the dialogue alongside Schafer and Gilbert on the first two Monkey island games is apparently a children's author, I think - I'm not sure. He definitely writes poetry and has a website here or there.

Being very fond of those old Lucas Art games, i though giving away a few links about the SCUMM VM may be interresting for other /.ers.

- The SCUMM VM (already on /. here (Linux SCUMM Interpreter), and here (Lucas Confuses ScummVM With Abandonware).
- The SCUMM Bar, sadly down untill mid-july (but not closed!), is a reference on the genre, with nice interviews with the original developpers of the first games.
- The International House of Mojo
- WWHS
- The Big Whoop Fairground (Monkey Island)
- The Legend of Mokey Island

Well from there you can find tons of links to fan sites...

Actually Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders was my first introduction to the genre when i was around 13, on a now old C64. This game was really crazy and got me so addicted that it was a reason for my parents to buy me a english/french dictionnary. There's a few projects from fans for a follow-up:
- Zak McKracken
- Zak McKracken and the Alien Rockstar
- Zak McKracken Between Time and Space

Finally some of you may also want to have a look to the news groups alt.games.lucas-art.*

have fun!

Lua the programming language, BTW, is a Open Source (but not GPL copyleft) Brazillian developed language.

That is NOT the largest ball of twine, this is.

People have stopped palying[sic] FreeSpace about 3 years ago

That doesn't stop people from learning from the code and making neat projects with it.

Open Source isn't just about getting a free dinner...it's about getting to play around with code. We just covered Wolf 3d and Doom algorithms in our graphics course when covering older graphics techniques.

If you want direct, practical, non-developer benefits, it's led to Linux ports of neat games, such as Bungie's Marathon/Aleph One. It's led to improved games, like PrBoom. It's revived development interest in various projects, such as zsnes (still the only Linux snes emulator that can do Seiken Densetsu 3).

Besides, maybe you're the type that plays games for a bit, but there are also people (myself included) that don't play new releases much, but love going back and playing an old nostalgic game now and then. :-)

I guarantee you that people will be poking around at and playing with Freespace 2 much longer because of the source release. I suspect that most people would have forgotten about neat games like Abuse had it not been for its open-sourcing. The result of an open-source clone -- Exult has produced quite a bit of Ultima 7 playing again. The same goes for scummvm, the clone of Lucasart's engine used in Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max. Plus AGIL and Sierra's AGI system.

Open Source is generally a Good Thing. Please don't rag on people for doing good things like this -- sit back and enjoy it, or if you aren't yet interested, wait until someone hacks around with the code a bit. Then enjoy. :-)

I wanna know if this will compile under gcc.

Myst is such a dialogue-free game, all it was about was exploring. At most, the series would just have a cinematography value.

How about instead do a Monkey Island miniseries?
Ghost ships, talking skulls, and monkeys! Plus it had PLENTY of witty dialogue. What more could you want on scifi?

...but then who would they cast as threepwood and who would play elaine?