Yes. It’s not that the voice acting as such is bad, it’s just that some specific scenes were lacking emphasis. That combined with 3D characters that seemed restricted to a single facial expression occasionally ruined the mood.
The graphics of the anniversary edition aren’t too bad now. Sure, the textures are a bit low-res and the geometry a bit coarse, but it’s not meant to look ultra-realistic anyway. It’s more the characters that lack in their expressiveness. According to the credits it’s using Ogre; I have no idea how good that had been back in 2005 compared to commercial offerings.
Started playing Disco Elysium. Died after ten minutes, before I even managed to put my pants on. I like it!
I actually had two false starts running it in Wine, but after reducing the graphics settings to lowest it ran the third time round. Need to figure out what’s the highest setting that still works now, then dive in some more. This time I’ll keep away from the light switch …
Turns out it only runs reliable on the lowest settings. But given it’s an isometric game, it’s still looking okay. Anyway, due to my testing I got to experience the first area about 5 or 6 times, and it’s pretty amazing what could be unearthed by going down different lines of dialogue and passing a skill check or two.
Today I just went along with the story, and I must say it’s quite unlike any game I played so far. I’ll just let this bit here speak for itself (mild spoiler, I guess):
Protagonist walks at an extremely leisurely pace for someone in her predicament. Can we speed this up please?
Looks pretty good.
Around the time it came out I was pretty happy with Syberia II and Dreamfall, never really got into the episodic Sam & Max, but how’d I not hear about this?
Anyway, haven’t really played it yet because of that outrageously long intro cinematic. Even without the lack of gameplay implications I’m inclined to think it’d have been better without it, because then I’d have been thrust into a mystery instead of knowing full well what happened.
Thanks for the review, I might actually play those because GOG tricked me into buying Season 1 by gifting me the second one (and I just cannot own only the middle of a series, can I?)
Finished Disco Elysium, though I rushed the second half. Basically had a couple bad die rolls, and thought about reloading, but then went along with what I got. Surprisingly, I still managed a *good* ending, but I really want to jump back in before things started to deteriorate and see if it can get even better.
But what a game! It’s been a long time since I’ve been so invested with my character, suffering when we got humiliated, rejoicing when we came out on top, and never passing by an opportunity to preach communism .
If you like good writing, you should not pass it by. Gameplay wise it’s pretty unique too: an RPG without combat or perhaps an adventure with die rolls. Mechanics are light and focused: if you’re not walking around and inspecting hotspots you’ll be spending your time in dialogues of a depth and breadth I’ve rarely seen. Every 100 XP you get a point to either invest into skills or thoughts and the rest of the time you’ll be investigating the main case or the many mysteries of the (rather compact) game world.
I’ve played it for a few hours yesterday and today. It seems to be quite linear. As a game it’s… let’s call it promising. Solid effort, well polished. I like the German voices better than the English. There’s this weird thing where some English lines were clearly recorded in a later session and sound completely different. Also some of the cheesy jokes felt like they were translated from German. No less cheesy in German of course but it’s just more polished. I used GOG Galaxy to do the language switching and even though it doesn’t need to redownload… omg it literally takes some 10 minutes to verify the download. And that’s no exaggeration like when I wrote “50 minutes” earlier.
I’m probably about halfway through, or maybe two thirds? Anyhow, there was just a several minute long cheesy escape scene plus extra Indiana Jones-esque travel scene. I don’t find this bothersome. By this point, the game’s earned the right to throw a few minutes of video at me. Not like at the start of the game.
Savegames. I can save however much I want.
More or less unlimited framerate (max of 1000) with an optional limiter. I didn’t even notice on my desktop, but even though my laptop is a weaker model it was running surprisingly warm for such an old game.
Keyboard support is a lot more limited than I like. Yet somehow there’s an Alt+F to see the framerate.
This game depends a lot on pixel hunting, so it’s nice to be able to spot the pixel with a highlight occasionally. Like when there’s two hotspots right next to or overlaid on top of each other.
Keep it in your pants, Max.
Did I already say it felt linear?
In theory, a Geheimakte Tunguska 2 should be a pretty good game, if they keep this solid base and work on the flaws.
Started & Finished a few arcade games (ok, with infinite continues on an emulator, that is not really an achievement- it just shows the ones I tried and kept playing instead of quitting after 5 minutes:
Metal Slug 2
Golden Axe
So I’ve replayed the latter half of Disco Elysium, but I think it might need radically different skills to get another angle at the story. However, not all was for naught as I came across that one:
I seem to have put Secret Files on hold since I reached that Irish pub.
I started up The Council and thought I hit a loading screen, but apparently I missed an opportunity to do something because it was a countdown timer, not a loading screen. I probably should’ve known, because it seems to be one of those games that loads in a second while pretending to show you tips on the loading screen.
Also very odd, it started in UHD with everything maxed, so it was a bit choppy at ~20fps. I decided to go with HD 1080p with everything maxed instead at 60 fps but it was surprisingly hard to find.
Alt+F4 seemingly closes the game, but the process keeps on running. Odd bug.
I can’t really say anything about the game itself yet, other than that it looks nice and that theoretically it seems like you might have three fairly different games depending on your choices.
Almost five years ago I bought the first affordable UHD monitor on the market, a Dell P2415Q for ~€350.
It’s perfectly fine and it was still one of the best price/performance monitors for several years after I bought it (even if the price increased to ~500 for several years; it’s down to ~400 now), but today there shouldn’t be too much reason to choose it over another model unless it particularly strikes your fancy in some way. It doesn’t have FreeSync for example because it predates it, unlike a cheaper, more modern competitor such as the LG 24UD58-B (only 40-60 fps, but at least for me that’d be the most important range anyway). It’s possible that color accuracy is better on the Dell though; I didn’t check in close detail.
PS I don’t care a lick for any stupid stand that comes with monitors. I just want a VESA mount.
But the developers of Ankh have modified the engine AFAIR.
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