Marian Schedenig

Earlier this week, Charles Cecil gave two talks at Reboot Develop in Dubrovnik, about remastering the first Broken Sword game. Here's a couple of things I remember - all from memory, in my own words, so hopefully I'll manage to convey his meaning. The idea behind the remaster is to not only bring the game back for those who already know it, but to also make the genre accessible for newer generations of gamers. Quoting Richard Cobbett, he said that adventure games have been backward looking for too long and should stop treating their own genre as retro. Revolution rely heavily on playtesting, and early on were shocked to find that modern audiences couldn't handle the interface. He says they got ratings of 50%-60% and lower (when their games used to reliable score 80%-90%) for their initial remaster attempts because contrary to what seemed obvious to them, newer audiences don't intuitively understand the point and click concept. He also says though that he believes the interface itself is sound, and the general Broken Sword interface is still valid today, but the presentation has to be updated not just for modern audiences but modern systems. He also didn't want to add a straightforward walkthrough hint system, because players inevitably choose the path of least resistance, and once you start using a hint system, it's almost impossible to stop yourself from going back to it instead of trying to figure out a puzzle yourself. Instead, they added some mechanics to nudge people in the right direction, e.g. automatic hints that nudge you in the right direction when you're stuck for too long, and items/clickable hot spots that disappear automatically after it has been established that they're of no more use. However, all of this is optional, as the game will offer a choice between classic mode and "story mode" and allow seamless switching during play. They're also making very slight changes to some other things, mostly because game development was always rushed to meet deadlines and things were overlooked that would otherwise have been fixed, like that pipe that the clown used to escape although it didn't extend all the way to the top of the wall (as already mentioned in the Kickstarter campaign). He was adamant though that they changed nothing substantial, as he himself wanted to preserve the original game, except in cases that he would always have fixed if he had been able to. They also went through the script and (maybe - I'm not sure) made very minor tweaks, but were happy to discover that it still held up today; he said that one of his original motivations was that women were heavily underrepresented and objectified in video games at the time and he wanted to make a game that didn't do the same*, and that naturally they wouldn't like to release something today that would conflict with modern sensibilities, but that happily the original script was fine as it is. *) He related an anecdote about Lure of the Temptress, the first game by Revolution, published by Virgin Interactive. When the game was mostly finished and it came to choosing a title, he racked his brain to come up with a list of possible titles to send to the publisher, and added "Lure of the Temptress (this is a joke)" at the end because he found it sounded intriguing, but didn't have anything to do with the game and would be totally wrong. To his dismay the publisher loved it and insisted that they use it, and when he pointed out that it's rubbish and that there wasn't any temptress in the game to begin with, the response was "… can you put one in?" So they had to rewrite the game to add a temptress at the last minute… He also said that they would have gone ahead with the remaster with or without the Kickstarter, but it allowed them to improve some things. If I understood correctly, it was meant mostly help them bridge the gap before the console ports are ready and do a simultaneous cross platform release. The original game contains 30,000 sprites, and manually redrawing them in 4K takes 1 hour per frame, i.e. 30k hours in total, which is obviously a lot of money. The experimented with AI upscaling, but found that especially the eyes of the characters didn't work, because they would be looking in the wrong direction in the automatic upscale (because the low res sources didn't have enough information). So the funds also allowed them to either fully redraw everything or to manual touch ups of all shortcomings (I'm not sure which of the two). Here's Charles Cecil presenting a slide about how film narratives can and cannot be applied to games, before showing the idol sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark as an example clip:

Watching it just now, I was surprised how much Alien owns to ASO that I'd never noticed before. No wonder the score was butchered and replaced with existing music.

"The first thing I am going to do when I get back is get some decent food." [...] "Well you pound down the stuff like there's no tomorrow." "It's got a wonderful defense mechanism. You don't dare kill it." "No blood. No Dallas. Nothing." "Come on, cat."

…and at least a dozen more that didn't come up in my Google search.

I don't have a Kindle because I generally prefer reading books as books. I spend most of the rest of my time in front of a screen anyway. I'll read news and tech articles and stuff in a browser (and I'll never stop complaining about people making 20 minute videos with background music for stuff that could be put into a text article that would take 5 minutes to read in whole and that I could just glance over to find the part I'm actually interested in), but for anything more substantial, I like having something physical in my hands that also gives me a feeling for how far I've progressed. That said, I still think that every physical book should come with a matching ebook version, if necessary for a modest fee that covers creating the digital version and keeping it published on a server. If an ebook version exsists anyway, it should be included free of charge (or a free that just covers the fees the publisher may have to pay to the hoster for a single instance of an ebook that's already been published and which they wouldn't have sold to me anyway). Simply because it's very useful for searching and perhaps quoting, but I'm not going to buy an extra ebook copy just for that if it costs almost as much as the physical thing I already have in my hand (and which cost that much partly because if had to be produced from materials).

I managed to get to the first confrontation with other humans before being too frightened and turning it off. I never got to meet an actual xenomorph.

This.

(That's what I said…)

Hi, I'm Curly, and I only surround myself with people who allow me to keep using that name.

I'm familiar with Spiral (I just played it again the other day), but probably not with the Stravinsky, because it doesn't remind me of anything. What is it?

Fixed.

Where?

Changes in interpretation (which I maybe don't always agree with, but clearly Karajan's views changed), advances in technology (though the problem with Karajan always being on the bleeding edge of technology is that fresh remasters of his analogue recordings sound better than his later digital ones, even if they may have been better at the time). Sometimes different orchestras (his 80s digital Berliner Planets are better performed than his 60s Wiener version, although that has the distinction of being one of the first mainland Europe recordings of the work, as far as I know). In the end though, why complain? If you prefer earlier recordings, stick to those. Technology. During the 80s, there must have been a massive rush among labels to be the first to offer digital recordings of any given work (I was too young to be aware of it, but that's what I take from reading contemporary reviews… pretty much like the 60s and 70s were a battle field of who could manage the first complete recordings of Wagner's Ring).

The Omen on the other hand… "No, that's Orff!" It isn't.