Justas has just finished his brilliantly funny forum adventure “Space Jeff Game!” If you liked “Chris Adventure,” go check it out on the forums now! And if you didn’t like “Chris Adventure,” then screw you and go check out Justas’ game anyway. It rocks.
I need to fill in an extra paragraph here for formatting purposes, so I’ll just ramble for a bit. I’m off camping for the weekend with relatives, so I’ll be paddle-boating and getting covered with mosquitoes for the next three days. I’m still working on TSL – not back onto SQInc or more Ducktalez yet (I know, I know.) Ah, there we go! Paragraph complete!
Years ago, I remember getting an adventure game called “The Riddle of Master Lu” and on the disc somewhere was a demo for another Sanctuary Woods game called “Orion Burger.” It had always piqued my interest, and I found out years later that the game had completely disappeared into obscurity, never finding a market and not even finding it’s way onto Amazon or eBay (unless I wanted the German version.) Fortunately, through the magic of BitTorrent and piracy, I finally found some time to go back and try it out.
The game has an awesome premise. Aliens are harvesting species to extinction all over the galaxy to supply their fast food franchise with burger meat. They eventually arrive at Earth, but before they can harvest us, they need to make sure we aren’t an advanced race. So they beam up a guy named Wilbur from a backwater town and put him through a series of intelligence tests, which he fails miserably. But as fate would have it, there’s a glitch when they beam him back to Earth and he arrives one hour before he gets abducted. So for the rest of the game, you’re reliving the same hour over and over again, getting abducted and getting sent back until you’ve finally passed all the tests (ala Groundhog Day.)
The pros? Well, the graphics and animation for one are very much on par in terms of quality with “The Curse of Monkey Island.” I especially liked how the big fat alien boss has a little wheel on the front of his belt so he can flop over onto his gut and paddle himself around the ship. There’s some sometimes brilliant puzzles that use the flow of time to your advantage. And whenever you pass a test, but fail another, Wilbur (in Speedy Gonzales fashion) will automatically resolve all the puzzles you needed to continue with the game.
The cons? You know that awesome premise? It’s not as awesome once you find yourself rewatching the same unskippable cut-scenes and having the same unskippable conversations over and over and over again. Not to mention the difficulty of the game sky-rockets almost instantly, mixing time-based puzzles with pixel-hunting and red herrings. Then there’s the question of the horrible voice acting – why does Wilbur look like a Michael J. Fox, but sound like a Jerry Lewis?
What really drove me crazy was how none of the great puzzle solutions I came up with were even feasible to try out. At one point, an alien eats Wilbur’s aunt – so I figured when they send me back in time, I can go warn her to get out of the house. Instead, Wilbur just yells at her about the phone bill again and doesn’t even care that she’s about to die in a couple hours. I checked every walkthrough – the game does not allow me to try and save her at all. Why would a game that’s all about changing the future not allow me to save someone’s life? Obviously the game designers wanted her dead.
All in all, “Orion Burger” is still a pretty noteworthy addition to the underrated adventure game library. But it’s one of those shorter full-length games that’s more fun with a walkthrough, lest you want to keep your sanity.
Weird Al’s putting out some new singles and videos, and it’s my self-sworn duty to inform the masses. These are part of his “Internet Leaks” collection, which may or may not also be the name of his next album. The first one is an original tribute to the lower-class worker (possibly done in the style of Jonathon Coulton) that I really like. The second one is an all right homage to The Doors.
To everyone that still drops in expecting updates, I thought I might bring everyone up to speed on what’s going on and why I’m not blogging as frequently as I used to.
Basically, if my life and routine were a pond, Michael J. Fox would have been break-dancing in it for the last three months. For starters, my workplace finally responded to the bad economy by re-locating and “re-structuring,” temporarily reducing the entire company to three guys in a closet. This prompted me to get my resume and portfolio back up-to-date in case of an emergency, and I found out that recovering and re-rendering four years worth of animation is a full-time job in itself. Then my doctor kept putting me on all kinds of crazy diets, work gave me a billion new things to work on, and a hairless cat threw up on my kitchen floor. Essentially, I had to develop a whole new routine just to maintain my sanity.
So the for last three months, I’ve been stepping back from the blogging and SQInc stuff to recover myself and catch up on some much needed de-stressing. I’ve been taking improv classes, meeting new people, going for massages, biking around, visiting parks and shows, and just laying on the grass and watching ducks whenever I can. I even found time to work on that new Ducktalez cartoon and beat the crap out of “God of War” on ultra hard mode. And, of course, Brittany’s always good about coming over for ice cream and video games. I even took last week off from work and explored the city a bit. On Canada Day I made friends with a goose and then joined a crowd that was heckling two people having sex under a public bridge.
I’ll be getting back on SQInc eventually. At the moment, I’m back on TSL, trying to crank out the cinematics and prep it for a release hopefully later this summer.
At the moment I’m at work and finally seeing some upness to all the downness that went on, so hopefully I can ride out any future ripples and be better prepared for tidal waves in the future. All this work I have to do seems more doable now and my health issues have gotten a little more manageable. So either I’m doing something right, or Spring was just a jerk to me. I’ll get around to reposting things more often in time after the right energy comes back for it. Anyway, that’s all for now!
AFTERTHOUGHT: Has there ever been a parody called “Bach to the Future?” There should be.
AFTERTHOUGHT #2: Ah, there is. Only they’re a modern rock band who plays 80′s synthesizer covers. I like it.
Justas has just finished his brilliantly funny forum adventure “Space Jeff Game!” If you liked “Chris Adventure,” go check it out on the forums now! And if you didn’t like “Chris Adventure,” then screw you and go check out Justas’ game anyway. It rocks. 
The game has an awesome premise. Aliens are harvesting species to extinction all over the galaxy to supply their fast food franchise with burger meat. They eventually arrive at Earth, but before they can harvest us, they need to make sure we aren’t an advanced race. So they beam up a guy named Wilbur from a backwater town and put him through a series of intelligence tests, which he fails miserably. But as fate would have it, there’s a glitch when they beam him back to Earth and he arrives one hour before he gets abducted. So for the rest of the game, you’re reliving the same hour over and over again, getting abducted and getting sent back until you’ve finally passed all the tests (ala Groundhog Day.)
What really drove me crazy was how none of the great puzzle solutions I came up with were even feasible to try out. At one point, an alien eats Wilbur’s aunt – so I figured when they send me back in time, I can go warn her to get out of the house. Instead, Wilbur just yells at her about the phone bill again and doesn’t even care that she’s about to die in a couple hours. I checked every walkthrough – the game does not allow me to try and save her at all. Why would a game that’s all about changing the future not allow me to save someone’s life? Obviously the game designers wanted her dead.