Douglas Adams Starship Titanic
Moderator: ScummVM Team
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ezekiel000
- Posts: 443
- Joined: Mon Aug 25, 2008 5:17 pm
- Location: Surrey, England
Douglas Adams Starship Titanic
I know that to add a new game there needs to be someone willing to work on it. But I wanted to ask who knows and liked Douglas Adams Starship Titanic? So in turn how likely is it that in the far future will someone decide to add it to ScummVM.
I only read about it, people seem to think it's an ok-ish game, but no milestone.
As for the technical aspects, the screenshots look like 16-bit renderings (currently ScummVM only supports 8-bit modes), and this page mentions a cinepak codec DLL, so I guess a decoder for that would be needed too. I guess seeing that game in ScummVM will take a long time.
As for the technical aspects, the screenshots look like 16-bit renderings (currently ScummVM only supports 8-bit modes), and this page mentions a cinepak codec DLL, so I guess a decoder for that would be needed too. I guess seeing that game in ScummVM will take a long time.
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ezekiel000
- Posts: 443
- Joined: Mon Aug 25, 2008 5:17 pm
- Location: Surrey, England
Ah it's the 16bit colour problem again, yep the videos are cinepak avi files although there is an open source version of this codec for Linux and the sound is encoded as mp3's (although they are packed into archives with the background and scripts or in the avi files).
In my opinion it is a good game but not the best in the 1st person point and click genre. The npc interaction is a bit complicated, which was Douglas Adams main focus to have natural conversations with npc's.
In my opinion it is a good game but not the best in the 1st person point and click genre. The npc interaction is a bit complicated, which was Douglas Adams main focus to have natural conversations with npc's.
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Robot_Maker20
- Posts: 55
- Joined: Tue Nov 07, 2006 1:23 pm
I've played it, and couldn't stand it. It felt like they took a reasonably good but very short game, then stuck it in a blender with an enormous, bland, frustrating one with an obscure, broken interface to try and bulk it out.
My biggest complaint is that much of the game is the equivalent of an Infocom maze; a mass of absolutely identical areas which, while technically not featureless, nevertheless contain absolutely nothing to do. What little you can do requires constant traversal of the vast, cavernously empty vessel; it's not at all conducive to puzzle-solving enjoyment when every time you think of something new to try, you have to spend about ten to fifteen minutes travelling somewhere first - along the same route you've already travelled a thousand times before, and wasn't particularly remarkable even the first time.
The puzzles themselves are of that particularly infuriating variety that come with no clues whatsoever, and you can only see why you were supposed to do what you did after you did it; they only make sense in retrospect, and are otherwise maddeningly obscure.
The music is blandly forgettable, the characters are all blandly one-dimensional and obnoxiously dislikable, the locations are blandly homogeneous and almost entirely static and noninteractive, and the much touted natural conversation system is not only as bland as the rest of the game (Not one single memorable line. From a Douglas Adams script!) but it just doesn't work.
The final insult, albeit one that probably wouldn't matter for a ScummVM implementation, was that this overwhelmingly bland, uninnovative, unadventurous adventure game had higher system requirements than any similar game at the time, and barely crawled. If you're going to have higher specs than anyone else, you'd better have some fancy effects that are making use of all that extra power. This game had nothing of the sort.
My biggest complaint is that much of the game is the equivalent of an Infocom maze; a mass of absolutely identical areas which, while technically not featureless, nevertheless contain absolutely nothing to do. What little you can do requires constant traversal of the vast, cavernously empty vessel; it's not at all conducive to puzzle-solving enjoyment when every time you think of something new to try, you have to spend about ten to fifteen minutes travelling somewhere first - along the same route you've already travelled a thousand times before, and wasn't particularly remarkable even the first time.
The puzzles themselves are of that particularly infuriating variety that come with no clues whatsoever, and you can only see why you were supposed to do what you did after you did it; they only make sense in retrospect, and are otherwise maddeningly obscure.
The music is blandly forgettable, the characters are all blandly one-dimensional and obnoxiously dislikable, the locations are blandly homogeneous and almost entirely static and noninteractive, and the much touted natural conversation system is not only as bland as the rest of the game (Not one single memorable line. From a Douglas Adams script!) but it just doesn't work.
The final insult, albeit one that probably wouldn't matter for a ScummVM implementation, was that this overwhelmingly bland, uninnovative, unadventurous adventure game had higher system requirements than any similar game at the time, and barely crawled. If you're going to have higher specs than anyone else, you'd better have some fancy effects that are making use of all that extra power. This game had nothing of the sort.
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CountBuggula
- Posts: 6
- Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 5:01 pm