Comments on: Episodic Adventure Newness

By: baf

baf — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:36:58 +0000

Wow, what a lot of not-love here for Telltale. I’ll chime in saying that I didn’t notice anything wrong with the audio in Sam & Max. Perhaps my headphones are just so low-quality that everything sounds like that to me.

As to Grimm, regardless of how it turns out, it’s nice to see that they’re tackling one of the less well-known tales first, instead of sticking to the ones that Perrault and Disney picked up. Maybe they’ll do The Robber Bridegroom next. Or The Juniper Tree.

By: Tims

Tims — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:54:49 +0000

I think I’ll add, this does seem like a good idea. Yay.

By: BJ Blazkowicz

BJ Blazkowicz — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:24:51 +0000

Looking forward to Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures.

By: GeorgeR

GeorgeR — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 04:58:57 +0000

I probably won’;t run to buy grimm stuff until a few are out and I know I won’t be diving into a sad letdown. From what I’ve seen that won’t be the case.

By: Justin

Justin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:36:32 +0000

To pick out a minor thread here – Doug Tennapel did Earthworm Jim along with Neverhood. He also wrote and drew “Creature Tech“, an interesting book (’graphic novel’ if you feel hoity-toity) It’s worth picking up if you liked the Earthworm Jim art style, though he tends to proselytize Christianity a bit harder than the story demands.

By: John Walker

John Walker — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:29:29 +0000

The audio in Sam & Max, Bone, and indeed in the trailers for Strong Bad, all sound garbled by a poor bit rate. And that’s on a standard Creative soundcard and regular speakers. It produces a bubbly sound to all the voices, that I’ve always found to be offputting. And I say this as no neurotic audiophile – it’s a distinct, peculiar sound.

I also said, “won’t be using exactly the same engine,” as in there are changes to it for this game. I realise this could be understood to mean a different engine – sorry for any confusion.

By: Ted

Ted — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:26:18 +0000

There was nothing wrong with the audio in Sam and Max. And this is not using a new engine. All of Telltale’s games have been done with the Telltale Tool (even CSI), with updates and enhancements added along the way, just as in this case. Different art style doesn’t mean new engine.

By: malkav11

malkav11 — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:18:25 +0000

Also, American McGee does have one other accomplishment to his name – he managed to release a game so bad that Gamestop would have paid me to take a copy of it off their hands (the sticker price was -$1). That game being Bad Day LA.

Well, that and I think he was involved with some of the early Quake games or something.

By: malkav11

malkav11 — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:16:25 +0000

Seriously.

I think Telltale’s done a great job with Sam and Max (a few notable missteps in the form of early season 1 and season 2 episode 2 aside), and that they’ve only gotten better over time. I can’t wait to see what they do with Wallace and Gromit – I might even be able to get my mom interested, which is a rare thing, believe you me.

By: A-Scale

A-Scale — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:46:32 +0000

I was speaking about audio quality in the bitrate sense, not in the writing sense as well. What kind of hardware are we talking about? I have a Realtek ALC883 chip and cheap but decent speakers, and it has never bothered me a bit. Do I need to spend 100 on a separate sound card and 500 on speakers before I will notice it? If so, I don’t think Telltale has much to worry about.

By: Optimaximal

Optimaximal — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:32:03 +0000

What bad audio in Telltale games? I have always been quite impressed with the Sam and Max audio quality.

He means the playback quality of the audio rather than the quality of the content – Telltale encode the sound at a low bit-rate to a) lower the file size of the downloadable versions and b) charge people for a soundtrack CD because most of the music is rather spiffing!

It’s actually quite noticeable with good sound hardware. It’s a shame they didn’t use higher-quality versions on the season DVDs – after all, I doubt they actually recorded them at that bit-rate.

By: A-Scale

A-Scale — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:11:56 +0000

@John Walker

What bad audio in Telltale games? I have always been quite impressed with the Sam and Max audio quality.