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Addressing JB though… aren’t those ‘forks’ more a kinda penalty, though? You hit ‘em, you get a short sequence where Larry fumbles, then recovers and you’re back to the main discussion.

Can you turn the conversation towards the childhood and influences of another character, allowing you to learn valuable backstory that enables several puzzles and/or confrontations? Can you backtrack, approach the subject from different angles? If you talk to other characters, will new conversational options open up when you talk to the object of your affections?

I seem to recall there’s a gift function in the game, but that it only enhances your approach to the single track afforded to you in the guide-em-up.

I was trying to suggest some forking in the minigame that takes you substantially off the main topic (though, obviously in this case, they’ll inevitably lead to your key goal). Or…

…Hey, you could fork it so you can get the ‘easy’ route, in which Larry quickly beds the lass or perhaps you could go for a slightly more complex ‘conversation’ which gifts the player with added reputation points, etc.

Anyhow.

Matzerath… The Path had better be pretty fucking goddamn good. I mean, I dig innovative mechanics as much as the next man (see this conversation), I dig atmosphere but I’ve had it UP. TO. FUCKING HERE with melancholy in games.

Christ, people used to complain about the amount of simple emotions in games – anger, fear, humour, etc – where’s the new emotional arc going to come from? …Ah! Melancholy!

Well, I’m fucking sick of it now. Some Silent Hill does it very well, Stalker does it well, I Fell in Love with the Majesty of Colours does it well, the Graveyard is a slightly embarrassing student film of a game. It’s an interesting idea, no doubt, but that doesn’t mean you should make the game and then try to sell it.

Melancholy is so 2008.

(That is Wot I Think)

skalpadda! DUDE! Sorry for skipping out on you a few days ago, I’ll try to address your points now.

Of course the sperm mini game might somewhat distract you away from bad writing and voice acting :)

Don’t actually remember much of MCL. Not that I disliked the game (was playing a friend’s copy), just didn’t really catch my interest except for this system. Perhaps if I’d bought it, I’d have an axe to grind, but as it stands I’d agree with phil on the quality of writing and plotting:

as a Carry On movie crossed with a Quagmire heavy episode of Family Guy, it succeeded and then some.

This is slightly off-topic, but the very presentation of the minigame makes sense in the context of the audience you’re trying to sell. MCL goes out of its way to defuse serious pretensions, dressing up its conversation system as a sperm working its way through some kind’ve… blue canal. (?) For a game you’re meant to be able to play drunk with a group of mates, this is more appealing then some kinda slate-grey techno interface. I’m not saying it particularly appeals to me, but for the folks they were trying to reach it’s a nice little bit of polish.

I’d say you’re more likely to get a scene to feel right by employing very good writing and acting, but of course both of those cost money and require talent ;)

No doubt that’d help the player deal with shitty gameplay if it exists, but let’s approach this problem from the perspective of a game designer looking to expose a general media library in an interesting, engaging way. In other words, just focus on the game loops for this conversation and not the reward structure, please. =)

On your use of the word ‘fluent’, I think you might be bang on there, from a linguistics perspective – it means to communicate quickly. However, I think there’s a slightly unhelpful association in that it implies a level of conversation competence, as in “fluent in English, fluent in French” – I can hold a fairly complex conversation with a native speaker, for example.

Perhaps ‘flowing’ or ‘seamless’ might be more appropriate, as you seem to think the reason I like the MCL system is because it allows for an ongoing back and forth between character, uninterrupted by dialogue selections and player musings and the like.

(That’s not why I like the system, by the way, but it’s a nice side-effect. More on why I like it later)

If this is unhelpful, feel free to ignore! =)

that is a mini game that does what it’s supposed to do, but which doesn’t really make any sense or add value to the experience.

the methods used to incorporate dialogue into games that rely heavily on humour and charm. Point being that if you want to have dialogue that reflects a certain state of mind and keep the flow of conversation with properly timed humorous cues you might as well make the dialogue into cut-scene (more or less) form and spend your effort on game play challenges elsewhere.

It’s worth pointing out here that I’m not championing the suitability of the system for delivering humour and / or charm.

I’m contending that this system is suitable for conversations where the player character is under duress.

That it also handles humour and charm well (depending on execution) is a bonus.

Okay, so I’m going to try to state your arguments.

1) The guide-em-up game is so abstracted from the function of conversation that it might as well be replaced with a quick-time-event (or similar).

Briefly (as I get into this fairly heavily during the answer to argument 2), the benefit of a GEU (guide-em-up) over a QTE is that that a QTE is about as linear as you can get. There’s only one correct button to press at any one time. The GEU gives you various approaches to a variety of conversational threats and boons (with respective effects on gameplay), allowing you to apply a level of tactics and skill unavailable in even the best QTEs.

I’d also argue that a pressure-and-navigation-skill system is significantly lower abstraction of conversation than selecting from a limited number of dialogue choices (I LOVE my dialogue trees, can’t beat a good one, but they DO have their limitations and the MCL system could help cope with ‘em).

To be continued in my response to point 2.

2) The guide-em-up system does not add significant gameplay and entertainment to what are essentially duel-outcome encounters. These would be better served by:

a) Removing the system and replacing them with in-world action sequences, inventory puzzles and traditional trees. This would provide a less abstract context in which the narrative could take place, in turn lending the narrative (thus humour) meaning and weight.

b) Removing the system and replacing them entirely with an attractive cutscene. Narrative meaning and weight without distracting gameplay elements.

I hope I’m stating your points adequately here. If not, er, sorry! =)

Well, I love a good cutscene, that’s true – they’re a fantastic way to change the pace of the game and reset the player’s reactions. The Legacy of Kain games triumph because of ‘em.

But, ultimately, I think it’s a healthy goal for the game designer to reduce the amount of time the player spends watching and not doing… so I’m going to propose we make the cutscene solution unacceptable for the purposes of this discussion.

So that leaves us with ‘a’. And normally, I’d agree with you. Dialogue trees work really well (as do stellar parsers like Facade).

But a lot of time you’ll find yourself where you’re under pressure to provide an answer quickly. So to handle this, we might add a timer to the dialogue choice interface. As long as the choices are easy to parse, this covers most circumstances and I’m pretty happy with it (though trying to read and click on large blocks of text is hardly perfect from an interface point of view – I’d almost prefer a controller-based approach here. But anyway)

Now we add another feature – we want to handle physical and mental distractions. You could try to obscure portions of the choices or randomly add new options or make it a little harder to select the option you want… but the system already has it’s flaws and we really don’t want to make it HARDER for the player to deal with the interface.

Handling duress is the crux of this discussion. And I fear that I haven’t been entirely clear in exposing this for you…

As for “accurately models experience of conversation under physical duress” I really cannot see how the sperm mini game in the Larry game above does this in any way, nor how you would adapt it to do better in other games.

Ah. Okay, so this may come down to whether you’ve played MCL. Hilariously, these next paragraphs may provide the information you’re missing and bridge the gap between our positions. I wish I’d thought of this earlier. =)

During the game, Larry has different needs. It’s like the Ship, sorta. You need to eat, drink, etc. In order to approach a specific belle, your character may need to be tipsy. Well, drunk. Well, perhaps only technically conscious.

This state of inebriation brings a number of associated checks and balances with it into the main game. Like: Larry becomes 90% beer, which results in Larry stripping naked and streaking across campus. Can you urinate the excess beer out of your system before the campus guards catch you?

I know.

(And yet, in the back of my mind, I’m constantly thinking… I’ve never seen that mechanic before! That’s innovation! It’s distasteful, but it’s actually a solid mechanic based on… overdrinking and urination… oh dear, dear god…!)

Back to chasing female affection:

While chatting up one of the girls in the game, some of the obstacles your sperm has to avoid (such a strange sentence) are glasses of beer (symbolising the drinks your character is taking while discussing Proust with the Page 3 Stunna).

If you’re shit at the MCL conversation system (LIKE MEE!) you’ll start to crash into the beer glasses. Crash your avatar into ‘em enough, Larry’s quality of conversation reduces respectively. Keep crashing into ‘em, Larry’s intoxication meter and bladder fills and… well…

Streaking minigame.

This does not improve your odds with aforementioned Stunna.

Other obstacles include farting penalties, etc, etc. Too tedious to go into, to be honest. But you get the idea.

The mini game represents your desire to finish a conversation as well as possible (by hitting positive response tokens and avoiding negative responses) while managing your bodies attempt to betray you. =)

That’s physical duress. Adapting this specific mini-game to MENTAL duress… actually, I’m going to try to avoid the truth-serum idea again. I think it’s a little too easy for me. Lessee.

You’re the youngest child in a family that’s dysfunctional to the point of being psychotic. Think of Custer’s family if you’re familiar with Preacher. Say there’s an almost comatose father, a bitter, sadistic mother and three older brothers, each worse than the last, all living in some decrepit house isolated in the middle of some godforsaken moors. All your life (you’re, say, 14?), you’ve been their victim, monkeyboy, slave. But you’ve found some kinda animal, say, and you want to look after it in secret.

Corny as hell, but it’ll do for our scenario.

So. You have to make several regular runs to the captive (maybe recovering) animal, bring it food, company, allowing it to exercise. This means that there’s a higher chance of talking to those family members who you normally do your best to avoid. In fact, you may be forced to ask them for jobs which allow you to secure a hiding place for the animal, food for the animal, yadda yadda.

Now you’re talking to the eldest brother, a man torn between his ambitions for the land the house is built on, his desire to escape and his need to remain head of the family (giving him rights to the land), now that his father is comatose. He also displays a level of cruelty approaching or surpassing his father’s in order to appease his mother.

Your character is TERRIFIED of him.

But you need to get access to the grain shed in order to secure food for your pet.

So maybe you perform a mini-game or something to increase your temporary level of courage (maybe steal some of your brother’s whiskey). Before this courage marker dips below a certain level, you find the eldest and run up to him and the conversation starts.

Maybe something like Tempest opens towards the bottom of the screen, where rather than the 2D system of MCL, you have a slight perspective on the oncoming conversation tokens. For art style of the mini-game, think 2D Boy or The Path.

Tokens might include a representation of the father (so important in the boy’s life, but dangerous to mention in front of the eldest brother), the need for a friend (shows weakness), a willingness to take responsibility (positive for the eldest, means he can concentrate on his effort to leave the farm), the urge to perform a nervous action that brings you comfort but annoys your brother…

It’s like the old “don’t think about pink elephants” chestnut. Sometimes if you’re worried about or have a strong emotion attached to a topic it becomes somewhat to push those thoughts away or distract yourself. Interestingly, it’s also rather difficult to think ONLY of pink elephants for a minute straight.

And the more angry you make the brother, the fast the game becomes, the harder it gets to dodge uncomfortable topics…

Y’dig, m’man? =)

I hope that helps. I don’t think the MCL system is any kinda panacea, but I think it’s a useful tool for handling specific circumstances.

If you can reconcile yourself to some of my ravings, then let us shake hands as brothers in design and part the ways for some time. If nobody minds, I’m going to go back to lurking. Obviously, responding to something like this takes some time. Been fun, though.

Sorry if the above is horribly disorganised. There’s no way for me to edit it if I’ve made mistakes… =)

By the way — “Story elements in Beyond Good and Evil were shit.” Can I make that my sig, somehow? Actually, I should just get the tattoo. In fact, I should graft more skin onto my body so that sentence can be ten feet high, protruding from my forehead at all times.

Anyhow. Byee.

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Except for in God of War, because you were usually breaking someone’s shit in a dramatic fashion at the time.

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I’m sorry, one more time.

As an Amiga Power veteran it’s just wonderful that the ’silly childish hate mongers’ of old are now making such a silly childish game

That IS funny. Maybe they’ll complain that it isn’t being reviewed “in a style not affording the gravity demanded by a Leisure Suit Larry game.”

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That IS funny. Maybe they’ll complain that it isn’t being reviewed “in a style not affording the gravity demanded by a Leisure Suit Larry game.”

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Awful character design in this game. Awful dialogue so far. Bummer. It’s sex, they should be able to make good jokes.

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As someone who enjoyed MCL I got to say as a game it failed, as a piece of entertainment that wasn’t sexist, homophobic and horrible grime, it failed, as a Carry On movie crossed with a Quagmire heavy episode of Family Guy, it succeeded and then some.

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LL: I’m a country and western producer
Girl: do you know any one famous
LL: Have you ever heard of…

Timed to match the end of your line are two different response prompt icons in the mini game. No matter what you will either hit the good music reference or the bad music reference.

the game treats your conversation as being internal to that scene so there is no knock on effect but the conversation flows well for the jumps between tracks it’s constantly taking.

Note that every time the sperm hits a bar of 3 icons it’s at a pause or the introduction of a new point in the conversation.

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