More new GS games coming soon

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'TeppanYaki\' post=\'229333\' date=\'Oct 27 2009, 09:25 PM\']JC_Ludia had mentioned when trying to get the game boards right that he only had a certain amount of time to do it.[/quote]
Probably true, but unless that amount of time was "less than 48 hours" (and trust me, it wasn't), he knows he has access to a bunch of people who not only know that information EXACTLY, but several who would be more than willing to pass it along without asking for so much as a Special Thanks To mention in the credits. So I don't buy that excuse.

[ten96lt]

Ok, I bought the game today since it was owed to me as a birthday present and I have two complaints with it. 1. I was heartbroken the game didn't have the original theme playing like on the show when it was originally in its hey day, and it only does the spin music for about 3 seconds then cuts off. I wish it would do it the whole time. 2. The prizes need to have a little more of a mix up on the value and I don't see how much of a pain it would have been to add some more graphics for prizes. Other then that I did find it entertaining, but those little things would have been really nice if they wanted to keep true to the game.

[comicus]

[quote name=\'chad1m\' post=\'229324\' date=\'Oct 27 2009, 09:28 PM\']Yo, gang. I'm not sure at all why I'm being attacked. It was not a slam at Chris. I knew he worked in games with Microsoft, I just didn't know what department and I was curious to see the parallels between his expertise and what Ludia produces. I don't appreciate the rudeness at all.[/quote]
Then explain that in your reply, elaborate.  A curt one-line question like yours smacks of impudence, and it looks like you're seeking to discredit Chris just for the sake of discrediting Chris.  There's no such thing as tone of voice on the Internet.

[BrandonFG]

[quote name=\'comicus\' post=\'229339\' date=\'Oct 28 2009, 08:17 AM\']There's no such thing as tone of voice on the Internet.[/quote]
Threads Have Meanings, coming soon to a TV near you?

[tyshaun1]

OK, my 2 cents:

Overall, I felt that the game had the potential to be great, not just mediocre as it is due to shortcuts that Ludia decided to take. From a layman's perspective, a lot of the strategy of the game is lost with every prize in the game worth $3000 or $4000, regardless of round; and is it just me (and my computer), or is the A.I. in the game dumb as bricks? Virtually every round I've played has at least one contestant earning 0 spins, and the most one of them has earned is 2 spins. I could go fanb- with it and wonder why that "JC_Ludia" claimed they couldn't obtain the series theme, yet they use a portion of it when it transitions to and away from the board rounds, and the board melody in the trailers and online game is the complete 2nd one, not a chopped and screwed version of the 1st, it's like they knew it would catch flack........ but I digress.

In short, it's definitely the best home version of the show, but if it sells well enough, I certainly hope that the next version is better thought out.

Tyshaun

[Jeremy Nelson]

I think the dumb contestants may have something to do with the fact that you play through episodes. Maybe the contestants get smarter, and maybe there's a Larsen caricature on the final game (I know that the latter is wishful thinking, to say the least.)

The game looks good for the most part, but the rest is sloppy. The killer, though, is that they had all of the materials to make the game really great in both gameplay and sound. There are countless episodes on Youtube, a Wikipedia page, numerous game show/PYL forums and newsgroups....not to mention any assistance Fremantle could possibly give. It's already been said, but there are many of us who would have helped if it would have made the game better. I don't know if the Ludia people have ever posted here, but it seems awkward that they'd only post on the G-R forums for a non-PiR game.

Oh, and the voice guy for PYL 2010 sounds like the guy from the iWin Feud games. That voice gets pretty darn annoying after a few games.

[RyanCDN]

[quote name=\'chad1m\' post=\'229314\' date=\'Oct 27 2009, 06:59 PM\'][quote name=\'clemon79\' post=\'229313\' date=\'Oct 27 2009, 07:51 PM\']That's some fine programming work there, Ludia.[/quote]Can you link us to some of the games you've worked on?
[/quote]

I have nothing wrong with Chris' comment.   As a paying consumer, why should you not be able to critique something without being "in the biz" so to speak.

I think it is great that they released a classic game.  It has been a while since I saw a company release a video game based on a show that does not have a current run.  Yes, that is a positive.  However, they are some things, from the sounds of it, that could really use some tweaking.

When a company decides to release a game like this, I think it would be wonderful if they brought a "true fan" on board to help with it development, and to test a version before it is put into major release.

-Ryan

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'comicus\' post=\'229339\' date=\'Oct 28 2009, 08:17 AM\']Then explain that in your reply, elaborate.  A curt one-line question like yours smacks of impudence, and it looks like you're seeking to discredit Chris just for the sake of discrediting Chris.  There's no such thing as tone of voice on the Internet.[/quote]
For the sake of discussion, why should Chad be responsible for other people misinterpreting his question, just because it was direct and to the point?  Should every message come with a disclaimer just in case someone might take it the wrong way?

For the record, I cringed when I first saw the message because I saw that there could be multiple interpretations, and frankly, I wasn't completely sure what he meant by it myself.  But now he's explained himself.  Ought to be the end of it.

[Hastin]

My biggest gripe:

The big board sound. How do you have a WHOLE QA department go through a game, and not realize that the Big Board sound is broken on the Wii? It works fine on the PC version, but it just cuts off on the Wii. I doubt that they will patch the Wii game either.

Playing this with a group is fun enough, lots of the problems seem to fall away in a group/party setting.

[RyanCDN]

[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'229347\' date=\'Oct 28 2009, 10:23 AM\'][quote name=\'comicus\' post=\'229339\' date=\'Oct 28 2009, 08:17 AM\']Then explain that in your reply, elaborate.  A curt one-line question like yours smacks of impudence, and it looks like you're seeking to discredit Chris just for the sake of discrediting Chris.  There's no such thing as tone of voice on the Internet.[/quote]
For the sake of discussion, why should Chad be responsible for other people misinterpreting his question, just because it was direct and to the point?  Should every message come with a disclaimer just in case someone might take it the wrong way?

For the record, I cringed when I first saw the message because I saw that there could be multiple interpretations, and frankly, I wasn't completely sure what he meant by it myself.  But now he's explained himself.  Ought to be the end of it.
[/quote]


That is the big problem in this media form, you can only take it at face value.  I certainly think Chad explained himself and what he meant in the previous post.  It is way to easy to interpret things on multiple levels when you just read a simple line of words on a page.

I certainly 'jumped' to the post as being more along the line of "If you think it is so bad, then show us what you did" versus "I want to see some of your work".  Anyways, my apologies to Chad for my reply being to quick to pass judgement on his post.

[Mr. Armadillo]

[quote name=\'clemon79\' post=\'229337\' date=\'Oct 28 2009, 03:10 AM\'][quote name=\'TeppanYaki\' post=\'229333\' date=\'Oct 27 2009, 09:25 PM\']JC_Ludia had mentioned when trying to get the game boards right that he only had a certain amount of time to do it.[/quote]
Probably true, but unless that amount of time was "less than 48 hours" (and trust me, it wasn't), he knows he has access to a bunch of people who not only know that information EXACTLY, but several who would be more than willing to pass it along without asking for so much as a Special Thanks To mention in the credits. So I don't buy that excuse.
[/quote]
Roughly a week (or at least that's the timeframe he gave himself to speak to the fans).  Here's a post JC_Ludia made on g-r on June 9th:

The PYL board layouts were made by me. There is still time to change them, but VERY LITTLE. I'll ask you guys to bear with me and tell me if there are other such spaces that only appear in specific spots. I made the boards to be balanced and (I hope) fun, but I didn't take into consideration the fact that the Big Bucks space should only be in space 4 (among other things).

We decided to build boards ourselves based on a few factors, namely that pretty much no one has the same favorite layout. Every answer I got was different, for different reasons.

I'm sorry if you guys are disappointed by that.

This is his next post eight days later:

In any case, I can confirm I have just updated the board layouts in the game. It's quite last minute, but I figure you guys would like to know. I used the board patterns used throughout the show, and there will be many variations of the boards (although they should keep true to the data I have).

I took the data from the web from a website someone recommended from here (the site is dead and I had to go through web.archive.org to get it) but it looked to be quite complete.

So! Big Bucks is always in the right space, etc, etc. I strive to make you guys happy!

Take that as you will.

[chad1m]

For anyone curious, here are some things JC addressed at Golden-Road:

The theme music: As I've mentioned multiple times before, Fremantle did not have a clean copy of this music in their archives, and for obvious legal reasons we couldn't use one of the many clean themes available on the net. We had to make a new one (our friends at Wave Generation). The transition music is a different story - Fremantle had the sources so we could use them.

The boards: At least the layouts are correct! And I know the QA guys were right. (JC originally said the QA guys said the big board was too easy because in many cases one of the three layouts has no whammies in it, leading to them racking insanely huge scores because they'd look out for the high whammy layout then buzzing when it changed. I kept my point and made it so it would be faithful to the show rather than changing this around. I did this for you guys - personally I would have rebalanced it but after seeing the huge demand for the original board layouts I decided to keep them as is.) It was even worse in one of our previous versions, where it would just cycle in a linear fashion, and you could be guaranteed to land on a no whammy board. At least now whenever a board switch is about to happen, it randomly picks a different board.

The whammies: I'm glad you guys like the whammies. We initially did 2 tests for their animations: one like it is in-game, which are closer to the original show, and one with in-between frames between the keyframes so they'd be better animated. While the version with in-betweens looked much, MUCH better, we felt the keyframes only version would fit better with the game. We have a few absolutely insane 2D animators on board here and they did an amazing job with them. If you want to check out some more of their work, you can look at our Where's Waldo game, where they painstakingly recreated every page from the first Where's Waldo book and added animation to it. It's phenomenal.
 
Prizes: We had problems with getting prizes in-game - video from the original show was in rather low quality and we didn't have the rights to use it, so we had to do a work-around.

[Sodboy13]

[quote name=\'chad1m\' post=\'229353\' date=\'Oct 28 2009, 12:01 PM\']Prizes: We had problems with getting prizes in-game - video from the original show was in rather low quality and we didn't have the rights to use it, so we had to do a work-around.[/quote]

Funny, Curt King didn't have any video in his game at all, and yet he still somehow managed to insert an assortment of prizes, each programmed to have a different cash value.  "Work-around", my ass.  They gave up on this element to save time and effort, and hoped no one foolish enough to lay out 40 bucks would notice.

/Oh, and Curt was able to do it 9 freaking years ago

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'Mr. Armadillo\' post=\'229351\' date=\'Oct 28 2009, 09:15 AM\']Roughly a week[/quote]Plenty of time, especially for a dude who claims to be as "in-touch" with the fanbase as he represents.

So! Big Bucks is always in the right space, etc, etc.

...and yet they couldn't be bothered to figure out that Big Bucks always moves to the space orthagonally above it, always, always, without fail, even if there's a more valuable prize on the board? How does THAT bug get through? How does that CODE get written? Look:

If Big_Bucks Then
JumpToSpace [4];
End {If};

How hard is that? Why would you even BOTHER with any kind of what-space-is-worth-most logic?

I'll tell you why: because either he didn't bother to find out or nobody bothered to tell the Latvians writing his code how it's supposed to work.

I strive to make you guys happy!

...so he screws up the basic behavior of the game and puts stock $3,000 prizes in the first round.

He strives, but he fails. But I bet the code ports *great*.

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'Sodboy13\' post=\'229355\' date=\'Oct 28 2009, 10:31 AM\']/Oh, and Curt was able to do it 9 freaking years ago[/quote]
Oh SO MUCH this, and this is another fine argument for "get the friggin' boards right": Curt had a WIDE ASSORTMENT of them in his game, all of them accurate to a square, and IIRC you could either get at them with a board editor app or pick which ones you wanted to play with within the game. They were EASILY accessible.

(And if there was a guarantee of whammy-free boards, it means they were switching boards per-board, and not per-square. Somewhere, Michael Larsen is smiling.)