Space Quest II Remake Trailer
Hey all, bit of a shameless plug but a team that I am working on are developing a fan remake of the awesome Space Quest II. It's been around 20 years and in the tradition of fan remakes we wanted to tackle this one and it's almost done! And because you're all fans of adventure games and the amazing work TellTale has done, I'd like to share this with you if that's alright.
We're Infamous Adventures, we worked on King's Quest III a while back which became fairly popular so I'd like to present our latest effort. I hope you all like it. I thought I'd pay homage to the 50's styles of B-movie trailers with this one.
http://www.infamous-adventures.com/index.php?page=view&topic=3246
We're Infamous Adventures, we worked on King's Quest III a while back which became fairly popular so I'd like to present our latest effort. I hope you all like it. I thought I'd pay homage to the 50's styles of B-movie trailers with this one.
http://www.infamous-adventures.com/index.php?page=view&topic=3246
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Comments
I really can't wait for this; this may be the first time I've bothered to finish a Space Quest game. (And believe me, I've wanted to finish one for quite a while.)
Oh, and awesome trailer.
Ugly? I think that graphics are quite good compared to other games of the same period. No one is forcing people to play old games, but those who want to enjoy classic games have to realize that games like Space Quest 2 don't have fancy 3D graphics. But with right attitude you can enjoy those games like you did enjoy when you first played those 20 years ago.
I still frequently play adventures and RPGs of 80s and 90s.
And I personally felt that the old 16 color graphics limited the game artistically. Heck, any game with only 16 colors is gonna turn out differently than if the designer had access to VGA.
Yes, there is something to be said for beutiny in using what you have. In that sense, I see a lot of old games as beautiful. But everyone draws a line somewhere. I doubt you would call Pong a visual masterpiece.
But I have to say, please, please study up a bit about recording and cast a wide net when casting, because the voiceover in the trailer is very, very poor in both aspects, and I'd hate to see that mar what looks like a really promising project. You don't need a professional recording studio to get some clean audio, just a good mic and some good software.
Keep us posted on your project and good luck. Interestingly, I think a lot of early VGA games really didn't know what to do with the larger palette. Look at the FM TOWNS version of Zak McKracken. They just wanted to put gradients on everything.
There's something to be said for limited color palettes, but the 160x200 screen resolution is really a pretty hard one to work with artistically. I think that's why SQ1 and 2 don't hold up artistically and SQ3 does.
And I just voiced an opposite opinion.
I'm impressed how complex adventures Sierra was capable of doing in the late 80s. Their games are playable even with the 160x200 resolution and 16 colours, because the graphics are well drawn and you don't have to guess what you're looking at, because spaceship looks like a spaceship and tree looks like a tree. It may be rough in modern standards, but compared to some other games of the era their graphics are really impressive.
I don't know where I would draw the line myself, because I occasionally play games like Akalabeth: World of Doom (which has really ancient black and white graphics), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which doesn't have graphics at all, but it's just text) or NetHack which has ASCII graphics. So for me the question isn't how modern the graphics are but how well graphics serve the game's playability.
Regarding the voice over, it was intentionally recorded like that. I studied a lot of 50's B movie trailers and commercials and many of the voiceovers had noise and background hiss. It was the 50's afterall! It wasn't as if I was limited, I have a high quality microphone here and I have Soundbooth Pro so I have the right resources, but I made the sound quality like that on purpose. I'll admit I'm not a pro at sound recording so it might seem amateurish but I had an idea of what I wanted.
Thanks for the advice though, it is good to get criticism from someone who I gather knows a lot in the subject so I take it all with good grace. I'm still a student so I do have a long way to go.
I dunno. There's no doubt that higher resolution really helps. This is clearly evidenced by old Seirra games featuring people and things that look grossly deformed. To make matters worse, some objects were so bizarre looking that one could not tell what they were, and had to try and guess by typing 'look at such and such' until they got it right. I particularly remember doing this in SQ2.
That being said, I really felt that having one out four things being an odd violet color, simply due to lack of color choices, really hurt the artistic direction of older adventure games. (that is of course but one example; I have nothing against violet)
I've never played the FM Towns version of anything. But I can say having recently replayed the remake of SQ1, that it still looks spectacular, and I attribute this partially to it's rich use of color. Ironically vastly more rich than most drearily colored 3D shooters today.
Not trying to be overly negative though, just figured it's better to mention these things sooner rather than after a ton of work has been done.
Here's Zak McKracken, which just tried to shove more colors into every surface using old-school pixel art:
Compare that to SQ1 which used radically different art techniques compared to the 16 color games:
Hmm. Now I will have to disagree with this because I have high quality speakers and I can't see how this could be related to "Xbox Live" feedback. I'm not being bitter and I'd mention this even if it wasn't my own work but I just can't hear the relevance. This was recorded with a studio condenser microphone with an anti pop screen attached. I than recorded background noise using my built in iMac microphone so I could add hiss because I wanted it to sound like that. It was all intentional.
I appreciate the criticism of course but in this case it was meant to be like that. As I said, the amount of 50's trailers I watched and researched had similar qualities and that was my objective to make it as exact as possible. It wasn't a case of poor equipment, it was a case of judgement that made me record it that way. I listened to it without the filters and in it's raw quality and it sounded way off, too high quality for a 50's style trailer.
I know you're not being negative and I don't have a problem with that at all but I just wanted to explain myself. Of course, if you don't agree with the way I've done things than that's fine and I can always build skills from these kinds of things but in this case it was paying homage to 50's sci-fi trailers which I adore and wanted to replicate with this trailer.
Also, I'm not gonna go back and listen again, but when I watched the trailer, the only background noise I heard seemed like it was deliberately inserted to make it sound like a 50's movie trailer. That was my impression anyway.
http://dod.vgmix.com/past/mar08/04-MusicallyInspired-SQ4-Tale-DoD.mp3
It's such an epic song, hope you like it.
The first will most likely not be remade as Sierra made a VGA remake themselves. As to voice acting, you'll just have to download it when it comes out and see, won't you?