Sam & Max Season 2 on XBLA

roberttitus

The Xbox 360 is a system that is fully capable of playing games such as Gears of War, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Assassin's Creed & SoulCalibur IV (IE: Gorgeous & fun games with amazing framerates). Either Sam & Max pushes the system to its graphical limits (not likely) or this is just a very shoddy port. The frame rate is atrocious, there are missing graphics, the cursor speed is ridiculously slow, more often than not when trying to move Sam he just fidgits around when the camera angle changes, considering that the game is $20 you would think that there would be more than 12 achievements & most importantly I find the dialogue cutting off on certain sentence before they are finished.
I suggest that you
1. Release a patch to fix these problems
2. Test the games rigorously before releasing them to the public. A delay will not kill us as long as the game is functional when released.

Hopefully you will take this to heart & fix the problems in the game. I don't think that it is right for a company to charge $20 on a broken game.

Will

Ok, let's get the easy stuff out of the way first.

First of all, 12 achievements is the limit to all XBLA games. Nothing we can do about it I'm afraid. As for the cursor speed we settled on, we found that if we had it any faster, people had a *really* hard time selecting smaller items, which proved to be very frustrating.

The camera angle fidgiting has more to do with how the camera angles were originally set up in season 2 than anything else. Since Season 2 wasn't originally designed with this kind of control in mind, some of the camera angle changes are rather drastic for the XBLA control scheme. The only thing we could do to fix that would be to go back and redesign those scenes with a more gradual camera change, but that would basically require us to completely redo those scenes from scratch.

Which graphics are missing? I can't think of any instances where stuff isn't there... Similarly, I didn't think voices were having any problems, do you have specific examples?

As for the framerate, I agree it does get a bit choppy during big transitions, and I agree that it can be a bit bothersome in those times, but by and large the framerate should be a consistent 20-30 fps (indeed this is something Microsoft can and does test during the approval process).

Do I wish we could go back and get rid of those hitches? You betcha. But the fact of the matter is that we have one engine running every single game we make (be it PC, Wii, or Xbox), and it would have taken some really serious engine overhauls to get those hitches smoothed out. Which not only would have delayed Sam & Max, but would have also delayed Wallace and Gromit and Monkey Island, and would essentially have brought our studio to a halt for a few months.

SHODANFreeman

Will wrote: »

As for the cursor speed we settled on, we found that if we had it any faster, people had a *really* hard time selecting smaller items, which proved to be very frustrating.

I have a question/suggestion about that. I know the Xbox analog sticks are capable of reading how far you have pushed the stick, would it be possible to allow the cursor to move at a variable speed, such that if you have pressed the stick as far as it can go, it would move at full speed, and if you only nudged it a little bit, it would move quite slowly?

(This is getting a little bit into Yare territory though, methinks.)

Will

There actually was a fair bit of that as it was.