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Well, I like Full Throttle better than he does, despite the demolition derby, but I completely agree with him on The Dig. I don't think you can chalk his attitu

by djur 5y ago

Well, I like Full Throttle better than he does, despite the demolition derby, but I completely agree with him on The Dig. I don't think you can chalk his attitude up solely to that handful of bad puzzles. It seems to me like a lot of the people who liked it the best also had read the novelization, which makes sense -- my biggest problem with the game, and I think Jimmy's as well, is that the characters are mostly ciphers. I'm sure the supplementary material helped fill that in.

WorldMaker 5y ago
Yeah, almost all of the characterization that hit the cutting room floor wound up in the novel and the game is far richer having read the novel. The characters do actually make a lot more sense given the descriptions of their thought processes in the novel. In some respects, The Digital Antiquarian's take here on The Dig actually is far weaker for mentioning the novel but not including it in the final review, especially when contrasted with the linked Loom review where the Audio Drama is lauded as being usefully central to the project and the understanding of it. That said, I'm in the group that read the novel first and found the game worse because of it because you could directly see all the holes of "this thing the novel described is probably a puzzle that got dropped at the last minute" and "this scene in the novel of great importance probably was a cutscene that was cut for time" and so forth. The Digital Antiquarian rightfully mocks OSC's somewhat hackneyed dialog and it is rare for anyone to wish the Alan Dean Foster dialog on a finished project that ADF did the novelization for (and I say that having loved many ADF novelizations nearly as much as the films), but The Dig is probably high on the list where the novel's dialog was far superior overall to the game's and it showed even beyond the internal monologues and characterization that couldn't make it into the game and/or were cut.
- djur 5y ago
  I think it's worth remembering that Maher is primarily writing with and only incidentally "reviews" anything. For that reason, I don't really think it's fair to expect him to go the extra mile to try to find a silver lining to games that he didn't think were successful. But treating the respective articles as reviews, the Loom audio drama was included in the box, directly supervised by the game's creator, while the Dig novelization was a separate product. (It's also not exactly a surprise that Maher's coverage of The Dig is a little bit skewed toward the parts of it that an ex-Infocom Imp worked on.)

by djur 5y ago

WorldMaker 5y ago

Yeah, almost all of the characterization that hit the cutting room floor wound up in the novel and the game is far richer having read the novel. The characters do actually make a lot more sense given the descriptions of their thought processes in the novel. In some respects, The Digital Antiquarian's take here on The Dig actually is far weaker for mentioning the novel but not including it in the final review, especially when contrasted with the linked Loom review where the Audio Drama is lauded as being usefully central to the project and the understanding of it. That said, I'm in the group that read the novel first and found the game worse because of it because you could directly see all the holes of "this thing the novel described is probably a puzzle that got dropped at the last minute" and "this scene in the novel of great importance probably was a cutscene that was cut for time" and so forth. The Digital Antiquarian rightfully mocks OSC's somewhat hackneyed dialog and it is rare for anyone to wish the Alan Dean Foster dialog on a finished project that ADF did the novelization for (and I say that having loved many ADF novelizations nearly as much as the films), but The Dig is probably high on the list where the novel's dialog was far superior overall to the game's and it showed even beyond the internal monologues and characterization that couldn't make it into the game and/or were cut.

djur 5y ago
I think it's worth remembering that Maher is primarily writing with and only incidentally "reviews" anything. For that reason, I don't really think it's fair to expect him to go the extra mile to try to find a silver lining to games that he didn't think were successful. But treating the respective articles as reviews, the Loom audio drama was included in the box, directly supervised by the game's creator, while the Dig novelization was a separate product. (It's also not exactly a surprise that Maher's coverage of The Dig is a little bit skewed toward the parts of it that an ex-Infocom Imp worked on.)