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Post by Discoalucard on Feb 21, 2010 17:04:02 GMT -5
www.hardcoregaming101.net/sanitarium/sanitarium.htmThis is an interesting horror adventure game from a bit over ten years ago. I still haven't gotten around to playing it myself, but I've heard plenty of good things about it, including from this here article!
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Post by ReyVGM on Feb 21, 2010 19:43:20 GMT -5
I miss pre-rendered RPGs and adventure games.
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Post by kaoru on Feb 22, 2010 16:33:22 GMT -5
I played it last year and really liked it. I have to agree that it falters a bit in the final parts, when it intodruces the villain. I was expecting an a bit more Silent Hill-ish main character, that went insane because of his own wrong doings or something similiar up until then. Also, the boss fights seemed very shoe-horned in since there are only 2 ones, while you defeat every other "boss"-like character in the other dream worlds with puzzle solving.
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Post by roushimsx on Feb 22, 2010 20:31:16 GMT -5
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Post by jorpho on Feb 22, 2010 20:58:20 GMT -5
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Post by roushimsx on Feb 22, 2010 21:07:28 GMT -5
Yep, Gamasutra is the online front of Game Developer Magazine. Totally missed the link at the bottom of the article (or on their site)! It's a shame they haven't migrated all of the postmortems over to the site yet, but there's a bunch of neato ones where they actually expand on the printed version (like the Trespasser postmortem). No idea how I missed the Sanitarium one on there Oh well! At least I hit up Shogo, about to scan in Aliens Online, Die By the Sword, and pretty much anything else I can find that's missing from their online archive.
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Post by Ganelon on Feb 23, 2010 0:47:56 GMT -5
Wow, DreamForge brings back a lot of memories: Dungeon Hack's permadeath feature, WarWind entirely ignored as a clone of Warcraft II, and the great standalone Anvil of Dawn. It's strange this game looks like it'd fit in an RPG; is the engine taken from another game or reused elsewhere?
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Post by kal on Feb 24, 2010 8:30:39 GMT -5
I disliked in this game how quickly all the initially chaos of the game descends into a rather slow adventure. The first level with the children is amazing after that the game sort of falls down and definitely as others have said once the story is explained further it all becomes a bit standard.
Now Chronomaster ...that's an interesting game.
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Post by syntheticgerbil on Feb 24, 2010 12:15:16 GMT -5
I played it last year and really liked it. I have to agree that it falters a bit in the final parts, when it intodruces the villain. I was expecting an a bit more Silent Hill-ish main character, that went insane because of his own wrong doings or something similiar up until then. Also, the boss fights seemed very shoe-horned in since there are only 2 ones, while you defeat every other "boss"-like character in the other dream worlds with puzzle solving. I really despise Sanitarium, but I will concede that the first 3 levels are well made. It seems like after that, for Sanitarium, the design, writing, graphics, and animation all get exponentially worse as the game goes along. As if the designers had no idea where to take the game or like they had spent more time on the first three levels. It was definitely an interesting setup, but the execution got ridiculously amateurish. Also the part where you find all of the fetuses in jars was incredibly uneventful and just came off as awkward and funny. I don't see what everyone sees in Sanitarium. And since it was brought up, I don't see what everyone sees in Chronomaster for that matter. I bought it based on tons of great recommendations by adventure gamers and it must be one of the worst offenders of bad adventure design. In the game you pick up tons of inventory objects you never use and there's a lack of description or explanation of the game world and the graphics do little to illustrate most of what's going on. Ron Perlman's voice acting was good and the sparse 2D graphics were nice (although marred upon the early ugly prerendered 3D), but I just couldn't even be bothered to finish Chronomaster even with a guide, which was a game I was hoping would be like Sanitarium, but better.
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Post by kal on Feb 24, 2010 19:09:54 GMT -5
Chronomaster's setting is really the only thing that sells it - kind of like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - and now the surreal sci-fi adventure game is pretty much dead. For a better game try Obsidian.
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Post by jorpho on Feb 24, 2010 23:23:24 GMT -5
Oh dear. I get the impression that next time I write an article I ought to do some more research into the general sentiment towards the game. I had no idea there was so much bad feeling towards Sanitarium.
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Post by kal on Feb 25, 2010 9:18:54 GMT -5
Don't get me wrong I enjoyed Sanitarium - but it always felt like it fell short. There is a lot of negative sentiment around for it I think largely due to the box art combined with the name that promises a lot more brutal carnage and psychological trauma then the game delivers.
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Post by syntheticgerbil on Feb 25, 2010 14:28:35 GMT -5
Oh dear. I get the impression that next time I write an article I ought to do some more research into the general sentiment towards the game. I had no idea there was so much bad feeling towards Sanitarium. I think I've actually heard more people speak well about it than anything else, especially at sites like JustAdventure.com or AdventureGamers.com.
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Post by jorpho on Feb 25, 2010 14:31:10 GMT -5
the box art combined with the name that promises a lot more brutal carnage and psychological trauma then the game delivers. I fear you lost me there. Well, unless you're referring to the box text, which does go a little over the top, I'll admit - though it would hardly be the first game to be packaged in hyperbole.
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Blake Casimir
Full Member
Space meditations from Alpha Centauri.
Posts: 105
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Post by Blake Casimir on Feb 25, 2010 17:21:19 GMT -5
I happened to get the issue of Game Developer magazine recently that had the postmortem for this game in it, so here's some scans for y'all. Lots of really neat info (heavily spoilerific) In case it hasn't been said yet: Props for the effort, Roushi! And cheers to Jorpho for the article. Sanitarium is one of those fascinatingly abstract "90s era" PC games that you don't seem to get any more... I'm not really an adventure game fan, so I couldn't honestly bring myself to play this again. But there is a let's play on Youtube - I don't care if it's considered "bad form" or not (what the hell?), but I found every second of it fascinating.
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