Thanks for the kind comments, people! I'm glad to hear that the game is being positively received.

I've been waiting to share this screenshot for over a month and a half :D

Quoting: ShmerlGreat! I'll buy on GOG. Did Double Fine consider open sourcing their remastered engines?

I don't believe Double Fine owns the remastered engines enough to open source them. They're based on the LucasArts developed wrapper around the original SCUMM engine that was developed for the Monkey Island special editions, so Disney owns that stuff (and with them being a driving force behind extending copyright and are so reluctant to sell IP that they own, it feels really unlikely that they'd consider it).

Quoting: ShmerlAnd, can Double Fine make some deal with Disney to release classic Full Throttle as a free bonus for those who buy the remastered game? It will allow playing it in ScummVM wherever it runs :)

That's not something I can really comment on or influence. Wouldn't hurt to let Double Fine know that that sort of thing is desired, though!

Quoting: Incandescent

Quoting: Mountain ManThis was the first adventure game I ever played, and it ruined the genre for me, because everything else I played after just felt inferior.

However, I would say that Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis and Gemini Rue get pretty darn close. :)

All are really great games, but to me, The Dig sits marginally above them.

Quoting: SkullyGreat stuff Cheeseness. You keep yourself very busy. Goodluck with whatever you do next.

Thanks! I think I'll be trying to focus on shipping Winter's Wake and the Icicle engine. That said, I'm sure I'll get roped into other things here and there along the way :D

Quoting: BlackBloodRumAlso, it's got my vote because the Windows trolls[1] in the steam forum "Linux support?" thread are banned haha :-D. Seems DoubleFine have a developer there by the name of "Cheesiness" who seems quite friendly towards Linux and that's always a good thing to see!

Just to be clear, I'm an external contractor when I'm doing ports for them and a volunteer community coordinator/forum moderator when I'm not.

Quoting: BlackBloodRumNow they've finished with this, how about Brutal Legend 2? Hint hint ;-)

I can't speak for Double Fine on that front, but I think it's pretty safe to say that there's zero chance of BL2 being on the table before Psychonauts 2 ships. With BL2 being such an expensive game (music licencing costs alone would be astronomical), it's possible that it'd never get made. That said, who knows what might happen in the future if the stars align right!

Quoting: tuubiYay! Thanks for being awesome once again Cheese! I will definitely pick it up at some point. The Dig next on the list? ;)

No plans for The Dig that I'm aware of! Would definitely love to have a hand in that one if the opportunity arose though. I think it's my favourite LucasArts adventure game.

Quoting: tuubiI'll be eagerly waiting for your article on the port process. If your past articles are anything to go by, it ought to be a fascinating read.

At this stage, I'm not sure what form it will take - I need a bit more time to reflect on what's happened. Hopefully that won't be too long though :)

Quoting: razing32I was wondering why this was not available when Day of the Tentacle was.

If I remember right, full production on Full Throttle Remastered didn't start until long after I was done with Day of the Tentacle Remastered's Linux port. The Windows version of FT:R didn't come out until April this year.

Quoting: t3gYou rock! One day when I was mowing the lawn, I had the interview you did with Boiling Steam playing on my phone (headphones of course) and bought the Linux version of Day of the Tentacle soon after.

It was my first time playing the game and you did an amazing job.

I hope you eventually assist in bringing over more games like the Secret of Monkey Island remasters.

Thanks! I'm glad to hear you had a positive experience with DotT and that there was something of interest in my Boiling Steam interview.

Regarding the Monkey Island special editions, I'd love to see them come to Linux. I'm not aware of any forward movement on that front, but it'd never hurt to ask Double Fine and let them know that there's an audience!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I've been helping test/prepare the Linux builds of this game. The developer gave me a key, but I ended up buying it myself because I enjoyed it so much :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I helped test some initial Linux builds last week and found the time I spent with it to be some of the most personally resonant experiences I've ever had with a game. Everything has moved me in ways that few other games have.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Ah! I'd been so busy with Amnesia Fortnight stuff that I didn't notice that got published.

There are some great responses provided by the interviewees. I think they all show slightly different perspectives on similar hurdles, which is super valuable to have!

Quoting: wintermute

Having Linux support fall behind other platforms is a sad reality that I think Linux users need to be understanding of. If a game is already released on another platform, then I'd have more respect for a developer who gives priority to existing customers over customers they don't yet have - the opposite only suggests that we'll be treated poorly when we are finally supported!

Except in the case of Kickstarters we're all existing customers, so we're already being treated poorly.

I'm less comfortable with platform specific delays when affected users are already customers (or in the case of crowdfunded games, supporters). I think you make a valid point.

That said, sometimes it comes down to a developer making a decision to give a particular platform priority over others in exchange for upfront payment that lets them continue working on the game. As much as I don't like those kinds of arrangements, I'd rather see a Linux version delayed than a game not get finished.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: scaineWell, I've played a bit more now and I've discovered one further bug - playing with an Xbox360 controller "works" but with the condition that the analogue thumbsticks don't work in menus. You have to use the D-Pad. Worse, up is down and down is up!

Do you get this with the main branch? IIRC one has the menu inverted and the other doesn't - it's been a while and I don't have it installed at the moment to check.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Perkeleen_VittupääOne of those rare long articles i read word to word, man. These games have a special place in my heart.

Thanks for reading. Glad to hear you got something out of it!

Quoting: Perkeleen_VittupääHopefully Topware or some other instance one day makes Linux ports of Rogue Squadron, Star Wars Episode I: Racer, Starfighter, X-Wing Alliance...

If you weren't aware, there was an attempt a while back at doing a licenced remake of X-Wing vs TIE [External Link] by Australian game dev studio Transmission Games. Unfortunately things didn't work out, though.

Quoting: Hamish

Quoting: CheesenessElite Force was a pretty good, but distractingly Quake3-ish for me. I think there's just something about controls built for an arena shooter that make it harder to appreciate a flowing first person narrative - at the very least though, it wouldn't have been the right choice for Jedi Outcast, which was a sequel to an existing franchise with its own sensibilities and identity.

Granted I also love Quake III to death which might make me biased here, but I do recall often getting frustrated while playing Jedi Outcast, and would have liked something as solid as Quake III's controls. Smooth navigation and solid gunplay have always been very important to me, and for whatever reason they did not really click with me in Jedi Outcast. But again, any analysis on my part is hampered by my not fully remembering what it was about the game that bothered me.

Don't get my wrong. I love Q3A (and Elite Force). I just don't feel that the kind of movement and weapon mechanics are a good fit for the kind of games that the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games are, and tend to be a little too twitchy for my tastes in narrative based FPS games.

Quoting: Hamish

Quoting: CheesenessSo far as story goes, Jedi Outcast feels a lot more solid to me than Jedi Academy (which I thought was kinda weak and plodding). I'm not really a fan of the whole artificial-force-user thing as I mentioned in my article, and there's a lot about all four of the Jedi-oriented installments of the series that fall into the trap of the kind of stuff which eventually lead to the kind of nonsense that is The Force Unleashed.

Academy's plot was nothing special, but I did like the branching mission structure it had. I do agree with you about the Reborn though, and I recall they were a lot of the reason why I did not like the plot. In Dark Forces II the powers of the Valley of the Jedi were left vague enough that you could read what you liked into them, while in Jedi Outcast it is shown creating a bunch of force wielding doofuses that can be killed by falling off a ledge. Defeating Jerec seemed important, while I just could never take Desaan seriously. I also found myself cringing at the Luke and Lando fan service in the game at the time. Of course Katarn would be good friends with both of them...

Ha ha, yeah. It does get a bit overboard in parts, but I think it's reasonable to portray Katarn and Luke as having crossed paths if they're both active force users associated with the Rebel Alliance. Still, the stronger actor performances in Jedi Outcast make its plot a lot easier to absorb/get into than Jedi Knight's (love it, but it's acting feels like it drags the rest of the game down a bit).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KetilEp 1-3 has continuity issues with the original triology.

My favourite one above all the others is that for some reason Ben's desert hobo clothes become official Jedi garb :D

Quoting: KetilThe story of KOTOR is great, but I haven't finished playing it yet, I am afraid to do a mistake that makes the end game fights hard, and because I have not finished KOTOR I haven't started on KOTOR 2 yet either.

My advice would be to stick with it and push through. Do the best you can and eat the consequences of your actions - just like Luke did in Empire :)

Quoting: KetilI would love a telltale like star wars game, or a point of click game in lucas arts 2D style. Obviously without the silliness of Monkey Island, and either stay out of the heat of the combat, or allowing allowing death and game over if the situation requires it.

That's something I touched on in the final The Ideal Star Wars Game [External Link] section of my article.

Though there have been Star Wars games with strong narratives, I'm hard pressed to think of any that are as narratively focused as LucasArts' adventure games were. When I was younger, it always surprised me that LucasArts had never made a The Secret of Monkey Island or Indiana Jones And The Fate of Atlantis-esque adventure game set in the Star Wars universe. Today, I think I understand that when the opportunity to actually make Star Wars games arose, the people driving the adventure game genre at LucasArts - people like Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer - were more interested in inventing their own worlds than finding ways to tell stories inside of George Lucas'.

Consequences are something rarely touched on in Star Wars games, and when they are, it always comes down to morally positive or negative actions determining whether a character finds themselves on the light or dark side of the Force. To me, there are far more interesting experiences and stories to be found when examining less black and white outcomes from the best decisions that people can make at the time. When Luke takes fear and aggression into his test on Dagobah, he is met with a confronting vision of himself as Darth Vader, and when he rushes to rescue his friends on Bespin, the outcomes are damaging for him and the future of the galaxy. At the end of the second act in Star Wars, Obi-Wan chooses to sacrifice himself in pursuit of positive outcomes. So far, I know of no Star Wars game that allows players to choose make their own sacrifices for meaningful outcomes (holding a point in Battlefront so that your teammates can fulfill an objective might come close, but sacrifices in emergent stories are a different kettle of fish, I think).

When touching on some hypothetical games that I think would mesh well with and embrace a lot of what makes Star Wars cool, I included a both a traditional point and click adventure that would've been darker than most of LucasArts' adventures were (IIRC all the Indiana Jones adventure games let you die!) and something in the style of Telltale's more recent works.

* A character oriented adventure game set prior to Star Wars about a Jedi in hiding trying to integrate with the local populace on a core world. Build relationships, participate in a community harassed by pirates and slavers. Avoid using the Force or risk endangering the lives of those around you and your own discovery by the Empire.

* A traditional point and click adventure that explored the origins and intersecting relationships of the six bounty hunters recruited by Darth Vader in the Empire Strikes back. Explore Star Wars locations and characters as never before, using wits, stealth and brawn to take down your marks and collect your bounties.

You might also be interested to learn about Han Solo Adventures project [External Link], an attempt to make a LucasArts style point and click adventure focus on Han Solo by Jack Huston And The Necronauts [External Link] developer Stacy Davidson. Paradigm [External Link]. developer Jacob Janerka also did a little mock-up [External Link] of a Han Solo point and click adventure a few years back.

I don't think that Jacob has any intentions of pursuing his thing, but Stacy still works on Han Solo Adventures on-and off alongside Jack Huston and sometimes streams it. You can see in-engine footage in Star Wars Uncut [External Link] at 49:56.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Hamish

Quoting: CheesenessJedi Outcast uses id Software's id Tech 3 engine, but manages to escape some of the Quake 3-esque feel that is present in Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force (Raven's previous game made with the same engine) and many other id Tech 3 games.

You make that sound like it is a good thing. :P

I recall disliking a lot about Jedi Outcast when I first played it following the source code release in 2013, and actually enjoying Jedi Academy more than it, but I am having trouble remembering what my specific complaints were other than taking exception to a lot of the game's story elements. I guess I would need to play it again to see what exactly got my blood boiling the first time around.

That said, in my mind Elite Force still holds up as the best franchise game I have ever played period, and I also grew up playing Dark Forces II, so a lot of my coldness to Jedi Outcast could just have been due to it wilting under the pressure of being compared to those two games.

As for the original Dark Forces though, talk to me again if or when the XL Engine comes out. Not being able to save within levels is simply unreasonable, and was so even at the time of the game's release.

Those are fair feelings, I suppose. Dark Forces is hard to come back to if you're used to games that let you save mid-level. It was my first FPS game and I didn't come at it with any expectations or baggage, so it's easier for me to overlook that sort of thing. That said, I'm super looking forward to Dark XL's Linux release!

Elite Force was a pretty good, but distractingly Quake3-ish for me. I think there's just something about controls built for an arena shooter that make it harder to appreciate a flowing first person narrative - at the very least though, it wouldn't have been the right choice for Jedi Outcast, which was a sequel to an existing franchise with its own sensibilities and identity.

It wasn't really until I came back to re-play it while researching for my article that I came to appreciate how much effort was put into giving it a good sense of flow and riffing on some of Dark Forces' and Jedi Knight's respective styles.

So far as story goes, Jedi Outcast feels a lot more solid to me than Jedi Academy (which I thought was kinda weak and plodding). I'm not really a fan of the whole artificial-force-user thing as I mentioned in my article, and there's a lot about all four of the Jedi-oriented installments of the series that fall into the trap of the kind of stuff which eventually lead to the kind of nonsense that is The Force Unleashed. From the Reflections [External Link] section of the article:

The use of the Force and representations of Force powers can be a double edged sword. This feels most dramatically highlighted in The Force Unleashed, but even going as far back as the first game to feature an original Force wielding character, the way that Jedi Knight introduced a slew of powerful force wielding characters whose origins have been retconned into Prequel Trilogy era history was unsettling to me.

For better or worse, no Star Wars games that I have played have ever treated the Force with the minimalism seen in the original trilogy, nor the level of exertion required to use it (raising Luke's X-wing from the swamp in Dagobah is shown to be taxing even for Yoda). The upshot of this is that players are typically given access to an array of increasingly impressive abilities that can be used frequently and without consequence.

The obvious solution to giving players god-like abilities is to create god-like adversaries for them, and the result is a sort of game design arms race that, to me, feels like it often leads developers away from embracing the worldbuiding and detail that makes the Star Wars universe interesting.

Force capable adversaries typically take one of three forms, all of which have been explored by the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games: A previously unheard of Force user emerges (Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II); A new Force user abandons their training (Jedi Outcast: Jedi Knight II, Jedi Academy); Someone develops Force-using or Force-resistant technology (Dark Forces). The amount of times these tropes have been used across Star Wars games and literature gives the impression that the Star Wars universe is populated by former Sith Lords politely waiting their turn to throw off their disguises, that nobody who trains Jedi ever learns from their mistakes, and that the science behind the Force should be well understood enough that it should be accessible to and counterable by anybody.

Beyond making it difficult to harmonise with canon, this isn't problematic in itself, and I have a hard time denying that grabbing a Stormtrooper and using it to bop other Stormtroopers off ledges can be a bunch of fun. It does, however, create a problem in making players powerful beyond any non-Force related challenges and removing any sense of interesting choice when deciding how to handle those challenges.

Would be super interested to hear your thoughts on Jedi Outcast after a re-play!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: thelimeydragon

Quoting: Cheeseness

Quoting: thelimeydragonI have a copy of what could be claimed to be the first "Star Wars" game. Although it is not officially licensed. Was made in 1978 for the RCA Studio II clones (bit more to it than that but that's a whole other topic). It's very to extremely rare.. but you're not missing out on much.

Ah yeah, I'm aware of that one! I've been having trouble getting solid confirmation of whether or not it's licenced though.

I am 99.99% certain it's not licensed. All paperwork I've seen that's included with copies has 0 mention of LucasArts or any trademarks.

LucasArts didn't exist at the time (it'd be founded as Lucasfilm Games four years later). Feels like it would've had Lucasfilm branding on it somewhere if it were licenced though!

Quoting: thelimeydragonAcademy Apollo 80 version:

To protect your privacy, external media requires approval to load.

Source: s16.postimg.org

View cookie preferences.
Accept & Show Accept All & Don't show this again   Direct Link

Nice! :D

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: thelimeydragonI have a copy of what could be claimed to be the first "Star Wars" game. Although it is not officially licensed. Was made in 1978 for the RCA Studio II clones (bit more to it than that but that's a whole other topic). It's very to extremely rare.. but you're not missing out on much.

Ah yeah, I'm aware of that one! I've been having trouble getting solid confirmation of whether or not it's licenced though.

Initially I'd hoped to be able to include and/or write about fan-works, but with 4 months' worth of reserach going in to licenced titles alone, and without any way to be as comprehensive as I like my stuff to be, I decided to not pursue them. I hope somebody does someday!

There's also the Star Wars Electronic Battle Command [External Link] game thing, which may have been the first licenced Star Wars game, but again, in the interests of keeping the scope to something that I could manage within one lifetime, I ended up sticking to what could I could identifiably classify as a "video game" (so, no Star Wars Trivial Pursuit [External Link] either).

View this comment - View article - View full comments