It just means that the people who couldn’t beat the Meat Circus have taken over the conversation ages ago, and those who manned up and beat it half a dozen times have decided that it isn’t worth it to keep arguing.
And the game isn’t just the Meat Circus. There’s a reason people want Psychonauts 2. The Milkman and Goggalor are two of the finest levels ever created in a video game.
Don’t get me wrong. I hate the Meat Circus, but I adore the game. And I’d argue Waterloo World is at least as good as Goggalor, though nothing beats the Milkman.
At least as good. At least? Dear sir, it is pistols at dawn with you. It is unquestionably better than all but the Milkman.
The game has so many memorable levels on it, it really is a masterpiece of design. Psychonauts and Brutal legend have some of the most inventive and wonderfully made game worlds the medium has ever seen. That is why I’m going to back, I want Tim Schafer to create more worlds like that.
The little doc about making of Psychonauts, What Color is the sky in your head, was pretty nice. It was interesting seeing younger versions of all the characters from the Double Fine Adventures documentary. Like a younger Peter Chan, a younger Bagel, etc.
My play through the PC version of Psychonauts is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the game is somehow even better than I remembered. But on the other hand, it crashes mysteriously and randomly to the desktop a lot. That really puts a damper on it. I should install the backward compatible original Xbox digital version I have on the 360 again. The resolution isn’t as good but at least it doesn’t crash.
Hunh. I have had two crashes (one early when I was trying to enter the main campground for the first time, and one from the start screen!), but that’s all. I’m up to the Napoleon level.
Regarding Part 2: I can’t believe they were mostly all learning everything from scratch, basically. No one there had ever made that type of game before. And so many of the interviewees had never made any game before.
And then to get cancelled by Microsoft after Ed Fries quit? That was harsh just watching Tim relive those memories. And that feedback from the Microsoft focus group they got, as they got cancelled? Good god. In a way I’m glad they dropped the game, instead of making it a condition to make those changes.
Part 3: It’s so weird seeing all these people transition from young people on the original team to being middle aged, balding, mature people. It was also interesting that they put that insecurity they have in the documentary: What if we can’t live up to people’s expectations?
Sadly, for me, it just keeps crashing about 10 seconds after loading after Sasha uses his gadget to send Raz into his own brain. That’s the second world after Coach Oleander’s. So no more Psychonauts for me on PC at least. Funny. I haven’t had a PC game crash on me in so long, I’d forgotten that this used to be common back in the old days.
Well, I finished my run-through with no more crashes. I watched that speed-run video, and that guy said that on some machines it crashes a lot, and on others it barely crashes at all. I guess there’s just something about your combination of hardware and drivers that Psychonauts doesn’t like. Bummer.
Hmmm, hardware and drivers you say? I can’t change hardware, but I can try newer drivers.
So I just tried the latest AMD drivers, and I got past that point! But as soon as I exited that world and hit the next cutscene, the game crashed again. Sigh.
I hope the new drivers don’t break any of the other games on my PC that were all working fine.
Partial solution found: I turned on Windows XP compatibility mode. Now it doesn’t crash anymore. Certain objects in the world flicker in and out of existence now though. Hmmm. It’s rare enough that I’ll keep going for now. Or maybe I’ll try Windows 95 compatibility mode.
Yes. I found the “compatibility mode” solution on Steam forums. Apparently the crashes were happening to a lot of people on level load, just like with me.
I wonder if my new graphical glitches are being caused by the new AMD drivers I installed?
Weird. Looked at their crowdfunding thing to see where they were at, and I noticed the timer didn’t seem to have gone down as much as I thought. I checked, and it turns out they’ve been pushing back the finish date for the crowdfunding. Was the 7th, now the 12th.
