I finished Al Emmo!

[DrJones]

Yeah, finally I managed to get through this game, and wanted to thank the people of Himalaya Studios for such an experience. It was a pleasure to play a new adventure game in the style of the old ones, and from the start I knew that I had to write a review of the game with the most cacti and red rocks of all Anozira, once I had fully beaten it, that is.

The first thing of note is the amazing game cover, which shows a lot of things that won't happen in the game but are somehow related. Then an installation of 1GB so that the CD is no longer required, and a cute note about how cool you were for buying this game to support the genre, so that you have something to read while the game is being installed.

Now, the game: the first impression with the 3D isn't too good: some models are just much better than others; Luckily, Al Emmo is one of the best ones and his animations are good; he also has a strange voice, but as the game progresses it ends fitting him well, unlike the narrator who I found somewhat annoying for varying so much the pitch to sound like an old west commentator. The problem is that you cannot choose which voices you want to suppress, it's all or nothing. I ended leaving them "on" as the others were good enough to give the voices a chance, and the obxonious narrator goes away in some places, yeah.  :cool:

Soon, you find that the production values are very high on this game. Almost everything you try has unique descriptions, even objects whose use is pretty obvious and don't stand in your inventory for too long will spawn their own and unique answer if you try to give them to any other person, some of which seem to not have other purpose in the game than to give special and funny commentaries every time you give them something. The mouth icon, which in other games would give endless "I can't talk to that" messages, is in this case an excuse to display lots of jokes and silly animations specially done for that purpose only!!

There is no need to say, I spent a lot of time showing every single item to everyone, and talking with every single cactus and red rock in the game.

Now, the interface. I would say that Al Emmo fails in this aspect, having a very annoying interface that's is not intuitive and dispersed all above the screen. The map, menus, and game actions are located on different corners of the screen, so browsing from one to another with the mouse  means you'll have to cover the maximum distance ever. This is specially annoying with the inventory, as you go from hotspot to top-right corner to open the inventory, from top-right corner  to bottom-left corner to pick the first item in the list, and from bottom-left corner again to the hotspot. This is much worse than any other system I've seen in a graphic adventure. To alleviate the problem, the game allows for easy browsing through items in the inventory by use of a mouse wheel, but unfortunately that option didn't work too well with my Wacom mouse, and every time I touched the wheel, the cursor moved directly to the bottom-right corner of the screen. Ouch!

Fortunately, the designers included keyboard shortcuts for easy access to most of the game features, and so I was able to concentrate in solving puzzles instead of fighting against the GUI. Thank you!

The puzzles were good, some were a bit easy, some were hard. But none so hard that made me search for a guide (which I ended looking anyway, to know if playing for hours at the slot machine was worth it or not). They were mostly logical, and the most illogical ones had not-so-subtle hints shown on the pictures of each act. It was so logical, in fact, that at times (but not always) the game had to stop me from doing things too soon. Though of linear nature, I found the game still allows some freedom when solving puzzles, and talking to characters provided both hints and red herrings to keep things interesting. I even got one of them help me with one puzzle if I promised never to talk to him again!

[WriteOh]

Thanks for your review, Dr Jones. For me (the writer of all but the game's story), Al Emmo was a steep learning curve!

I agree with some of your points. Though I suspect a first person approach may have been proven even more powerful, I thoroughly enjoyed John Bell as the narrator - he made it better than my lines, in my opinion!

Looking forward, it is hoped that I shall be able to contribute to further projects, as I continue on my journey as a writer.

I am glad you enjoyed the game. It is gratifying that Al Emmo is still being discovered and savoured by fans of the adventure genre. They're still out there, these adventure games, we just have to find them!

[GameDevChris]

When we first started developing Al Emmo, we had a very talented 3D modeller on-board, who was intending to handle all of the 3D modelling, animations, and 3D cutscenes for us. He worked for a game company as his full-time job, and had a lot of experience.  His character modelling style was also very unique, which is why it was difficult to find other 3D artists who could match his exact style.

Unfortunately, he had to stop working on the project much sooner than was expected and he only had time to model and animate Al. This meant we had to find other modellers and animators to take on the bulk of the remaining workload.  Finding workers who were able to commit the required time and who had matching 3D styles was next to impossible. We run way overtime and started going over budget on the game, so we had to use whatever 3D talents were on offer to us in order to finish. This turned out to be beneficial, however, since it forced us to learn things about 3D modelling and animation which we wouldn't have learned otherwise.

Pssst... you can click the middle mouse button at any point in-game to bring up the Inventory menu. No need to always go up to the top menu to access it. You can also right-click to cycle through all available mouse cursors.  

Hmmm... that sounds strange with your mouse not responding well to the Inventory menu. Don't think I've heard of any similar reports like that before. Does the same thing happen if you run the game in a window?

[DrJones]

I thought the problem here might be related to me using a wacom tablet mouse. Playing the game on windowed mode fixes the problem, I've just tried it and works. I usually play on full screen because I have a very nice tray tool that gives 99% of CPU time to full screen programs so they run faster, meaning I totally skipped windowed mode.

The mouse scroll bug doesn't appear everywhere, I've found now that on some lucky occasions I can cycle the entire inventary on a same spot, as long as the cursor stays on the same place (not moving even a pixel). But seems totally erratic behavior.

I didn't know about the middle button press, but I don't think I would have used it instead of the hotkey, as in my experience wheel buttons break easily.

I've never managed to do anything worthwhile in 3D yet. I think it has be that the tools I've tried (different 3DStudio versions) are horrible. But I've seen so many awful 3D animations that finding that Al was so well animated was really surprising. I touched cactuses and talked to bears several times just because I liked the animations so much.

[SirWulf2]

Very nice review, it was very enjoyable to read.

I wish that, as one of the 3D modelers (who handled a few of the background structures), I would have been available to work on much more of the project, but work kept getting in the way of that.  Overall though it was a very rewarding experience and I hope to one day be able to do this as a career.  I've used 3D Studio MAX mainly, dabbled a bit in Maya and have also tried AutoCAD 3D for architectural designs.  Seems to me that 3D Studio MAX works best for me with its similar layout to AutoCAD.

As for the narrator, I really enjoyed the performance, it was great.  Reminded me a lot of the Space Quest narrator, and I found myself doing what you did, trying every possible click I could think of to hear his performance.  Al was annoying at first indeed, but you do warm up to him after awhile.

So again, great review!  Thanks for taking the time to write all that.