Return to Critiques

A few years ago, I used to live right next to a nice Chinese buffet. That fact is usually nothing special but this particular buffet was reputed to be very good. In fact, it had received a four star rating out of five from a popular tourism handbook. Not too shabby for a buffet. When we wanted to celebrate a special occasion or when friends came to visit my home, it was the place to go. You see, my gang and I could have easily gone to any restaurant in town. This buffet was one of the many spots in town that was both popular and good. The thing is that, when it came down to choosing the kind of food we all wanted to eat, there were many dissonances between our tastes. One wanted something light and easy on the stomach; another wanted something spicy and massive because he was hungry; another one didn’t know what he felt like and didn’t care about the place but he didn’t want to eat pasta because he had already ate that for diner. The buffet was the perfect compromise. When we finished our meals, paid the bill and walked back to my place, the conversation regarding the food was typically something as follows: “yeah, it was good, nice place. There was a lot of things there, lots of choices. However, it was good but not great. I wish they’d made that thing I ate better.” Our bellies were full but our taste buds were barely satisfied. Brütal Legend, the latest game from Double Fine, published by Electronic Arts, feels to me exactly like that Chinese buffet. Good reputation,  satisfying but in the end, you need to run around the place to find what you want, there’s just too much different things in there and the whole thing ends up being a big compromise rather than a game that excels at everything it does.

Brütal Legend is notorious for being the latest brainchild of game creator Tim Schafer. For those of you who might not know who this fellow is, don’t feel bad about it. Mr. Schafer’s popularity is increasing steadily as years go by but he is mostly popular among North-American PC gamers of the nineties. Mr. Schafer started his career at Lucasfilm games (now Lucasart) and worked on many celebrated adventure games such as Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. In 2005, his very own studio, Double Fine, released the PS2 and Xbox game Psychonauts. Mr. Schafer’s design style can be easily recognized by three main traits: humor, strong storytelling and game mechanics geared mostly on exploration and puzzle solving.  The two previous Schafer games, Grim Fandango and Psychonauts, were both critically acclaimed but commercial failures. Grim Fandango's failure became an icon of the fall of adventure games in the industry; Psychonauts’ failure to reach out to the masses, despite the fact that it was released on popular gaming platforms and that it featured an incredible original theme and presentation, left the industry wondering how a studio like Double Fine could survive in the gaming jungle. When the studio announced a new action-adventure game staged in a world of heavy metal music, the industry was curious yet suspicious toward a new Schafer-esque daring title. Would it break the commercial losing-streak of Mr. Schafer or would it also suffer from the same fate? Brütal Legend had pressure on its massive studded, leather-covered shoulders.
 

Eddie Riggs, the protagonist of Brütal Legend, rockin' out.

First impressions

There’s always something magical happening when popping a Tim Schafer’s game disc in your console or pc. From the moment that the game starts loading, you simply don’t know what is going to happen next. You can anticipate but really can’t predict what will pop on-screen. Everything and beyond is possible. It’s one of my favorite feeling: I love surprises and Schafer’s games are always full of them. Brütal Legend is no exception. The sheer amount of originality in this game’s theme is staggering and thrilling. The presentation is spotless and has a strong personality. The character design is quite effective and the story is not only funny, it is also entertaining and interesting. The whole game does feel heavily influenced by the lead voice actor Jack Black, who is the main inspiration for the design of the protagonist Eddie Riggs. His influence on the game’s comedy is palpable but blends very well with Schafer’s style. It’s also important to mention that all the voice actors, including metal rock legends such as Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy Kilmister, did a very good job and gave their characters great personalities. However, when we look at the game from the player’s gaming experience angle, the title lacks that layer of chrome the theme and presentation received. The game mechanic system feels more like a mash-up of popular mechanics from the past five years than like an original take on game rules to transmute the game’s story and theme into player actions and interactivity. The pacing of the game is uneven and doesn’t follow the story’s own pace. The difficulty and the ergonomics feel as if they struggle between the “old school, little help” and “modern hand-holding” philosophies. This makes the experience rather bland; functional perhaps but nothing out of the ordinary. Brütal Legend is a game that you want to play to find out the course of the story, know how the characters evolve and see what the imaginative minds behind the game came up with; it is not a game where you play with the mechanics for fun and satisfaction. The Multiplayer mode does help to enjoy the strategy game mechanics but the main game mode cannot say the same thing. Brütal Legend is a game that is much more accessible to the broad public than previous Schafer’s games but it’s still far from being a masterpiece. Double Fine did a great job and concocted a nice entertaining game but failed to extend their attention to details when designing the gameplay.

Beautiful. Smart. Rough

If I were to describe Brütal Legend’s presentation using a single word, I would have to use “clever”. It is wonderful to see a game with a theme so well exploited and developed, so clever and intelligent, so coherent and original that it’s hard not to praise it. I am not a big fan of classic heavy metal music,  I am more on the industrial and Goth side of metal (I would be a drowning doom according to the game world), but the game’s presentation and theme is so well executed that I actually started liking this world of seventies and eighties metal. Without a single shadow of a doubt, the visuals, the audio and the settings are the game’s most brutal

Eddie Riggs

strength. I must note that, to truly enjoy the game, you must have some knowledge of the metal culture and it’s a big plus to have actually lived during the seventies or eighties. I’m afraid that individuals who are about twenty years of age today and that don’t know much about the metal culture won’t find some of the jokes quite as amusing as those who were teens when classic metal ruled. The writing played a major role in making this metal world come to life, but the main plot however, didn’t feel as intelligent and original as the rest. The plot does deliver a few surprises, but once the two main characters are presented, the end of the story and their relationship become obvious. The main character, Eddie Riggs, is the perfect roadie: he’s fast, he’s intelligent, he’s tough, he’s courageous and he gets what he wants to. He starts the game like that and ends it the same way. The character doesn’t evolve at all during his voyage. He does learns terrible secrets about his past but he doesn’t care and it

doesn’t affect him at all. This caused me to be less attached to the main character. He’s cool, he’s awesome, but he doesn’t feel human. The secondary character, Ophelia, suffers from a similar fate. Her character is rather flat. She doesn’t show much emotions and is practically the same character from beginning to end. The only time where the character changes, it turns out it wasn’t even her. Ophelia might just be the less lovable character of the story. She doesn’t have a sense of humor, she’s always serious and when its time to feel sympathy for her, it doesn’t work. At some point in the story, her boyfriend Lars, leader of the Ironheade army, which Eddie works for, is murdered right before her eyes. Only a few moments earlier, Eddie and Ophelia shared a forbidden kiss; Ophelia decides not to tell Lars right away that she loves Eddie now and that he’s yesterday’s news, even if he is madly in love with her. As the limp body of her ex-lover is tossed off the killer’s lance, she doesn’t seem to react at all. Maybe it’s poor animation, maybe it’s poor writing, it’s hard to say. Once the killer is offstage, Lars’ sister is the one in pain and tears. Ophelia seems rather relieved as if this event was quite convenient. It felt like if she was thinking “Oh good! I don’t have to break up with him! Phew! What a relief! That takes a load off my shoulders.” The guy that did everything to save her life and loved her and whom she loved back only a few hours ago, had been impaled on a demonic blade, in front of her and she didn’t shed a single tear. In my tour book, that is called being cold.

The general plot is interesting but lacks the comedy found in the first missions. The story begins with good jokes but it soon vanishes, never to come back. Which is a shame; a break from comedy is always good but it has to come back during the experience, and in Brütal Legend, that didn’t happen. A good note goes for the writing due to its ability to hook the player from one mission to another. Once you finish a main mission, there’s just enough cliffhanger to want to see what happens next right away. This makes the pace of the main plot very fast. Everything seems to happen quickly and within a few days. This fast pace doesn’t fit with the generally slow pace of the game though. Exploring and traveling a large world takes time. Melee battles, even the short one, are also slow due to the focus on strategy combat. The stage fights are also relatively slow paced, which is quite understandable since it is using real-time strategy game mechanisms. It would have been a nice touch if the main plot would had occasionally slowed down the player to give him time to look around and explore. As far as the

rest of the cast, they get a good share of spotlight at the right time. Some steal the show even if they are not part of the action nor are playable. For instance, the comical guardian of the gods and shopkeeper, played by Ozzy Osbourne, takes the entire spotlight when he’s there. He’s only present on the screen when you are shopping making him a fun and interesting character with just the right amount of depth for his role. Also, shopping becomes quite funny instead of being annoying. In fact, I found myself, going back to the shop when new items were unlocked even though I had no fire tributes to spend

simply to listen to his comments on the new items. The visuals of the game are top-notch. The mature cartoon look is exquisite and fits the game like a finger-less, spiked leather glove. All the visuals are stunning. To be honest, there’s not much to say about the visuals other than the art team at Double Fine know what they are doing. The character and environment design are simply sublime. The only thing that bugged me visually, in the entire game, is the small waterfall effect found in the jungle temple, which looks like a close-up of water flowing out of a faucet. And that’s it. Everything else is a feast for the eye. This game makes me wish I had an HD television set. The audio of the game is very well done but has a few technical glitches. It seems that the sound engine has problems calculating sound distance and volume. When you leave your car, Deuce a.k.a. the druid plow, the music in the radio keeps playing. Turning the camera while standing still makes the sound fade away, sometimes cutting it abruptly, even if you are at the same distance from the car. Other times, enemies located far from the avatar emit sounds as if they were standing next to the main character. On a few occasions, I thought I was being attacked or close to an attack when it wasn’t the case. It didn’t stop me from playing nor distracted me enough so I was confused but I still noticed it. Maybe it’s an issue only found on the PS3 version but it is a noticeable bug when playing which breaks the immersion a bit. Speaking of immersion, the game does a very good job to keep the player inside the game. The direction taken regarding the removal of health gauge and other similar information on screen works very well but it could have been pushed a bit more. Knowing when you are about to be defeated is clear enough but, for example, some enemies loose body parts after receiving a certain amount of damage while other stay the same no matter their health. It would have been nice if all enemies would have had at least three states of health to indicate the player how badly in shape they are.

Overall, the game manages to deliver a great presentation and uses its theme very well. Every single corner of the map is filled with small details and clever elements that makes the metal world believable. The story and character development on the other hand are not as spotless. The main characters are flat and the story becomes predictable and looses its comedy along the ride. Still, you want to know what happens next. The story remains fun and interesting despite being predictable.

To roam the world as a free man

Brütal Legend shares many traits with numerous modern games. Glancing at Brütal Legend for a few minutes might remind you titles such as World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto 3, Overlord and Shadow of the Colossus. And don't forget the many guitar rhythm titles. The game offers a vast exotic world where you can explore freely in search of your next goal or side quest. A few beasts roam in the wild, sometimes enemy patrol pass by and you can fight them. A large beacon of light highlights your main goal and you can surround yourself with minions to protect you and attack enemies using simple unit commands. You can drive around with your car, looking for places you’ve never been before. The world is vast and rather empty. Sometimes it feels deserted and as if you need to drive very long distances before you can reach your next goal, especially when looking around for secondary missions. Special moves, called solos, can be performed by using a Guitar Hero reminiscent mini-game. The theme of exploration and discovery in this game is quite present and the designers seem to have focused a lot on it to fill up the solo game mode. Throughout the world map, the player can discover motor forges to shop, tab slabs to unlock new riff powers, buried relics for extra music, artifacts of legends for extra background storyline, bound serpents to raise Eddie’s general power, landmark viewers to see the landmarks under new angles and lighting plug jumps to get extra fire tributes when performing long ramp jumps with Deuce. Needless to say, there’s a lot of things to discover out there. But there’s an issue with the exploration focus in the game’s design. The rules around exploration send mixed message whether to favor exploration or not.

The game offers a lot of treats for those who have the patience to search every little corner of the world. Patience is a keyword in this game. For example, there are a hundred and twenty hidden bound serpents to discover. A hundred and twenty elements to discover is quite big. I have personally found about eighty serpents through my twelve-hour game. In this run, I have completed 92% of the entire game and finished the main campaign. I’m through with all the challenges and now all that is left for me to do is to go in every little corner of the map and search for power-ups I will never use. It is always important to give the right motivation to the player in order to carry out certain task. In this case, it’s even more crucial since exploring is not a challenge in itself. During the entire campaign, you drive around and discover new grounds and explore them. Once the main missions are completed all you do is visit the same locations again. Also, there are no more stage battles once you defeat the last boss so anything you unlock regarding Eddie feels wasted. If the game gave the player proper motivation, it would have been a lot more interesting to have so much exploration to do in order to fully complete the experience. It doesn’t take much either; if the game had featured one single stage fight side quest that could be taken numerous time, the game would have given enough motivation for the player to fully upgrade his avatar. The game already has a large crew of characters, it would have been simple to take one and create a side storyline with them to make these side quest events more interesting.  Unfortunately, since the game doesn’t offer something to truly motivate the player to find all the hidden goodies, exploration becomes a chore.

Ridin' the druid plow

Raising buried relics and releasing serpent statues without proper motivation is not the only issue regarding the explorative direction of the game design. The movement mechanisms are fairly simple and allow the player to move on the ground by controlling Eddie on foot, in his car or riding an animal. The mechanisms do not allow the characters to jump, meaning that they are glued to the ground. To climb slopes, it must be gently inclined. If it’s too steep, you can’t walk on it. That means that some steps, even if they are lower than Eddie’s knees, cannot be climbed. This causes many collision bugs where the character becomes stuck. The car collision also has some similar issues. Many times, as I was exploring the world, I fell off small cliffs and found myself stuck behind pillars, in corners of buildings or between trees. For example, while climbing stairs in the temple of the nearly completely nude kiss girls (well they have a name, Zaulia, but hey, my name suits them better in my opinion), I ended up walking over a tree root, about the height of Eddie’s ankle, in a corner of the temple. I found myself stuck behind that root since the collision on it was only working on the side from which I came. I was genuinely stuck there, and couldn’t jump out. Luckily I was able to summon Deuce close enough to be able to jump in the car. Otherwise, I would have had to restart the game from the last checkpoint and travel all the way back to the temple to finish my exploration. Checkpoints are established by the game once you finish a certain task. The game saves progression on a regular basis but not checkpoints. Every time you finish a main mission or a side quest, a checkpoint is at the location of the success. This works very well in theory but in practice there are a few issues. For instance, if you are killed during your explorations, you respawn where you last saved the game. Dying at the hands of enemy troops that are overwhelming you is acceptable but there are events where it’s a lot more irritating. There are many places where the player can get killed by driving off a surprise cliff or being attacked by roaming monsters you never even bothered. Yes. Surprise cliffs. The design of the environments are very bumpy and wild, so sometimes while driving, you cannot tell if you are going to fall off a bottomless pit or just going over another bump in the road.  So let’s say you finish a side quest and then you want to explore the vast

world. You spot a location that that looks like it could have something interesting, which happens to be pretty far away from your checkpoint. As you drive to it, you find out that the bridge has a whole in it. You fall to your fiery death, respawn and now you have to drive all the way back there. This, at first, is a minor inconvenience since missions are close. But if you start doing secondary missions and more thorough exploration, it can become quite irritating. Secondary missions can be far apart and exploring can lead the player in places pretty far away. On top of that, the game features beautiful landmarks. Some are used in missions, some aren’t. Those unused in missions look as great as the others look but sometimes have bugs or don’t fully favor exploration. For example, in the tainted coil section of the map, at some point you can stumble upon a house that’s been infested by dark tree roots. The house looks great and just screams to be explored. However, there’s nothing there except bugs. I tried

to climb on the roots of the house to see what was in it but I kept sinking, yes sinking, in the root I was standing on.  I soon found myself inside the model, between the ground and the actual root. I had a hard time getting out of there. While trying other roots, I sometime fell off without moving or just passed through them by as if they were illusions. This was quite irritating and similar cases, peppered throughout the world map, turned off the explorer in me.

Earlier I was talking about ways to motivate the player to explore. Various goals are a good idea but there’s part of the motivation that comes from the tools accessible to the player in order to ease exploration. Brütal Legend offers a world map that the player can use to spot locations of shops, main missions and side quests. It also uses a black fog that covers the regions you never been to, which is partially removed once you enter the region.  These tools are handy but they aren’t complete. Knowing where the shops are located once discovered is a good idea but the same feature for all the other elements you discover would have been nice. Hunting a hundred and twenty serpent statues, among other things, is much more work when you don’t know where you’ve been. The world is vast and scenic; there are so many landmarks that it’s hard to remember which were thoroughly searched or not. A simple marker toggle button in the world map would have sufficed to palliate this problem. By having different sets of markers, the player would know where he’s been in order to know where he’s heading next, simply by pressing a single button. But the most irritating part of exploring in Brütal Legend is the lack of quick traveling from one map section to another. Even if the game separates the map into roughly five sections (the Ironheade, LionWhyte, Tainted coil, Jungle, Sea of Black Tear, etc) it would have been quite handy to have at least some way to quickly transport from one section to another. The worst part about this is the hunter secondary mission that forces you to go everywhere on the map to complete it. Having to hunt in one or two sections far from the location of the hunter is acceptable once or twice, but after six or seven hunts, it really gets irritating and right down insulting.

Exploration in games can be quite fun. Collecting can also be an interesting task to do while in the game world. But to pull it off, you need to be coherent with the vibe your movement mechanics give, your world design, the motivation you give to your player and the tools that are available to ease the tasks. Brütal Legend has only managed to do a bit of everything but none of these two activities is perfect. 

Eddie with a few friends: Ophelia, Lars and Lita

Under the hood

What happens if we stop Brütal Legend for a short while, pop the hood and look at all the gears and bolts that makes the game work?  The first thing that comes to mind is how stable the game is. Yes, the game does have some issues with the avatar getting stuck here and there, but I never experienced slowdowns or major crashes. Some models pop on screen, sometimes you can find yourself caught between models but nothing makes the game completely unplayable. The game has a few technical scratches here and there but they never affected the experience during moments of high tension, made me loose progression or stop the game. The game controls are somewhat overwhelming at first. There are four basic control layouts: Basic layout, Deuce layout, Stage Battle (on foot) layout and Stage Battle (flying) layout. Most of these layouts use all the available buttons on the PS3 gamepad, which makes learning all the controls rather difficult. The Basic and Deuce layouts are quite common so getting the hang of them takes a while. But since you’ll have time to practice, you’ll be fine early in the game. The Stage Battle layouts however, always seem to require a bit of adaptation since they are only used a few times during the entire game. This doesn’t help the real-time strategy mechanics at all. When playing Brütal Legend in basic mode, it takes a short while to digest all the commands needed to explore but when you get into your first stage battle, the first time you play the game with its RTS mechanics, it is right down imposing. Everything switches gear and all your basic controls are expanded to two new layouts that you need to learn at once. The Stage Battles is the game’s worst weakness. The idea of controlling many units at once and giving out orders has been seen before in major titles. Overlord 2 allows the player to dispatch minions around a map by giving them simple orders. Dead Rising has a similar concept where you can guide survivors using simple commands. In these two games, the actions are very simple and the context in wh-

The head banger. I bet is name is Andrew.
 

ich they are used are also very straight forward, making the controls work well. In Brütal Legend, however, the same concept is applied to a much more complex situation. Getting all your troops the way you want them to be, dispatching them and giving them orders to follow the strategy you have in mind is rather hard and unintuitive. Once you’ve done it a few times, it starts going better, but the learning curve for that particular mode is quite steep. It feels as if the design team tried to adapt the concept of other games to their own. The game’s promise of elaborated strategies in stage battle is great but it doesn’t deliver enough. It also feels as if the design team wanted to put a great focus on these real-time strategy mechanics so all the melee moves performed by the avatar have been balanced so that there is a great advantage when using brains over brawn. The result has the melee combat almost useless and forces the player to use strategy, instead of suggesting it to the player. This balancing direction would be acceptable if it existed only in stage battle but it bleeds in the Basic mode

where you don’t have access to as much strategy and you find yourself fighting for your life against troops of enemies by yourself with a weak arsenal. This also destabilizes the difficulty curve: the enemies get increasingly stronger but the main character only grows slightly in power and becomes almost useless in battle. The most irritating part of this is that the game’s economy focuses a lot on avatar upgrades. In fact, most of the rewards you can earn or buy have something to do with melee combat. Even when you buy the most powerful upgrades and weapons, you are still weak against the enemies. Yes, I understand that a roadie should not attract attention. Yes, it is subtle to design combat around the fact that the main character should not be center stage and strong melee combat would put too much spotlight on the hero. But why is he a six foot four heroic strong guy, with arms like tree trunks, wielding a devastating axe and playing a guitar that shoots lighting bolts if we can’t play like one? The game allows us to act like center stage but it takes away the benefit from doing so. This sends mixed message to the player regarding the focus of the game. This lack of clarity also affects the difficulty curve since most missions where you get to kill enemies with Eddie alone are much easier than the actual fights. This gives the wrong impression to the player that he can be powerful. When he has to fight within a Stage Battle or on the world map, he can get beaten up pretty badly even though it was not the case before.  

These mixed feelings about the focus of the game lead me to the ergonomics and usability of the title. There seem to be some conflicting philosophies regarding how the game treats his player. The game pops a lot of messages on screen. It’s not uncommon to have four of five pop ups in a row telling you that you have unlocked new concept art, unlocked new entries in the tour book and unlocked new items at the shop. In addition, the game’s info box can be quite intrusive, constantly giving you tips about things you already know. Even after ten hours of gaming, the game still told me that I could use the nitro boost while riding Deuce, even though I had used it at least fifty times. Another annoying message occurs when in stage battle fights. When you summon a flag, the game pauses and shows you a large image explaining how the flag works. The first time it’s ok, but every time I summoned a flag, I had this huge pop-up taking me away from the action and breaking the mood completely.  Then, sometimes the game forgets it's trying to help me and gives me little information. The first time I discovered a bound serpent, I didn’t know what to do. I had been using the ground stomp since the start of the game to break things or clear passages. So naturally, I tried it. Didn’t work. I attacked it with the axe and the guitar repeatedly. I gave up and when I found another, I tried to attack it with the guitar again but held down the button, which created a fire burst and freed the dragon. The game never told me anything at all about how to free dragons. The audio hints were something in the likes of “I need to find a way to free this dragon” which didn’t help me at all. In side quests, the game usually spawns the avatar facing the opposite side of where the action will begin which is quite annoying. Also, the audio hint telling you were the enemies are coming from are unclear. The characters yell something like “Enemies coming from behind sir!” But when you turn around, there’s nothing. They are actually on your left. Probably because you already moved by the time the audio started or the enemies changed direction to attack your troops. You won't know. Other times your helper tells you “They are coming from that hill!” The landscape of Brütal Legend is filled with hills and bumps. Which hill he’s talking about? You know once the enemy have already started to attack. These comments are even more insulting since, during the first stage battle, the helper is using an efficient clock terminology to tell where the action is. “Enemies at 9 o’clock sir!” is a simple sentence but tells much more than “Sir! From the plain sir!” Why did the game stop doing this? I don’t know.  Otherwise, the game is well crafted when it comes to ergonomics. The game can be paused at any time, the map system works well, except from the lack of different markers as mentioned earlier, and saving is quite easy. The player can easily know where he is, where to go, and has easy access to menus and options. Even with great visuals, the menus are easy to browse. The option to turn on and off swears and gore is a fantastic idea. Personally, I found playing the game with swear words bleeped much funnier. I was glad to have the option to do so. Brütal Legend is a proof that ergonomics and beauty can walk hand by hand without one of them making the other trip.

When I think about it, it feels as if the clashing hand-holding philosophy regarding in-game messages are caused by publisher demands. They feel as if the game went through play tests from focus groups and the developers received a list of things they had to implement without really knowing the context of these suggestions. Double Fine had to work with two of the biggest publishers in the world, Activision and Electronic Arts. I have the impression that the publisher’s input during development was very precise but lacked explanation. Of course I could be entirely wrong on this but from my personal past experience with publishers, it felt like these issues could be problems that appear when developers need to implement things without fully understanding why due to a lack of complete explanation from an outside party. And when it comes from someone who’s holding your money bag, sometimes you just don’t ask questions and do it.

On the battlefield

Final thoughts

Brütal Legend is a great game to look at. It’s the kind of game you want to play because it looks just so great and cool that you don’t want to miss it. I believe it's worth the play simply to discover the great theme and universe that was created in this game. It's just very sad to see that the game experience was not as well executed as its presentation. It's also sad to see how the game is portrayed through the media, the trailers and the screenshots. It feels like the marketing department doesn’t want people to know that this game is in fact a simplified real-time strategy game rather than a God of War-esque brawler. Well, maybe that’s the strategy too. God of War is an action adventure game and it is quite popular, now with the third installment of the series is about to be released. It's quite probable that the marketing people saw Eddie with an axe killings demons and went “Hey, that can be like a metal version of God of War! There are half-naked chicks, blood, magic and an axe! Let’s sale it like that, it‘ll attract more customers.” I sincerely hope that the sales numbers will keep Double Fine as a profitable studio since I love to play their games. I simply hope that the game design will become has great as its theme and visual team.

So? How about we go back to my place? It's pretty close, we can walk there. I would be able to tell you “yeah, it was good, nice game. There was a lot of things there, lots of choices. However, it was good but not great. I wish they’d made exploration better.”