Thoughts on the Al Emmo Demo

[cew-smoke]

Okay, I downloaded (via bittorrent) and installed the demo.  I hope it's alright that I give my honest thoughts on it and encourage other folks to disagree and tell me what their feelings are.

I very much enjoyed the music and felt the backgrounds were outstanding.  There are already a surprising number of NPCs to interact with and they all seem to be done quite well.  I really liked the ticket guy and the bartender so far, but it seems like the others will come along really nicely.

The demo whetted my appetite and I expect good things from this game.  Now a couple of things that I am not 100% crazy about; neither enough to stop me from buying and enjoying the game.  The first thing, I was not a huge fan of the 3D scenes.  Obviously without a ginormous budget and a huge team of people and render farms you are not going to have super high caliber 3D.  I was in no way expecting such, but I still felt the scenes were a bit under-rendered and could have been done better.  I have some experience in rendering in 256 color environments and it brings a whole set of palette issues that are difficult and painful to work with.  Perhaps it is the old school in me, but I would have actually rather just had 2D for this game instead of settling on the current state of the 3D scenes.  Although, I am probably being too harsh and most folks would not be so picky.  They are certainly serviceable and give the eyes something to look at besides static backgrounds.

The second beef and it is more of a major one is the voice-acting for the title character.  Probably, other folks would be just fine with it.  I, however, was tired of it within the first 10 seconds.  It is simply too high-pitched and grating to me and I ended up turning off the voice acting shortly into the demo.  Which is a shame, because I didn't mind any of the other voice actors.  I would find myself turning voices back on to hear what everyone else sounded like, but would end up turning it off after hearing the main character voice for any length of time.

Again, are either of these game killers?  Absolutely not.  The rest of the game was very well done and I will no doubt have a lot of fun playing this game.  I can't stress enough how well done I thought the 2D graphics were, the top-notch music and the dialogue and story have a great start.  This game has tremendous potential and I hope it sells really well and Himalaya continues to put out new titles as time goes on.  So, I would love to hear what others have to say as well.

[Broomie]

Well, everyone had a gripe with Al Emmo's voice, even I find it pretty annoying aswell. Yet, hate it or not that's his voice and you can't change that. If he was real guy, you couldn't just mute his voice. He's supposed to portray a pathetic character and he's more of a love to hate guy than just someone you hate. It's only the demo however, perhaps the reason he's looking for the Lost Dutchman's Mine is so he can find the source of making his balls finally drop.  :p However, it is still the demo and in the full game you'll probably get used to it.

I liked it, although the full game would give me the better judgement, right now it's promising.

[Erpy]

Thanks for the comments, although we'd encourage you to post stuff about Al Emmo on the Himalaya Studios forums.