[zoecastillo]

Well, I was finally able to get a copy here in the U.S. - just arrived today - will play tomorrow. I HOPE I have good things to say about it - been waiting awhile for this one... (Seems to be a slow season for good AGs the last few months)

[Matt Berkeley]

I did finish it. And it did continue to rise above the menial or otherwise inane gameplay standards that many too many games these days are wall-to-wall with.

It also, I suppose somewhat necessarily, continued to devolve more and more into a strict storyline. There is no real choice to be made in the conclusion. Despite the illusion.

[Oscar]

I'm curious which games you are playing Matt which are so terrible. A New Beginning wasn't bad, but I've come across lots of games of better quality. I have played worse games too.

[zoecastillo]

I'm up to Chapter two and despite one crash at the global boat scene (worked perfectly second time around - save often!) - I am thoroughly enjoying this game and I really can't stand cartoon games & it took me awhile to decide to play this one. It looked really good even so - very glad I decided to give it a whirl! Will share my thoughts on the full game when completed. *btw, Fay sounds like Nicole Bonnet (except with much better voice acting!)

[diego]

Originally Posted by zoecastillo

btw, Fay sounds like Nicole Bonnet (except with much better voice acting!)

I was quite sure they are the same actor, but i've checked names and they do not match

[zoecastillo]

Thanks for looking it up Diego - I was going to. Its uncanny though!

[Matt Berkeley]

It's a little bit canny...

I'm curious which games you are playing Matt which are so terrible. A New Beginning wasn't bad, but I've come across lots of games of better quality. I have played worse games too.

So many games these days, in my opinion (i.e. "in fact" ) are nothing but super-tedium. I don't bother to remember them, not even their names, but one series I can remember having messed with recently was the Black Mirror trilogy. I wised-up during the 2nd game and quit wasting my time (others, sadly, it seems, played the whole miserable series through before realizing that even the one element they were holding on to as redeeming -- the story -- was worthless).

So much dreary junk. A lot of the others that come to mind - aside from the hidden object plague -- are all these Disneyesque animated "games". There have been more than a few over the past 3-4 years. They are basically mediocre (or, to be honest, very subpar) little cartoons that you "play" by mindlessly clicking through dialogs and inane "puzzles".

...

So, really, ANB isn't great against the backdrop of the whole of Adventure Gaming, just a cut well above the schlock we are fed these days.

Oh, but speaking of "dreary": if the makers of ANB are listening: you guys picked some dreary music for the menu/save/load screen; don't do that! It's where a lot of cathartic time is spent! Not a good place for a dirge, psychologically.

[tsa]

I just finished this game. I liked a whole lot of things about it. The cartoonish style was refreshing, and I liked the "strip-like" intermediates between the chapters. I liked how you had to play Fay's story, and how you changed between characters all the time. I liked the music. The puzzles were excellently integrated into the story, although most of them were far too easy to my taste. I didn't have to write anything down, which was a big disappointment. The voice acting was also not very good here and there, although I did grin whenever Fay said "No, no and no!" I have mixed feelings about the story. Some things were very well done, especially the way the emotions Bent went through were shown. Very touching. He must have felt truly rotten when back in his lab and discovering that all his work was in vain and basically wiped out. But at the same time it was never explained well why people didn't want to talk to him about the "accident," and why they chose to abandon the good algae Bent had developed. And then Fay's health suddenly deteriorated, but in the next chapter that was over again and we never learnt why she coughed up blood. And then at the very end the whole story went pear-shaped and took a very weird turn and I was very disappointed.
So I would not give this game a four star rating like AG did but rather 3 stars. The story and the voice acting are debet to that.