The things I loved about eps 4 & 5

Smollie

Playing episode 4 & 5 were a real treat!
I loved the cars driving by on the street, outside the office. It gives the location such vividity (is this an actual word?).

I also love Max' ongoing career as president of the USA. I sure hope he gets re-elected.

And then there is the reference to TRON in ep 5, one of my favourite movies of the time. I especially love the sound of the footsteps, as S&M wander around on the internet. Those weird bumpy sounding footsteps were one of the things I loved about the movie!
Great stuff!

And finally, the text-adventure portion at the end of the game. How it brought back memories!

I love you, TellTale-people!
You must have hearts made of solid gold!:D

Laserschwert

Smollie wrote: »

I loved the cars driving by on the street, outside the office.

And they're still driving into the wrong direction (according to the "One Way"-sing)...

Badwolf

I think it commented on that if you click on it this time round.

Dangerzone

yeah, in episode 5, sam says "quite possibly the least observed street sign in the U.S." (clicking on the dead end sign is funny as well)

although i was sad to see that shooting the one way sign does not flip it over and cause a crash anymore.....

it would be funny if you shoot the sign and it stays flipped over, and then the cars start going in the other direction...

Laserschwert

I've watched the intro a second time around, and I've noticed that up until Sam hangs up on the commissioner, the lip-sync animation of the duo is probably the best I've seen so far in real-time graphics... after the phone call the quality goes back to "normal" though. Did one of the animators spend too much time on the sequence, and got a whipping, so that the rest of it isn't as perfect as the first minute?

TapamN

It's like that at the ending, too. Episodes 2, 3, and 4 have high quality syncing on the openings and endings, too. Maybe 1, but I can't remember.

I think Telltale is hand syncing the lips in the opening and endings, and using a tool something like Clipper to automatically sync the lips for the rest of the game.

Also, one big reason that S&M has such good lip sync is that Sam and Max's lips have a better range of movement than many other games. Japanese games dubbed to English in particular have trouble because Japanese has simple mouth animations (for example, the tongue doesn't move) and the polygon models aren't designed to support animations not required by speaking Japanese. When the games are translated to English, the animations look worse. (There are exceptions to this... the 1996 Sega game Virtua Fighter 3 has good enough lip animations for "th" sounds, although no tongue to go with it. This was lost in Virtua Fighter 4. Virtua Fighter 5 still seems to lack proper "th"s.) Sam and Max have tongues and very mobile mouths, so it's possible to get much better quality than other games.

LuigiHann

When I started playing the games, the lip sync really bothered me, but I got over it (when I realized how good it is compared to most other games). I still wish they'd hand-sync the lips whenever they do close-up shots, because that's when it's most distracting.

GalFisk

This has been bothering me as well (and I posted about it earlier). Some sequences are beautifully syched, while others are missing entire syllables (notably the middle of "playland and casino" said by Sam in ep3).
A better automated lipsynching system, such as that used in HL2/Source, would be ideal.