Well, okay...
I've never heard of these characters before. Maybe it's just me or they generally aren't this well known in germany, which to some degree must be the case as otherwise they wouldn't be introduce so well. Anyway i had a look at the characters and my first thought was this looks just disgusting. It's almost the opposite of what i like. But whilst saying so the videos also had a certain charme, it's both distracting and interesting.
So i went to youtube and watched a few videos which they have online and whilst not everything was something to laugh, i liked the concept behind it and three of the videos were really funny (video games, dragon, can't remember the third). So i think you can get used to this look to a certain degree but as soon as the humour is out it leaves at least me in a quite distracting world. It heavily depends on how funny/interesting these games will be designed. It's hard to imagine moments, like in Sam&Max, were you just sit back and enjoy the atmosphere in a certain location for a while. Other game aspects than the gfx have to do the work here on their own.
So i went to youtube and watched a few videos which they have online and whilst not everything was something to laugh, i liked the concept behind it and three of the videos were really funny (video games, dragon, can't remember the third). So i think you can get used to this look to a certain degree but as soon as the humour is out it leaves at least me in a quite distracting world. It heavily depends on how funny/interesting these games will be designed. It's hard to imagine moments, like in Sam&Max, were you just sit back and enjoy the atmosphere in a certain location for a while. Other game aspects than the gfx have to do the work here on their own.
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I think Homestar runner isn't known very well outside the US. At least here in Israel I don't know anyone who ever heard of it.
I'm also going through the toons in preparation for the games. I think some of them are pretty funny, but most of them are so-so. I was a bit disappointed that the series Telltale is making is homestar runner. It seems to me like:
1. The characters aren't very relationable. That's probably not a word, but I don't know what's the word I'm looking for. I mean the characters are so quirky, they are very hard to actually relate to, so I don't find myself really caring that much about what's happening to Strongbad.
2. The world - intentionally - doesn't look very good
Given 1 and 2, I guess this is a game that would rely mostly on its humor and not on the story or atmosphere. That's okay, it's just not really the kind of games I like.
I could actually also give "1." as a complaint for Sam&Max but at least it looks good and the story is somewhat interesting. I still think I would've preferred a "bit more serious" adventure game (I mean the amount of seriousness of "Bone" or "Phoenix Wright" - not CSI serious) instead of a "bit more quirky" one.
Having said all that, I'm still going to buy this game, and it's probably going to be better than most adventure games out there right now, since it's made by TTG
As you posted i guess you already improved your situation significantly?!
@Iron Curtain
Thanks, i'll have a look at it.
Our hope is that people in other countries who are already familiar with Telltale's games will find out about the license through us. If that happens, it's win-win for everyone.
To be sure, some of the humor is difficult to translate, but I think the fact that there are people dedicated to translating H*R into all these languages indicates that there are fans all around the world!
(EDIT: Here are some instructions for getting the subtitles set up in German and Hebrew, in case either of you is interested)
Actually, someone already told me about this project on the adventuregamers thread. It really saved these toons for me, because I couldn't understand a word of the spoken english before I installed these subtitles
I installed them in english though. I don't have a problem understanding the english words, only in the deciphering the spoken voice because these characters talk funny... I really hope the game will have subtitles.
(Well, I'm sure it will actually)
Now I'm a little weary of finding out what the Antwerp and Dubrovnik branches are up to.
Your hope effected me, i've never heard of homestarrunner as well as anyone that i know of but the fact that there is a game coming for it has made me feel like having a look and trying it, and it's quite good and hopefully i will get the wii version whenever i can get the internet on it.
Excuse my snarkiness, it was just a perspective.
I suspect Homestar hasn't strongly caught on internationally due to the linguistic nature of the humor. Many of the jokes aren't funny because of a set up or a punchline, but more because of timing and the WAY things are said, not to mention frequent butchering of the English language. I couldn't imagine reading Homsar's dialog from a subtitle and getting the same effect. Everything's quirky, loose, and conversational so there will be a lot lost in translation.
Much younger or much older, and you'll likely miss a lot of the cultural references. I've no doubt that the US over the last 30+ years has a large number of similarities to (for example) Germany, but there are still plenty of those references that almost certainly don't translate across the pond.
I've seen quite a few that would probably throw even someone on the west coast of the US, but squarely hit the mark with those on the east coast.
All that's quite apart from the difficulty of parsing the strange accents for non-native English speakers.
That said, I think setting aside a couple of hours to watch a big chunk of the Strong Bad E-mails will convert anyone with an actual sense of humor.
I don't catch all the references, so I usually go to the wiki after watching a toon. Maybe I'm psychotic, but to me half the fun is clicking around and accidentally learning something in the process.
I'm about 9 years outside of that age bracket, but I still enjoy most of the cartoons on the site. I'll admit, it took me a long time to really get attached to it and even now sometimes I kind of step back and ask, wow, what the heck am I watching here?! And I've been a fan since the Tandy era...
To me, though, the weirdness is the charm. There really hasn't been anything like it before and that is refreshing.
And even for people who don't like the cartoons at all, there's still the nostalgic games.
Later I decided to give it more of a try and worked my way through the backlog of toons and sbemails... and I have to say - standing alone, they don't make much sense nor are they particularly funny (absurd, yes, but not really that funny). The humour comes with the familiarity... which means ensuring you've watched everything available... the more you watch, the funnier the characters are, and the funnier the toons and sbemails are.
I honestly didn't think Homestar Runner was all that popular (only my geeky internet-obsessed friends knew about it... I guess that's still the case) but when there was a reference to Trogdor the Burninator in the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I was floored with laughter.... I figured H*R must be /reasonably/ popular in order to get referenced in a /very/ popular TV show!
Of course, I wonder if people coming into the H*R universe through SBCG4AP will go "Whu?" or actually find it funny enough to check out the characters' backstory via all the toons and sbemails... and if they do, it's certainly worth it.
anyway, my experience with the whole homestar-thing was similar to the others. there are probably only few people in germany that ever heard of it, even though there was a strongbad_email from a german once. i checked the site for the first time, because some members on this forum have a homestar avatar or signature or something...and i didn't know what to do with it. that was before sbcg4ap was announced. afterwards i gave it a second try and have been watching all sbemails and some other toons since then...and i love it. i can't really say why though.
I looked on the HRWiki, and I found out that one of them was sent by a German. Weird, I thought there would be more than that.
But I can say that I showed the "Little Questions" email to a swedish friend of mine and he thought that it was hilarious...
Of course, Buffy is largely popular with the geek set, and the line of dialog on Buffy was spoken by one of the three nerdiest characters, while playing Dungeons and Dragons... I remember all of my co-workers at the time (in a QA lab at Apple) being extremely happy that that reference was there.
Homestar reaches outside of that group a bit, though. I think that its silly-instead-of-raunchy humor style let it penetrate into a lot of offices, and when I was living in the dorms (in the ~2001 era) there was a HUGE percentage of the dorms who were watching the cartoons every week.
i vaguely recognized strong bad from a desktop a friend of mine had on her pc some odd months ago (and thats the only reason i even bothered to look into this), but even though i recognized him i still had no idea who/what it was, up till last week
she always has some cartoon character lining her desktop, most of them i have had to look up... strong bad, Dr. Tran, happy tree friends, drawn together, now she has some little goofy green eyed alien thing on her background, and yet again... i have no idea what it is, lol
Telltale's next episodic adventure!!!