Maybe I picked the wrong game to pin all that frustration on, I certainly don't intend do badmouth anyones hard work. It's just that I'm really tired of that "pixelated nostalgia" thing. Pixel art graphics have their place, sometimes they can be the right choice for a game, but it feels to me like there are many developers who just use that nostalgia as an excuse to not bother with something better looking. I don't like the fact that you can just stamp "retro" on something and that seems to excuse everything for some people.

I like playing many old games, and I love new games that adopt oldschool approach, but I don't want them to be exact replicas of those old games. I want them to take what was great in the old, and deliver it in a new, better package. I guess that's why I love Chains of Satinav so much. I know it's just my opinion, and I'm not saying everyone has to agree with me.

When you say 'but it feels to me like there are many developers who just use that nostalgia as an excuse to not bother with something better looking', I think this is where you get it wrong.
I really like the pixel art style, not only for the nostalgia trip, but for how beautiful some of them look. And that is clearly a question of preferences. You don't have to like pixel art, nor the 2D background of Deadalic games (I personally enjoy both, Memoria was a gorgeous game for instance), but I don't think you can talk about being lazy or else for choosing a pixelart style.

It would be like saying dev have been lazy creating a 2D game instead of 3D.

Yeah, I can relate to the general sentiment, I just don't think WadjetEye Games is a deserving target for such accusations. They don't even market their games as "retro", and I'm pretty sure they really appreciate the elaborate pixel art of people like Ben Chandler just as much as I do and don't just employ him because they can't be bothered to look for something else. To me their titles are the opposite of cheap, lazy and gimmicky indie games, they're clearly labors of love in all aspects.

Just as a sidenote, this new and greatly extended version of Technobablyon already is a graphical update of sorts to the three freeware chapters, although I kind of liked the original's cruder graphics drawn by the writer himself, too. But you can see in the screenshots that it was a lot more "retro" before. ;)

Hi all! I just want to apologize. This should have launched in fullscreen mode by default. I'll write GOG about fixing that!

My statement isn't meant to reflect on the quality of Technobabylon as a standalone work of art (I haven't played it), but they really, really shouldn't.

Fair point. It works the other way too, though. Particularly with movie soundtracks, sometimes a really outstanding piece of music gets lost or only has a small portion in the film and it can be really cool to hear the rest. And in games soundtracks can get lost as you immerse yourself in play.

Some game soundtracks stand really well on their own too, I think often more so than movies, because they are frequently ambient, designed to create a mood. On GoG the soundtracks of Primordia (another of Wadjet's fine offerings) and System Shock both come to mind in particular. Great background music for work, for example. I do lots and lots of basically math for a living, and I sometimes use different types of music depending on the specific work to enter the right headspace. For calm flow that kind of ambient game score is awesome.

As individual works of art some really stand alone too, particularly in cases where the soundscape is an important component of the design. For example in games Bastion has an incredible soundtrack (which I bought separately long before the game was on GoG) and in movies Guardians of the Galaxy's "awesome mixtape" is, of course, a nostalgic triumph as well as a fantastic practical element of the story.

If I may interject. :) Despite the pixel art, I've never considered our games to be retro. I'd go as far as to say that I consider them to be quite modern. You can do many many more things with pixel art these days than you could back in the 90s. It's a style that has worked REALLY well for us. It's served us well for almost a decade, so we stick with what we know.

Do you plan to release the Linux version of the game on GOG? I can of course build AGS and run it myself, but having an official release here would be nice. Thanks!

It's trickier to make native/official ports than it used to be. There are some technical issues involved, as well some family health issues that have slowed things down by a lot. Things have stabilized on both fronts, so we are slowly catching up.

But to answer your question - yes. Once there is a linux version we will sell it here.

My sentiment exactly!

Please continue to do so, imho it's a strong selling point because one knows what to expect and what one sees is what one gets. I'd say it's more about reliable and efficient quality rather than profiting off nostalgia. I think there's still ample room for getting the most out of beautiful VGA graphics, the most recent titles are getting progressively more artistic.

In my eyes, VGA pixel graphics aren't a simple retro thing. I simply find this style more vibrant, alive and less flat/awkward than high res 2D or 3D. When done as nicely as in Blackwell Epiphany and Technobabylon, that is. There's a world of difference between sumptuous VGA graphics like that and minimalist flat pastel colored indie platformer graphics, or the super reductionist near undecipherable blocky style found in The Last Door & Co.

I have one complaint about Technobabylon though:

**spoiler alert**

Even if I spare the biobomber's life, he still ends up dead on the dissection table at the police station and Regis & Max talk about how nicely Max hit her target. Even though I made the effort to talk the terrorist into giving up peacefully. I understand that the plot requires the bomber to be dead because otherwise you can't loot his bones for explosives later on but I found it oddly immersion-breaking that one gameplay choice results in such a loss of continuity.

**spoiler end**

edit: thanks to Laberbacke's post below, this turns out to have been a one-time bug that didn't repeat itself on my 2nd playthrough so I had the corresponding criticism removed from my review.

Must be a very strange bug on your end. In my game, they talked about what really happened.

Very odd indeed, I just spent half an hour replaying the game up to that point and this time I got the correct dialogue where it is revealed that Central did it and not Max. So that gets the game off the hook in terms of continuity issues, good to know and thanks for making me look at this a second time. I only considered this a minor issue anyway, nothing that would have subtracted from the rating either way.

edit: The store page review has been edited and the corresponding sentence removed, thanks again for bringing this to my attention!

I didn't encounter any other noteworthy bugs or crashes so possibly a one-time freak occurrence. Only other glitches I encountered are that occasionally there's an extra cursor stuck in the middle of the screen upon booting the game and it doesn't disappear, have seen this happen with various other AGS adventures but it's often a temporary problem that disappears after restarting or ALT + TABing the game, seems like an engine glitch and not specific to any particular game. Same for the occasional blinks where the screen blinks white for a split second, had this happen in other AGS games as well and again assume it's an engine glitch. It's subtle and doesn't detract from the gaming experience in too notable a way.

I tried a variety of funny stuff to see how the game reacts, e.g. trying to get hit by the industrial laser beam by standing in its trajectory or get squashed by the elevator. The laser just goes through the game character when you stand in the way, I guess that's quite alright even if it would have been fun to have death occur to the player in that situation. On the other hand, there's little point in asking animators to do costly extra work for such shenanigans, it would be a waste of resources for an indie production. As for the elevators, the playable character stand clear of the elevator when it comes down even if you position them underneath so no death there , either :)

All in all this game is -very- well made so any complaints I can come up with are of the nitpick variety.

Shenanigans, eh? You might like this, then: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheDevTeamThinksOfEverything
About player deaths: It's great that it just resets here. I was just playing the Tex Murphy series where you are really screwed if you don't save every couple of seconds. I learned that the hard way, had to replay about an hour or so.

Spot on! :D

One reason why I use many savegames (almost 30 for my 1st Technobabylon playthrough) is because I can't resist trying all manner of nonsense and am usually not satisfied unless I've managed to get the game characters stuck in walls or otherwise create calamity at least once in every game.

The other reason is paranoia from ye olden days, games like Tex Murphy etc for sure. One of my favorite examples is Kyrandia where towards the end of the game you can fly to the castle without a crucial item and can't fly back so that would be game breaking without having earlier saves to fall back on :O