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Seriously, this is an amazing game that I bought when it was released because having the opportunity to play it on a system that still works was something I couldn't miss (my Gamecube died a few years back, sadly, so I'm stuck with roughly thirty games I can no longer play). But this is the last time I buy into "THQ" Nordic's scams, these guys suck, all they care about is making money by banking on people's nostalgia and fandom -- they did the same with the Darksiders games, now they're making a third one with no involvement of the original devs whatsoever, and then there's the appalling Black Mirror reboot, which is a load of crap.

I'm glad it keeps getting patches, I really am, but the fact is that NO ONE cares about resolutions, textures, etc. Most of us, fans of the original game, think it looked gorgeous as it did back in the day; I don't care about graphical improvements. I do care, however, that they make it playable with keyboard+mouse, because A LOT of third-person action-adventures that look and play like Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy are playable just fine with that control scheme on the PC. Is it so hard to let players map the action keys to something other than F, Tab, Space and FREAKING Escape?! Also, what's the point of having the mouse control the camera, if you can't use the mouse buttons at all? Why can't I remap the attack/action button to left mouse button?

Nordic just keeps getting hold of these old IPs and they try to make money out of them by re-releasing them, making broken "enhanced" editions no one asked for, or, in Black Mirror's case, completely failing at rebooting the series with a game that tried to be a Telltale interactive novel while still appealing to the fans of the original games, miserably missing the mark on both objectives.

Stop selling IPs to Nordic, there are way better publishers out there who don't want to abuse honest paying customers just to make some moolah.

[Disclaimer] Yes, I know Sphinx "was made for a controller, so you should play with one". I don't have a controller and I have no plans to buy one because of this one game. If I can play all the other action-adventures of this kind perfectly fine with keyboard+mouse on PC (some with keyboard alone, even), there's no excuse for how bad Sphinx plays with that control scheme. It's a game released on PC, you should at least give your paying customers a decent control scheme using the default input method for computers. And, no, I'm not going to google for some stupid code language just to edit the ini file and remap the keys that way, because they didn't even bother with making THAT an easy task.
Eh, I'd prefer if you could be a bit more respectful and not generalize.

I think I'm doing my best to respond to everybody's demands and issues and being upfront about it, the next update will implement mouse-controlled blowpipe, and keyboard action mapping will come after that. Just so that you get an idea of the amount of code that I have to rewrite; the original EngineX is around 200,000+ lines of console-only code. And that doesn't include the Sphinx-specific behavior. The entire thing might be 800,000+ lines that I have to grok and tweak for the various subsystems to work without breaking what is already there.

It's okay to have an opinion, and it's true that the game isn't that keyboard-friendly at the moment, and if most of the rough edges have already been polished and this one hasn't, well, that may be for a reason. But being nice goes a long way.

By the way, I'm not part of some random porting house, I'm doing the job because I care about the game, as a fan. Also, GameCube USB adapters are dirt cheap and you can make them work with the PC version pretty easily.

If you need help setting it up just ask about it.
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Swyter: Eh, I'd prefer if you could be a bit more respectful and not generalize.

I think I'm doing my best to respond to everybody's demands and issues and being upfront about it, the next update will implement mouse-controlled blowpipe, and keyboard action mapping will come after that. Just so that you get an idea of the amount of code that I have to rewrite; the original EngineX is around 200,000+ lines of console-only code. And that doesn't include the Sphinx-specific behavior. The entire thing might be 800,000+ lines that I have to grok and tweak for the various subsystems to work without breaking what is already there.

It's okay to have an opinion, and it's true that the game isn't that keyboard-friendly at the moment, and if most of the rough edges have already been polished and this one hasn't, well, that may be for a reason. But being nice goes a long way.

By the way, I'm not part of some random porting house, I'm doing the job because I care about the game, as a fan. Also, GameCube USB adapters are dirt cheap and you can make them work with the PC version pretty easily.

If you need help setting it up just ask about it.
I apologize if I was rude and offensive towards you, I didn't mean to be disrespectful of your work, especially since I have no clue whatsoever of how coding and programming works; I'm sure it's not an easy task.

It wasn't a jab at you or your work, what I said about Nordic still stands, and I won't apologize for that. Sphinx is just one of the games that have been causing issues to customers, out of a recent or semi-recent batch Nordic has been releasing in the past few years. Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition is still broken to this day, two years after the last patch; the original version worked fine, the Deathinitive one has caused new issues and glitches that weren't there. Oddly enough, Nordic picks the studio who did this version to work on Darksiders III (with no involvement whatsoever from the original devs, which reeks of milking the franchise cash grab), instead of KAIKO, who did an impressive job with the Warmastered Edition of Darksiders. Then there's Titan Quest, which got a fan-made expansion that goes completely against what the original devs wanted for their game, bringing Norse mythology stuff to the game -- probably because Norse is trendy and fashionable and sells well, in this day and age. Black Mirror's reboot was a disaster, I don't even want to talk about that one. It was disrespectful to fans of the original game and it failed on being a decent "Telltale-style interactive movie", as well. And Sphinx... well... you're working on it, you know way better than me what struggles you still have ahead of you to make it more like what you, as a fan, want it to be. But maybe -- just MAYBE -- Nordic should have waited until you had a product you were happier with, instead of selling it straight away, as it was on release, with all the issues it had (some of which are still there).

Having said this, I do applaud your continued support of the game, and I wish you the best of luck making it as close to flawless on PC as you can. I saw the changelog for the latest patch, and I see you are planning on making action buttons remappable on keyboard, which is a HUGE step forward; also, thanks for adding some sort of initial mouse control support, hopefully, in a future patch, we'll be able to use mouse buttons as rebindable keys for action "face buttons" (again: I have no clue at all of how hard this is, or whether it is even possible to implement).

As for the Gamecube USB adapter, I appreciate the recommendation and the concern, but I'm not spending roughly ten bucks on an USB adapter because of one game (Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy); I guess I could play mt GCN games on PC via Dolphin, but since my laptop lacks an optical drive, there's no point in that.

Anyway, sincere apologies for my rudeness, and keep up the good work.
Post edited June 29, 2018 by groze
Just to clear something up, it doesn't matter whether your laptop has an optical drive because GCN and Wii discs are not DVDs. As an anti-piracy measure, they use a custom low-level format that makes no sense to the firmware in PC optical drives.