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The Next Big Thing (video Game)
''The Next Big Thing'' is a 2011 comedy graphic adventure game developed by the Spanish company Pendulo Studios and published by Focus Home Interactive. The spiritual successor to Pendulo's '' Hollywood Monsters'' (1997), it takes place in an alternate-history, 1940s Hollywood where real monsters portray themselves in monster movies. The game follows reporters Dan Murray and Liz Allaire as they uncover a conspiracy within the film industry. Assuming control of Dan and Liz, the player navigates the game world, converses with non-player characters and solves puzzles. Pendulo began developing ''The Next Big Thing'' in the late 2000s, after years of fan requests in Southern Europe for a sequel to ''Hollywood Monsters''. The company planned the project as a remake, but decided that the original game's design flaws—and what the developers retrospectively called its " male chauvinist" outlook—necessitated an overhaul. Pendulo reworked the puzzles, game structure, plot and character ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pendulo Studios
Pendulo Studios S.L. is a Madrid-based video game developer founded in 1993 by Ramón Hernáez, Felipe Gómez Pinilla, Rafael Latiegui and Miguel Angel Ramos. Since the company's 1994 debut project, '' Igor: Objective Uikokahonia'', it has specialized in graphic adventure games. Pendulo first achieved mainstream prominence in Spain via '' Hollywood Monsters'' (1997), which met with critical and commercial success in the country but was never released beyond Southern Europe. The company broke into the international market with its third game, '' Runaway: A Road Adventure'' (2001), whose hit status in Europe contributed to the reenergization of the adventure game genre. It also saved Pendulo from bankruptcy, following the closure of its publisher Dinamic Multimedia. Thereafter, Pendulo created two sequels to ''Runaway''; the series collectively had sold more than 1.5 million units worldwide by 2010. After the release of '' Yesterday'' in 2012, Pendulo entered another period of fina ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Male Chauvinist
Chauvinism is the unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people, who are seen as strong and virtuous, while others are considered weak, unworthy, or inferior. It can be described as a form of extreme patriotism and nationalism, a fervent faith in national excellence and glory. In English, the word has come to be used in some quarters as shorthand for male chauvinism, a trend reflected in ''Merriam-Webster's Dictionary'', which, as of 2018, begins its first example of use of the term ''chauvinism'' with "an attitude of superiority toward members of the opposite sex". As nationalism According to legend, French soldier Nicolas Chauvin was badly wounded in the Napoleonic Wars and received a meager pension for his injuries. After Napoleon abdicated, Chauvin maintained his fanatical Bonapartist belief in the messianic mission of Imperial France, despite the unpopularity of this view under the Bourbon Restoration. His single-minded devotion to his c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Difficulty Level
Game balance is a branch of game design that is described as a mathematical-algorithmic model of a game’s numbers, game mechanics, and relations between the two. Game balance consists of adjusting values to create a certain user experience. Players’ perception and experience are the objectives of game balancing. Overview and development Similar to game design, the definition of game balance is different between various game designers and developers. Game balance is present in every type of game in some form, so there are no existing comparable interpretations of the concept. Even so, game balance is generally understood as introducing a level of fairness for the players. This includes adjusting difficulty, win-loss conditions, game states, economy balancing, and so on to work in tandem with each other. The concept of game balance depends entirely on the type of game being discussed. Most game designers agree that game balancing serves towards providing an engaging player expe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minigame
A minigame (also spelled mini game and mini-game, sometimes called a subgame or microgame) is a short game often contained within another video game. A minigame contains different gameplay elements, and is often smaller or more simplistic, than the game in which it is contained. Some video games consist entirely of minigames which tie into an overall theme, such '' Olympic Decathlon'' from 1980. Minigames are also used to represent a specific experience, such as hacking or lock picking or scanning an area, that ties into a larger game. Minigame compilations Some games, such as the ''WarioWare'' series (which are called microgames in the series), Universal Research Laboratories's '' Video Action'', some Cinemaware titles like ''Defender of the Crown'', David Whittaker's ''Lazy Jones'' or the smartphone satire ''Phone Story'' are made up of many minigames strung together into one video game. Some similar games, such as Nintendo's ''Mario Party'' series, are considered party gam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Item (game Terminology)
In pencil and paper games and computer and video games, an item is an object within the game world that can be collected by a player or, occasionally, a non-player character. These items are sometimes called pick-ups. Items are most often beneficial to the player character. Some games contain detrimental items, such as cursed pieces of armor that confers a negative bonus to the wearer and cannot be removed until the curse itself is lifted; the means to do this may be costly or require a special item. Some items may also be of absolutely no value to the player. Items are especially prevalent in role-playing games, as they are usually necessary for the completion of quests or to advance through the story. Sometimes certain items may be unique, and only appear once at a specific location, often after completing a particular task. Other items may appear frequently, and not give a big bonus alone, but when many are collected. Games may differ on how the player uses an item. Some games, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dialogue Tree
A dialogue tree, or conversation tree, is a gameplay mechanic that is used throughout many adventure games (including action-adventure games) and role-playing video games. When interacting with a non-player character, the player is given a choice of what to say and makes subsequent choices until the conversation ends. Certain video game genres, such as visual novels and dating sims, revolve almost entirely around these character interactions and branching dialogues. History The concept of the dialogue tree has existed long before the advent of video games. The earliest known dialogue tree is described in "The Garden of Forking Paths," a 1941 short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which the combination book of Ts'ui Pên allows all major outcomes from an event branch into their own chapters. Much like the game counterparts this story reconvenes as it progresses (as possible outcomes would approach n where n is the number of options at each fork and m is the depth of the tree). Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nonlinear Gameplay
A video game with nonlinear gameplay presents players with challenges that can be completed in a number of different sequences. Each player may take on (or even encounter) only some of the challenges possible, and the same challenges may be played in a different order. Conversely, a video game with linear gameplay will confront a player with a fixed sequence of challenges: every player faces every challenge and has to overcome them in the same order. A nonlinear game will allow greater player freedom than a linear game. For example, a nonlinear game may permit multiple sequences to finish the game, a choice between paths to victory, different types of victory, or optional side-quests and subplots. Some games feature both linear and nonlinear elements, and some games offer a sandbox mode that allows players to explore an open world game environment independently from the game's main objectives, if any objectives are provided at all. A game that is significantly nonlinear is sometim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Point And Click
Point and click are the actions of a computer user moving a pointer to a certain location on a screen (''pointing'') and then pressing a button on a mouse, usually the left button (''click''), or other pointing device. An example of point and click is in hypermedia, where users click on hyperlinks to navigate from document to document. Point and click can be used with any number of input devices varying from mouses, touch pads, trackpoint, joysticks, scroll buttons, and roller balls. User interfaces, for example graphical user interfaces, are sometimes described as "point-and-click interfaces", often to suggest that they are very easy to use, requiring that the user simply point to indicate their wishes. These interfaces are sometimes referred to condescendingly (e.g., by Unix users) as "click-and-drool" or "point-and-drool" interfaces. The use of this phrase to describe software implies that the interface can be controlled solely through the mouse (or some other means such a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2D Computer Graphics
2D computer graphics is the computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models (such as 2D geometric models, text, and digital images) and by techniques specific to them. It may refer to the branch of computer science that comprises such techniques or to the models themselves. 2D computer graphics are mainly used in applications that were originally developed upon traditional printing and drawing technologies, such as typography, cartography, technical drawing, advertising, etc. In those applications, the two-dimensional image is not just a representation of a real-world object, but an independent artifact with added semantic value; two-dimensional models are therefore preferred, because they give more direct control of the image than 3D computer graphics (whose approach is more akin to photography than to typography). In many domains, such as desktop publishing, engineering, and business, a description of a document based on 2D computer grap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Graphic Adventure Game
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or Puzzle video game, puzzle-solving. The Video game genres, genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games (List of text-based computer games, text and List of graphic adventure games, graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' is identified as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include ''Zork'', ''King's Quest'', ''Monkey Island'', and ''Myst''. Initial adventure games developed in the 1970s and early 1980s were text-based, using text parsers to translate the player's input into commands. As personal computers became more powerful with better grap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Next Big Thing 2011 Game Screenshot
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pron ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Porting
In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally designed for (e.g., different CPU, operating system, or third party library). The term is also used when software/hardware is changed to make them usable in different environments. Software is ''portable'' when the cost of porting it to a new platform is significantly less than the cost of writing it from scratch. The lower the cost of porting software relative to its implementation cost, the more portable it is said to be. Etymology The term "port" is derived from the Latin '' portāre'', meaning "to carry". When code is not compatible with a particular operating system or architecture, the code must be "carried" to the new system. The term is not generally applied to the process of adapting software to run with less memory on the sam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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