Traveler's Tales

[Anonymous No.6878076]

Thoughts on this developer?

[Anonymous No.6878093]

I think it's more sad they ended up making copy & pasted lego games than if they simply went belly-up in 2004.

[Anonymous No.6878215]

Underrated. Mickey Mania is really good and I like Sonic 3D Blast which is also underrated but they got stuck with games that they did great work on but never were going to raise their profile. Toy Story is just infamous for being hard as balls and Sonic R was never going to be the Saturn Sonic everyone wanted. Their work demonstrates a lot of technical expertise but they needed something "bigger" if you catch my drift. Like had they scrapped the racing nonsense and just converted Sonic R into the Saturn's flagship Sonic title after Xtreme imploded they might have really taken off.

[Anonymous No.6878278]

>>6878076
Great logo, meh everything else

[Anonymous No.6878972]

they tried

[Anonymous No.6878985]

>>6878076
toy story 2 psx was nice

[Anonymous No.6878995]

>>6878076
I'm upset that they never got to finish the gane they were making about this mascot and it got turned into Haven: Call Of The King.

[Anonymous No.6879141]

>>6878076
Imagine being a tech wizard team working on shovelware until death.
A Bug's Life was one of my favorite videogames though. A masterpiece.

[Anonymous No.6879169]

_ ____ __ ____ ____ ____!

[Anonymous No.6879220]

The studio's director. Jon Burton has a Youtube channel called GameHut, which allows some insight into why their games are so their games are often mediocre. He was a kind of Carmack analogue in the studio, but rather misguided in my opinion.
He came from demoscene, and never got rid of the demoscene mentality, often sacrificing gameplay to shoehorn in whatever cool visual effect he managed to generate on a particular console. If you watch his videos, you'll see how proud he is of these effects (and some of them indeed support the gameplay), but if you read between the lines, some of them would be better off left out.
Fore example, look at how Sonic 3D blast is probably the slowest Sonic game, antithetical to what Sonic is supposed to be, all because of the awkwardly zoomed in isometric perspective. Sure, it's impressive looking, but the gameplay suffers from it.
For a non-gameplay example, take Crash: Wrath of Cortex. They've written a robust and efficient particle system, but instead of using it tastefully and with restraint, they've decided to use it absolutely everywhere. Compare the teleporting animations from the original Crash trilogy to the ones in WoC. In original games, Crash contorts or his body gets transferred in parts - cartoony animations with a lot of personality. In WoC, Crash just immediately turns into a bunch of particles that anemically dissolve in place. Impressive tech was again more important than an actually interesting visual.
My favorite game from TT is Toy Story 2, which is coincidentally the one that Jon had the least to do with.

[Anonymous No.6879241]

>>6878093
How so? Before Lego Star Wars they made only one good game (Toy Story 2) and everything else was shovelware.

[Anonymous No.6879272]

>>6879220
Yeah I don't really bother with many YouTubers.but I like his channel.
He created a romhack for Sonic 3D a couple of years ago fixing a lot of the misgivings he had about the final release.
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3810/

[Anonymous No.6879335]

>>6879241
I know, but I would rather I never knew they were hacks rather than learn over time that they are. Same with Wayforward

[Anonymous No.6879370]

>>6878215
I agree with this. TT had tons of technical expertise but their games were never great from a gameplay perspective. Ironically I think LEGO was what put them in the spotlight, although its getting pretty stale at this point.
I think if the Saturn hadn't crashed and burned TT could have been great standout developers for that system, the Sega equivalent of Rare.

[Anonymous No.6879384]

>>6879220
>Sonic 3D blast is probably the slowest Sonic game, antithetical to what Sonic is supposed to be, all because of the awkwardly zoomed in isometric perspective
If you actually watched his videos on Sonic 3D you'd know the game is slow because of the need to store complex sprites in the ROM, not because of the 3D perspective. Keeping those complex sprites to draw, for example, loops is literally in service to the gameplay.
You'd also know from that same video that it would have been technically possible to double sonic's speed by optimizing the scrolling, but anyone with a brain can tell that would have made the game hilariously unplayable.

Stunning graphical effects and hardware wizardry were what SEGA wanted developers to do with the Genesis and Saturn, and TT delivered. Burton did stray too far occasionally with effects that absolutely didn't serve the gameplay and Sega didn't ask for, like 3D Blast's opening FMV (which looks shit), but Mickey Mania's spiral tower and mode 7 Moose Chase are good examples of hardware serving gameplay, as is Leander's pixel-perfect collision.

Don't talk shit on my boy Jon Burton.

[Anonymous No.6879447]

>>6878076
They were great at leveraging the hardware capabilities of the consoles they developed for (Toy Story on Genesis and Haven on PS2 are probably the most impressive examples) but they struggled a bit with game design, their games were kind of average or uninspired at best in terms of gameplay but their presentation was always top notch.

[Anonymous No.6879502]

>>6879384
>Don't talk shit on my boy Jon Burton
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to paint him as a complete buffoon - I do admire how passionate he is about his craft and how good he is at it. I'm not trying to shit on him, just trying to point out how his efforts might have been misguided in places.
>it would have been technically possible to double sonic's speed by optimizing the scrolling, but anyone with a brain can tell that would have made the game hilariously unplayable
This is kind of what I'm talking about, they were able to make a 3D game world (3D in terms of gameplay, not necessarily display) with isometric perspective, but that perspective was just a bad fit for the kind of a game Sonic ought to be.
>Stunning graphical effects and hardware wizardry were what SEGA wanted developers to do with the Genesis and Saturn, and TT delivered
I didn't look at it from this angle, but I'd say it was a case of shared interest - SEGA wanted pretty games, TT wanted to show off how pretty a game they could make on the system. In his videos about his oldest games from before SEGA, Jon talks about visual effects he was able to achieve with the older systems.
I absolutely agree about Mickey Mania's moose chase and spiral tower being really good additions that served the gameplay, but not so much for Leander. I recall Jon saying that because of how it was achieved, enemies had to be placed far enough from one another as to not make the game confused about which one you're colliding with. That's a clear tradeoff, and I don't think it was worth it seeing how the difference would have been barely noticeable if they used separate bounding boxes for the characters and their weapons.
Jon Burton is a genius, but an important part of being a genius is knowing when to stop showing off one's intelligence.

[Anonymous No.6879514]

their games have soul but they suck, love that guy's videos though

[Anonymous No.6879564]

>>6879502
>This is kind of what I'm talking about, they were able to make a 3D game world (3D in terms of gameplay, not necessarily display) with isometric perspective, but that perspective was just a bad fit for the kind of a game Sonic ought to be.

Is this really on Traveller's Tales though? I always assumed that Sega wanted to jump on the 3D train but Sega being Sega didn't think it through and left TT with the vague instruction to make a 3D Sonic on the Genesis. Even back when it came out the school playground talk was how it was "fake" 3D compared to Mario 64. The game had a "hurry up and give us something!" vibe. Which under those conditions, they did a good job.

[Anonymous No.6879810]

>>6878076
Why they changed that amazing logo?