Interview with the lead programmer of The Last Express
by Jordi "El Bárbaro"
10) The 'egg' savegame feature. There're people who love it and people who hate it.
Could you explain us in detail how it works, and how it was done? A, more or less,
850KB file that can store everything you've done in such complex gameworld for three
days sure it has great enhanced uses.
I am always surprised when I read that someone doesn't like our savegame
feature. We believe that we created a save system that is intuitive,
flexible, and unique. Jordan Mechner and I had always been frustrated with
traditional adventure game save systems which require you to constantly save
11) Stop talking about TLE! We all want to know if 'Smoking Car' is
planning new [adventure?] games and how they're going to look...
Unfortunately, there are currently no future Smoking Car titles in
development. Although some companies have expressed an interest in
licensing our image processing system, Smoking Car Productions itself is
semi-defunct. Sales of "The Last Express" sadly have not yet come close to
breaking even, and our publishers have not put as much faith in the game as
we had hoped.
12) What videogames are you currently playing with? What's the videogame you've ever
liked best? What's your favourite adventure game?
Well, I assume you mean besides Express. Truthfully, I don't play a ton of
games. Although I try to stay current and look at every demo, there are
only a handful of games that I have really liked. When I do find one I
like, I play it a lot. Recently, I've enjoyed "The Curse of Monkey Island"
and "Age of Empires". I also really like the Nintendo 64 games "Super Mario
64" and "MarioKart 64". Seven or eight years ago I used to play all the
Sierra games. For the last few years though, I've spent more hours in movie
theatres than playing video games.
Well, Mark, the interview is finished... the torture is over! We hope things will go better
than what you pointed out in your answers, and we can have more games of yours. Thanks a lot!
and type in 50 letter descriptions. Because time in Express constantly
advances as the train makes its way across Europe, the game lends itself to
the linear interface of a VCR tape. The game saves its state in a highly
compressed format every 30 seconds and before critical story points. This
allows the player to rewind to any previous point in his story and to
review what happened or to change his course of action and restart the game
from that point. Also, because the game constantly saves itself, it can
easily recover from power failures and so forth, and the player never needs
to worry about saving before he tries something potentially dangerous. As a
final point, since the game knows which saves are more "important" than
others, when the player loses it can automatically rewind back to the latest
point where he could have changed his course of action or undo his mistake.
This provides an important "hint" feature.
