Demo for cancelled Humongous Entertainment game released

somerandomhefan · Post by **somerandomhefan** » Mon Feb 08, 2016 12:15 pm

Recently, a former employee of Humongous Entertainment released a demo of Aliens Ate My Cookies, a cancelled game that was going to be released by a sub-division called Gaspocket. Since the original license included with it prohibits sharing it, I'm not going to post the link here just in case this could count as piracy.

I checked it out and it actually uses the SCUMM engine. I managed to make SCUMMVM run it after renaming its data files to PJGAMES in order to disguise it as Pajama Sam: Games To Play On Any Day, which was released around the same time. As to be expected from an unsupported game, there were multiple glitches not present when using the original interpreter though. If you're willing to add official support for it, here's what's currently not working correctly:

-There's notable audio stuttering during the second half of the intro video.

-On most screens the cursor is given wrong colors.

-SCUMMVM seems to think the voice files are longer than they actually are, resulting in fairly long breaks after every one of them during which the characters' talking animations are continued even though they're silent.

-The debugging features such as pressing G to enter the room selection menu work even when the INI settings haven't activated them.

I'm restricting this list to the bugs that SCUMM itself doesn't have. There are a few additional ones that occur with both engines, so these would probably be far harder to fix.

somerandomhefan · Post by **somerandomhefan** » Wed Feb 24, 2016 11:14 pm

Is it okay if I post the demo's download link here? Technically, its release could qualify as copyright infringement, seeing how it was only intended for internal use and includes a license specifying that it's not shareware, but it's very unlikely this would cause any trouble, seeing how it's just a prototype of what was most likely going to be the game's official demo.

dreammaster · Post by **dreammaster** » Thu Feb 25, 2016 2:29 pm

somerandomhefan wrote:Is it okay if I post the demo's download link here? Technically, its release could qualify as copyright infringement, seeing how it was only intended for internal use and includes a license specifying that it's not shareware, but it's very unlikely this would cause any trouble, seeing how it's just a prototype of what was most likely going to be the game's official demo.

Please don't. Since it wasn't officially released, it is still technically an illegal copy, and we need to err on the side of caution.

somerandomhefan · Post by **somerandomhefan** » Thu Feb 25, 2016 4:17 pm

dreammaster wrote:
somerandomhefan wrote:Is it okay if I post the demo's download link here? Technically, its release could qualify as copyright infringement, seeing how it was only intended for internal use and includes a license specifying that it's not shareware, but it's very unlikely this would cause any trouble, seeing how it's just a prototype of what was most likely going to be the game's official demo.
Please don't. Since it wasn't officially released, it is still technically an illegal copy, and we need to err on the side of caution.

Okay then. I'm going to assume this means I shouldn't give the link to anyone who asks me via PM either, right?

dreammaster · Post by **dreammaster** » Thu Feb 25, 2016 10:58 pm

somerandomhefan wrote:Okay then. I'm going to assume this means I shouldn't give the link to anyone who asks me via PM either, right?

I'd err on advising against it. Even though PMs are private, it's still the ScummVM Forums, and we don't want even a hint of impropriety. Besides, anyone really interested in it can presumably simply do a web-search to locate a copy elsewhere anyway.