Re: Drill
Yes. Now you know how those shitty AVG games can balloon up to 3-4 GB despite having looking no better than similar games from 10 years ago. Apparently, data compression is not an important area of focus in Japan.
It's not an issue about good game developement or whether or not data compression is a focus for Japan. For disk distributed games, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to let your file sizes balloon as much as they need to as long as it still fits on a disk.
Uncompressed media plays with less processor load which is good for people with basic or old computers or who would be playing on a netbook or some other CPU light option.
Drill has 258 megs of uncompressed *.wav files which is pretty heavy, but perfectly understandable back in the day. It'll fit on a CD with room to spare. Any modern game will be shipped on a DVD anyway so 1 gig or 4.7 makes no difference and in fact is a turn off for would be pirates who would rather not have to download or deal with an extra huge image on their drives. And burn time is not a factor, disk duplication costs are always calcuated per disk.
The ADV game formula's basically set by now innovation isn't what they're looking for so much as good character design, art, and writing. Voicing 100% of the script in these games is pretty heavy, there's a lot of it.
American companies are just as guilty about huge and unwieldy media files as the Japanese are, hence our multi disk games. I remember Wing Commander 3 being I believe 4 disks. If the company doesn't intend on actually selling their games via download, there's no point to compressing anything if it'll fit on one disk. Not to mention the current generation of computer games. Try checking the size of the opening fmvs to most of your games.