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I love this description - MI1 is the first game I ever did that with. There is a phenomenon with certain games that I find incredibly attractive, and that is the appearance that the player has broken the game because they did something the designers didn't anticipate, and being proven wrong -- the designers are just as inexhaustible and petty as you, the player. I can clearly remember trying to exhaust Stan's list of extras on each of the boats he tries to sell you, and finding it nearly inexhaustible -- the same is true with the multiple iterations of the door on the cannibal's hut when you escape over and over. I took gleeful pleasure in seeing how outthought I was as a player. The only other game I can think of that gave me that same pleasure was Portal 1, which felt as though you were seeing behind the scenes of a game that you weren't meant to see behind -- it was thrilling in both games to think you were beating the game at it's OWN game, and then to be continually reminded that, in fact, you were not -- the pleasure of the synthetic experience.

I'm guessing I'm not alone as someone who has made Mojo-adjacent content in the last few years and would like to share it. Maybe this thread can be a home for it? Anything you've made that you think Mojo Forums readers here might be interested in, but is small enough or old enough that it may not need its own thread, feel free to place it here! I'll start! Monkey Island 1 and 2 Livestream with Marius Winter and Dominic Armato A couple months ago, I did a complete playthrough of Monkey Island 1 and 2 on Twitch with Marius Winter (@Marius) and the voice of Guybrush Threepwood himself Dominic Armato (@Dmnkly). It was something Marius and I had been talking about doing for ages - we worked together at Telltale and both loved just talking about Monkey Island forever, and years later wanted an excuse to do that again - and having Dominic show up as a surprise guest made it even more special. If you want to watch the stream, you can watch the first video or view the whole collection of Monkey Island 1 and 2 (and a brief break to talk about Disneyland) here.

Eighteen months ago I unveiled the first phase of an ongoing undertaking to bring old Mojo articles back online. To make a long story short*, the various redesigns of Mojo over the years, and the not-always-diligent efforts to port previous features over during these transitions, would cause articles from the sunsetted version of Mojo to simply get left behind in the process. The cumulative effect was that well over fifty percent of Mojo's content ended up missing. For years I've been keen on addressing that travesty, but the more I dug into it the more I came to understand why prior staffers gave up on the challenge. Mojo backups are woefully limited when it comes to the really old stuff, and though the backups have come to my aid many times on an individual basis, generally speaking the only strategy you really have when you want to recover an old article is to turn to the Wayback Machine and extract the content of a snapshot/crawl (hopefully, one even exists) by hand. This at least gets you the text if not always the media -- and without the media, many articles are borderline pointless, such as the Gold Guy Exposed article, which I only recently got the images for with the help of Jake. Not all articles have such a happy ending, though. Aside from the major issue of lost media, the other problem is that modern Mojo is way more restrictive on the presentation of features in terms of layout and available markup tags. This lockdown was deliberate and undoubtedly a good thing going forward, but it makes for an absolute nightmare when trying to adapt old articles, which were written with a laissez faire attitude toward handwritten HTML, to MojoEx. (Gabez in particular seemed to love to make his articles as bespoke as possible, and I'm going to die five years sooner than I otherwise would have died due to my traumatic experiences in trying to recreate them with any accuracy.) The end result is that it's often impossible to replicate the appearance of older articles even when you are lucky enough to have all the actual materials on hand. Sidebars, for example, once used regularly in Mojo, are simply not a thing in MojoEx. The compromises pile up. I'm still committed to getting everything back in whatever form possible for posterity's sake, and I've made a point of linking to Wayback Machine snapshots at the end of the retrofitted articles for reference. I also make a point of putting a link to the original news posts at the end of the resurrections, though hopefully Zaarin will at some point be able to associate the articles with their originating news posts the "real" way that modern features do. Similarly, we need to get the old articles properly backdated in the system. I have to say I consider what has been achieved even now to be a minor miracle, but there's plenty to be done. The reason I've made this thread is because I need the readership's help. I think/hope we're at a point where every legacy article is at least in the system now, in variable states of restoration. But I've pretty much taken this as far as I can bring it by myself. Now that the forums have returned and the community has a place to gather again, I am relying on any readers who share an interest in getting the old stuff back to help me fill in the remaining gaps -- by pointing out missing, incomplete or faulty articles, and maybe even helping me track down some of the stuff I could not. So if you spot something funky, point it out here, and I'll see if I can address it. With multiple sets of eyes on this, it'll be a lot easier to bring this insane excavation to the next level of polish. And then we'll really be cooking with Spaff grease. *Sorry for lying

Because you love polls! The correct answer is MI2, by the way. Grim will also be accepted.

You can get all your purchases through TTG again -- I'm seeing all of mine, at least. I can't speak for Devil's Playhouse on Windows, but it runs fine on macOS. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. Make sure to play all three seasons in order, though, to get the most out of them.

Yes! I regained control of both my old accounts, thanks a lot!

The account for Mojo comments was and is completely separate from the forums account. If you PM me the e-mail address you used in both places, I can try to find the accounts and give you access again. ATMachine has been approved manually so he should be able to log in now.

I know we have the Puerto Pollo art somewhere, but I cannot find it for the life of me... Mind if we nab it for Mojo?

You might have a point there with Maniac Mansion, but that game is still pretty overtly a horror/sci-fi B-movie parody, while its sequel is overtly a Saturday morning cartoon. In addition, we've seen interpretations of Maniac Mansion rendered in ink, oil and clay that predate Day of the Tentacle that managed to be much more evocative of the game's world, in my opinion. I need to shut up about that now, because if I work through my ideas here I'll end up using it as an excuse not to make the article. To build on your point, though, I think the reason the visual jump from MI2 to Curse continues to spawn discussion is that there's always going to be a certain ambiguity about just how much the art styles of MI1 and MI2 were dictated by extreme technology constraints, and how much of their look can be ascribed to deliberate aesthetic choices on the parts of Purcell, Chan, etc. When it comes to really old games where there's so much sleight of hand involved to wring every last bit of potential out of limited palettes and ungenerous pixel counts, the art design and the problem-solving get melded together in ways that are difficult to unweave. The black magic Mark Ferrari had to pull to achieve those dithering effects in Loom, probably the most impressive EGA game ever made, was practically a programming task. I do think that certain people who can't stand the look of CMI can get this idea in their head that somehow the original art team would have made the game look like the LeChuck's Revenge cover art, which is silly. I don't think there's truly any way of knowing what a Steve-Purcell-art-directed Monkey Island 3 made in 1997 would have looked like, but probably the closest thing we have to a reference point would be the MI1 concept art or the original character close-ups from the EGA version, all of which is pretty cartoony. They're still distinct from Ahern's stamp on the series (I stamp he is entitled to, I might add), but I think it's a more reasonable comparison. Now, those pirates are still really different, but I think it puts the "How cartoony is too cartoony?" debate in the proper context.

I will put out a promise right now. Two in fact: Sidebars will return in MojoHEX. MojoHEX will arrive in 2020. And that's a Remi PromiseTM.

I love both Monkey 1 and 2 so dang much, but I enjoy the first one a tiny bit more. Mostly because the world of 1 feels more real to me. I got this sense of visiting a world with people in it that have their own things going on. There are pedestrians everywhere on Mêlée Island, and even the main plot is a conflict primarily between Elaine and LeChuck. Guybrush is just a tiny part of a world that is moving on without him. Monkey 2 to me has a similar, believable world, but the more I progress through „Four Map Pieces“ the emptier the world gets, and unlike in Monkey 1 it‘s not narratively supported. In Monkey 1 the world gets emptier because everyone is scared by the terror of LeChuck. This is SO GOOD, aaah!! Anyway, good first thread. Hi everyone!

For me it's never not been Monkey Island 2. The only thing that has fluctuated in my mind is how thin the margin is. The original is an undisputed classic, the game that showed off the true potential of a SCUMM adventure game and more or less represents the best of a genre and the halcyon days of LucasArts as a spirit. I don't think the series ever really did fully recapture that kind of Princess Bride storybook flavor it had going here. I can't imagine arguing with anybody who would rank it first, though I find it hard to find any new way to sing its praises at this point. Monkey 2 feels like it builds on the first game and offers a deeper, richer, more ambitious experience. It ups the ante in every way, and to this day you can pit the Four Map Pieces segment against pretty much anything the genre has produced since. Again, three decades worth of discussion sort of leaves me at a loss to come up with some kind of original take on the thing, but for me this is still my favorite game. CMI is an undeniable departure from the first two in overall feeling for reasons both unavoidable (major technology gap, different creative personell) and chosen, and it probably honors the template of the original a little too much in the first half (get ship and crew, insult sword fighting) but it's just such a well-made adventure game top to bottom, with stupid good production values, that I doubt a convincing, objective argument could be made for it representing any kind of misstep from a strict quality standpoint. It's another installment where I can't object to it being ranked first. It is also as influential as the first game in a certain sense as it seems to have spawned, or at least been released at the right time to soak up, that initial burst of online fandom. Many people seem to have met the series through CMI. EMI is the least of the games, but I think it deserves reappraisal in terms of what that really means. What I see is a satisfying, rock solid adventure game with a lot of funny moments, good animation and very possibly the best voice acting in an LEC game -- and that's really saying something. On the other hand it delivers a somewhat off brand story for a Monkey Island installment, it comes dangerously close to making the world feel too small (that Tri-Island Area map: hilarious) and it unquestionably fails its pedigree on the graphics front (both because using GrimE to create a cartoony-yet-lush 3D world with the target specs of the average turn-of-the-century Windows user isn't setting yourself up for success, and because Chris Miles, by all accounts a talented animator, probably wasn't the guy to sit in the Art Director chair for the series' delicate transition to 3D.) But visuals aside I think it's held up reasonably well, and I would like to think its status as a kind of "side trip" story will gain some appreciation/perspecitve now that it is a middle installment and not the last game, which admittedly was not a good look for it. Monkey Island is an exceptionally good series, and in this case being the worst of five great games still leaves you: a really good game. TMI is a bit of a rebound that to a large extent feels like a course correction or return to form, especially in terms of a moody atmosphere and a general sense of captivating piratey-ness (both of which were a bit lacking in EMI as a consequence of its story), and the Telltale engine really upped the ante on the "performances" in my opinion, allowing the installment to go into some new emotional territory. On the downside, the decision to develop the episode with WiiWare in mind and general corner-cutting absolutely and unnecessarily hurt the production values. The art direction is good, but the 3D is up against limitations it should not be up against, and it is kind of funny how the Xerox-character-designs-for-background-NPCs strategy never really improved on Monkey 1. And while the MIDI score has a certain nostalgic feel that I like, it is kind of shameful that Michael Land's excellent compositions were not given the respect of a proper production, which might well have resulted in something that could have usurped the CMI score. The game's qualities more than overwhelm these drawbacks, it's just frustrating that they feel so self-inflicted. On the quibbles front, the equal-sized chapters necessitated by the episodic structure made me weirdly sad, I object to the absence of Alt+W, and the abruptness of the last moment felt like the one real shortcoming of CMI wasn't learned from. Short version: All these games are great, and I question the value of rankings, but I give the crown to MI2 if coronating one is a life or death matter. And I look forward to buying them all yet again in what promises to be a truly absurd anthology package in October.