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Yep, no Kate and no spitting contest. IIRC, the map pieces go as follows: Rapp Scallion: Woodsmith just lets you take the nails without needing to saw off the peg leg; lock Stan in the coffin and take the crypt key; open the crypt and each coffin already has the pirate names on them so no Famous Pirate Quotations needed. The map is just lying in the coffin so no Ash 2 Life necessary, therefore no Rapp Scallion resurrection sequence. Captain Marley: The map doesn't fly away after Elaine throws it out the window, you can just pick it up. Therefore, no cliffside, so no fisherman, so no treehouse, so no bone dance. Young Lindy: Buy it outright from the antique shop. No Mad Monkey, no Kate, no spitting contest. Rum Rogers: No monkey wrench puzzle, the waterfall is already shut off. Rum Rogers is gone so no drinking contest, you can push any brick and go down to the skeleton and grap the map piece. I don't think you have to enter the library once in Lite mode.

I do remember at the time the SE came out, somebody found that tweaking one of the settings in the games' data did enable easy mode in the SE. The easy mode dialogue is all voiced and everything puzzle-wise is accounted for, though I think I remember one or two glitches being present here and there given that easy mode was never meant to be included. Will report back here if I find it...

I played Monkey Island 2 on easy mode first because other than quickly losing interest in Kings Quest V (understandable imo), it was my first adventure game. It still took me and my younger brother weeks and weeks and weeks to beat. I still remember the little differences like Largo just having some folded clothes that you can pick up, and some little incidental dialog here and there, but I agree there aren’t many additions. Because I played east first, and was 10-11 years old or something, my brother and friends and I were convinced we hadn’t seen the “real” ending. Or maybe more appropriately, I remember being suspicious of it and feeling like I hadn’t seen the whole thing. So we dove back in and played it on normal. And I remember we found it SUPER HARD. Especially putting the rat in the soup just took forever. My friend called the 900 number hint line with his parents permission, and when he called me to tell us the solution, we got to hurriedly tell him that MY BROTHER HAD JUST FIGURED IT OUT. His hint line time: wasted. I remember getting to the captain Kate stuff and feeling like the game was absolutely huge. Then we got to the end and it was exactly the same, and I remember all of us collectively saying “okay that’s what it is then.” Honestly, formative as hell haha.

Honestly that might be the one place where the game is funnier on easy mode than on normal difficulty. It still makes me snicker to think about. (For those who don't remember, the puzzle solution is to ask Wally if he has any ideas, and his response is "Well, I might have one...but you have to close your eyes." Then the screen goes black and you hear a PSSSSST sound.) As a kid I played on easy mode first and when I played on normal I couldn't believe it cut one of the game's funniest jokes.

I never finished MI2 on hard mode for many years growing up, because our Macintosh computer was so slow that you could bang the trash cans behind Elaine's mansion and leave the screen before the cook ever showed up. We had the hint book, but I didn't realize for years that you had to wait for the cook to appear before walking off the screen. As for easy mode, probably the biggest change, besides Largo's folded dress shirt as Jake mentioned, is that Guybrush escapes the acid pit by asking Wally to pee on the candle.

I picked up the first season for PC and Switch, and it was glorious. I'll be picking up the second season too - probably on both platforms, but definitely on the Switch. The thing I liked about the original mini CD was that not only was it shaped like a record, but it had a record groove noise on the music as well. I thought that was a fun touch.

I don’t know the answer to this! Maybe he DID do an audition for zombie LeChuck and it wasn’t as strong? Or maybe the team was hoping Boen could be used just for those parts so it was cordoned off as a separate smaller role (which obviously didn’t happen at launch but wouldn’t surprise me as an attempt that was made by the team)? Honestly I don’t know for sure; I wasn’t involved in the casting really other than in the communal team pressure to get Boen back for episodes 4 and 5.

Yeah, that's the £150 one I linked to an unboxing of! (He links to it in his pinned comment.)

Yeah, the main thing that would hold me back is how amazing that diary seems to be for only £40 (make sure you've got 'prop replica' style selected). 235 pages of content, plus 24 impressive inserts, themed packaging, and it's all hand-aged..! Plus they have 'made in the USA' logos, but they're based in China, they don't have a Facebook or Instagram (the links just take you to those sites' homepage) and there are only two reviews for it which are both dated in the last couple of days, and in the video on one of those reviews all the inserts look massive, which is a bit odd. If I could find a reddit thread or something with some reviews that didn't feel astroturfed, I might be tempted to risk the £40+p&p..! edit: I did find this while googling around! https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/537089950/make-your-own-grail-diary-200-high And also this unwrapping of a pre-made one (also from etsy, but it's £150): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShgKh1WHUDA They all seem to be working with very similar material, maybe kittiway bought that pdf pack and are willing to make it up for people on the cheap, I dunno...

I remember looking this up a couple of years ago and being absolutely baffled. Lite mode doesn’t just simplify puzzles, but it cuts out a lot (most of) the story. Give me Curse style difficulty anytime (although, looking at that tweet, technically that does cut puzzles too though.) I’ve got a LeChuck casting question that’s been burning a hole in me for a couple of days now. Maybe @Jake can answer this for me? When casting LeChuck for Tales of Monkey Island, initially two actors were chosen, Adam Harrington for his zombie form and Kevin Blackton for his human form. I think pretty much everyone agrees that Blackton had the stronger performance. Why wasn’t Blackton chosen to do both? It would have been an easy solution since Telltale was recasting the role anyway?

All time great easy-mode-only gag. A+++

I think this view discounts the existence of Game Pass. Double Fine’s medium size games seem like they’d be an awesome fit for that service.

Andy Kelly ignored my reply to that tweet, asking if he had secret news. So I'm taking that as a super-double-confirmation!

Bear in mind that Mario is Nintendo's flagship game. They literally use that franchise to sell hardware, they have a lot of money and a very good reason to spend lots of it... They have a lot more resource available to them than Double Fine. That said, honestly for me Psychonauts 2 was one of the most polished gaming experiences I've ever had. I just loved it from top to bottom. (And am sad DF didn't get any BAFTAs despite so many nominations.) I'm still hoping they take the Psychonauts 2 engine and remake the first game with that level of polish one day. So anyway... any more news about Loom?

I'm pretty sure Tim has gone on record saying the next thing it he makes he'd want to be completely new, but it wouldn't shock me if he revisited Brutal Legend in a few years. I think that'd happen before another adventure

Well to be fair you most likely haven't seen any other 3D platforming staples since the early 2000s because the genre is quite dead. And sure, Nintendo is still making these games but they have the benefit of countless years of iteration and the fact that a Mario game can be even more abstract than a Psychonauts and when level design gets to be like that you won't really notice invisible walls and such. Double Fine on the other hand is kind of a jack of all trades, master of none developer were mechanical depth and polish usually takes a backseat to world building. It's not like how for example id Software is second to none at making FPS because that's the only thing they've done since the early 90s. I still remember how hard it was for me to get into playing Psychonauts after Prince of Persia The Sands of Time because gameplay wise Psychonauts was a huge step back but the writing and the insane world building still pulled me through. The same goes for Brütal Legend that is all things considered pretty bad at being a third person hack n slash / RTS hybrid (it definitely is better at the RTS though) but it has the most awesome and brütal world going for it. In a sense I think these shortcomings in gameplay design was what always made their bigger games not do that well. I've yet to play Psychonauts 2 but it's nice that I've only heard good things about it and it seems pretty obvious that the switch to Unreal (and maybe all that Microsoft QA) benefitted the game's technical quality.

Just as a point of information, yes, Tim has said that if they had only gotten around the $400K mark they were planning on making a low-fi SCUMM/Flash-like adventure game. (Also, I should point out that the budget for FT was over $1mil in 1995 money, so at $300K - iirc they planned for 25% of the money to go on the doc - it wouldn't even have been in the FT range!) As for if Tim will make another PnC, I feel like maybe he might decide to do something interesting with them again, but it won't be for a good 5-10 years.

On the topic of what I want, I think I'm more part inclined to want something that feels modern than a throwback, mainly because I don't really enjoy the perception of adventure games as a throwback genre. I think they can, and sometimes do, tell great, contemporary feeling stories now. And it was for that reason it's taken me a long time to play Thimbleweed Park. Firstly, the graphical style it's going for wasn't one I'm particularly nostalgic for (I like the look of the backgrounds but those MM style characters don't do much for me) and Secondly I was worried it was going to be so self-consciously a throwback that it would end up getting in its own way. I've played Thimbleweed for 4 hours at time of writing, and while I'm used to the art at this point, and actively enjoy aspects of the look, I do think parts of my second worry are at least partly true. It feels like it can't go five minutes without some sort of self-conscious joke about some aspect of adventure game mechanics, or some reference to the old days, and I... just don't find that sort of humour that engaging when it's overused. Monkey Island arguably had 3 'you can't die' jokes in its first 3 games (the falling off a cliff joke, I guess the falling into the acid pit joke, and the gravedigger's joke in CMI) but I've played this for 4 hours and there have already been 3 or 4 jokes on this theme. It was okay by the first time, but a little tedious by the 3rd time. It's so self-aware that I actually think it wraps back around to being not self aware about just how self aware it's being. And I am enjoying it, more than I thought I would, but with those caveats in place. If Tim or Ron or anyone else wants to make a throwback adventure game, my thought is by all means let 'em, but please, I beg you, constantly winking at the camera and saying, 'see, this is like what those old games were like' doesn't actually make it feel like the old games, it just reminds me of how far we are removed from them now. Personally, I'd rather they avoid the problem altogether and focus on making a great, modern game, with great characters and world building and puzzles, and trust the player to make the connection between this and what they made in the past all by themselves.

I am going to preface this comment by confirming unequivocally that I adored Broken Age and would love Double Fine to make more adventure games if they want to. When Double Fine did their Tim Schafer Adventure Game kickstarter, I found out about it maybe 6-8 hours after it went live. As I'm sure you all remember, by that point it had already reached its funding goal and was well on its way to setting all kinds of records. It proved, immediately, that there was an appetite for adventure games. I remember thinking about that old infamous LucasArt's quote about "current marketplace realities" and sort of smugly thinking, "see? if you build it, they will come" - or in this case, if Tim Schafer asks us if we'd pay him up front for a new adventure game, the answer would be a three-million-dollar "YES". What we ended up getting from Double Fine, as others have said in this thread, was more than just an adventure game. We got a fully transparent production of an adventure game from inception through to release, and it was truly money well spent as a backer. I got plenty of goodies from my pledge level and in the end I also got an adventure game that I truly enjoyed. Tim Schafer took on the project from the position of a former-adventure game developer who was returning to the genre after a long gap, and wanted to modernise the experience. This was (and is) absolutely fine - just like Ron with Return to Monkey Island, I wanted Tim to make the game that TIM wanted to make. But a part of me felt like the kickstarter had really been about nostalgia, and wanting to revisit the LucasArts days. Had Tim decided to go down that road and make a game in the style of, say, Full Throttle, I'd also have been happy about it. (Actually, I wonder if that was the original intention now - a small low budget, SCUMM-style game. And then it only expanded into what it became because they got so much more money than they were asking for. I'm sure the answer is out there somewhere in an interview or on the documentary, but I guess it's irrelevant now.) What I'm meandering to here is that Thimbleweed Park felt like a conscious response to this. A similar kickstarter to the one Double Fine did, but this time explicitly with the intention of making a throwback, retro adventure game. As they put it at the time, they wanted it to feel like finding an old LucasArts game from the late 1980s in a drawer and realising you'd never actually played it. And I found myself being, for whatever internal reasons, massively more excited by the prospect of Thimbleweed Park than I was by Broken Age. Of course, Thimbleweed Park came and went, and I found it to be a really entertaining adventure game, just like Broken Age was, but it felt way closer to the early LucasArts games of my memory because it used retro graphics and had verb interfaces and all that stuff. It was truly a product for a person like ME, and I was really grateful for it. Now Ron Gilbert is working on his next adventure game, Return to Monkey Island, and we all know it isn't going to be a Thimbleweed Park. It's going to be a Broken Age. It's going to be Ron Gilbert consciously bringing his design sensibilities into 2022; the graphics will not be retro, there will not be a verb interface, and it will not feel like a game we found in a drawer and had forgotten about. And that's fine! But it has made me think about what I even WANT from these old LucasArts developers when they sit down and make new games for us. Do I want Thimbleweed Parks, or do I want Broken Ages? I have a natural tendency towards nostalgia, so it's little wonder I'm drawn more to the Thimbleweed Park style games. But of course, it's utterly unrealistic to expect those games now. It was frankly a miracle that we even got ONE more of them. And I'm not stupid enough to think that the old fashioned pixels and verb interfaces are inherently BETTER than any other way of playing adventure games. The fact of the matter is, I loved Broken Age, and I'm really excited for Return to Monkey Island - I couldn't care less what type of interface Ron thinks is right in this day and age, I just want to explore another world created by these game developers. So in answer to the question about Tim Schafer, I don't really think he's ever going to make another "point and click" adventure game again. But that's okay. Whatever he makes in the future, I'll be there to give it a try.

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