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I took some quick photos to show some friends the funny pictures in the manual for the Japanese version of the Sega CD Monkey Island, so I thought I'd share here for anyone who's interested in this kind of thing. Apologies for any poor quality etc.

I think the people coming to Ron’s (online) home to yell in his face is a problem. I also think people who don’t like the art style trying to claim they speak for others (or accuse others of lying or having an ulterior motive for saying they like the art) is also a problem. That is the actual objectionable behavior. And it has been happening. It’s fine to not like the art. It’s fine to be disappointed. It’s even fine to be mad about it. But do it on your own time, and don’t take it out on other people. From every poll about the art that has shown up on Twitter, Reddit, and even Facebook where the most arms-folded adventure curmudgeons seem to hang out these days, the answer skews overwhelmingly positive, so any sense of a groundswell or anger or disappointment really is a small group of people trying to take up all the air in the room, get in peoples faces, rally others to their cause. Again, if people were just saying “I don’t like it because X, it makes me feel Y, which really sucks,” that would be fully fine! And many of people who are feeling that way are saying those things, but an unfortunate number of the comments can’t resist going a step further, into conspiratorial speculation — “it’s a sell out choice” “it’s a cheap out” “Disney made them,” etc — because they’re seemingly unwilling to accept that other people see the world differently from them or have different tastes, that there must be some nefarious reason for their disappointment. That stuff is what really gets me down. A person not liking a creative choice? We’ve all been there! Being unwilling to accept that’s all it is? Ooof.

The other thing I forgot to respond to on this post is this. And like... maybe I shouldn't try to be Batman. But it's what I was saying before. I often wondered whether I was spending too much time responding to misguided comments on Double Fine's forums. And then I met Tim Schafer one day and was a bit too shy to explain exactly who I was on the forums, and he found out later on and sent me this: And I have to admit I was kind of bowled over, but since then I've always felt like going out of my way to speak up when I have the energy to, because you never know who might be looking and appreciating it from a distance and thinking 'I'm glad someone said it'. I think often times when you're a creator you feel like you can't wade into heated discussions, because of a need to keep a professional distance, so I guess it's nice when there's someone there to say the thing you really wanted to say.

Since the thread has been bumped and I'm sure you're all dying to know - I did indeed play through the EGA version of Loom a little while after making this post. Moriarty - and you guys - are not wrong. The EGA version takes a massive dump all over the talkie edition. Pretty sad that the version of Loom available on Steam is the bad one, especially because anyone who is put off by it being - shall we say, an historic artefact - isn't going to be made happy just because it has 256 colours and some ropey speech. Luckily I was able to acquire EGA Loom from archive.org, which I'm sure is 101% legitimate and above board. I see the appeal of the game a lot more now! It's amazing what they were able to wring out of 16 colours. The video above on the previous page 😡 looks great - will have to watch at some point!

I posted this on Ron's blog but I think people here might be interested too, so: By the way, if anyone reading this wants to get more of a feel for Rex Crowle and how he thinks about developing a visual style for a game, he did a really interesting talk about this in the context of Knights and Bikes called "Overtaking nostalgia to create the fantasy of Knights & Bikes", which you can find online on twitch and places if you search for it. I was lucky enough to be present for this talk, and I've been following his career since. (Incidentally I really enjoy the thing he says about influences on visuals not having to be visual - I've been saying this for years, that it's never too early to engage a musician on a project - concept music can, in some ways, work just as well as concept visuals) No matter what you think about the tiny amount you've seen so far of Return, it's extremely clear to me that Rex is a guy who really thinks very deeply about developing a visual style, and was never going to just throw something together thoughtlessly, and that we're really going to need to see the whole thing to get the full effect. I think a lot of the themes that he was thinking about for K&B have overlap with Monkey Island, and I know he's a huge fan so believe me when I say he's one of us. He's exactly the kind person who would have been disk swapping Monkey Island on his Amiga 500, and who feels the atmosphere of Monkey Island in his bones. This project is very probably an absolute dream come true for him, and I hope one day to see a talk from him where he shows some of his working like he did with K&B.

Man, that character just IS stan, to me.

If the trailer is any indication, the full effect of the art cannot be perfectly represented in the screenshots. There will be camera motion, flowing animations, atmospheric effects, parallax scrolling, etc. Similar in many ways to the Telltale tool. I'll bet that shot of Melee town, for example, will have the foreground rooftops on a different plane to the backdrop art, possibly with some additional fog/camera effects, giving the piece a greater layer of depth and atmosphere than what might be coming across in the art.

It’s not a real spoiler. It’s about how Grumpy Gamer comments are turned on again. Agreed that if any real spoilers show up folks should use spoiler tags aggressively. Eventually we may need to make a dedicated spoiler thread, but so far it’s been all speculation no spoilers, so it’s fine.

I feel more sorry for Rex than Ron on this one. I'm sure he must have anticipated it but I think no matter how much you do, it must sting a little to be a fan of something since forever, land an absolute dream gig of being able to work on it, putting your heart into your interpretation and then getting told by some people that you did it wrong or don't get it. I get that's just... the nature of this, but I still think it would be nice if people paused for 5 seconds before putting their words out into the world.

Definitley agree. I think the animation in the trailer really brings it together. The screenshots really don't give us the full picture. I kinda wish instead of screenshots they posted 30 second clips that showed off how the game will look and feel when not static. I really hope there is a proper reveal soon. Maybe next month. They need to show gameplay of Guybrush in action, i think that would calm alot of peoples concerns.

That's the thing I like about some of these drawings, they didn't shy away from wild creative freedoms. Stans coat doesn't have the plaid texture, but has a weird intimidating look on its own. Also, great scarf. Also now we know that the Voodoo Lady has a part-time job as a professional wrestler.

What? No GameCube version of Psychonauts?!? I'm angrily marching to their forums right now!!

It’s one thing to not be so keen on the art. Sure, that’s an opinion, life goes on. It’s the way they treat it almost like a campaign, like they’ll get what they want by just going on… and on… and on. You sometimes see this sort of thing manifest into review bombing, etc. I hate it. This is the art style. That ship has sailed. Enjoy the game or do not. But nobody really needs to be hearing ranting and raving about how it looks. It’s just poisonous and sad.

It Is truly weird how the Guybrush MI 2 sprite leaves so much to the brain for interpretation. To me he always looked to be in a coat waaaay too big for him, his hands half covered by the sleeves, the bottom worn from being a bit too long. I fully realize that this is just my brains interpretation and other may see it differently but I think that itself is really interesting

With the development version of ScummVM, you can also replace the music in the EGA version. It's still subject to the limitations of the original music, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out: https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Loom#Audio_tracks

I also only saw it recently when someone mentioned it on one of my YouTube comments. Dialogue/singing from both SE and VGA below: The 100 bottles of beer dialogue is slightly different for the SE as you can only pick between 4, 42 or 508 while in the DOS version it seems to be completely random. They most likely did this to avoid recording all the numbers.

The vast majority of comments now is positive. Unfortunately, the negative tormentors, I mean commentors, have the tendency to bla majorly. I really understand how responding adequately to such nonsense doesn't serve a real purpose besides generating instant negativity. "Don't try to be Batman" is one of the central teachings I took away from "Crash Override". But with comments like that, it's so_damn_difficult. I'm absolutely okay with people that didn't like the artwork at first sight. I myself was exactly as shocked and provoked by the artwork as Ron Gilbert vocally intended. But this. These "arguments", the artwork supposedly looking "generic" or cheap or "like a mobile game", whatever that means. I don't know how to handle that without exploding. I've tried for 18 years to draw and paint, and I haven't got an ounce of Crowle's inventiveness, creativity and stylistic consistency. These backgrounds aren't jotted down, they are meticulously planned. The composition is, the angles are, the color scheme is. The position of the main character is, his impact is planned. 🎯 And why doesn't this guy know that the LeChuck's Revenge Special Edition was mostly outsourced to "some sweatshop" aka Lucasfilm Animation Singapore? I really hope Rex and his entire team can disregard comments like that by people who don't know their sh*t, and I hope those comments won't reflect negatively on the MI fandom as a whole. It's clear what's happening here, we're tapping into childhood memories which elevate MI1 and MI2 (or even CMI for those late to the party) to a level of perfection that these games never had. The visual nostalgia was always destined to be the most bitter and divisive battlefield. I still think that this kind of gatekeeping mentality is more prevalent in other franchises, but I kind of dread the release of the first Guybrush pictures. 💣

Well anyway, here's a 2015 post-mortem of the first Loom with Brian Moriarty. At the end he says there are three companies he'd trust to make the sequel - Telltale, Double Fine, and Wadjet Eye Games.

E3 is cancelled, but Summer Game Fest starts on the 9th of June. Devolver always have a big showcase there, so I think a peek at the game there is pretty much locked in. Having said that, we don't even know how close the game is to coming out. Maybe they'll drop a trailer tomorrow and it'll be out in 2 weeks, or it won't be finished til December. I'm inclined to think it's closer than we think though because they were doing voiceover and music recording when the announcement dropped, which is generally the last thing to be done, and Thimbleweed Park was released around 2-3 months after voices were added in. All I know is that I'm craving more.

If people have the energy to post positive/not agressive or flame-warry rebuttals to some of the comments, then it may well be appreciated. Back in the Double Fine Kickstarter days I pretty heavily posted on their forums, and spent quite a lot of time correcting folks' knee jerk responses to stuff and misinformation and... while I was mostly polite I was worried that I was adding to the noise and helping to maintain a bad atmosphere. But years later I learned that they knew my name in the office, and they really appreciated the time I took being a voice of reason. So later on I'll definitely be posting some encouraging words over on the site.

The season 3 box is honestly the one I'm the most looking forward to because they don't have a case file to base it on this time so it'll most likely a brand new set of case file goodies! I like seeing people on the Sam and Max discord server talk and speculate sometimes on what the collectors will have, I'd personally be very happy with owning the soundtrack physically so that is one of my top most wanted things for it (I have the first 2 so I gotta get that 3rd one to let my collector brain rest). A figure would also be REALLY cool but those are harder to produce/doesn't really align with the whole "souvenirs from each episode" theme that the other case files have, so I know it's way less likely to happen. I'm probably gonna be weak of heart and buy The Devil's Playhouse Remastered digitally on the day of its release but whatever the collectors edition has, I'll still buy it, I just know it's something I'll want to spend my hard earned money on, Skunkape Games doesn't disapoint.

Like a lot of Rex's stuff it'll really come into it's own once in motion. He actually makes really expressive characters, so I'm not worried about that aspect at all. By the way, Ron has actually posted a comment on the blog: I think everyone is just very anxious to see it in motion but I trust the art team to have put together something special, I really do.

I also really like this one. Man... i really really want to see Rex's new take on Guybrush.

Nice piece of fan art imagining ReMI Guybrush. 🙂

Definitley, the last thing i want is the team changing their vision to fit what fans think they want. I want Ron and Dave's vision.

It's grimly relieving that this game was announced well after all the primary creative decisions were under glass. It seems unlikely that a team of professional game developers would ever depart from their own tastes and instincts in response to men's room graffiti, but between Ron feeling the need to put his blog in timeout and Dom directly engaging with Reddit comments to address the feedback, it's unfortunately clear that there is some personal impact here, so knowing that the shrillest voices were denied the ability to have even a subconscious influence on the game's development is satisfying.

The Governor Marley song is in the Amiga version. The one thing I remember from the scripts (other than some iMUSE stuff being reduced, and palette colors obviously having to be changed) is that the mixing of different-colored drinks in the Woodtick bar was removed.

Oh yes I have, and I love them but there is a difference between action fgures and a figure that was made to have a specific pose and expression, to me at least. I guess I just want a chance to get a cool thing like the Symbiote figure from 2012, it's got such cool poses and has so much personality, if I had known what the internet or money even was when it came out I would have totally bought it without hesitation, my biggest regret in life is not having been born 20 years earlier lol. It's pretty impossible to get nowadays (unless you want to pay more than $1000 on ebay for it). I know it's a pretty selfish reason though, most people would probably be satisfied with the boss fight action figures.

Yeah, I felt the need to respond to that "corporate cash grab" comment myself, just because reading the full comment, I felt like the guy genuinely believed he was leaving constructive feedback. People forget that there are actually real people behind this, who maybe have friendships and working relationships with each other. So I did respond, biting my tongue enough not to get nasty but unable to conceal a little venom:

Well that would be a shame

Another example of something I learned from the scripts (that I COULD have learned by just playing the game) is how many bespoke lines there are for blowing the ship's horn in various locations.

I think it's fine to make a post about differences between versions of the game. It was a very interesting discovery about the removal of the word "midget", for example. I never knew that. I just think it was put in the wrong thread? No idea why it was added to this Loom one.

It's so strange and weird, I love it! I like Guybrushs (Gaiburashi Suriipuuddo) look, and Stan is just wild. And excellent map drawings. 👌 Thank you for digging that up.

I think we've tipped past the peak with the art issue and descended into being a reactionary counter-jerk. It seems now to be vastly more people complaining about other people complaining which really isn't any more helpful that the latter. People are going to have negative and positive responses to the art regardless. Better to just drop it and move on.

It’s worth noting we get a pretty good look at Guybrush in a few circumstances: These really cemented an overall look in my mind for Guybrush, much like the cover art and close-ups did for SMI. Note that gold trim appears on the in-game sprite only. Regarding the concept, yeah that Guybrush does appear to be from the Special Edition concepts.

Have you not ordered the 2 Boss Fight Studios sets of figures of Sam and Max?

Oh, and don't worry. I'd never. Depending on when ReMI will be available on DRM/launcher free platforms, I'll have to rely on you folks to keep things very very spoiler free.

I won’t click if it’s really a spoiler for the new game. Please keep using spoiler tags while further discussing this, people. Thanks in advance!

I was wrong about where Remi's thought process would lead. But then, he is unknowable. 👕 I beat #Mojole and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 3/6 💛🖤💚🖤💚 🖤💛💛🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

I wrong a big long reply to this, but I'll spare everyone and just say... I completely (but respectfully) disagree

When I looked into this thread, I thought I'd be reading about Loom. Instead I found another discussion about political correctness in Mi2 and people talking about pretend nazis. The last few posts were people trying to continually get the last word in, which only served to aggravate the others. I deleted all of that to get things back on track because I honestly thought you would all take the hint and move on. I'm sorry for overestimating you.

This and exactly this! Couldn’t have put it better myself. Just focus on writing a good story. I don’t know if anyone’s interested in the works of Carl Barks and Don Rosa, but if you read the Carl Barks stories, he has such a wonderful free style of writing, which has story above all. If Donald Duck needs a second story to his house for a comic, he just has one. No need to explain it. It’s fun to read the Don Rosa comics too, because they came after the Barks comics and try to make an interwoven story of it (especially the Scrooge stories). They’re great comics in their own right, but he sometimes writes himself into corners, because he tries to make “canon” out of it. Back on topic: Gee, isn’t Monkey Island swell?

Not sure what's happened here, but people have already been warned about certain topics of conversation that are not up for debate. That does not mean people aren't allowed to make a thread about differences between MI2 versions if they want to.

Wow, sorry to add noise (feel free to delete the post after you read it) but as a regular Mojo reader and forum user I just felt a bit uncomfortable, it really does look like mentioning some things will only trigger a lot of aggressive and hostile behavior. I think you can trust me as I never, ever had any kind of argument with anyone here and I'm quite the peaceful dude. It just comes up as an attitude that leads users to think "wait, am I allowed to post this here without stepping on someone's toes?", like we're all walking on thin ice. You have every right to just reply "OK get the hell away if you don't like it", but I don't think it's wise or appropriate to just kick out those who politely make a point.

Maybe in RtMI Jojo goes to the International House of Mojo and transforms into... MOJO JOJO!!!

Seeing as we’re really getting into the weeds here, the colour of his jacket is another continuity error. 😀

Yes, not to mention the possibility of some sort of time jump. But I think the situation of Stan being inside a coffin since MI2 and somehow getting transported to Blood Island and somehow not dying in the intervening time is already ridiculous enough that you could handwave ANY explanation for it. It would be a kind of fun joke payoff if we found out in ReMI that the coffin in CMI is actually a completely different coffin that he's ended up in for another, unrelated reason.

Just what I thought. If CMI is canon, Stan can't be in ReMI. Well, if someone cuts a hole into the left and right side of his confinement, we would have a wildly hand waving coffin, which would be hilarious and wouldn't break canon. But I'd actually rather have Jojo return! Because he plays the piano, almost as badly as I do, and Guybrush didn't listen to his mom and didn't practise enough. Also we need to get a band together with unnamed ghost lady at the violin.

Oof, that was a close one! I have an idea for what the answer might be tomorrow. At least, what it might be if Remi's brain works the same as mine, which we all know it doesn't. Sicko. 👕 I beat #Mojole and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 6/6 🖤💚💚🖤🖤 🖤💚💚🖤🖤 🖤💚💚🖤🖤 🖤💚💚🖤🖤 🖤💚💚🖤💚 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

New: A very light interview with Ron and Dave (and Sid Meier) that doesn't add much new info: https://www.theage.com.au/technology/video-games/monkey-island-is-back-but-don-t-call-it-a-90s-throwback-game-20220505-p5airk.html