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Sorry if I post too much about the voice direction of the SE’s. I work in the dubbing industry, so it’s professional deformation. If someone in my field delivered a product in that fashion he’d be butchered, and I just can’t stand that it happened to Monkey Island, something that’s so dear to me.

I definitely had the feeling in MI1SE that the game wasn’t meant to be read, and could feel some of the actors struggling with many of the lines, but you’re right, the fundamentals were all there and in place. They likely just needed better direction, and the overseers of the voicework likely needed more farmiliarity with the material. Some still came out perfectly, though. Like LeChuck and the storekeeper. I definitely had that feeling far less in MI2SE. Maybe it’s just down to it being a better written game in terms of dialogue, or maybe the direction improved, but I felt the cast, particularly Dom, managed that game a lot better.

I think Wally deserves a particular special mention for having the same actor in the MI2SE as in CMI, but it’s the wrong bloody voice. You would expect the actor and/or director to have been aware of and checked the performance in CMI, but apparently at no point did this happen. For me it really typifies the general lack of direction happening with the SEs, even if fundamentally the voices are mostly fine.

I have a theory that the word "love" being spoken aloud was a result of the word being present in the "dialogue dump" from the games' script. The word appeared in the Guybrush script, so they had Dom read it just to cover all bases, likely without having a clue where it appeared in the game! Plus. the joke is ruined in the SE on two accounts. With subtitles on, the word "love" isn't positioned properly over his face, and with the subtitles off, the word doesn't even appear! I doubt that part went through any kind of testing!

That's a matter of taste. If you have 2.5 hours to spare, you can listen to two guys comparing the EGA and VGA versions here: Me, I'm on "Team EGA". I don't care about the minor palette differences, but I think the DOS version sounds better than the Mac version. The only replacement music I've used is the Seiji Ozawa recording with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It seemed appropriate, since apparently that was used as tempo reference when adapting the music for the game. Though after all the replaying I had to do to get that, and other things, working properly in ScummVM, it'll probably be a while before I want to play through the game from start to finish again. 😛

The old games are written to be read, tbh. The delivery and timing in your imagination is better than any voice acting.

I never got off Melee. It was just so misjudged that I had to quit while I still had good memories of the original intact. Apart from Guybrush, LeChuck and The Storekeeper (as I say I never got off Melee, so there may be others) the voice casting was so off. Everyone secondary character was doing a stereotypical pirate impression and performances meant the humour was lost. (Even the usually perfect Armato seemed off at times -- as if they rushed him through the lines or picked his worst takes.) The new interface was awful to use. The animation felt horrible. Guybrush looked terrible. There were graphical glitches throughout. They messed up jokes... sigh. It was brutal. Beyond fan patch remedy. The backlash felt deserved with the first SE (despite the best intentions of the creators -- I'm sure they believed they were doing good). Perhaps it was budget constraints, I don't know. Thankfully they got a lot of stuff right in the sequel. Even a die hard like me enjoyed it.

@Jake who do I blame for Morgan stealing my heart?

I don't really have a beef with the performances, I just think it's a quality of the writing in those days that works best with your inner voice. They weren't expecting anyone to act out those lines, they were crafting them with the intent of their words rendering in glorious pixelated text. The dialogue has a pithy, Far Side cadence to it. So deadpan it's silent. Now that I've seen a bunch of SCUMM script I appreciate what a great creative tool it was for letting multiple people write a game collaboratively. That's what gives MI its charm, writing it was functionally pretty close to just some dudes making each other laugh on a BBS.

Funny you said that, my first encounter with Monkey Island was that same demo. It was love at first sight. I don’t have any beef with the casting of the main characters in the SE’s, though I think they too could’ve benefited from better direction. It’s most of the side characters that were newly cast that I don’t like for above mentioned reasons. Compare it to the diverse characters from CMI and how every voice and performance just *clicks*, that just never happens in the SE’s. That’s why I played them once and never touched them again. (Come to think of it, I think I didn’t even finish the first one.) This sums it up very well, and good example!

Seeing all the various versions reminds me of my earliest Loom experience. I don't know how or why, but when I first played Loom on floppy as part of the "Classic Adventures" collection on my Windows 3.11 PC, it showed up in a bizarre 3-color presentation--yellow, black and white. In some parts of the game this rendered the dialogue totally illegible--I remember not knowing that Stoke had any lines, assuming that for some reason it just kept showing me his glowering face to let me know he was upset with me. Same with Cob. By complete accident I eventually realized that this was apparently happening because I was playing without the disk in the drive--putting it in caused the game to boot in full 16-color mode. None of the other games in that collection played any differently without the disk in the drive, and I've never heard anyone else mention this happening, so I've sometimes wondered over the years if I imagined it--but my memories of it are so clear and specific that I can't quite make myself believe it. (I remember being shocked on seeing Master Goodmold in EGA because I'd assumed he was wearing a full-face black mask with lenses over the eye-holes, and on seeing Fleece because I'd thought she was supposed to be quite elderly.) Clearly the game was never MEANT to be played like that, but I've always wondered what the deal was and if it ever happened to anyone else.

Yes, I heard them again recently (for the Amiga thread). They were "generate pirate voices" but still probably little better than the MI1:SE? I seem to remember one being significantly dopier than the other, for example. But given that the Caribbean would have been a mix of different European cultures, there was a real opportunity for at least variation through the accents, but anyway... I'm glad I'm not alone with my thoughts on the voice work in the SE. I know people talk about dialogue designed to be written vs spoken, but a great actor can turn clunky dialogue into something sparkling (and teamed with a great director, you've got even more chance to make that happen). I've seen my own clunky writing been transformed by the magic of acting before -- and it really something incredible how subtly and nuance can be added, elevating everything you've written. The actors seemed to miss all the humour in MI1 -- and I don't necessarily blame them. It takes time and money to do things well. Classic example of a bad delivery: "My name is Mancomb Seepgood". The humour from the line (for me) comes from the character's face falling when he delivers his name. He's gleefully mocking Guybrush's name but then has to concede his own isn't any less silly. Without that context (which a director needs to provide), the actor will just the line without any subtext, "My name is Mancomb Seepgood" (see below). Brutal

Fully agreed. Playing Monkey 1 and 2 both occupy a pretty awesome and unique place in my mind where the writing is captivating the same way as a good book, including choosing what to say next having a feeling similar to “turning the page,” but then it’s also a visually rich game world I can explore that somehow feels real to my brain. The way suspension of disbelief in those early games work is really cool and irregular. That era-specific confluence of technology and ideas lead to what is basically a unique type of media (in this case the combo was text-based point and click graphic adventure game) that only lasted for a few years, was really magical. And Monkey 1 and 2 are for my money easily the best version of that short lived form. I don’t think it’s inherently superior to other types of adventure games, but that combo definitely is its own flavor. While it’s fun to hear the voices in the SE, it almost feels like an audiobook at times to me, for this reason. (Aside: It’s understandable why people at the time were trying to coin the phrase “multimedia.” I think that phrase is kind of a miss, because it looked at all these strange mishmash combinations of analog and digital technologies being combined in unique ways to make new works, and put them all under the same umbrella, but in practice that didn’t seem super accurate. Sure some artists were deliberately going very high level conceptual with it and explicitly using different media types as part of the point of a work, but for a lot of people, “multimedia” was just means to an end - a way to get the desired experience out of an early computer that could only do so much. As a kid/teen I never really understood the term “multimedia” to mean anything, because to me it was just “how you make a thing with a computer.” Now that a bunch of time has gone by and that bashed together style has sort of faded into history, I can appreciate it a little more as a handy retrospective term to apply, and the multimedia nature of these games sticks out to me more than it did, in a good way. The same way I can now go and look at the pixel artistry of Monkey 1 or Loom in a way I didn’t really as a kid because it was just “good graphics,” I have a lot of fun picking apart all the disparate types of media, process, and technology that make up these games from before the era of functionally-unlimited AV and standardized graphics and sound pipelines. This is a jumble of thoughts, sorry! Through the lens of time, I’ve come to appreciate more how unique the construction of early games are, especially LucasArts games, which I think are mind blowingly impressive combinations of so many skill sets and techniques and technology that blend into a seamless experience, but when looked at as a pile of components it’s absolutely wild and unprecedented, and basically unrepeatable. I think Full Throttle is the pinnacle of this, but it’s present in the studio’s DNA from the earliest days.)

I had a few mins so thought I'd have another look. I've found a different impression, this one without the red. some subtle blue around the islands. https://www.hipkiss.org/cgi-bin/zoom.pl?id=653 apparently 1200 dpi is available EDIT scratch that: it's slightly different -it doesn't have the concentric lines around the islands Interestingly though this one is Engraved by Hughes himself, and doesn't have the concentrics, the G.E.Sherman one might be a later re-engraving?

True, but that’s no excuse for lazy casting and bad direction.

I think it could have used Khris Brown. I didn't hate the casting choices, but ... well, the voice director they had mostly worked on Star Wars games and I think this needed someone who was more familiar with the script of these games because in both 1 and 2 SE there are more moments than I'd like where the line read doesn't fit with the context, or is odd in some other way!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the voice direction was the worst!! What did you think of it in MI2:SE? I recently looked at some footage of Bart and Fink and there’s the generic pirate accents again. (“So, who is this character that I’m playing? What’s his backstory? What does he feel?” “He’s a pirate! Just go AARRR!”) And then the singing… the singing!!! It’s bad enough with Bart and Fink (99 bottles of beer on the wall is totally off, like they put the first take where the last one should be), but as if that wasn’t bad enough, they completely butchered the bone song! Where in the original, I could almost here the voices due to the perfect combination of music and text, the sung version in the SE is out of tune, out of rhythm and plain ugly! And don’t get me started on the voice of Largo… If I could make that second SE of those games (see last page), I’d throw almost all the voices out (except main cast and a few exceptions) and rerecord them.

While we might have to agree to disagree on the voices, I totally understand your position on the first SE. I don't mind the new art, it was really just the bugs and lack of polish to some of the backgrounds that prevent it from being the definitive version it could have been. As I understand it, the first SE was mostly developed in secret and wasn't given any sort of a budget (I suspect mainly for the voices and remastered music) until they had enough of a working build to formally pitch to the higher ups at Lucasarts. MI2 on the other hand had a full budget thanks to the succes of the first one which is why it's such an improvement. I would love to see them go back and fix up the backgrounds, add the interface from 2 and implement more customization options that the DOTT remaster benefited from (old gfx with new interface/music, voices in classic mode, etc) and address some bugs (it really annoys me that sometimes, but not always, you gain control of Guybrush before he walks off screen from the Lookout at the beginning, bypassing the Part One title screen and bugging out the interface until you talk to someone in the SCUMM bar). Heck, do it before RMI comes out while the hype is at its peak. However, I respect that these fixes may mot be enough for you, but I think it would be a good step in the right direction to making it a more viable option for more people (like me haha). There are some things I'd like to see done with MI2:SE, though not as major as the first one. There are some transitions that were recorded but not implemented (the cue where the coffin gets lifted into the Voodoo Lady's, for example, or the whole buildup music between Largo taking LeChuck's beard and Guybrush going back to the Voodoo Lady; it kinda just fizzles out and fades to the voodoo theme without that big crescendo) and of course the opening credits really should be there in remastered mode (and I still have no idea why it wasn't done). Beyond that, some tightening up of the Rapp Scallion resurrection to be more in time with the music cues and some proper mouth animation on him would be good. Again though, I get the feeling that this would require more money put into patching than they might care to bother with, and I don't know how much ability the fan community has to fix things beyond graphics thanks to the MI explorer. The transitions and bug fixing seems like something that would need to be done with access to source code, but I don't know nearly enough about game development to know for sure.

I’ve been replaying Tales since I haven’t played it or really looked at it since it shipped!

Ha!, you know I like a challenge, <goes and gets IFOA box & engage googlefu> ...and <15mins later yeah think I've found the Indy Map. 😁 I'd says it's "The Coasts and Islands of the Aegean Sea" by Cartographer William Hughes c1867. Engraved by G.E Sherman From the Book "An Atlas of Classical Geography constructed by William Hughes and edited by George Long" Links Previously Sold Item, but not bad scan and one on abebooks by the looks here

As a quick test I took the 1977 map (which had the best quality at Archive.org), cleaned it up and color-matched it to the back of the game's manual: We should get an even better results as soon as we can work with uncompressed high-resolution scans.