Leaderboard

Oh yeah, the original menu is there too! I still have to implement the thumbnails, but other than that I managed to get every remaining feature to work as expected.

Let's bring a more positive note to this thread So, about the original COMI GUI not being in ScummVM...

I'm constantly surprised by how funny this is: Write a sarcastic back of the box blurb for Return to Monkey Island: "What do you get when you cross the fourth wall, a talking pirate monkey, and Tim Schafer? The answer is: a whole lot of nothing. That's right, in Return to Monkey Island, you play as Guybrush Threepwood, a washed-up pirate who has to save his wife from a bunch of monkeys. With gameplay that consists of picking up bananas and saying 'Argh!' a lot, this game is sure to provide hours upon hours of mind-numbing fun."

I promise this was the first thing that came up:

I'll admit. Sometimes this scares me a bit: "Write an open letter from Ron Gilbert sarcastically pretending to apologize for ruining the Monkey Island franchise and listing the 3 things he'll do to make amends:" Dear Monkey Island fans, I am sorry. I have ruined your beloved franchise and for that, I am truly sorry. I know how much you all love Monkey Island and I have taken that away from you. But there is still hope! I promise to make things right. Here are three things I will do to make amends: 1) First, I will release a brand new Monkey Island game that is exactly like the first two games. No changes, no new features, nothing different at all. Just the same great game you remember from your childhoods. 2) Second, I will personally apologize to each and every one of you for ruining the franchise. You have my word that I will never again set foot near a Monkey Island game or anything related to it ever again. 3) Finally, in an attempt to win back your trust, I will give away free monkey-related merchandise to everyone who purchases the new game. T-shirts, hats, keychains – you name it! We want you to be happy with Monkey Island once again.

Niiice! I hope the 3D accelerations finally work now, too.

Tomorrow marks 11 weeks exactly since the announcement. Tha'ts roughly 6 pages of discussion in this thread per week, or 1 page per day. You crazy bastards, I love ya! Please release a trailer soon Otherwise...

Thanks, AI. Both for being no help at all, and also for adding 'LeChuck's Revenge' to my prompt.

I recently began playing it on my M1 MacBook Air using a GOG version and Porting Kit. This was totally easy (and free) and I only had just a few hiccups where the game became pretty slow for some seconds but then went on working totally fine. EDIT: And here’s the link: https://www.portingkit.com/game/966 There’s a very clear instruction, too.

My memory is too faint to be useful, sorry. I feel like LucasArts must have known about their own SE when they signed with Telltale, but I don’t feel like the Tales team really knew the SEs were a thing. (I feel like if we had, there would have been more synergy with the voice casting, eg not beating around the bush with whether Boen is in it, making sure we use the Curse voodoo lady actor, etc). My memory is that the SE came out after Tales, but that Tales was in preproduction before the SE was announced (and we didn’t really know about the SE or what it was until it was announced). I may be misremembering and we knew it all, and my memory has just eroded, but I don’t think so.

From what I remember of back then, the story goes that Craig Derrick (who's still an executive producer at Lucasfilm and might have had some involvement in Return aswell) was secretly developing MI:SE without company knowledge, and when it was pitched and approved, the president of LucasArts at the time, Darrell Rodriguez, asked him to find someone to continue the series (Telltale), because he too was a fan of the old IP and wanted to bring them back, creating what was called the "heritage team". I'm sure I've not got all the details right, @Jake may or may not have further insight at least on how the people at Telltale found out about Tales, but this is what I can gather from piecing together interviews and statements from Craig Derrick over the years.

I did a litte stream of the first game (Ultimate Talkie) on Twitch yesterday, my first ever foray into streaming, and OF COURSE I forgot to make sure stream archiving was enabled, boo me. I plan to stream MI2 soon! Will do Curse, Escape and Tales as well, but I've decided to play Return for the first time outside of Twitch. I want to keep that as a personal experience, free of temptation to get hints from the chat...and you just know some dickhead will come in and spoil the Secret, I'm having none of that nonsense.

Most of the changes are, IMO, pretty minor. The details of many scenes have changed over what is now decades of revision, but the mood of the ride is fundamentally unchanged. Some recent updates have actually removed some of the movie content and reinstated some of the original audio, and even added some tiny setpiece details in line with the original 60s character designs and style: The dark hallway with the voice saying “dead men tell no tales” and audio of a scared pirate telling you you’ve seen too much and are cursed, was for a while replaced with a video projection of Davy Jones or Blackbeard, but those projector scenes have been removed, the original audio reinstated, and a small vignette added of a skeleton pirate turning into a real pirate as you pass in the boat, and it’s a wonderfully simple trick done with a mirror split down the middle: It directly precedes the reveal of the huge ship vs fort setpiece, a tiny transition moment as you leave the skeleton vignettes for the “real world.” With Pirates I think it’s easy to obsess over the details, and I understand when people have a favorite moment removed or swapped out for something else, but I think the overall tone of the ride is currently in really good shape.

One of my pandemic efforts. I had a really good surge of creative energy back in 2020. But, alas, didn't finish much. Back when I showed it around, one of the most common comments was "That's not Guybrush Threepwood!". I mean, I can't taylor the outcome that much to what's in my brain, but this one is coming pretty close to how I imagined high res Guybrush in the original The Secret of Monkey Island. Hope you guys like it ... ... because I have tons of that stuff back from 2020, especially Swordmaster sketches ... I have so, so many Swordmaster sketches ...

All right. Life-size Guybrush statue with Dominic's likeness it is.

I have to admit, I was curious: seems legit and... Wow, they really DO know us

I can't take it anymore!!! No trailer or Guybrush pics makes Sam something... something...

I've now asked the AI to "Spoil five major unexpected plot twists in the upcoming game Return to Monkey Island:" 1. Guybrush is revealed to be a robot created by the Voodoo Lady. 2. The Voodoo Lady is actually LeChuck in disguise. 3. Elaine is possessed by LeChuck and tries to kill Guybrush. 4. Guybrush discovers that he is the reincarnation of LeChuck. 5. The final battle takes place on Monkey Island, which has been taken over by LeChuck's zombie army.

In the end, it's still just people. On a personal note, I've had several run ins with companies that employed me getting acquired and becoming bigger, and those have been overall pretty negative for me. I started out my career working for a pretty large media company and at first that was exciting but very quickly you started to see the low-level abuses that come with that - the idea that we should be happy with the prestige of working for a large company in exchange for lower pay, or less individual say, and whatever else. But mostly for me it was just the layers of bull everything became mired in. Being told that new policies were empowering when they felt like the opposite, feeling smaller and smaller and told like this was a good thing. When the companies I subsequently worked for got bought I started feeling similar stuff start to creep in around the edges and I got out as soon as I could, and never regretted that decision. It shouldn't be surprising that I personally have some mixed feelings about Microsoft acquiring Double Fine, even if I can fully appreciate and support the reasons that might motivate that, and am even excited about some of the potential outcomes of it. But the thing is, I suppose, is that these are still all companies that need to create things, and creatives are ALWAYS going to be motivated to put out their best work even if it has to all get filtered through a corporate lens. There's a reason why Disney films are usually still pretty enjoyable and well written and made when they come out, despite the ever expanding presense of the Disney Entity, and I guess it's because through all that, despite all that, there are still creative people, operating within that framework, who really care about the story they're trying to tell. Until the AI gets good enough to do away with THEM too, we'll always have that, at least.

Incredible! This is a feature I've wanted to see in ScummVM for years! Thank you so much for working on adding this!

I think Disney is one of the scariest company's at the moment. The monopoly they hold over media and the hypocrisy with which they treat certain subjects is something that I just cannot get behind, so I rarely endorse them. However, in rare circumstances this can be a positive thing, as I doubt the making of a new Monkey Island would have been made possible if it weren't for Disney. Hooray for the person that took that decision. However one right does not undo all the wrongs that are done just for the sake of making money.

Anyway, I’ve always liked that the stairwell into the Bloody Lip is dark, and the characters get dark when walking through it. It’s a detail that immediately made Woodtick seem like a real place I was existing in with the characters.

(Note: I've copy-pasted this quote from Marius' Details of Monkey Island thread, because I'd like to keep that one a thread of full blown positivity) I guess it's really maddening if you have some inside knowledge and can't share it, especially when people are talking about that exact thing and visibly lack the knowledge that you have. 😞 I'm not clobbering Disney at the moment, they've made a new Monkey Island possible and they have a B rating on the Yale/Russia list after all (I will, however, clobber them if they interfere with the excellent Devolver/gog.com relationship and/or will only sell a PC version of ReMI through a company with an F rating. But enough of the politics stuff). But Disney is huge, Disney holds innumerable monopolies, every employee has an infinite number of higher-ups with quite different ideas about how things are done. What mere opinion prevails in the end is a game of chance, and some decisions will necessarily feel absurd and damaging to both the individual franchise as well as Disney as a whole. Somebody, somewhere, at Disney has made the decision to get rid of the original "Adventures in Babysitting" artwork by Drew Struzan by just throwing it out with the trash. Somebody then made the decision to place it lowest in a pile, face down in a puddle of water. But some Disney employee also made the decision to call the artist and bring the ruined artwork back to him, free of charge. Good guys, bad guys. I don't know, I just hate it when companies get so big that the left hand never knows what the right does. Some will always be there for the money. Others still have dreams, principles and compassion. 🤷‍♂️

I have to imagine LucasArts management was interested in reviving Monkey as a franchise and it was all at least partly strategic on their end, even if it came from seeing some unrelated opportunities and tying them together. But at Telltale, we didn’t feel like part of some strategy, we were just happy to be making a new Monkey game, and happy that LucasArts was interested in adventures and the IP enough again to be doing two projects at once.

Yeah, when Tales was made it was Lucasfilm’s decision to rebrand and update the Monkey Island IP, and they wanted Tales to be part of that. Disney-era Lucasfilm seems to have decided the original logo was already doing a good job of representing the IP so the new logo has been re-binned (or reserved for the SEs).

Thankyou fellow Mojoers, your sacrifice enabled me to get it in one. 👕 I beat #Mojole #90 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 1/6 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

30 years ago, an april's fool of an italian magazine hipotized the same connection...

OK I'll do that but first, some of these are incredible:

ResidualVM has been incorporated into ScummVM, so out of the two, it's ScummVM that is more likely to work properly. ResidualVM is the one that's been left behind so it won't benefit from whatever recent bug fixing has gone on, if any! I've been playing EMI through ScummVM and it's kinda okay, but buggy for sure. Minor stuff like shadows looking bad and some dialogue lines being cut off, but also weird stuff like characters wandering around the wrong screen and one place where you can make the game crash consistently if you do a particular thing. And I'm only on Lucre Island, so there could be worse to come! Sounds like I should investigate some of the options in this thread.

I'm now getting it to generate negative steam reviews, to recentre my expectations: "Return to Monkey Island is a huge disappointment. Not only does it have terrible graphics, but the plot is full of holes. For starters, the game completely ignores the ending of the previous game. In that game, Guybrush Threepwood became the governor of Melee Island, and married Elaine Marley. But in this game, they act like none of that ever happened. Secondly, the villainous LeChuck is somehow back from the dead, despite being killed in a very final way in the last game. And his new plan makes no sense whatsoever. Finally, the whole game feels like it's just going through the motions. There's nothing new or interesting here, and it all feels very stale. Avoid this one at all costs."

Wow, a robot AND the reincarnation of LeChuck? What a twist 😂 Would you be kind enough to ask it to interpret how it keeps all the post-Gilbert games canon? I'd love to see how it stacks up against our theories

Surely this AI could write Frozen parts three to one hundred and forty-eight.

I like that the AI just completely forgot about one of the map pieces.

Or even that Monkey island was the site of a past apocalyptic event. Remember all those anachronisms ... ? Well.

Makes me think of this thread: Here we noted that in addition to the CD version seeming to lose the VGA version’s dynamic sprite lighting — where characters would be lighter/darker according to the scene they’re in — the Special Editions and Ultimate Talkie added lighting within scenes that lit the sprites differently according to where they were exactly. I had completely overlooked that in addition to those excellent Details of Monkey Island, MI2 has its own functionality in this respect. It’s also used when going through the swamp, the House of Mojo, and presumably plenty of other places.

Also, while I was there: Come up with 10 different theories for what the secret of monkey island is: 1. The secret of Monkey Island is that there is no secret – it's just a fun place to visit. 2. The secret of Monkey Island is that the monkeys are actually aliens from another planet. 3. The secret of Monkey Island is that the island is actually a portal to another dimension. 4. The secret of Monkey Island is that it is haunted by ghosts or other supernatural beings. 5. The secret of Monkey Island is that it was once used as a laboratory for experiments on animals (or humans). 6. The secret of Monkey Island is that it contains a treasure trove of pirate booty. 7. The secret of Monkey Island is that it is the home to a lost civilization or race of people. 8. The secret of Monkey Island is that it has magical properties and/or powers. 9. The secret of Monkey Island is that it is the location of a powerful and/or evil being or entities. 10. The secret of Monkey Island is that it will be the site of a future apocalyptic event.

Today I asked an AI to "Write a detailed synopsis of a new game called Return to Monkey Island set directly after the end of Monkey Island 2, including details of how the key shop and courthouse are involved:" The game begins with Guybrush Threepwood being shipwrecked on the shores of Monkey Island. He is soon met by a band of pirates led by Captain LeChuck who mistakes him for one of his long-lost crew members. After being taken captive, Guybrush manages to escape and finds himself in the middle of a battle between the pirates and the native monkeys. He eventually makes his way to the pirate headquarters where he meets up with LeChuck's first mate, Carla. Carla tells him that LeChuck has been seeking a powerful artifact known as the Idol of Ultimate Piratey which will grant him absolute power. She also reveals that the only way to stop LeChuck is to find four pieces of a map which lead to the location of the idol. With Carla's help, Guybrush sets out to find the first piece of the map which is being held by Governor Marley in the governor's mansion. After infiltrating the mansion and acquiring the first piece of the map, Guybrush attempts to leave but is caught by Marley who demands that he turn over all pirate treasure in exchange for his freedom. Guybrush manages to talk his way out of it and escapes but not before overhearing Marley mention something about meeting up with someone at The Cutthroat Arms tavern. At The Cutthroat Arms, Guybrush eavesdrops on a conversation between Marley and Le Chuck wherein they discuss their plans to double cross each other once they have possession of the Idol. They also mention that there are two more pieces of the map, one held by Mr. Fossey at Fossey's Fabulous Key Shop and another held by Judge Grindstone at courthouse square. With this new information, Guybrush sets out to acquire these last two pieces ofthe map so he can finally put an end to LeChuck's reign of terror...

This might be outdated by now — particularly with the Mac architecture shift — but I did write up some steps back in the day: https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/Running-GOG-Escape-from-Monkey-Island-under-Wine-on-macOS I believe some people had sound issues with those steps while others didn’t.

@Aaron Giles Hi Aaron. Thanks so much for this amazing program. So wonderful to have a flawless way to enjoy the games as they were released! I was wondering if you'd ever consider sharing your source on a platform like GitHub to allow other developers to assist with the development (eg. help the move to MacOS). Can't wait to use this once it's supported by MacOS (even if it's just an SDL version). Thanks!

I've attempted the PS2 version, and the biggest issue I can see is that depending on the graphics mode you use, certain transitions hang and there are some minor sound glitches (especially during the opening credits during all those fades between shots). As far as I'm aware, those issues disappear in Software rendering mode, but you're stuck with the original resolution of the game, wheras OpenGL and Direct3D options allow you to upscale the game so the 3d models are a lot more crisp, so it's a bit of a balancing act on what concessions you're willing to make for which features.

I might be mistaken but I think it’s potentially the better version. It came a little later and includes refinements such as in-game Monkey Kombat assistance I believe. Not sure how quality of audio, etc compares. With an emulator you can probably run it in HD regardless.

It's just frustrating when people with power stop a certain creative decisions for nonsensical reasons.

Generally speaking, the nuclear solution is to use Windows. If you have an Intel Mac you can install Windows as a secondary boot drive. With the newer M1-based Macs you can only run Windows using Parallels, which is also an option for Intel Macs. This runs an entire version of Windows within macOS and is very effective, especially for older games where performance is less of an issue. There is also Crossover, which uses WINE to translate Windows code to Mac. However this is less reliable and tends to be very game-specific in terms of how well it works. So far using Parallels I’ve played Broken Sword, the Monkey Island SEs, Planet Coaster, Surviving Mars, and even ran DREAMM to play MI1 EGA. This is all quite general. For your use case specifically (EMI) you might find a more specific solution. Now the bad news. As with all things Mac, these apps are a bit pricey.

Damn, I was going to find a picture of terrible 90s curtains hair but stumbled upon Guybrush Threepwood:

This is my favourite 😅

I feel obliged to add my 'I like the updated monkey island logo' and have no strong feelings about returning to the old one to unpopular opinions. It feels more or less respectful to the original logo to me, while adding a torn treasure map effect, and giving the lettering a little bit more of a piratey feel. I sort of wish it was purple, I kind of like the idea of each of the games logos getting their own colour? But other than that, I'm into it. The original was fine, I s'pose But I feel no special attachment to it, and I don't think anything about it particularly says 'piratey adventure' to me. If anything the new logo takes it closer to this:

Not Breaking Bad/Saul-related, but I always found the Fusco brothers from The Return would make great (aged) Men of Low Moral Fiber.

I know who'll play the amazing, adventurous, acrobatic, and exceedingly well-known, fabulous, flying Fettucini Brothers.

These are just things that chipped away at my enjoyment quite a lot, and I’d enjoy them being rectified before finally replaying: Reuse of character models, resulting in many looking like lightly modified versions of one another, even major ones like Winslow Similar to above but animations, like that bloody finger clicking Soundtrack was given a cheapo treatment for PC, so excellent Land compositions don’t really get to shine (the Wii version did use proper Land-picked instrumentation but… is the Wii version) LeChuck voice acting recasting, which I think was only rectified for the DVD version…?! Detail can be a bit lacking My understanding is that a lot of this is down to the game being designed for Wii, which had very strict disk space limitations. So a remaster has a great opportunity to lift the ceiling on some of this stuff.

I gritted my teeth through MI1SE, and am now enjoying MI2SE where there are far less technical oversights. It’s a shame these games didn’t get much in the way of updates because most of the MI1SE issues are fixable, aside from the art which I’m happy to concede to being a matter of opinion. I’ll hopefully get through CMI and EMI by the time ReMI comes out, the latter of which I haven’t played for about 20 years. I do want to replay Tales at some point, but I find the compromises and issues really sad, and am holding out hope for an eventual remaster from SkunkApe.