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Title card!

A great hour-long interview with @Dmnkly, over at Laura Cress' Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1527971822?t=63m55s Poor Dom, dying to talk more about RtMI 😄

Apropos of the new Mojo banner for the Ackley/Ahern interview, I feel I should confess something... ...I don't like slaw.

THE MUSIC!!! AAAHHHHH!!!!

I dumped them all into a Twitter Moment (basically twitter's version of a playlist) for easy viewing: https://twitter.com/i/events/1546172305243398144

In today's tweet, Devolver draws our attention to a teensy detail in the background of the New Pirate Leaders' hideout: I might never have recognized that. 🙈

Jonathan Ackley has been sharing developer memories on Twitter throughout the year, including many about The Curse of Monkey Island. We had thought to embed these tweets throughout our new CMI interview, but the idea proved to be impractical. Since we’d gone to the trouble of collecting all those URLs, though, I thought I’d put them all here. Taken in aggregate they’re practically an article unto themselves, and they’d be otherwise inaccessible to those of us without Twitter: https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1487145415711420419 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1487199807693221890 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1487247707857043456 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1487487658544668673 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1487891726890983426 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1488673416525746177 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1488674191230390275 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1488674554897571846 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1490342581657427975 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1488672930561097732 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1490343063645872128 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1490343316004610050 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1490343930117824522 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1490344353792880642 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1490344758337683460 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1491978257368973313 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1492159504917549057 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1492663745876684800 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1493240973672939520 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1493264687718285313 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1493747722586779654 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1494025906641260545 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1494528958926184448 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1495268944369704962 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1496909302262423553 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1503755841488531460 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1507425120586924038 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1510035777350037506 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1511500601229656066 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1511956648226480138 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1515130237083799552 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1516933414913396736 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1518239188960768002 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1519436155560812544 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1520478121908379648 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1520991257073360899 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1521489481119019009 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1524838588235784192 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1524922568750211072 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1528746361646030848 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1528892976499286016 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1533133083502817281 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1533153572744929280 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1544731668056928257 https://twitter.com/ackley_jonathan/status/1545222501327781888

Cool to hear about all the positive experiences people have had with Larry. He's always been a great interview. If anyone walks away from the CMI interview hungry for more, I can recommend the one he gave Adventure Classic Gaming in 2012 and the two parter conducted by Genesis Temple last year. Along with Mike Levine he also participated in a Mojo postmortem on Insecticide in 2018. And [never] forget The SCUMM Bar for the real legacy stuff.

IMPORTANT NOTICE This crow is not dead, it is only SLEEPING. No animals were harmed during the production of this game.

If the release date is Talk Like A Pirate Day... Monday 19 September then uuhhh I would say this is a countdown. Including this one but not including the 19th, there are 10 Mondays left. That's 10 little mini clips for them to plan. Put it this way... I no longer think it's November, because that would mean they'd be doing this for like 20 weeks up to release which feels like an awful lot of tidbits to release. But 10? Nice round number? Mm, that's believable. (alternatively believable, on the 19th Sept they drop the release date as Thursday, for day and date with Switch store)

Yeah... the music. My beating heart. I for one hear a real flute, but my ear isn't necessarily trained enough. 🥰 Both Devolver tweets today drive the point home that Return to Monkey Island is targeted at an adult audience. And I'm all here for it.

I’m very excited for the prospect of #monkeyislandmonday! Maybe we’ll be getting closer to the release than we thought!

How strange! My company nearly hired him for a project, too. I had a Zoom call with him and also had to tell him what a fan I was. Sadly we didn't use him, but I think the project would have turned out better if we had.

Oh and by the way, for those crazy amazing fans here who like to listen to the trailer on the go like me, here's an album cover for "Return" using the new artwork:

Sure! (Note that whenever I'm saying "synth" I'm actually referring to sampled instruments from the E-MU Rack Instruments) Drums are live except for orchestral pieces (where there are marching drum patterns, like snare rolls); Percussions are also live for most part except when there are a LOT of percussion, in those occasions the live percussions are augmented by synth ones (the cannibal theme on Blood Island is a perfect example of mostly synth percussions); Marimba and steel pan are live on in-game pieces, and synth on cutscenes (except for the intro cutscene and the Elaine becoming a statue scene); Reed and woodwind instruments are for a good half live and for the other half synth in-game, while are completely synth for the cutscenes (except for the main theme, in which the only synth instruments are the hammond organ and the MT-32 organ); Keyboard instruments are synth (organ, harpsichord); Bass guitar is always live, played by Michael Land himself, and can be heard on any band based track. Non-band tracks use a synth pizzicato doublebass instead; Electric and acoustic guitars is always always live (thank god, sampled guitars just suck 🙂); The whole orchestra (violins, violas, strings in general, brass instruments, timpani) is synth;

Anyway so I put MI2 Guybrush through a face depixelizer

There was. I went on that trip and from what I remember I think there were like... 2 guests who had actually paid for the tier, then a couple more who won a contest to go along, and then a couple of us got invited to go along. It's the sort of thing that could have been pretty awkward, done wrongly, but literally the whole of the studio showed up and everyone was just so welcoming and generous with their time. And you could feel just by being there how much their making efforts to be a diverse and welcoming studio had done for their whole vibe. Everyone just genuinely was enjoying each other's company but also being super welcoming to any new person who crossed their path. I had someone I knew who was reasonably local to it drive me down to the campground and they were going to just drop me off and leave me to it, but instead they ended up staying a few hours, played some board games, tie dyed a shirt with us just because they thought it would be nice to let them hang out a bit before leaving, it was that lovely kind of comfortable, big-hearted thing that I think really defines what DF is as a group of people.

Yeah, I love the SWAM stuff! It's like MT32's technology but with all the advantages of modern processing power. I used a SWAM clarinet on this piece.

Its good to see the joy of sharing hasn't been completely driven from Ron. Its a great title card illustration, too. Like any good cover illustration, its very enticing, and sparks the imagination. It seems the eccentricities of Rex Crowle's art style are subdued in a sepia still-life piece. Although its still clearly a piece made under his direction. But hopefully, it won't draw in much art style hate. Honestly, I hope everyone's got that out of their system for now. I'm bad at describing music. I like it and think its a good variation on the title card jingle.

My musical brain is already tickling, this is some fricking good stuff! The production level seems to be on par with Curse (well, at least for these 12 seconds), which is only good news 🙂 take this with a grain of salt, but (judging by ear) the wind instruments seem to come from SWAM virtual instruments, which I have used many times and are so good. And I agree with @KestrelPi, not-live/synthesized does not equal a bad soundtrack: want to know how many synth instruments Curse has versus live ones? You'd be surprised 🙂 It probably comes down to choosing the right instruments to be performed live (notably percussive, exotic and band instruments), choosing some very convincing samples (and as a musician I can say that in 2022 we're basically overloaded with those) and having the right producer working on it and mixing the final product. Unfortunately, IMHO Tales lacked in all these three departments, but Return already seems to excel at each one of these!

Feels to me that based on that title card that by the time we get to part 1, we're already going to be past the carnival and into the main story. So excited to finally find out how that'll work. Love the look of the title screen, and love that the tune is evocative of the previous chapter screens while not identical, and also seeming to quote the MI1 'Journey' music. Not sure if the flute is real or not. Legato instruments are really fancy nowadays at being able to reproduce performance details. It's still true that live instruments are preferable I think, but less and less true every year that imitations can't be convincing and musical in their own right, in my opinion...---- (Also - aside, I don't think it's intentional by anyone, but I do think there's a hint of accidental elitism in the idea that live is the only good and pure way to do it - not everyone writing music for things has ready access to a bank of performers, or the means to pay them (like... well, me), but I still think we should be given a chance!) ---... and here I can imagine for such a small musical moment, they might have opted not to record something.

I wish they used Boens voice for Elaine throughout. In all seriousness though, I think the direction Ron had for the character (or at least her relationship with Guybrush) was way more interesting than what they ended up doing in the sequels. I hope he can make her interesting again.

I can take or leave Elaine. While her role in the first game is clear and essential, that isn’t really the case for MI2 (where it feels like more of a cameo) and she’s virtually a MacGuffin in CMI. They clearly tried to do more with her in EMI and TMI, but it always felt a bit ‘how do we make this character actually good’ to me and those are my less preferred games in any case.

Another interesting detail I noticed today was that the table where the new pirate leaders are sat has another one of those voodoo symbols around it. Perhaps a protective enchantment? For what, that is the question. It seems that at least Guybrush can cross it, though maybe there's an early puzzle that involves making him invincible to its effects...unless of course it's only to ward off LeChuck or ghost pirates.

It's so good! Once again, Dom continues to be a gem of a human being and yeah, it must be incredibly frustrating not to be able to share the juicy details, but I'm sure we'll all talk about it once it's out. I love the story about how Ron told him he was making a new one, I wouldn't have believed it either...I didn't on April 1st.

Okay, this thread had to get out of hand at some point... 😶😅 I don't know if it's an unpopular opinion, but I think Elaine should have remained a pure cameo character after MI2 (like Stan for example). Mostly she's just ballast for the story anyway, or rather the story is written with her in mind specifically. Tales did spice things up with Morgan (love her!), but in the end it was all about Elaine again and I didn’t like her character here either. I'm very curious how it all behaves in ReMI and whether I might change my mind about her.

The crow can be seen on the box! Once you see it you can’t unsee. It’s such a good detail.

Slight off-topic but I had the pleasure of working with Larry briefly on a work project. I had to do my best to not “fanboy” over his work but I told him how much I enjoyed CMI, and he was very polite and great to work with!

I've always assumed that since the bones of Guybrush's parents work with the LeChuck voodoo doll, that proves that they are indeed brothers. (Plus the ending in Big Whoop itself, of course, provided it is all true and not a complete illusion from LeChuckie!) However, the only thing really that makes me cast doubt into that is that CMI - Tales never refers to it at all. And you'd think that would be something one of them would bring up once in a while! (i.e. LeChuck dies for the umpteenth time and Guybrush is like "Til the next time... brother...") As much as I doubt that ReMI is going to tie up every question with a bow, this is an element that I think having more clarity on would be welcomed. On a seperate note, I actually never even realised that LeChuck had a crow in his hat in MI2 until the SE. I could never tell in the pixel art! Now that I know it's there, though. So cool!

That's fan art though. Here's a similar pic from the storyboards for the movie: Check out The Scumm Bar for more movie art.

Quickie acrylic fan art attack

David Sheep is really great at emulating the new art style. https://twitter.com/Pelayator/status/1545561387736391682?cxt=HHwWhICz6Zb59_IqAAAA (no likes needed. Go to Twitter and give the artist a like. I'll finish one of my Carlas these days and THEN ... )

I think Charity James gave a good performance (all the voice acting in EMI is top notch), but I think the writing for Elaine in that game wasn't especially careful. Sure, Guybrush has always been a goofball to some extent and Elaine has always been capable, but the marital dynamic there gives the impression that the writers thought it was a zero sum game: that Elaine only looks good when it's at Guybrush's expense. I think this risks making Elaine unlikable in a way that could easily have been avoided. And in a way, it makes her a dependant: If you need to make Guybrush extra stupid to underline Elaine's qualities, you're not really doing Elaine justice. A summary of how EMI views that relationship is in the game's opening cutscene. How does the game choose to recap their dynamic? With a montage of Elaine punching Guybrush in the face. It's funny in a "don't think about it" way, but also a really lame and sitcom-y distillation of the couple.