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While reading through some 12-year-old thread about the Ultimate Talkie for Monkey Island 2, I noticed an observation made about the PC Speaker soundtrack for MI2 being different in some ways. The major divergences I can hear are that the slow LeChuck’s Fortress music used during the cutscenes has been replaced with a much faster take on the LeChuck theme (more like MI1 and briefly the MI2 credits), and the ending medley uses different songs.

It's okay, Stan. I still love your technically-still-first theme song. And I look forward to maybe someday having another dialogue puzzle against you related to a major purchase, preferably with different possible price outcomes.

Yeah it’s a nice take! Although I have to say, for me it can’t beat the absolute chef’s kiss that is mostly just hearing slow, churning versions of the LeChuck theme throughout most of the game, aside from a truncated version after the bone dance, and then it ends with this (Sadly still a little truncated!):

Mind blown - 🤯 - thank you! That completes the picture! I've been following McCaig's blog back in 2010 when he was posting a bit of art instruction. Unfortunately his blog is dead now, but man he's so great. I visited his short and sweet artstation account just now, and although he switched to digital in the meantime, I still think he wields the stylus like paintbrush. Occasionally a traditionally painted piece steals the show. His watercolors especially because those leave no room for mistakes. A whole lot of artists study themselves in the mirror for facial expressions, so a partial likeness is something that does occasionally happen as a happy accident.

The red bandana? Headband? In EGA, Carla has nothing in her hair for the sprite or the closeup. In VGA, her sprite looks similar but her closeup has the headband now. Continuity oof! She keeps the red headband in Escape, and the Secret Special Edition adds it to her sprite. She also still has it in Return.

With the wonky handmade logo! Seems like that was never used officially - it was in the site metadata when they put the page up, but never actually appeared. One for the archives.

As far as I know, they were added by the team that did the CD-ROM edition, which was shortly after the main game and VGA upres were done. The Stan theme and the extension of the main themes weren’t done by Land.

The MI2 CD version is just the floppy version with copy protection removed (which also removes lite mode since that and the copy protection screen is in the same "room") and with the ability to run it from CD while storing save games on the HDD. Unlike MI1, there are no separate EGA and VGA releases of MI2. That video you posted up there just runs MI2 in EGA mode along with the PC speaker soundtrack, which lacks most of the music, but where the end credits medley is different. The Adlib and MT-32 soundtracks are both complete.

Yes, it's true they removed copy protection... although I can't remember if they removed Lite mode? Is that true? I have my The Monkey Island Bounty Pack CD somewhere. I presume it's the same version included on that?

Yes, by "CD version" I'm referring to the Monkey Island Madness CD which was basically just the disk version, as I understand things. I know it removed the option to play Lite Mode in the process of removing copy protection. I had not realized the cut text was unique to the amiga but had thought it was specific to all the original releases. I see, now. EDIT: It's funny that EGA MI2 version doesn't include certain songs like Campfire or Woodtick, but it's understandable.

But the correct answer has all the likes...

Precious few reply with the correct answer. But the people who understood "What video games do you want [us to make] real hard [difficult]?" sure are hilarious.

It does look like release date is imminent, and that September might be likely... a month or so of hard marketing before release. And because Ron likes to be a bit contrary, the date will be the day before "talk like a pirate day".

It's August tomorrow 😬 it could happen. Pretty please.

Someone tell me I’m reading too hard into this, but I’m suspecting a big drop on Monday.

Pretty cool to hear the Bones song after that ending. A little bit chilling, as it's a call back to your parents helping you on your quest... but in the final moments of the game, they are so distant. Oh, and wow, the score when Largo steals the beard and announces LeChucks return, is surprisingly good! (See 08:44)

This is funny, but to be clear it's less that my opinion on marriage has soured, and more that I don't like its status as the default or ultimate expression of love. I feel like love takes many forms, and none of them require marriage to be valid and many of them are incompatible with marriage as it exists in most jurisdictions.

Yeah I doubt it has anything to do with likeness rights, and everything to do with them wanting their own character designs and style for the SE.

I think the close-ups in the SCUMM Bar in MI1 serve to make the world feel more immersive early on in the game, and I never really thought about the fact that they mostly disappear afterwards. They are such a crucial part of my memories of Monkey Island, probably because I spent a lot of time as a kid wandering around through the early sections of the game not really knowing what to do. I didn't feel disappointed that they dropped away after that, though. They're kind of luxurious, but they also feel intrusive in a way that the regular dialogue usually doesn't. I did like that they returned at the end for the final scene with Elaine, and it gave the game a sense of coming full circle. I played the VGA as a kid, and even then I think I picked up on the fact that those portraits were pastiches of old, romantic oil paintings. There was something funny about the level of detail on them, even though the style was naturalistic. Which I guess is to say that they are dissonant with the rest of the game, but I enjoyed that aspect of them even as a kid. I some ways, I think they tried to improve on the full-screen portaits with full-screen animation in MI 2 -- There's the single instance of full-screen animation early in MI2 when Largo chucks a loogie, and that seems like it could have had the same effect of making the game feel like it's going to be more immersive and technically impressive, except 1). It's a shot of just a ball of spit/snot, and kind of gross 2). I think it took like a full minute to load on my computer back in the '90s, and then just as long to transition back to the regular game. So I'm looking forward to what other kinds of surprises the early stages of MI6 has for us

Carla, Smirk, Elaine all get them, and Meathook’s scene has a closeup dedicated to it but it’s Guybrush. So many of the main Part 1 puzzle chains have a closeup, but you’re right that they disappear after that until the end of the game. Maybe they decided it wasn’t worth the disk space (That’s one reason why the LeChuck closeups were cut from Monkey 2.) but liked what they’d done so far and kept them?

Of course not, things have changed drastically from game to game. It's all part of the fun. Monkey 1 (1990) Monkey 2 (1991) Curse (1996) Escape (2001) Tales (2009) Return (2022)

Some of you have expressed displeasure with the institution of marriage and its role in Monkey Island games, particularly MI3 and MI5. You have said that as you've grown older, your opinion on marriage has soured, and therefore you're not as keen to see it elevated in these games. My suggestion: when playing these MI games, try to visualize marriage as an elaborate voodoo spell. It has wild magical power in the same way that a voodoo doll or recipe to Monkey Island. Related to this: try to read Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides if you get the chance. It was one of Ron's inspirations, right? And if you go from On Stranger Tides straight to The Secret of Monkey Island, you can almost imagine that LeChuck's goal of marrying Elaine could have more to do with the governorship of Mêlée than with anything related to the incel life. In which case, score a point to MI4's gubernatorial seal.

I don't think Ron or anyone from the team decided to make any "safe" choice with this game. I think that they made the choices that they thought were best for the game they wanted to make and for a new Monkey Island game. The music is a very important aspect of Monkey Island (one could argue the most important), all the games had at least one of those composers working on it, seems like a pretty obvious choice to me. The voices were already perfectly cast and I doubt they had someone else in mind to do them, so why would they need to change them? Doesn't seem to me like this is nostalgia pandering, but simply that they had (most) of the casting job already done. The returning characters were a thing since Monkey Island 2 (there aren't many important characters in the first game, but most of them return in the sequel) even though they are few. The UI we don't know anything about really, other than it works with a mouse OR with a controller, and that they worked really hard to make the controller option worthwhile. I think this really shows how really willing they are to modernise the way adventure games are played in a modern era. This leaves the art style, which changes in every Monkey Island games (even between the first two). If there was a safe choice with the art, they couldn't take it while trying to make a modern game. Pixel art is out of the question because they don't want to get the "nostalgia game" label that Thimbleweed Park got, so it was a choice of choosing an art style that suited the game. They decided to go with 2D probably because it gives a cleaner look and ages the game less (look at how Curse aged better than Escape and even Tales visually) and getting the guy who made Ron's favourite fan art and worked as an art director in very good looking games was the best they could do. Also, Steve Purcell, Peter Chan, Bill Tiller and many others who worked on the art of the first 3 games were probably busy with their other jobs so... P.S. Also I'm new here, been lurking around since page 1 of this thread 🙃

I have strong feelings about the EGA version, it's true. But I don't begrudge anyone for preferring the VGA version. Amiga, on the other hand...