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It looks like the three probably-not-that-important-anymore Pirates took over the store.

Funny how they "fixed" the interior of the store, which didn't match the exterior at all. Imagine Guybrush pointing that out, only to get a response like "You think that is weird? Remember how different the whole town looked when you returned from your honeymoon?", and then the topic is dropped forever.

Really enjoying the details in this one by the way. Each time I look at it I notice a new little animation detail, either in the foreground, background or characters. I like all the little blinking eyes, moving fish, and I like the little subtle expressions on the pirates. Just real small eye movements but it really sells the thing for me.

So the plot of Return is that Guybrush has a diminished lung capacity from drinking too much grog and he can't even win a belching contest let alone hold his breath for three minutes. His sole superpower is GONE and we still have a game. Take that, Marvel! By the way, I had this scene on repeat in the background now for 15 minutes. Something is wrong with me. Somehow I have the feeling that the solution to this puzzle is the longest belch in history, and that @Dmnkly intends to tell us that he got it right on the first take. 🤭

I recently read through a lot of the original design pitch for Curse, which originally was Ahern and Ackley originally proposed to be a MUCH longer game (I've attached it in case any of you haven't read it and are curious), and I was struck by how much of the game was thematically tied to the idea of weddings as cursed or fraught. Some of this made it to the finished version -- most obviously there is the doomed Goodsoup engagement. The pitch also includes a different puzzle with the theater, where Guybrush has to act out Romeo & Juliet, "pledging his undying devotion to a hook-armed pirate in drag". Most notably the overall arc of the game is that the Voodoo Lady has given Guybrush a number of tasks that he must complete in order to "destroy what remains of LeChuck's wedding plans", which includes visiting the wedding reception (which is somehow still in-progress four years later), returning a bunch of LeChuck and Elaine's wedding gifts, and visiting the 'Tree of Life' to crossing out where LeChuck has carved "LeChuck + Elaine". There are some interesting ideas in there, but the plotting is ropey because it feels weird to have to undo all of these things about a wedding that didn't actually take place. Maybe they could have finagled it into working -- like maybe the voodoo magic spell is set up so that it takes effect once Elaine puts the ring on, for example. I think they made the right choices in simplifying the game. This next spurious bit of psychoanalysis is probably totally wrong, but the original outline suggested to me that least one of the designers was working out a lot of MARRIAGE ANXIETY. I mean, they probably weren't, but the subtext of this version of Curse would have been a lot meatier. It make marriage as an institution seem kind of creepy, and has at least four iterations of cursed engagements: Guybrush and Elaine, LeChuck and Elaine, Romeo and Juliet (as performed by Guybrush), and the Goodsoups. The original pitch does not end with a successful wedding (although it calls for a romantic musical number). After everything Guybrush has to go through in this longer, rather darker, version of Monkey Island 3, I think it could have ended with both him and Elaine deciding that marriage was waaaay too much commitment (and voodoo), and parting ways.... maybe something like: Elaine: After the way my last engagement ended? I'm not looking for any more attachments right now. Guybrush: Funny, I was thinking the same thing... It could be played as glib on the surface, but with a tragic undertone. I don't think it would have been the crowd-pleasing ending that matched the overall tone of Curse, but it would have been hewed closer to the tone of the first two games, which undercut their expected climaxes. It would have also avoided saddling the subsequent games with a happily-married protagonist, while setting up a potential plot element for the next game (which Curse doesn't really do). Anyway, I'll be interested in seeing what Ron does with their relationship. ...and thank you for reading my dissertation on the theme of marriage in an unproduced version of a computer game I first played when I was in middle school. 1995 08 29 Curse of Monkey Island.compressed.pdf

Clearly, the storekeeper was evicted by Stan for owing him 5,000 pieces'o'eight. 😱

This one gave me a small chuckle

"Got any... 4's?" "No, go blow-fish."

Actually, puts a whole new spin on why he's looking over there, doesn't it?

I wonder if the storekeeper lost the place because he was a creep towards Carla, who is now Governor and has the power to throw him out?

Curse my overhyping personality... I thought we'd at least get something new gameplay wise like showing us how puzzles work, or our inventory. I really dont want to see more rooms as its just going to spoil the surprise and take away from exploration. If i had a release date I'd stop checking these and just wait it out haha Its weird... this feels like step down from last weeks which had dialogue and 2 rooms. It feels like it should have been posted earlier maybe before the Melee Island clip.

Here we are

I think it's more that Guybrush and Elaine are so established as a romantic, married couple now, people have trouble imagining anything different. But people do drift apart. A failed romance can turn into a successful friendship. A breakup doesn't have to be fiery or even extremely sad - it can be a sign of two people growing, or finding happiness elsewhere. We don't see those kinds of stories very often in video games but I think they're just so much more inherently interesting than 'and the couple who are meant for each other get together just like it was supposed to go' There's a lot of nuance and depth to be had in that space of 'there's a world in which these two could have worked, romantically, but it's not this one' I mentioned it before but I loved that for the ending of Full Throttle, and it's so well directed, very little is said but you absolutely understand the emotions at play: There's that moment of 'so what happens at now'. You know that both of them want to talk about some feelings they have. Ben has doubts but Maureen thinks perhaps they still have a future. Then Maureen gets a phone call. She has to take it. As soon as she does, she's back in work mode. She's an Important Person now. She has Responsibilities. We hear a car door open and close as Ben leaves. Maureen gives just a little glance over toward it, before continuing with the call. She's sad, but she knows he's right. Duty calls. Ben knows it's best if he just goes. It's not a bad thing - a little sad, but it's just him playing out the inevitability of what would have happened if they'd tried to make something worse. Best do it now, quietly, and avoid the pain. Duty calls. It's so beautiful to me, brings those characters to life way more than any kind of shoving them together could have done. MI1's romance was absurdly, comically unbelievable, it was played almost entirely for laughs. In MI2 they play a lot of it for laughs too, but via a post-break up version of the relationship because of course they do - the MI1 romance was absurd, there was nothing about that non-relationship that was set up for long-term success. The attraction is still there, and Elaine is definitely not immune to it, but she's wiser to who Guybrush is as a person and doesn't fall for it for very long. Then we had the next few games where we suspend disbelief that they had anything approaching a workable relationship before. Fair enough, that's the direction things went, I'm not going to begrudge it, but it leaves so much unaddressed, that I'm just begging for something that brings a bit of depth to their dynamic.

And 57.2% of facts are made of up on the spot

I loved, loved, loved Psychonauts 2. It was the game the world needed after all those lockdowns, but it also just absolutely fantastic in its own right. DoubleFine's games tend to have a little bit of (forgivable) jank, but this was such an incredibly slick experience from beginning to end. Absolutely gorgeous. I've said it before, but I'd love to the see the original remastered with the same level of fidelity... because it was beautiful. It's a crime that it didn't snag a single BAFTA, too.

This is one of the best platformers in years. I could talk about it longer than I played it and it's long. The game just has this confidence that you can feel throughout everything. To me honestly a classic in the genre. ______ Billigste forbrukslån

Why not just drop the game? 👀 As soon as the games comes out I will cut internet from my life until I finish it. I have always played Monkey Island. Didn't have internet at home for the first 4 and for Tales I was already of the mindset that point and click games to me are all about that feeling of "I don't know what I'm doing, why am I so dumb?" followed by "YES! I am the smartest man alive and I will never get stuck again" in loop. I may use the hint system in a moment of weakness, but intend not to use it

Octoburp the Burpteenth it is. Not surprisingly, a Thursday! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Omg that's genius!

Yep, I know... Feels that long, anyway!

Yeah fair enough lol. I know the extremely Monkey Island fans have discussed if Guybrush and Elaine should be together A Lot. Its a debate that's been happening online since... I dunno, the release of MI2? Or CMI? Like, twenty years at minimum, over thirty at max. Christ almighty everyone (including me). But when it comes to more a casual majority of fans, people liking the couple is the vibe I get. But there's no stats to prove anything so I am just making shit up. You're right. GOD we are so close to RTMI ending this. Ship wars never truly end, but at least we can get canonical closure.

Guybrush! You're holding it wrong, omg. The pirates got it right.

@Rum Rogers pointed out on Twitter that those 3 pirates in the shop look an awful lot like the original 3 pirate leaders. My guess about what the pirate leaders are doing there is that since the new leaders got rid of them, they've imposed a whole new different set of 3 trials that you need to pass to become a pirate, and having been kicked out of the pirate club they are now working in this fish shop while they try to live up to the new pirates' weird demands.

I see we are going back to the basics. 😅

One hour until the next drop. Increasingly I think it's going to just be a normal thing, and we'll hear more later in the month, after Devolver's next release (happening on the 11th) is out the way

I guess it's unpopular: I see Elaine as head-over-heels for Guybrush in both Secret and Revenge. She left the guy for year(s) and wrote books about him being disappointing, but she was about to jump back together with him LIKE THAT, back in the Booty Island mansion. I wouldn't imagine it as a giant leap for her to pine after him after assuming him dead for months. People have told me that doesn't necessarily mean they're destined to be married. Fair, but it does lean toward them being together - even if it's the modern type of relationship that's sort of become equivalent to how marriage was recently perceived. EDIT: I sometimes wonder if it was Grossman or Schafer who wrote the scenes at the MI1 docks or MI2 mansion, rather than Gilbert, whenever I read Gilbert's comments on Elaine and Guybrush. Because those scenes don't give me a "little brother" vibe.

I may be a little biased but it did feel absolutely robbed at every turn

I would SO love for Guybrush and Elaine to separate but part as friends in the end of ReMI, I feel like it would be a great way for Ron to get what he wants out of their relationship while respecting what came before.

The way I've come to think about 2 in relation to 1 is that I think it's an overall better game than 1. The highs aren't quite as high as 1 - I don't think the comedy and its sense of imagination ever truly reaches the heights of, say, the Milkman part, but also I think the overall experience is much better and the writing is so much more considered, the themes it deals in are so much better realised, and the platforming and combat is much stronger. And as much as I like P1's hub area, I prefer P2's. If psychonauts 1 is always at least 'fine' and sometimes absolutely amazing, psychonauts 2 is always at least great and sometimes 'really great'

I'm not sure if I knew that, so thanks! "A while back" was probably seven or eight years ago, so I don't actually remember how I solved my problem (or if I just got bored and decided it mustn't be that important)

I'm almost certain the CD release removed Lite. I remember a while back wanting to revisit Lite mode and popping in the CD thanks to computers doing away with floppy drives and being shocked to find it wasn't available.

What Jake said. 👕 I beat #Mojole #132 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤💛🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤💛🖤💚 💚🖤🖤💚💚 💚🖤🖤💚💚 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

I think the most we're likely to get tomorrow is a release date or platform announcement or something like that. But if I had to put money on it I'd say it's just gonna be a regular MI Monday - another 10-30 second clip of something. Maybe a returning character, or something. Maybe a LeChuck voice reveal, at most. What I'd like to see: some behind the scenes footage of soundtrack recording. It won't be the release since doing 3 of these then just flat out dropping the game would be very weird.

I was having so much fun I didn't want the game to end. 👕 I beat #Mojole #132 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 6/6 💛🖤🖤💛💛 💛💛💛💛💚 🖤💛💛💛💚 💛🖤💚💚💚 🖤💚💚💚💚 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

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.

But the correct answer has all the likes...

I'm also going to try to play the game without any hints as much as possible. To not do so I think takes away the main appeal of adventure puzzle games. I can't remember the last time I played a true adventure game with puzzles, so I'm curious how well I fare now that I'm much older and, hopefully, a bit more intelligent. What would typically happen to me in Curse is that I would know exactly how to solve a bunch of puzzles in a chain, but needed an item. The puzzle to get the item was what stumped me. Getting the scissors from the barbershop would be an example. I knew I needed them to cut through the jungle and needed to raise the chair to get them. I just didn't know how until I finally realized the lice work on the comb. Often times, I got stumped on the simplest solutions. Knowing I needed to nail down the murphy bed to get the book to fool Griswold, but didn't realize I could simply pick up the coffin nails. Curse I did beat without any hints though and I think that was the only one I did so. It was the first MI game I played at the age of nine. It was hard, but immensely satisfying. I would love to recreate that feeling for Return and come full circle.

I'll probably do similar to what I did when I played Tales and Thimbleweed this time, which is that, first of all, I turned the hint system way down to the bottom, and then looked up a guide or used the system only when I felt I wasn't having fun anymore. I never really regretted looking up the hints when I did, it was either something I don't think I would have thought of for a long time, or something really silly like I didn't realise that I was supposed to return to a particular location because something had changed. I played through MI1 with a hint book first time, and for MI2 I chose Lite mode first time... it was a bit later before I developed a desire to try to play the game without help, but it doesn't seem to have harmed my love for the games, so I guess where I am with it all now is sort of ... chilled out. I won't play with a walkthrough or something, but if I want a hint I'll get one. I suppose theres something nice in that you can only play the game for the first time once and there's accomplishment in knowing you worked it all out on your own, but hmm... if that involves me wandering aimlessly and using everything with everything else until I hit upon the right solution, maybe I'll like the game better if I just get a hint when I'm truly stuck.

I think he gives my language a new kind of rythm, and I love that. Igh/buingemigh/middemazbjaum 🎶

I just released the German version! Who do you think voices Nightmare-Guybrush in this one?

Ooooh, true, true. I was assuming that if they'd ganked somebody's art, they probably weren't clearing it with LucasArts, but I suppose they could totally do both. FWIW, IANAL, but I suspect Laserschwert would have options. Just because you don't have the rights to profit off your work, I'm not sure that means somebody who holds the rights does. Prolly more trouble/expense than it's worth for anything more than a shame campaign, tho. Also I could be completely talking out my ass.