Leaderboard

"What's the matter, Threepwood? You don't like porcelain?"

Well said. To add to this, I think the use of the word "Original" in the plaque at the end of the game when referencing the Secret was extremely purposeful by Ron and Dave. The amusement park was indeed the original Secret conceived during the development of the first game, but that doesn't mean it's the sole secret of Monkey Island. The series has become something so much more than Ron, Dave, and Tim ever intended and so much of the series was born from multiple other teams with their own takes and interpretations. In many way, the multiple endings capture that perfectly. Ron and Dave do a great job in paying homage to all the great work other teams have done on this series. Return, beyond being just a great game, is also a very humble one too in many ways in how it treated the canon.

I have only just now gotten to the start of Part 3 of RTMI, due to having two kids and plenty of other responsibilities, and I'm definitely enjoying it. As a kid, I only got limited pockets of time to play games, so I would work puzzle over an adventure game for (what seemed like) months. I have introduced my kids (4 and 7) to Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo on the Switch and they have replayed it half a dozen times now. The four-year old finds the controls difficult (mostly navigating the cursor precisely with the joycon), and my seven-year old is now starting to find it a bit simple. They enjoy playing together though, so I think there's a very narrow sweet spot for the Humongous games. The three most recent purchases on my Switch are Putt-Putt, Thimbleweed Park, and RTMI, which I thought was funny. --- To chime in on BTTF3, I think I agree with Kestrel that the first is nearly perfectly structured, the second is a glorious and ambitious mess, and the third one is a genre exercise that is well-made, but which doesn't feel as personal as the first two. I think what makes the first two movies more than just adventure romps is that they are about Marty's relationship with his family and his own past/future. The third film doesn't add to this in any significant way, and it feels kind of extraneous to me - like an episode of the animated series or something. They lean on the "Are ya CHICKEN" bit so hard in 2 and 3 that I was convinced it was set up in Part 1 for years....

Very cool interview from her once again! My thoughts: - The long visit from Stan is starting to have an impact on Ron's style to dress. - I like that Ron cleared up about the ending and the amusement park thing (even though I was pretty sure that's exactly what happened). - I like even better that Ron told a bit about how the beginning of ReMI came about. Since its release, I had always wondered if he had such a resolution in mind all along (the ending being subtly altered and re-enacted by child-Guybrush or other children) , since it was so important for him to start with it. I'm quite surprised that the resolution only came about in the process of ReMI and I think it's beautiful! It shows how open Ron is to "dead ends" and how optimistic he is that a good resolution will eventually come (good lesson for me). AND it shows that the two of them are just very good storytellers. - What I like best is how Ron (once again) raves about his team and especially about Dave. You can really tell that this game (and probably the others as well) is very much about teamwork for him. Till ReMI, I often had the impression that he was very stubborn with his ideas and their execution. But that doesn't seem to be the case at all. - The original original Monkey Island (realization of being in an amusement park and a showdown with the proprietor would have been veeeery different - and interesting! But I'm glad they went with another direction.

I wonder if it was at one point though. That squid positioned itself as your enemy only to die when you weren’t looking. Maybe originally guybrush killed the squid, which checked off the pamphlet, which unlocked the new ending, which killed the cat that ate the rat that lived in the house that jack built.

Earlier today, Laura Cress interviewed Ron on Return to Monkey Island and got into full spoilers, specifically the opening and ending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHmnvnfhHjw&ab_channel=Cressup Ron talks openly about the Secret and what has been in his mind for the last 30 years. It feels so good that Ron is finally free to talk openly about this topic after so many years and to hear his full thoughts. He also clarifies a lot of other aspects as well, such as his thoughts on the series continuing.

This is what the "Docs" end sting looks like: If you want to see it for yourself, plop this file next to the other "Weird.ggpack" files in your game directory, and then run Guybrush back up the stairs before getting the key: http://www.thunderpeel2001.com/Weird.ggpack6 It is literally just this image, however. I don't know if there's more to be found in order to trigger it to do anything else.

In recent years I think BTTF3 has seen something as a rehabilitation, as a fine conclusion to the series. I can't go with you on it being better than the second though, which is my favourite of the lot. I feel like the first one is just very well-formed, it's hard to find bad things to say about it, the second or third can't survive without it so if you could only save one of the films it'd probably have to be the first. But the second is an absolutely glorious mess, from its bizarre envisioning of 2015 (though accurate in more ways than it's given credit for) then very silly-yet-believable 1985 dystopia and then the revisit of the location and events of the first film in a way that's never been done as well since. I can't help but love it, it's so much. The trouble with BTTF3 to me is that it hangs so much on being a western pastiche, so if you're not really into that then it's wholly reliant on the characters and writing (which are still great!). The other thing is that it's so far back in time that aside from the clocktower which barely gets used, the locations are practically unrecognisable so you don't really get the fun of the same places being recontextualised like you do in the first two. So I get why people feel like it's 'apart' from the first two, but I think most people I talk to about it now agree it's a perfectly fine adventure in its own right, and concludes the trilogy well. On the whole I think it's probably one of the most consistently good trilogies ever.

It did and it didn’t. There was enough ambiguity — Chuckie’s glowing eyes and Elaine’s comment about the spell being the usual suspects — for there to be never-ending debates about it during the last 30 years. I think it’s good that some closure has been given to that particular hole in all of our childhoods, while at the same time introducing new layers of intrigue that will torment us until we die.

In the interview Ron says, if I understood it right, originally it wasn't Stan but another character, and that proprietor character was actually the antagonist, who eventually morphed into the current antagonist, LeChuck.

I finished the game still feeling that endings like "Chucky and Dee chase each other for the key" could co-exist with endings like "LeChuck and Lilah battle each other for the chest", both of them real and fictional at the same time. Then I watched this interview, and Ron says he thinks one of the endings is more true than the others... and he goes on to say that Dave probably thinks a different ending is more true. Heh. Around the 52 minute mark, Ron says he originally conceived that a villainous amusement park owner had Guybrush trapped, and Guybrush had to figure out he was trapped in the amusement park to defeat the owner and triumph. And eventually this park owner evolved into what became LeChuck. I do wonder if that was conceived before or after the concept of Governor Fat sending pirates to discover the Treasure of Monkey Island, which turned out to be not a monetary treasure but a crack in the earth into "hell", which turned the living into the undead. https://archive.org/details/ComputerGameDesignDOcuments/Aric Wilmunder - 1990 Mutiny on Monkey Island/mode/2up To me? That's the most compelling Secret of Monkey Island. It's harder for me to believe that Herman and his Captain sailed to discover that the world was an amusement park, or that LeChuck sailed to learn the world was an amusement park and coincidentially became a Ghost Pirate while the pirates of Mêlée Island (i.e. Estevan) believed he had successfully learned the Secret when he actually hadn't. Mutiny on Monkey Island, p. 3, is the secret I learned and choose to believe. In MI6, I think the closest thing to it is "There's not just one Secret", with the banana and the rock. The banana and the rock take me back to 1990.

I finally repainted that damn bread. (The surrounding area will be touched up later)

To me, this doesn't add up, though, because the amusement park "secret" has been revealed at the end of MI2. Why bother all these years to keep shy about telling what the secret is, when he's already revealed it?

I haven't had a lot of time to look at this, but going through the "EndStingers" resource files, there was only one that looks unfamiliar to me. It involves Guybrush crumpling up a document. The KTXBZ file looks like so... Odds are that I'm spacing on something or simply that others got this ending while I didn't. Or?

I'm still interested in knowing the intent behind MI2's ending. If that was supposed to be the reveal of the secret, what the lighting eyes and Elaine saying "I hope he doesn't have a horrible spell on him" meant, or if they had any idea how they were gonna resolve it in a potential third game. Just curious

Secret: - The rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle and the zip wire definitely feels like something that could be an attraction/ride. - The fact that the pirate leaders have a detailed list of modern ingredients for the grog and mentions them almost as if contractually obligated to do it. - Now when I think about it, even the Fettucini brothers circus does make more sense in the theme park context...

Heck I mean what else is there to talk about RMI without spoilers at this point xD I agree that detail is a little hamfisted but if the first one could be said to have a flaw I would say it's that Marty can essentially do no wrong. The worst that could be said about his character is that he's a little impulsive, he sometimes acts without thinking and gets into trouble sometimes because of it. But even when he does, getting into trouble is usually set up as a way to make him look cool. At the end of BTTF Marty has actually overcome very little on a personal level. Maybe playing the guitar got him over some of his fear of rejection but it's not exactly made very clear in the narrative. At the end, he's the character that stays the same while the rest of his flawed family gets 'fixed' around him (Incidentally this, when you really think about it is a horrifying thing to happen - for your parents to become unrecognisable to you as people, and suddenly your memories of growing up being all wrong). He can't be said to have grown or learned anything in any meaningful way in the first film, and that's okay, a film doesn't have to deliver that... but over the course of a trilogy you probably would start to notice it. So I can understand why they felt that they had to give him something to overcome, and while it's a bit weird to have this bit introduced midway through the trilogy, I give it a pass because without it there really would be very little to tie the 3rd film back to the second (and by extention the first). It allows him to have a moment of personal growth that makes him realise he doesn't actually need to prove himself (even if he's forced to in the end), which comes full circle when he gets to change the moment when he would have been in the car crash. I feel like without that, BTTF3 would have felt less part of the whole than it does. On topic bit: something related I really like about RMI is (spoilertexted for very, very oblique allusions to some stuff that happens in the game)

I fear we're going offtopic, but here's my two cents: I love the whole BTTF trilogy apart from one tiny detail. BTTF2 introduces "What's the matter, McFly? You chicken?" thing about Marty being a hothead. It truly comes out of left field for me, because nothing in BTTF hints at this. I get that they wanted to give Marty a character arc, but it's so obviously shoved in there that I cringe every time it's mentioned. Other than that, almost perfect trilogy (aside from some necessary recasts). The first one however is flawless and one of my favourite movies of all time!

There's two reasons MonkeyPack doesn't convert those ktxbz files to png's, translates the Yack files, or does other conversions: 1) I very intentionally tried to keep MonkeyPack simple, both code-wise and to use. To convert ktxbz files, I'd have to use a separate library, which means you have to set up a virtual environment to use the Python script, which isn't exactly intuitive. 2) I want extracted files to be re-packable. The Yack files still have some unknown op-codes, and re-packing files with unknown data seems risky. To re-pack a ktxbz converted to a png, I'd have to check if a ktxbz exists with the same name as a converted PNG, but then I'd also need to be sure that they're not just allowed to exist next to each other. Then if both a ktxbz and a png of the same name existed, do I pack just the ktxbz, or both the png and ktxbz, or do I first convert the png back to ktxbz which overwritese the existing ktxbz? Ith makes the code more complex and makes the result less predictable for the end-user. For just extracting data to look at the contents, Thimbleweed Park Explorer (or Dinky Explorer as it's now (going to be) called), ggtool, or gg should work to some extent.

I think it's funny that Guybrush has become defined by his quirky ability to solve adventure game puzzles, while in the universes of Maniac Mansion or Thimbleweed Park, that's just breathing. 😆

Just finished the video. It wasn't as revelatory as I had hoped, although it was nice to hear him speaking openly (mostly) about certain aspects for a change. Here are some disparate thoughts I had while watching. We finally got confirmation that Boybrush was an idea invented for this new game and not the original intention in MI2. I'm curious about the "hidden" things that Ron says people haven't found yet. I wonder how on top of the discussion he is (has he browsed these forums?). He also seemed hesitant to confirm whether certain endings hadn't been found yet, although he did eventually confirm that. Interesting that Elaine and Guybrush were originally meant to be split up at the beginning. I get that the idea was abandoned early on, although it was still my first impression from playing it. I still have so many questions about the early intentions between Guybrush and Elaine and the ending of MI2. Was LeChuck based on any character in Guybrush's real life? Was Stan always the proprietor of the park in SoMI? I'm very interested in how ideas have changed and evolved over the course of all three games. I still don't understand why Ron says that the secret is that it was an amusement park and he's been waiting to tell us that for 30 years. And yet, the ending of MI2 made that very clear. Interesting that he has one true "canon" ending in mind. We can definitely eliminate the drowning death and "I don't believe" endings, I think. It honestly wouldn't take anything away for me either way. The scrapbook note wouldn't have worked in the chest, although it's an interesting idea. I really like that it was an extra feature that came after I thought I had already finished the game. If I had read it in-game, it definitely would have taken me out of it and changed my initial interpretation. I'm glad Ron agrees it was a melancholic ending, although obviously that's a bit different from a developer point of view who's worked on this for 30+ years. As he says, he feels like he's Guybrush sitting on the bench with his thoughts at the end. A standalone Elaine game would be great, but it definitely wouldn't be as silly as Guybrush's adventures. There would be a much more logical and pragmatic progression to puzzles, but I still think it would work. Sounds like it's his next "dream" project anyway.

Welcome to the club! Hard to believe that Trivia Overlord is the rarest achievement I own, though!

I think it’s this, Ron mentioned that the note was going to be in the chest in lieu of the current item.

The previous game I had this was Thimbleweed park!

I'm starting to even take the ending of the second game was Guybrush accidently finding the maintenance tunnels of the park and his imagination/reality comes crashing down as a result. He realizes that it's just a park, but to sustain the illusion, he comes up with the plot points of the park being one of LeChuck's schemes to build up his undead army, with himself being under a hex of LeChuck's creation, and the tunnels connecting islands together. Then his son takes it further and puts another spin on it upon his reimagining of it with his friend Chuckie. At the end of Return, Guybrush was so entrenched in his imagination, it took him a few minutes to realize that he is still just in a park, even if it's the umpteenth time he's been there. Perhaps even Guybrush and Elaine got married there if that's where they met and he proposed to her. It would be a modernized concept since more and more couples are getting married at places that mean something significant to them as a couple and not the typical venues. The dream of Guybrush's parents from the second game are indicative of his feeling of abandonment and loneliness. They left him when he needed them the most and was raised in an orphanage. The park was an escape from these feelings for him, but they are still there, deep down. Those feelings come up in the dream and at the end, when he finds their skeletons. They are gone/dead in his life, perhaps even literally. So now, he wants to share those tales with his son and experience the park together as a family. Maybe Guybrush's thoughts at the end with just him on the bench was him thinking "Perhaps it's time I take Boybrush to the actual amusement park." The Secret and Big Whoop are all just in-depth carnival games. The prize for Big Whoop was an E-Ticket and the Secret was a t-shirt. Even the Voodoo Lady's agenda from Tales could be Guybrush's take of her being a prominent amusement park worker who creates the scenarios and stories of the park and the battles with LeChuck.

Now that the dust has settled, I'm ranking the game a little lower than I would've thought. That's not to say I didn't really, really, really like it, but it has more to do with how little new ground it treads. Most of the locations we've already seen in other Monkey Island games, and the new locations don't really feel quite as inspired or detailed as the old ones. A lot of the themes have been done before too (by EMI no less!), maybe not as effectively, but the overlaps are there. The graphics are nice and the compositions and details are wonderful! I'm just still not a fan of tween animation, and while it was expertly handled, I still just see shapes tweening back and forth. I guess it's a compromise that has to be made if you want 2D animation in this day and age, but I just don't like it. About the ending: I really love the humour, the music and the ambience, but I can't shake off the feeling that It's retreading some of the same ground as in MI 1, 2 and 4. On that note, it's not in my top 3. That'll still be SMI, MI2, CMI. That being said, I had a great ride! And the fact that, to me, it doesn't reach the hights of some previous titles, doesn't mean it's not a great game! I'm really impressed by the accomplishment of Ron and his team! Chapeau to them, and I love the product that they've made! Now gimme a physical edition with a soundtrack CD!

What I loved about the interview in particular is how Ron really stuck to his guns regarding the Secret. He didn't say, "Well, the Secret is that it's truly up to interpretation but you can find evidence to support....," or anything like that. He specifically brought it up right as the ending began and confirmed that this is in fact the Secret people have been wanting to know for decades and what he had originally envisioned. I think the game makes that clear, especially that plaque at the end, but this was the last bit of closure I needed. This also lines up quite well with comments Ron has said throughout the years in various interviews. The original concept of the first game became too big and ambitious to reveal everything within one game, so they created a series around it to segment some of its themes and aspects. Ron didn't have all the specifics of the journey mapped, but the Secret was always there in his mind. It's great. My take on the multiple endings is this - had the third game by Ron came out relatively shortly after MI2, the ending would've probably be much more streamlined with one definitive one, perhaps with some wriggle room on certain things but not to the degree that we got here. But with 30 years of this series becoming so much more for so many more people and Ron and Dave really honing their craft as designers and writers, they wanted to be definitive with the Secret, but also allow multiple interpretations for many other aspects of the game with the inclusion of 10 endings. I'm actually very happy and appreciative that he didn't reveal which one he views as canon. If I had to guess, it would be the one that implies that Guybrush takes his family to the amusement park to finally share the experiences with his son and come full circle.

I’m going to guess they don’t think any one of them is “canon.” I know that’s annoying, but I strongly guess it is true. This game was very deliberately made, and I can’t imagine they went into the end thinking “okay we’ll make the real one, and then six other ones that don’t really sound in our eyes.” My own personal example here, which is maybe relevant maybe not: I worked on The Walking Dead season one at Telltale, it was one of the few games I’ve worked on that had multiple things that could happen at the end. Similar to Return, they are narratively contradictory but thematically all on the same wavelength. I know how they work under the hood – what triggers them, what paths players had to walk and what choices they had to make to get the different endings – and I don’t consider one any more valid than another. It just wasn’t how we thought about the game or story when designing at.

It's been a long time since I visited the old Mojo forums. I must say. The new Monkey Island is ffing fantastic.

Looking forward to Chris Pratt's take on your iconic role 😅

A thing I'm not sure anyone mentioned, but I felt resonate with me through Elaine: Naturally I identified with Guybrush ("We are Guybrush", as per the brilliant writeup from earlier), and quickly figured out that this is an older Guybrush, a more grown up Guybrush. This Guybrush dealt with the loss of his youth, with obsessions from the past, just like I craved a new adventure in the vein of the good old ones. I nodded along the way and thought, yeah, Ron gets it. And then we get a glimspe of what our wife is doing with her time. Elaine isn't chasing some dreams. She's living in the moment and fights a deadly desease that she's not personally impacted by, simply for the greater good, not for politics but because it's right. And as if it hadn't already been clear from the start that no Secret could ever live up to our imaginations, it really stung that I realized that I was a grown man after all these years but I wasn't Elaine, only Guybrush. However, the game also says it's ok to be Guybrush. He brings a smile on people's faces. Elaine loves him, tolerates and even encourages his quest. And he's a great, loved dad. Having a daughter of my own now, I want to try to be a bit more Elaine, but I don't want to discard my inner Guybrush.

You just saying that gave me this fun image: Us being stuck on a puzzle is basically Bench-Guybrush having a hard time remembering. “And then I put the spicy fish in the bucket!“ “But how did you survive eating spicy fish yourself?“ “I didn‘t.“ “So what then?“ “Well, er, then I was going from island to island, looking for a glass of milk. So, uh… I looked everywhere… hmm… Then I went back to Brrr Muda, to see if I can do something with the fish bucket. Nothing… So…“ And looking in the hint book is basically Bench-Guybrush‘s brain remembering again.

with love

What's with this weird map in Wally's shop? The one that's all criss-crossing wires with blue dots. The most I can make of it is that it looks like an "X marks the spot". Guybrush's comment on it is kind of cryptic.