Leaderboard

First glimpses of Mads Mikkelsen and Boyd Holbrook, with some new quotes. https://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/indiana-jones-5-nazis-1969-exclusive

Indiana Jones and the Sunset Cruise.

Thing about the nostalgia as well, is that it is much more of a _critique_ of nostalgia than just pure '-baiting'. Most characters talk about it in more or less subtle ways, like the Voodoo Lady who actively warns against the deleterious effects of nostalgia. It might be fruitful to think about two kinds of nostalgia: reparative nostalgia, in which you simply "want to put back everything as it was, reality be damned", and reflective nostalgia, in which you do not try to erase the passing of time, and you work through the pain, the -algia part of nostalgia, by reflecting upon the passing of time, what good and ill it had brought, and how you have changed as a person.

So, the other day I posted two things I would change about the game. Freeing Wally and having a showdown with LeChuck. Both of those are now perfectly answered for me. There is an achievement to free Wally, which I did last night and man did it feel satisfying. I had wanted to do that since Curse, my first MI game, so a weight has been lifted. With the multiple epilogues, it gave a scenario for what happened to LeChuck and Lila. Forever fighting in the pits of hell over the Secret. Knowing what they are fighting over is a T-shirt makes it all the the more satisfying. Cool way of showing how their obsession enveloped them. I realized I just wanted a bit more closure on Lila and LeChuck especially and that short epilogue does just that in spades. It also works on many levels. LeChuck was described several times throughout the series as true evil that could never be destroyed completely. So, him being enveloped by his lusts and trapped in hell fighting over essentially nothing is perhaps the perfect end for him. It also compliments the fantasy/carnival aspect well. Their animatronics are stuck in place, still after the secret, while Guybrush leaves and starts a family with Elaine. So, now I wouldn't change a thing. The game is perfect to me and just gets better the more that gets unraveled/revealed. The other epilogues compliment other characters/aspects perfectly as well.

(pokes head in) Considering this game is giving tones of generational change and perspectives (at least in the early game, where I still am), it's an interesting experience to be sharing this first playthrough with my children. Talking to Carla, when she mentions Elaine's project, my first instinct is to have Guybrush respond to it directly and sort of help Elaine while also helping myself. But my children wanted me to change the subject back, with a "Just because Elaine's doing something, doesn't mean I'm involved" answer. If I read too much into this - and I LOVE to read too much into things - I wonder if their perspective is influenced by identity with their own life situation. My wife and I have very different jobs, and even at the house we generally perform very different sets of chores and errands. The concept of a happy couple needing to stay in separate lanes to finish unrelated tasks is probably a normalcy to them. Or who knows? Maybe they just figured the Scurvy Awareness thing wasn't important to the story and didn't want me to dwell. Also my son is convinced that we're still at the end of MI2 suffering effects of voodoo tomfoolery, literally talking to ourself in the prelude, and any references to MI3 or later is due to voodoo future-seeing shenanigans, along with modern technology references which I note is common with magical beings like Sword in the Stone's Merlin and Aladdin's Genie. (pokes head out)

Hi all, actual benjoyce from all of those years ago, mostly from MILegend.com! I am also one of those people with a lifelong obsession with the games, starting from the tender age of 9, with CMI being my first game. I wrote my BA (2009) and MA Theses (2011) on the games, comparing the Disney influences, theme park design and adventure game design, as well as the many-many meta-layers of references of these games, sprinkling it with a bit of Baudrillard here, a bit of On Stranger Tides there (this before the 4th POTC movie, too), few kicks of theme park history, and a big dollop of game studies for good measure. I have even returned to the games later in my scholarly career here. And I think I am about to write a game studies paper on ReMI eventually. I think that ReMI is a fine addition to the series, and a genuine iteration of the same principles that made the games great back in their day. Ron Gilbert was into meta for many, many reasons, mostly because postmodernism was in the Zeitgeist and a lot more innocent that the metafiction we get these days. But I believe that ReMI in particular owes its humour and metafictional aspects very much to William Goldman's fairytale adventure novel, The Princess Bride, and I especially emphasise that it is the novel, because it has a lot of textual shenanigans that plays with both the way stories are told, and also the nature/status of fictionality. Goldman's constant barrage of patently absurd historical claims and the obvious fictionalisation of his authorial persona, the numerous digressions, omissions, blatant lies, tall tales, asides, and the whole "found manuscript"/"fictional editor" shtick is very much in the same vein as Gilbert and Grossman's masterful play with the computer game as a (meta)medium. There are several themes that run through Gilbert's whole oeuvre, intense preoccupations and hard-won lessons of storytelling, observations of real life and human nature that go well beyond the MI games, and his protagonists always seem to be "Lost in the Funhouse," to quote John Barth's lovely short story, which, incidentally, touches upon the same themes as ReMI, and it ends like this: "He envisions a truly astonishing funhouse, incredibly complex yet utterly controlled from a great central switchboard like the console of a pipe organ. Nobody had enough imagination. He could design such a place himself, wiring and all, and he's only thirteen years old. He would be its operator: panel lights would show what was up in every cranny of its cunning of its multifarious vastness; a switch-flick would ease this fellow's way, complicate that's, to balance things out; if anyone seemed lost or frightened, all the operator had to do was. He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator- though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed." Quite like a game designer's passion, wouldn't you say so? But I don't believe that Gilbert _certainly must have_ been aware of Barth's work (and while aware of The Princess Bride as a movie, not sure about him having read the book, either) but still, they are not essential to the argument. What is essential, though, is that Maniac Mansion, DOTT, The Cave and Thimbleweed Park are also part of this metafictional house of mirrors because they all seem to be centred around a few core themes: 1. The more aware we are of the artifice of art, the more we are equipped to deal with the absurdities of life. 2. The worlds we build in our fantasies and imagination are true to us, but might be paper thin for others. 3. Our personal quests are dangerous things to actually attain, because with the end of our quests, we lose something of our sense of self. 4. The human condition is one of always seeking, of finding new adventures, 5. Putting an end to interpretation is impossible, definite answers to find meaning and to stabilise it is a fool's errand. 6. Excursions, digressions, side-paths, getting lost are an integral part of getting where you want to be going. Sooo, they are very postmodern attitudes by nature. For these reasons (and because I would have accepted whatever ReMI would end up being at the hands of Terrible Toybox), I am grateful for the ride, and they way I eventually want to give back to the developers and the adventure gaming community is to continue to interpret, critique, and analyse this game as the metamodernist masterpiece I believe it to be.