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Hello everyone. I cannot not do Monkey Island art while waiting for ReMI, so I made this. Please enjoy. ❤️ Marius

…or do you????? 😅

The story was always supposed to have a sea monster eat you in the third episode (mermaids and sea monsters were seemingly always part of the story because of the overall “edge of the map” theme), but I am responsible for it being a manatee. I said the words “giant manatee” in a story meeting basically as a joke, and then it got a ton of traction and I learned my lesson of never contributing an idea you yourself don’t like because you might be forced to live with it. I think it turned out well even though it’s on the goofy side, the writers came up with some of my favorite set pieces and writing within that constraint, and we took it upon ourselves to try and make the appearance of the manatee as scary as possible at the end of 2 start of 3, but there’s no changing it being a manatee. There’s lots of fun concept art of the sea monster in all sorts of forms, ranging from giant terrifying angler fish to lovable borderline-plush manatee, and we landed somewhere in the middle.

Turns out, guy posted two unfinished Full Throttle 2 cutscenes back in January and no one noticed 😮 Spoilers for a cancelled game Intro: Cutscene:

In MI1, Guybrush teases one of the Men of Low Moral Fiber by saying he likes rats "with a little wine sauce." Along with the cereal, the Sea Monkey contains cinnamon sticks and fine wine. Many bananas are found on Monkey Island. There's livestock on LeChuck's ship, and I doubt they're being raised for friendship. I don't know if ghost pork counts, though. In M2, Governor Marley's party is referred to as a fish fry. Insulting Governor Phatt can include a reference to "bacon grease and pure fat." Among the suggestions that appear in the end credits: - Or eat lime jello with pineapple in it. - Or go out for pasta. - Or invite some friends over for salmon and white wine. In the library's card catalog, Yorkshire Pudding is a subject. Guybrush references ketchup when reading "Vegetables Children will Eat." There is a book called "Scourge of the Pizza" with the byline "Examination of forced olive consumption." There are also references to gumbo, tomato worms, and soda fountains.

Very, very nice! “the candle room”… 😂 I love that Guybrush wears his dress till the end under his coat because he likes it so much. 👌🥰

Coming right up! Although those screens were posted three years ago, so I would assume they are known...? This is the source: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OyanLg There's also some stuff from RTX Red Rock, a couple of Star Wars games and Infernal Machine.

Laughed a good few times at that. 😄

Linking to this speech from "the other adventure game Gilbert": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfHpch-ipFU "I'm David Gilbert and I'm here to talk about creating dialogue with fewer words. Basically, game dialogue should be shorter." (Screen in background switches to "Thank you for your time" slide)

The manatee swallowing the ship was probably the best cliffhanger of Tales next to the one in Chapter 4. I remember thinking "this is what Guybrush gets for riding one on Jamabalaya Island" 😂 I get that it's maybe a bit goofy, but I actually like that. I've noticed that others have said that they prefer MI when it's more dry, but I also love it when the games committ to something truly dumb. It's why, despite the retcon, I kinda love the giant monkey robot in Escape. What's that? This isn't the unpopular opinion thread? Oops, my mistake, carry on then 😜

I was at the "Too Many Games" comics and games convention this past weekend and got to meet Richard Horvitz, the voice of none other than Zim of Invader Zim. Oh, and the voice of Raz of Psychonauts. Just thought I'd share that he was extremely friendly to the fans that came out to see him and doesn't mind doing Raz's hand-brain pose. ;)

Wowww, that is a brilliant mix by Dmnkly of his usual Guybrush performance with an impression of Marius and his speech rhythms. SO GOOD.

I assume Remi is thinking of Cheese Squigglies™! Clearly distinct from CHEETOS®. Are breath mints food? Of course they are! Probably only a calorie apiece, too. In the Monkey Island 1 demo, the pot in the kitchen is full of unspecified soup. And if you add the meat it becomes "hunk of meat soup". And if you try to add the fish, it sucks to be you because Guybrush "doesn't like fish soup", the big baby. God, has everything after the first line changed colour just because I had the temerity to copy and paste the Registered Trademark symbol? I hate the future.

Yes! I recognised that voice and rewound to hear it again

The candle bit had me legitimately laughing out loud. Thank you for making this!

Fun and wonderfully animated. 😀 "Are you El Carlo?" 😁

You mean upscaling the Star Wars prequels? That's pretty much been done by Disney for the 4k releases (Disney+ and UHD), though probably not with as much AI support as would be possible. But there are fan projects out there, doing just that, upscaling Eps 2 and 3, plus adding digital film grain to make them look ever so slightly more detailed.

That's certainly a valid concern, as something I've long lamented about many modern adventure games is how overwritten the dialog can be. It often feels like the writers are too impressed with themselves and lack any sort of editing. I always appreciated how the LucasArts adventures in general were punchier. However, it's also possible that the large amount of lines has more to do with the scale of the story and where it takes us, with more interactable items and lots of locations, rather than a whole lot of overwritten dialog in smaller spaces. I certainly hope for that.

Don't get me wrong - 'dry' isn't meant as an insult. It's a style of wit, where the writing style is a bit detached and little bit understated, it's not overly screwball and goofy. I'm saying I like that the bone master thing didn't have a follow on joke, it was just a quick visual gag then done, never referred to again. I like that the humour is a bit dry and understated, and that I think especially in EMI onwards sometimes there's a bit of a tendency to write the jokes a little bit broad. Here's another example of MI2 being dry. When he gets arrested on Phatt: 'Aren't you Guybrush Threepwood?' 'You must have me confused with someone else. My name is 'Smith'.' 'Smith, eh? That's an unusual name.' And that line is left there (they call back to it with Kate, too, I guess) You could miss the joke if you aren't paying attention, but I think in more recent MI games they'd have been tempted to make guybrush make a face, or say 'It is?' or something. Dry wit, to me, is just wit that trusts the audience a bit, doesn't need a big signpost with flashing lights saying 'here is a joke' As you know I didn't LOVE Thimbleweed, but I don't know that I found it overly rambly. That said I do agree that the person I mostly associate with tight dialogue is Tim Schafer. My go to example for this is early in Grim Fandango when Manny asks Eva what she did to get stuck in the DOD and she responds, "What I did back in the fat days is none of your business - you know the rules." It's such a small line but it does SO MUCH WORK. Firstly, it introduces a little piece of slang 'the fat days' which gives us a little insight into how the dead view their living days a little irreverantly. There aren't really tormented souls, they're just people, settled into a new phase of existence. Then it introduces the concept of their being a kind of taboo around talking about the living days - it doesn't matter who you were back then. Thirdly it tells the audience - what happened to Manny and anyone else in the Land of the Living is not a relevant part of this story. Don't worry about it. It's very typical of Tim to write something like that, just a very terse - no, this doesn't matter, and you shouldn't be asking about this - while another writer might have been tempted to serve up a whole land of the living backstory for all of its characters. My hope is that with Ron and Dave having played through MI1, 2 and CMI, they will really pay attention to its 'voice' (while I have some quibbles over CMI's story, I do think that its comic 'voice' was fairly similar to the first two games.)

Yeah, I mean don’t expect miracles but you should enjoy it @ThunderPeel2001, as long as you’ve got the appropriate setup. In my ‘man cave’ where I’m pretty close to a 55-inch TV I can appreciate the differences quite easily, but with the 65-inch downstairs I can’t — because we sit quite a bit further away. The thing about 4K is that it creates a ‘sharper than sharp’ sort of effect. A starfield is a classic example, where the dimmest stars would occupy less than one pixel in HD, yet in 4K you can still perceive them even though you can’t see the individual pixels themselves as such. I guess it’s a similar concept to ‘retina’ screens on phones. It’s not so much that you can see the extra detail, but that the detail is so fine it creates this perception of a much more detailed image a la real life. Of course, all this falls apart if the source material isn’t ideal, you’re too far away, or your vision isn’t so hot. It’s also worth noting that it’s an entirely different situation with games. The difference is very visible there; even going from 1080p to 2K makes a notable difference. I think it’s because of the perfectly sharp nature of games, plus the fact that many have jagged edges or other such artifacts. Cinema smooths this out somewhat.

When I finally got glasses a decade ago I was deeply upset that I could see the pixels in theatrical screenings. What a ripoff!

Haha, great find but I already hate it. The way that the end of FT dealt with Ben and Mo's relationship was perfect - yeah, there's a world where those two might have worked together but they missed their chance. Retreading that and turning it into a potential romance cheapens what the end of that game does. FT showed me at 13 that it's fine, actually if the hero doesn't 'get the girl', that sometimes it's actually more interesting if he doesn't.

Amazing work, I love it.

They're referenced as Cheese Squigglies -- the non-copyrighted cheese treat also seen in Putt-Putt Saves The Zoo. (I was researching if it was an actual brand, but it doesn't look like it.) Related, the crackers found around Dinky are, going by the inventory, likely modeled after Saltines.

I was trying to figure that one out and concluded it was the same thing pigs eat. So more edible than IHOP in other words.

Amazing! Was DMnkly really in it?

Oooo, what a great cameo!

Well I just loved that

Yeah, those come from the online portfolio of Karen Purdy, an artist who I believe built environments for the game as well as Telltale's first season. We made some educated guesses about what their in-game context was in the FP article.

Fantastic. Hugely enjoyed all the nice little animation touches.

Excellent job, @Marius!

That was amazing! Thank you Marius, and well done!

Yeah and/or maybe it's a side effect of what they're doing with the UI. If the UI is designed, as they say to minimise the number of stock responses you get to interactions, perhaps that's encouraged them to write in more bespoke interactions.

Indeed (hence my concern!)

I think I was hoping that people would get from context that I was talking about the comic style. but I see the confusion - when I was saying 'if I can critique the writing' I meant that 'if I can critique the writing of Tales', in contrast the style of the first three games is drier. But yes, I see your point about the writing in TP. Maybe in that context it isn't necessarily a positive that ReMI has so many lines of dialogue, but we'll see

I'll admit that even as I wrote it I thought 'is that too much callback' because I agree to a certain extent that there can be a tendency to overly fan-service things by calling back or bringing in old characters or locations. That said, I do think the time to do it is when you're in unfamiliar territory. I might be reading too much into it, but it feels like Murray was included in here at least in part to remind the players 'see? Still Monkey Island.' But I've long wanted the return of the Men of Low Moral Fiber and when I think of them getting themselves trapped in a whale as their latest misadventure that makes me smile.

I do think sometimes the 'grit' was overstated a bit. MI2 had more cartoony backgrounds and animations, so I already felt that the game's visual language was moving in a more cartoony direction even as the story itself got darker, but you're right, it's tough to balance these two impulses of the game.

That was always a neckbreaking balancing act in LucasArts games, and I guess the preferences are very subjective. A lot of fans have no problem with Monkey Island looking and feeling like Day of the Tentacle. Others abhor the cartoony stuff and would rather have a gritty and at times brutal pirate story. And there's no "middle" here, no real balance that fits everyone. I'm quite with you, I would have wanted more of the grit in Tales. Then again, once we got to the ending of episode 4 and episodes 5, we had rioters over at the Telltale forum because this stuff was "way too dark for Monkey Island" for some. Lair of the Leviathan was definitely too cartoony for me (could go on for hours about "Noogie"), but the pirate faces meme was a massive hoot on the forums, and the manatee language phrasebook a stroke of genius. The bad yielded the good, so I eventually just shrugged it away.

Whoa! That must be the original Indiana Jones jacket! His mom even embroidered his logo in the tag.

And 'swallowed by a whale' is a popular seafaring trope/yarn that hadn't yet been in a Monkey Island instalment, so I say fair game.

Oh I absolutely agree, like I said, in terms of the actual writing and design of the episode I think it's one of the funnier and better parts of the series, I just feel slightly conflicted about how wacky the writing gets in parts of the series. If I have to critique the writing in one way, I always felt like the writing in MI was somewhat dry, especially for the first two and a little bit for CMI too. There's a lot of sarcasm, a lot of comedy generated around nobody caring what Guybrush is up to except Guybrush, and occasionally Elaine. And the writing is... understated, a bit? Like, even when it's doing something a little bit goofy, it's understated. In MI2 Guybrush says 'Watch me flip this bone right into my pocket. They don't call me the bone master for nothing." then he tries it and it hits him on the head and there's no follow up. That's the end of the joke. I feel like newer games would feel the need to add Guybrush saying something like. "Yeah, well, the wind was off" or "Glad nobody was around to see that!" or something. It reminds me a bit of something I was talking about with a friend the other week, where a writing problem I think newer Simpsons has vs earlier stuff is that it doesn't know where to stop a joke. They'll make a decent gag, then they'll follow it up one or two beats too far, and the follow ons have the effect of sort of milking the joke empty. One of my hopes for ReMI is that it's written tight. I want a drier, less rambly Guybrush, and story elements that feel more grounded than goofy. Bu I forgive you for the manatee thing

That looks like concept art drawn by Peter Chan to my eye. Nice to see him working with Tim Schafer again!

These are clearly deeply early, they look like layout passes bounced straight out of Maya (3D animation program) as a playblast preview.

This really makes me wonder what they're going to do with that courthouse in Return, given that Ron has been very clear about not wanting to retread any story beats from Curse-Tales. That judge is definitely not Grindstump, he's got a very different look, and obviously it's described as "a chilly new island" so we're not revisitng Flotsam at all (and I think we've covered everything we possible could from there within Tales itself). Out of all the screenshots released, I think that's the one that has me the most intrigued, because it seems to be an entirely new place, unlike the other screenshots that are very obviously evoking the nostalgia for the old games, being that they are from familiar locations. But yeah, if Guybrush isn't on trial, I wonder why he's there in the new game. So many questions, I'm constantly channelling my inner Marius and exclaiming "I wonder what happens!'

Further Tales thoughts as I play though Chapter 3 and squeak into the beginning of chapter 4: * I continue to be appreciative of the difficulty level, and the style of puzzling in the game. It's mostly straightforward, but they're all GOOD puzzles, they make sense, they're not irritating to carry out, and they're designed well and quite original and sometimes stretch your brain a bit. I thought Chapter 3 had some really nice little set pieces, from the marriage quiz at the start, to finding all the different faces, to the out of body experience, to the manatee phrasebook dating. * While I like the puzzles themselves, I am struggling a little with the tone. I'm starting to think Tales overall strays a little too far over to the goofy side of things. The jokes in this episode are written well - it got more chuckles out of me than the last two, but when I'm trying to think about the vibes of this game against the others in the series, getting trapped in a huge manatee and discovering a sort of party brotherhood inside, then later hooking that manatee up on a date is skewing a little closer to EMI than MI1/2 or even CMI, tonally, IMO. I think I prefer my MI on the slightly less wacky, whimsical end of the scale. * I appreciate the extra work done in this episode to differentiate the characters, even though they're clearly working off the same models. That said, similar to above point, I think the nerdy character and the dude are characterised a little more broadly than I like from my Monkey Island. * At the time I remember loving Chapter 3 and thinking this is where the series gets on track. In hindsight, I think it actually starts picking up in Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 is the best written and executed yet, but not particularly Monkey Islandy to me. * But of course, the presence of Murray helps. Always love a Murray appearance, and I think he's really well done here, moreso than I remember. The credits are a very nice touch. He's also really well animated. He's very recognisable, for what is essentially an ordinary human skull. * Sure are a lot of weird fat jokes about the Voodoo Lady. Feels a bit cheap, and I don't remember this being particularly a thing in the first 3 games. Can't remember about EMI. * I've only played through the lengthy intro to Tales 4, and I'm already excited to get back to a more grounded setting. When I think about the set up to this episode - Guybrush getting arrested and tried for various puzzle crimes he did earlier in the game -- I can absolutely imagine that as something that could have happened in MI2 or CMI, perhaps, and I think I'm going to enjoy this episode, especially because I remember only a couple of things about it. * The switch to night is nice, and the opening moments are moody in a way I like. * Good to hear that Stan voice, think it's going to work really well in ReMI

The part where Ben started strangling Mo was a bold design choice.

I dunno what to tell you, they're objectively the same melody but with MI2's version modified a bit to make it fit more easily into a 4/4 time signature. And I already knew it was based on an existing tune, I just couldn't remember where I'd heard it before. And we know all 3 composers were both pretty fond of incorporating trad tunes into their pieces, and it was a well known enough tune in the US to make it into The Simpsons, so it's not even a stretch as far as I'm concerned. This sounds much more deliberate to me than the idea that the LeChuck theme was based on that tune from Dr. Doolittle, which starts the same and then goes off somewhere else. Or the Moleman being a bit like that Poirot music because they both use a 5 note chromatic descending melody. This is the same melody right up to and including the B section (it's an AABA structure melody - there's a tune, then it's repeated, then it does something else, then the A melody comes back again and both the A melody and the B melody at the same here)

Oh, I knew exactly what I was doing, and it didn't take a voice director to guide me 🙂 I mean, cheap, fun, dumb, goofy, sleazy, whatever. Take it up with whoever wrote the line. But as an actor, there's only one way to read that line responsibly.

Amazing work, once again! Can they just hire you to work on the remasters from now on?