Jake

Apology accepted

Somehow Monkey Island returned... And we're playing it. I was fortunate enough to be a playtester on the game so I already got to the end a while back. I am extremely eager to discuss the entire game with all of you so I made this thread. I'm guessing it'll take a little while for others to get there but in the meantime this thread is GAME WIDE spoilers. That means ending discussion etc is fair game in here! I'm going to hold off on posting my thoughts for a minute so some others can catch up but... I can't wait. It's been a long few months holy hell.

Releases always make someone grumpy. If they’d released it at a convenient European time Americans would have been mad instead (including the developers, who in my experience always prefer to release games at times convenient to them in case some surprise goes wrong). They probably should have given the time earlier but beyond that I don’t think there’s a way to please more people and also ensure the day is as positive as possible for the developers (though as I pointed out up thread, if anyone looked at the public Nintendo documentation for the region where the developer, publisher, and license holder are located it says downloadable games release at 9am pacific.)

The sense I get is they didn’t want the game to be about that, but considered the idea of it being something that just happened in it or was part of the fabric of it. I can see why that wouldn’t work, in execution, in the sixth entry of a series. It’s not something that could easily happen in the folds between the pages of the story, people would want to know about it and have it be plot relevant. And I think that’s a very realistic expectation.

👕 I beat #Mojole #178 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤💛🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 💛🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤💛🖤🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Nintendo says 9am pacific time on release day is the usual time. https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/17395/~/when-are-new-games-added-to-the-nintendo-eshop%3F

So good!

👕 I beat #Mojole #177 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 6/6 🖤🖤🖤💛💛 💛💚🖤🖤🖤 🖤💚🖤💛🖤 🖤💚💚💛💚 🖤💚💚🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

I love the scrapbook. Hearing Dom read the lines in the IGN video was great.

I think I’m going to set up a separate subforum and fresh threads when release hits, so for now I’d consider this still a speculation thread.

whoa. a maniac mansion-style game that starts with the full collection of teens and act 1 is to recruit three of them would be... awesome? (I know some RPGs have this sort of structure for recruiting party members. I remember a very adventure game-like version of it in the prologue of West of Loathing. But I don't think I've really seen it applied at large scale to a full on point and click. Could be cool!)

I think if you were making an adventure game that had some sort of interactive narrative element (rpg style or telltale style "dynamic" character relationships, either entirely narratively based or stat based) you could start delving into side quests, either optional or mutually exclusive or whatever else. Like you said Kestrel, I think players would need to know the rules around them. If you're just making a SCUMM style game, side quests will potentially muddy the water of "what is progress" (since in a SCUMM game players understand any puzzle solution to be progress, thats the arrangement you make with the developer when playing those games). I think as long as the rules of how your world works are communicated early on, you can try things like "side quests in an adventure game." That doesn't mean it literally needs to say it on the box, but you would need to build an early scenario whose job (in the game design sense) is to train players on the rules, on what their actions in the game world mean. That is a half-baked post, I'm sorry. Please don't debate me on the finer points because I just dashed it off.

This, for a while, seemed to be all he did. LucasArts was a sandbox created for other people to play in (“just don’t lose money”), and ILM increasingly became the toybox a set of other directors could play with when making effects-filled blockbusters. George as benevolent king of a quality-first entertainment empire was the impression I had when I was the most engaged with it all, in the mid 90s before the special editions started to unravel things, then the phantom menace hit.

Gave it a shot 👕 I beat #Mojole #175 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤💚 🖤🖤🖤🖤💚 🖤🖤🖤🖤💚 🖤🖤🖤💛💚 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Those are already released. We’re only counting visible living game launches.

Which Monkey Island has the smallest number of Mondays until it’s released?

Maybe the new movie will be an adaptation of the long delayed Fountain of Youth fangame. If we see a de-aged Ford it will be canon!

EXCEPT in the opening scene of Escape where elaine calls Guybrush “Snugglecakes”!!! Why is she calling him the nickname of one of the pirate barbers of Puerto Pollo? An innocent slip of the tongue, or something far more damning??

👕 I beat #Mojole #174 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 4/6 🖤🖤💛🖤🖤 💛💚🖤🖤🖤 🖤💚💚🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Damn looks like someone leaked the Tales Season Two design document.

Yeah it is a shame. Past a certain point telltale wouldn’t do a dub unless a regional publisher would pay for it.

I loved that show as a kid, and rewatched it when it was put out on DVD and was amazed at how much of a flat nothing it was. It didn't help that they all got re-edited from short frame stories told out of order into boring hours-long movies with no breaks, but I don't think preserving the original format would have really saved anything either.

You may have misread me: I meant there were some of those people within LucasFilm itself, not referring to the fan community. Fans are welcome to be whatever they want, including huge lore heads! I welcome it all. (I read the heir to the empire trilogy and played most of the games, but didn’t get much deeper than that. Wore out my VHS copies of the movies and made a ton of lightsaber battle movies with my friends in the mid 90s though.)

That was already built on two decades of slop though. Star Wars was slop mountain and that was part of the fun for me. That universe is actually not built to make sense. It’s often cited as either being a pulp adventure serial, or an epic myth, but either way those aren’t the kinds of stories built atop Tolkien-style worldbuilding pre-gaming. You just pile what happens next on top of what came before. There are no rules until you need the next one. That’s how actual storytelling works! You’re right that post prequels they tamped things down a lot, but it was still a shaggy dog. I’m fine with the fact that they decided to fully shear that shaggy dog when making ep 7, but I wish they’d let it grow out again. Instead it is constantly trying to be a beautiful show dog, which is against its nature. I have no way of knowing this for sure but I get the feeling George Lucas doesn’t really care about “canon” in the modern sense, where every piece of lore needs to perfectly touch. He seemed a lot more impressionistic with how he liked to work. Everything that was already made only existed as a convenience or a jumping off point for what he wanted to make next (this seems to be how Ron and Dave are thinking about Return to Monkey Island). There were Star Wars lore heads out there but they were at the fringes of the organization, having their fun cleaning up the mess, but not in a way that was primary to the IP or the vibe. The way Disney seems to be handling Star Wars, “lore” is king, “canon” is king. I think the change from the former outlook to the latter has drastically shifted how Star Wars is made, consumed, and perceived. Anyway I see we don’t agree on this and won’t really get any farther discussing it because we’re repeating our points to each other so I’m going to disengage at this point! Thanks for providing a place for me to wring out my thoughts on Star Wars