Jake

I don’t even really like Myst and I was sad to hear Curse bag on it. Felt unnecessarily sore, given Monkey Island is already the crown jewel of its own genre.

This is a lot of weird assumptions about both The Dig and Myst! Myst-like games and sequels to Myst sold like gangbusters for a long window after Myst. Many many many people who played it were captivated by it and recommended it to their friends and kept coming back to the game again and again. Myst created an entire and very successful sub-genre of games.* The Dig is a weird game but it’s easy to imagine the combination of “a sci-fi mystery game… by Spielberg!” was a huge draw. (And honestly the game is kind of Myst-like! Lots of puzzles involving weird alien transport devices, subtly rearranging things to make patterns and wake old machinery, etc. All stuff traditional adventure games yawn wildly at, or have scorn for, but captivated the Myst players who like these games as slow meditative experiences to get lost in.) I think you’re probably right to some degree, that The Dig is the game equivalent of a movie everyone is excited about the week before, excited about on the walk in… then at the end, walk out of the theater and don’t even really discuss on the walk back to the car, and kind of forget they saw it. But what’s interesting to me here is, we don’t really know that: No one really tried making more games quite like The Dig, and no one really talked to these hundreds of thousands who bought it and asked what they thought. The traditional gaming press - especially adventure gamers - seem to have a low opinion of the game, and don’t interrogate it other than point out how it’s lacking through the lens of traditional LucasArts games. Honestly the disdain for the dig among adventure gamers is kind of similar to that for Myst, but Myst was an undeniable blockbuster so press have had to (sometimes reluctantly) grapple with its success and interrogate it. Its success-but-not-an-undeniable-blockbuster status is another place where The Dig found itself kind of adrift out in the middle of nowhere, fading out of existence. * Point and click players often hate on Myst for being a totally different thing, but holding that against Myst is, and has always been, a mistake in my opinion. I don’t think Cyan ever set out to make a traditional graphic adventure game, but unfortunately there weren’t many genre boxes to put non-combat games into so it got lumped in. And then adventure game fans got really sore when Myst sold super well and was beloved by millions instead of their favorite (and in their minds, more deserving) games. Again, not Myst’s fault.

🤔🤔🤔 👕 I beat #Mojole #159 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 3/6 🖤💛🖤🖤🖤 💚💚💚🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Yes!!! Welcome

👕 I beat #Mojole #158 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤🖤💛💛 🖤💛💛🖤🖤 💛💚💛🖤🖤 💛💚💚💛🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

El Carlo La Grande

👕 I beat #Mojole #157 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤💛🖤🖤 🖤💚💚🖤🖤 🖤💚💚🖤🖤 🖤💚💚💛🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Yeah it’s Gavin Hammon playing Stan in Return, and he was Stan in Tales as well. (He’s also Kenny in The Walking Dead.) Kurt Russell in Used Cars, like Stan himself, are both takes on Cal Worthington. Somewhere between Cal and The Music Man (archetype reused as the Monorail salesman in the Simpsons) — that fast talking nasal voice with a tiny drawl — is how I always pictured Stan in the original games, and the slow, smooth talking version in Curse never felt right to me.

👕 I beat #Mojole #156 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 4/6 🖤💛💛💛🖤 🖤💚💛💛🖤 💚💚🖤💛💛 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

That would be awesome. Super Monkey Island All-Stars.

Most likely reason is the game is done (or very much done other than final QA bashing on the game to break it) but there is hangtime in between while they go through final console certification for Switch, including leaving space for time to ship and certify a patch. That’s honestly just a guess, but is the ideal time to leave these days so you can get through cert with a predictable release date and also have time to get any last minute issues stamped out too.

Maybe it’s more that this may be farewell to guybrush.

It would optionally reveal a second verb. (Open/close/pick up, that sort of thing, depending on relevance) I bumped on it at first because it was different, but ultimately found it very intuitive. I found Delores really refreshing just because it was clearly the result of someone thinking hard about how to further iterate on adventure design and game feel, without just cutting all complexity out or making the interface animation prettier (the two usual routes taken)

Eep ook ack! I failed at #Mojole #154. 💛💛💛🖤💚 🖤💚🖤🖤💚 🖤💚🖤💚💚 🖤🖤💛🖤🖤 🖤💚🖤🖤🖤 🖤💚🖤🖤🖤 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

The Delores engines name is Dinky afaik Glad we saw a new feature and everyone has something else to freak out over.

We live in a society 👕 I beat #Mojole #153 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 4/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 💚💚💚🖤💚 🖤🖤🖤🖤💚 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

👕 I beat #Mojole #152 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 3/6 🖤🖤🖤💛🖤 🖤🖤💚🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

I think more than anything the bra joke was just “it’s an unexpected garment to show up on the slowly revealing clothesline,” a surprising payoff to a multiple step puzzle where you know at the end you’ll get “something of the thread” belonging to Largo. In lite mode it’s something just sitting there, because the lite puzzle is “look for an obvious garment in his room,” and in that context a shirt is a very generic and comprehensible object. You can’t hang much more on it because there aren’t any other puzzle steps in place on which you can build anticipation and context so it’s generic. If guybrush just found a bra there, players wouldn’t assume it was largos, thered have to be an extra step there, which is inappropriate for lite mode. Instead Guybrush can say “it’s largos shirt,” and that passes player credulity because it looks enough like the one we’ve seen him wear. Agreed the bra as a punchline hasn’t aged great, but at least it’s mostly an innocuous moment of eyebrow-raising surprise and doesn’t get harped on. Apologies that some of this is just repeating what others said above. I missed a few posts

It’s also how they’re referred to in the game’s source! As learned by @Marius and Frank Cifaldi when excavating it for the VGHF chat with Ron Gilbert. Also your post was a great read!

classic PTKFGS!

Converting a day scene to night reminds me that I did the first pitch for converting the opening of Tales from day to night. It was originally a bright sunny day at the start of the game, and I suggested we change it to a dark night with thunderstorm, rain etc, and then have it fade to day as Guybrush washes ashore on Flotsam. The effect animation I made to test this time of day transition looked extremely goofy at 10x speed (which is a common speed to run at in Telltales tools because it has a 10x/1x toggle hotkey for quickly getting through things without skipping over any keyframes or code) because of how LeChuck and the ships bobbled around, and became a video I dumped onto my personal YouTube the day before the game came out

ARGH Eep ook ack! I failed at #Mojole #149. 💛💛🖤🖤🖤 💛💚💛💛🖤 🖤💚💛💛💛 💛💚💚🖤💚 🖤💚💚💛💚 💚💚💚🖤💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/