Jake

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

I mean, Dave Grossman helped make Tales. He was in charge of the writing and design department at the studio that made it. He’s probably aware of what’s in it. Yeah probably. It’s mostly standalone but has some post-game narrative stuff that could be a spoiler.

@KestrelPi have you played the free Delores Thimbleweed Park spin-off game? It was described as A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure started out as a prototype for Ron Gilbert’s new point-and-click adventure game engine and grew into a fun little game. It has a lot of thinking about simplifying and providing a contextually aware interface for point and click games. It’s two years old now but that means it’s probably a good representation of where Ron’s head was at when starting work on Return. Two years of development is a long time (and had Grossman join up, along with a whole team), so its probably not safe to assume “this is how it will be,” but Delores is definitely interesting. I had some knee jerk responses to the UI when I first started playing, but it’s very thoughtful and grew on me pretty quickly.

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

I have a 91 Gousha atlas but unfortunately it is the “new edition” which means the graphic design has changed. I know the 88 is missing some roads so it’s the wrong edition, but it’s the only one I’ve found that is available for sale so I picked one up off eBay. My guess is 89 or 90 is truly correct, since they seem to come before the “NEW DELUXE 1991” redesign, but I haven’t found them for sale yet. Fortunately these are all staple bound and will be easy to scan.

The way that one samples Murray repeatedly saying "Ron Gilbert..." "Ron Gilbert... told.. me" is baffling. Wouldn't be MI fan art without weird choices though. This one showed up a couple weeks after the trailer and made me happy. Also theres this, which showed up early too:

I think it might be better to just let multiple Return subthreads branch out in the main forum for now, and then create a sub forum once people want to cordon off spoilers? (Only suggesting that option to avoid having to split things TWICE once spoiler time hits.)

I'm happy to chip in for that map. If anyone else joins, hooray! If not, DM me anyway.

It’s true 👕 I beat #Mojole and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤💛🖤💛 💛💛🖤🖤💚 🖤💛💚🖤💚 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

😎

DREAMM is very exciting!

It looks good!

I would not overthink it, and play them in the order they were made! This color is a little dark but is otherwise exactly what I wanted the Tales of MI logo to look like, but LucasArts wouldn’t let us at the time, because it was the “old school” logo and didn’t reflect the current state of the brand. I was pretty sad that as a result it wasn’t allowed to match the rest of the series (other than the special editions). Makes me happy to see this again.

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

I really like Thimbleweed Park. It’s one of the few games I’ve played since Monkey 1 and 2 that have the same nebulous feeling of “something dark and unknowable lies beneath the surface,” that slowly seeps into the game the more I played, which I guess means that’s a Ron thing.

My Thimbleweed Park confession is, before I started playing I flipped the switch in settings for fewer injokes. I have no regrets. (There we’re still plenty of injokes but it felt like a normal amount for the type of story it was telling; I have no idea what I might have “missed out on,” and don’t even want to know, because the experience felt plenty complete without whatever I disabled with that checkbox.)

Yeah I think that you can print directly on paperboard or, “casewrapped” where the art is printed on adhesive paper that is wrapped over the paperboard. I don’t think either of those necessarily implies the folds you see in some boxes vs others, but I’m not sure. apologies if I got any of that wrong

I’ve recently heard the ones with the full lift-off lid referred to as “board game” style boxes, which makes sense! I’ve started using that as my mental shorthand for them.

I always liked that MI2 didn’t have any of that stuff. No insult swordfighting, no crew-gathering and finding a ship. I was sad to see them return in Curse, not because they were bad puzzles but because until Curse did them they were “just something you did in the first game,” and not “essential parts of the franchise.” Curse turned them into a pattern, almost like Return of the Jedi deciding to do the Death Star again - now they’ve become a trope that keeps showing up instead of being just one idea in an ever-growing universe of ideas. This isn’t to say Curse’s versions of those puzzles were bad (they weren’t), but I would have liked to see something new there instead of further entrenching the idea that we’ve got to repeat a specific puzzle from the first game over and over for it to feel like Monkey Island. Monkey 2 showed its not necessary. Sorry that this probably sounds more curmudgeonly than I mean it to. I really like Curse of Monkey Island!

Fully agreed. Playing Monkey 1 and 2 both occupy a pretty awesome and unique place in my mind where the writing is captivating the same way as a good book, including choosing what to say next having a feeling similar to “turning the page,” but then it’s also a visually rich game world I can explore that somehow feels real to my brain. The way suspension of disbelief in those early games work is really cool and irregular. That era-specific confluence of technology and ideas lead to what is basically a unique type of media (in this case the combo was text-based point and click graphic adventure game) that only lasted for a few years, was really magical. And Monkey 1 and 2 are for my money easily the best version of that short lived form. I don’t think it’s inherently superior to other types of adventure games, but that combo definitely is its own flavor. While it’s fun to hear the voices in the SE, it almost feels like an audiobook at times to me, for this reason. (Aside: It’s understandable why people at the time were trying to coin the phrase “multimedia.” I think that phrase is kind of a miss, because it looked at all these strange mishmash combinations of analog and digital technologies being combined in unique ways to make new works, and put them all under the same umbrella, but in practice that didn’t seem super accurate. Sure some artists were deliberately going very high level conceptual with it and explicitly using different media types as part of the point of a work, but for a lot of people, “multimedia” was just means to an end - a way to get the desired experience out of an early computer that could only do so much. As a kid/teen I never really understood the term “multimedia” to mean anything, because to me it was just “how you make a thing with a computer.” Now that a bunch of time has gone by and that bashed together style has sort of faded into history, I can appreciate it a little more as a handy retrospective term to apply, and the multimedia nature of these games sticks out to me more than it did, in a good way. The same way I can now go and look at the pixel artistry of Monkey 1 or Loom in a way I didn’t really as a kid because it was just “good graphics,” I have a lot of fun picking apart all the disparate types of media, process, and technology that make up these games from before the era of functionally-unlimited AV and standardized graphics and sound pipelines. This is a jumble of thoughts, sorry! Through the lens of time, I’ve come to appreciate more how unique the construction of early games are, especially LucasArts games, which I think are mind blowingly impressive combinations of so many skill sets and techniques and technology that blend into a seamless experience, but when looked at as a pile of components it’s absolutely wild and unprecedented, and basically unrepeatable. I think Full Throttle is the pinnacle of this, but it’s present in the studio’s DNA from the earliest days.)

I’ve been replaying Tales since I haven’t played it or really looked at it since it shipped!

I know @Marius tried something similar - starting with the published source code from the Delores engine release and adding a couple Monkey 1 scenes. You could conceivably start from there and then split them out to have parallaxing layers, lighting, effects, but it would be a lot of work given how relatively undocumented that release is.

For what it’s worth, if you don’t mind opening the box, the standard console editions are inside the collectors edition boxes. Of course, you have to unwrap and open the box to get them out first!

The one I got is from 1993, we’ll see if the maps line up.

Wow! Found one with that cover on eBay for just a few bucks and bought it. Will report back!