Jake

He said the game had its 10,000th bug filed in the database, not that there are 10,000 bugs currently open. Those are two very different things! It’s been in development for two years so many of those bugs are probably long closed.

I think you’re both right that it would be a needle in a haystack, though I think more specifically than a highway map, It looks like it might be pulled out of a road atlas. It’s a pretty tight region so I figured someone flipped through a big driving atlas and found some appealing pages. A big road atlas with maps of different scales would be the right prop for a cross country road trip too. I’ve looked through online scans of road atlases, hoping that they weren’t significantly updated between the late 80s and mid 90s so there’d be something online that was a close fit, but haven’t found it. There are unfortunately one zillion of them, it was a common item to buy and chuck in the back pocket of a passenger seat pre-internet. There are big brands like Rand McNally and AAA and also just an infinite collection of smaller ones like this. It would be a borderline impossibly wide search I think.

Seems like the correct choice.

Looks so nice!

Finally this thread is great.

After my earlier remark I decided to do the worst thing possible and look up the Scumm Bar's "Curse of Monkey Island Fan Reviews" page, containing a bunch of reviews that went up basically right after people got to play Curse for the first time. Unfortuantely my review is in there, a review with which I find no faults absolutely disagree with on almost every point made, when I read it back today. There are a few people complaining that it should have been 256 color pixel art, and blame the excesses of the new high res production and far-too-fancy art style on why the game is ruined (Of course Curse was also 256 colors but they probably just meant the 320x200 part). And a lot of people really upset that Herman Toothrot isn't in the game (the monkeys paw curls and EMI is born), to the point that it almost seems like it was a meme in the community that people picked up on from each other and said "you know, yeah youre right that does suck!" but it's really hard to wind the clock back and tell. I think the truly old Scumm Bar forums are gone. It's really hard to tell the context of this at all without the rest of the discourse that surrounds it - a lot of the reviews look like they're written in response to hate that didn't get recorded as vehemently in reviews. Anyway sorry for what 16 year old me wrote at the time. He's an idiot.

I don’t know that Gilbert is interested in parity with the Special Editions, which he had nothing to do with other than being on the commentary track, and at this point it doesn’t seem like he or Grossman see this as the third game in a trilogy, but rather the nebulous “next” entry in a series that has had many beloved entries. Did people ask for a retro pixels mode for Curse when it came out in 1997? (Actually they probably did and I’ve forgotten. Actually I probably asked for that sort of thing on this very forum and have forgotten, may I never be reminded of my old posts.)

I love being reminded that “fan” is short for “fanatic.”

I think the people coming to Ron’s (online) home to yell in his face is a problem. I also think people who don’t like the art style trying to claim they speak for others (or accuse others of lying or having an ulterior motive for saying they like the art) is also a problem. That is the actual objectionable behavior. And it has been happening. It’s fine to not like the art. It’s fine to be disappointed. It’s even fine to be mad about it. But do it on your own time, and don’t take it out on other people. From every poll about the art that has shown up on Twitter, Reddit, and even Facebook where the most arms-folded adventure curmudgeons seem to hang out these days, the answer skews overwhelmingly positive, so any sense of a groundswell or anger or disappointment really is a small group of people trying to take up all the air in the room, get in peoples faces, rally others to their cause. Again, if people were just saying “I don’t like it because X, it makes me feel Y, which really sucks,” that would be fully fine! And many of people who are feeling that way are saying those things, but an unfortunate number of the comments can’t resist going a step further, into conspiratorial speculation — “it’s a sell out choice” “it’s a cheap out” “Disney made them,” etc — because they’re seemingly unwilling to accept that other people see the world differently from them or have different tastes, that there must be some nefarious reason for their disappointment. That stuff is what really gets me down. A person not liking a creative choice? We’ve all been there! Being unwilling to accept that’s all it is? Ooof.

It’s not a real spoiler. It’s about how Grumpy Gamer comments are turned on again. Agreed that if any real spoilers show up folks should use spoiler tags aggressively. Eventually we may need to make a dedicated spoiler thread, but so far it’s been all speculation no spoilers, so it’s fine.

He seemed like a smooth talker in Curse to me as well. I love the sound of his voice but it never sounded like Stan to me. That low-toned drawn out “Weehhllcome to muuutual of Stahhhnn” just never seemed right. Again an excellent voice and great performance, but not Stan as I heard him. Stan always seemed like he should be Kurt Russell from “Used Cars” (or as I recently learned, the person that archetype is based on: Cal Worthington), a more nasal, sweaty fast talking guy who never lets you get a word in.

Moved these posts out of the MI forum to their own thread!

Yeah the Quest has a link cable (though any fast and to-spec USB C cable will do) and can run SteamVR games or any other ad hoc VR apps (like if you’re doing game dev in Unity or Unreal). I don’t know if it has official wifi support but there is a cheap program called Virtual Desktop you can buy from the Quest App Store that lets you run your PC inside your headset, but that also emulates the Quest as a virtual device in SteamVR and will let it stream from your PC. You need good wifi but it works very well.

On my first playthrough of MI2 I did die in LeChuck’s fortress and that cutaway was one of the biggest laughs in the game for 11 year old me. I’d completely forgotten it was a frame story by then. I think as a kid it was the first time I’d ever seen that particular format of joke play out. (Honestly playing MI2 was the first time I’d seen a BUNCH of types of joke play out. It was pretty seminal in my education about what comedy was and how it worked. It was also seminal in my understanding that creative works I liked were made by actual people - I think it was the first thing that really spoke to me that I could also super clearly feel the writers inside the game talking to me. Anyway these games are good and I like talking about them!)

I apologize for pushing on it because it’s taken up almost a page 😛

I just don’t think Monkey Island 2’s reputation needs defending, especially not on this board.

I think Elaine’s “spell” remark could just as easily be a kid still playing the game when everyone else went home. I don’t think it’s that, but I’m not a fan of requests to cut off a line of interpretation because you don’t like it.

Both DOTT and Return seem to be drawing from mid-century animation, which definitely includes Chuck Jones cartoons (or more specifically Maurice Noble’s style including background designs), but also UPA cartoons like Mr Magoo on the way more stylized end and Disney cartoons like Sleeping Beauty which is also stylized but more ornate, and 101 Dalmatians on the more naturalistic end. Here’s a mess of stuff from that era of animation:

I also think, as has been said before, what was fooling around in Monkey Island 1 (fooling around with jokes, but also with being creepy and evocative for no real purpose other than it felt right) got codified into the text of 2 in a way that retroactively tints how those moments play in 1. That too was surely a deliberate choice by the team who made 2. Walking out of the elevator from the underground tunnels into Melee Island is a deliberate act of recontextualization that isn’t just one guy cracking another guy up. And it’s not something that would be written about in a review of Monkey Island 1. I don’t think anyone is arguing that there is any grand and perfect plan - it’s clear these games are built on top of each other, with each choice being an intuitive response to the choice that came before, done at the time in real time (the first two games came together in under two years!). Like much of Monkey Island discussion, I think everyone is right here. There probably is no true right or wrong, at least within the band of conversation that’s been happening in this specific thread, which is by and large a really good one.

If it’s any consolation we were happy we got to make Guybrush himself be sad his hook was gone.

It was, the girders and music in the Crossroads were both referencing underground tunnels to some degree, that area had a map that was a little bit of a park map. The boat dock is meant to be styled after boarding gates for a ride. It’s hard to hear but there’s also some audio that bleeds through when lechuck is defeated. When designing Guybrush digging out of his grave, my initial desire was for the “dirt and grass” to be cardboard and astroturf, almost like he was buried within a stage set, but we decided to keep it more real. That said, there was a desire with the Crossroads to make it feel like artificial vignettes, and stay ambiguous as to what they are or where you are. I honestly couldn’t tell you what any of it means in a literal symbolic or plot sense but could talk about what it was trying to evoke for me for probably way too long haha Both Monkey Island 1 and 2 have this feeling that if you get too close to the edge of the world, if you dig too deep, it will all start unraveling. It’s a wonderful feeling to have in a world you get to explore so fully, and get to be an active participant in because it’s a video game.

I can't speak for the other games, but on Tales what was fun was knowing that because of the end of Monkey 2, there was always this feeling of some crackling unknowability that existed at the edge of the game's universe, and that it was there to play with when working on the game, and sort of dare yourself to get up close to. Sometimes I think Tales got too close and sometimes I think it didn't get close enough. That could just as easily be talking about "how do you get to Monkey Island and what will I find once you get there?"

Not sure whose balls you're talking about here but we weren't allowed to. In regards to the post-credits scene in Tales, I feel like the team was okay with it even if we never got to do a followup because while it can imply some huge story if people wanted to use it, it could also be just another turn of the crank, the same as the end of Curse and Escape, eg LeChuck buried under a mountain of ice (and then somehow he returns because he always does). If a future game doesn't pick up that thread, I don't think it's too harmful to leave behind "Morgan is now the voodoo lady's lackey, off on business that may never cross paths with our heroes again." That's not to say folks shouldn't feel burned or annoyed by that scene, but I think we had hoped it was open enough to not be damaging if it was never picked up again* *I do hope someone picks it up again of course, that would rule.

Oof! I should play the DVD version, it's been a long time.

Telltale management was extremely against patching unless absolutely necessary because it cost QA and producer time. It was a bummer.