Jake

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!

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.