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Jake

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Everything posted by Jake

  1. I’m going to guess they don’t think any one of them is “canon.” I know that’s annoying, but I strongly guess it is true. This game was very deliberately made, and I can’t imagine they went into the end thinking “okay we’ll make the real one, and then six other ones that don’t really sound in our eyes.” My own personal example here, which is maybe relevant maybe not: I worked on The Walking Dead season one at Telltale, it was one of the few games I’ve worked on that had multiple things that could happen at the end. Similar to Return, they are narratively contradictory but thematically all on the same wavelength. I know how they work under the hood – what triggers them, what paths players had to walk and what choices they had to make to get the different endings – and I don’t consider one any more valid than another. It just wasn’t how we thought about the game or story when designing at.
  2. Yeah it went well with the sunset palette for me. Visiting Monkey Island in what seems like its fading twilight years.
  3. [i should have known] 👕 I beat #Mojole #200 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤💚 🖤🖤🖤💚🖤 🖤🖤💛💛🖤 🖤💛🖤🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/ 200 baybeee!
  4. I’ve voted though I have some feedback on the poll itself: I think the “ending” options are weighted pretty steeply towards negative after the first choice. There’s no “pretty good!” space, which feels like it will force polarizing answers.
  5. Started off strong but had no idea where to go from there without figuring out at least another letter. 👕 I beat #Mojole #199 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤💚🖤💚💚 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤💛 🖤🖤🖤🖤💛 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/
  6. How many deaths have happened on screen in Monkey Island? my attempt at remembering how much real on screen death there is: Secret: LeChuck’s Revenge Curse Escape Tales Return I’d say Return is one of the lighter games in terms of death depiction but not the lightest.
  7. It’d still be fun to see a linear cut of guybrush narrating it all. It would be a huge and borderline-impossible undertaking though.
  8. 👕 I beat #Mojole #198 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 1/6 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/
  9. 👕 I beat #Mojole #197 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 3/6 💛🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤💛💚💚💚 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/
  10. The water ripples and there’s a moon, so there are Could of course be from a wave machine and all the passing mechanical gondolas and bumper cars.
  11. They were replaced by one kleptomaniac seagull in a treehouse.
  12. Jake

    Andor

    Well, they’ve gotten that in literally everything else that’s been shown on screen, other than the Ewok adventures maybe. So fair to them I guess but this is so refreshing. Stories like this have only ever been in games, books, comics so far. Glad to see one on screen, and (so far) done so well. I enjoyed the first four episodes enough that if the show does crap the bed I’ll still be happy.
  13. Jake

    Andor

    Whoa, I honestly had no idea this was a take. Andor feels like what my imagination always told me was happening off screen in the edges of the Star Wars universe, and it’s a treat to get to see it on screen. (It might be like you said, my real EU exposure is from Dark Forces, TIE Fighter, and the Heir to the Empire trilogy, and in modern times the world of Kieron Gillen’s Star Wars comics, all of which feel of a piece with Andor to me.) Rogue One I ultimately didn’t like at all. The end left such a bad taste in my mouth. I know the audience in my theater was just whooping it up during the final huge space battle, and were literally screaming when Darth Vader was tearing through the ship, but none of it felt right to me. It felt like those scenes were looking right at fans in the eye and saying “you like this, don’t you?” Reader, I did not want it. The end felt bigger than the battle of Yavin, Darth felt wildly more powerful and more desperate. Everyone knew everything about the beginning of A New Hope in the last scene - it felt like it ended moments before A New Hope starts. It was so pat, designed to make a Star Wars fan hyped more than designed to tell a compelling story. (* I understand that many people absolutely love Rogue One, probably including you whoever is reading this. I’m glad you like it! Please don’t feel compelled to defend it or tell me why I’m wrong, thanks! I’m only bringing it up in the context of Andor in the next paragraph.) Andor, so far, has none of that. The cinematography and dialog are all played straight - the characters live in the universe of Star Wars, but to them that’s just life. There is no self awareness that they are “in a Star Wars movie.” No fourth-wall-breaking quoting of existing dialog, no using old iconic shots as shorthand for story moments. The TIE fighter that flew by our heroes in episode four was a moment of absolute human-scale terror. They don’t know, like we the audience do, that powerful Force users can knock them out of the sky now. I bet when we see stormtroopers, if we do, they will be actually threatening, and scare our heroes. (They don’t know that “stormtroopers can’t hit anything” is a popular meme among their shows viewing audience.) When thinking about that TIE fighter moment and how successful it was, I am reminded of the moment when in Star Wars, they hyperspace jump to Alderaan and it’s dead silent until suddenly they get buzzed by the TIE fighter and everyone in the Falcon jumps. What Andor reminds me of the most is Star Wars (1977): the only other piece of Star Wars media that didn’t know it was “a piece of Star Wars media,” because it was lucky enough to exist in a world where it was the only one. Andor exists in a world where there are a million other Star Wars things, and I respect the heck out of it for trying to be true to all the internal rules and history of this universe, while refusing to let our worlds awareness of Star Wars reach back through the screen and change how the characters act or make decisions.
  14. I think the top right one on Booty Island was named something like the island of parrots? @Marius please help me out
  15. 👕 I beat #Mojole #196 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤💚🖤🖤💚 🖤💚🖤🖤🖤 🖤💚🖤🖤🖤 💚💚🖤🖤💛 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/
  16. Also, though I voted for LeShip since it’s just a chefs kiss of nostalgia, I love the BrrrMuda music. It’s such a cool expansion of the Monkey Island sound into new places. It’s a genre mashup that I’ve never really heard before, but works so well.
  17. I recommend a playthrough with voice turned all the way off and maybe even ambience turned off. It sounds great and gives you a legitimate old school feel.
  18. Approx: 00:00 LeShip Main 02:44 Lower Deck 05:30 Crow's Nest 08:15 Murray 11:08 Underwater 13:54 LeChuck 16:38 Spyglass 19:25 Spy Ship Cutscene Agreed it probably makes sense to do this as gapless
  19. To be totally clear I love that Return did dive all the way into the multi-layered nature of especially the first two games. I also like that they did it with their own unique tone. Monkey Island 2 had this creeping dark underbelly to it, and everyone was kind of a dick, and it was great. Thimbleweed Park actually really had that mood going on, and I appreciated it the. I liked that Return did it’s own thing, though, and scratched and picked away at the surface of those layers, but did it inside a shaggy dog hangout story about a bunch of old people.
  20. There are a few others in the Crossroads (I can’t remember all of them). There’s the Grog machine sitting there of course, though that’s almost a Monkey Island meme at this point. The boat that takes you to the different crossroads island is initially boarded via a queue system that is meant to evoke the way guests are loaded onto ride vehicles in a theme park (and it has a tiny puttering gas motor and seems to run on a track when it starts and stops). The music is a deliberate callback to the underground tunnels. When LeChuck is killed and the screen goes to white, there is some ambience from a theme park bleeding in under the voodoo sounds. Does any of that mean anything??? I couldn’t tell you because it never felt to me like there was any sort of direct symbolic correlation between these images and any one meaning in a high school literary analysis sense, but it “felt right” to us so we did a bit of it. We had talked about going more full bore and having the grave Guybrush dug himself out of be made of cardboard and astroturf and that sort of thing - waking up in a more explicitly artificial world - but in the end decided to keep it more grounded and less explicit.
  21. Jake

    Andor

    Only good answers from Tony Gilroy it seems. I love this outlook.
  22. 🤔🙄 They clearly put a ton of thought into it. Again, it’s just not the thing you want, which is fine.
  23. I think you might be projecting if you’re implying the Curse team effectively censored themselves for mass appeal, when it’s probably just that they didn’t like that stuff and didn’t want it in their game. I think the team did see themselves as artists and did feel free to create what they wanted, and it’s just very different from what you wanted. I think that team just didn’t like those surreal and mysterious themes that came to a head at the end of 2, so they chose to interpret that moment as “I hope LeChuck didn’t cast a spell on him or something” being the literal plot truth, and based their game on it. Even though I like Curse a lot, it’s never been the Monkey Island 3 that I wanted, because it ignores the things you’ve been talking about (which I also love about the series), but I’m sure it’s the game they wanted to make, with the only real compromises coming from budget and scope restrictions, not creative or thematic. Personally I didn’t ever care if I got “Rons original vision” in future monkey Island games, but always wanted them to live in that exciting space where uncertainty exists, where the world feels like it’s almost projected on paper and you can see that unreality and feel like you could poke a hole through it or fall through at a moments notice, if you dig too deep. I don’t think that stuff remotely appealed to the leads on Curse, though. In that case they were the ones who were irritated at the thought of the potential head on car crash with those themes, and drove the car as far away from it as possible as the motivation for their game. You’re probably right that it was a big contributor to its success - not necessarily because those themes are unpalatable, I think, but because their absence from the plot made Curse a soft reboot in a way, a great entry point in the series for a new era of players. Sorry my thoughts on this are kind of jumbled. It’s not something I’ve thought about enough.
  24. Counterpoint: I’d argue that they didn’t ignore it, but that all the sequels are consciously attempting to deal with the aftermath of 2 in their own ways, with the knowledge that if they ever had attempted to say anything definitive, fans would have rioted and punished them for trying. Those teams were all in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. I don’t think they all liked the ending of 2, but every sequel was made in response to it in some way. For example, the original design document to Curse: Mediocre but real example: I dreamed of a moment in Tales where Guybrush hits his head or takes a huge punch from LeChuck and wakes up in a first aid tent, is bandaged up by a nurse, walks outside and is back in the story, and to never mention it again. Not the most genius idea of all time, but I know I’m not the only one who worked on these games and was drawn to the idea of crashing head-on into the dual-layer blurry reality we get a glimpse of at the end of 2, but knowing a head-on crash like that would be rejected by everyone everywhere for different reasons. Instead some games tried to fold it into the reality of the game, some games did their own version of surreal piracy, some tried to acknowledge it but only around the edges. (Anyway I know this isn’t really what you meant. You know they didn’t literally ignore it, you meant they didn’t try to imagine exactly what he wanted and try to do that. I think that would have been far worse than them instead reacting however they most naturally wanted to and making that game. Someone imagining what Ron would have done and just sort of futzing around would have probably created something far less memorable than the games we got!)
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