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Jake

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Posts posted by Jake

    Spoiler-Filled Interview with Ron Gilbert and Laura Cress

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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. 

    • Like 4

    What is your favorite *NEW* character of Return to Monkey Island and why?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    5 hours ago, JacquesSparkyTail said:

    side note: i wonder if every death happening off screen was to help make this one more kid friendly. 

    How many deaths have happened on screen in Monkey Island? my attempt at remembering how much real on screen death there is:

     

    Secret:

    ☠️🌸🌸 none that I can remember, unless you count ghosts getting zapped. the piranha poodles may appear dead but they are only sleeping. there is an actual kind of unsettling corpse hanging by a rope though, so one skull I guess


     

    LeChuck’s Revenge

    🌸🌸🌸 none that I can remember, unless you count Guybrush and Wally drowning in acid, which I don’t think we see anyway, it cuts away


     

    Curse

    🌸🌸🌸 same, i can’t recall any unless you count Guybrush dying in the hotel and waking up in a grave, or the pirates turning into skeletons on the lava roller coaster. it is all gags, not really played as a “death” as much as cartoon silliness


     

    Escape

    💀🌸🌸 okay real talk I don’t remember what happens in this game sorry, maybe it ends in a bloodbath. does ozzie get squished by a giant stone lechuck or something like that? I vaguely remember thinking “eugh, yuck,” so one skull but without the crossbones why not


     

    Tales

    ☠️☠️☠️ Morgan dies on screen in a very dramatic way. So does Guybrush. Both are played as big death moments and not for laughs. Nipperkin and a few other characters are said to have been killed by LeChuck off screen. What a murderous game!

     

    Return

    💀🌸🌸 some characters die in the story in a way that is coded as death, but it happens off screen. another lightweight skull

     

    I’d say Return is one of the lighter games in terms of death depiction but not the lightest. 

    • Thanks 1
    • Chef's Kiss 1

    The Mojole Results Thread

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    On 10/4/2022 at 4:33 AM, Jake said:

     

      Reveal hidden contents


     

    👕 I beat #Mojole #196 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6
    🖤💚🖤🖤💚
    🖤💚🖤🖤🖤
    🖤💚🖤🖤🖤
    💚💚🖤🖤💛
    💚💚💚💚💚
    https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/


    👕 I beat #Mojole #198 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 1/6
    💚💚💚💚💚
    https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

    • Wow 1
    • Chef's Kiss 2

    Andor

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    4 minutes ago, BaronGrackle said:


    Well, I gave a paragraph of Star Wars things that make me happy. For other people that list might include lightsabers, the Force, hero's journey in a fantastic space setting... a minimum of one action sequence... 😆

    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. 

    • Like 1

    Andor

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    3 hours ago, BaronGrackle said:

    I've heard the criticism that it "doesn't feel like Star Wars"

    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. 

    • Like 1

    Favorite music by location

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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. 

    • Like 1

    ReMI Soundtrack Project

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    1 hour ago, BillyCheers said:

    Could you post the time stamps for each section?

    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 

    • Thanks 2

    Return to Monkey Island 🚨GAME-WIDE🚨 Spoiler Chat

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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. 

    • Like 1
    • Haha 1

    Return to Monkey Island 🚨GAME-WIDE🚨 Spoiler Chat

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    40 minutes ago, LuigiHann said:

    Always kept an eye out for that kind of nod, didn't catch many others. 

    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. 

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    • Thanks 3

    Return to Monkey Island 🚨GAME-WIDE🚨 Spoiler Chat

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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. 

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