Jake

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

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.

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.

Only good answers from Tony Gilroy it seems. I love this outlook.

🤔🙄 They clearly put a ton of thought into it. Again, it’s just not the thing you want, which is fine.

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.

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!)

I don’t think it’s possible to get them all in one paythrough, as they seem to be delayed a few steps behind you, and depend on the order in which you get the keys.

👕 I beat #Mojole #195 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 3/6 🖤🖤💚🖤🖤 💚💚💚🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

A Grumpy, Terrible, Dinky Explorer

Thank you 😊 And I agree. I initially tried to split it up into ten 10ish minute pieces or three 7ish minute pieces or something, so the album could have more variety, but it works best as it does in game, as a giant suite.

We’re gonna need a second black tshirt.

I scanned archival assets for Laserschwert and all I used was this black tshirt.

Ah damn they’re even outsourcing the inscrutable shitposts to bots now!? Mojos days are truly numbered.

I think in the closing credits they call the engine Dinky, so I guess they did settle on that name.

Mojo has just posted all the unedited OGGs to twitter so I assume tools are coming soon. From the game rips I made a 20 minute edit of LeShip which includes all the variants and also weaves in the Murray intro cutscene as a mid-song bridge into the Murray track, and closes on the spyglass cutscene, since it ended up working out well as a way to end the track. https://remi.mojodb.com/music/LeShip.mp3

I think I’d want something that played it straight, but maybe allude to it a little bit. Like, if the game opened with a little sliver of Guybrush narration, the slimmest reference to it being a frame story or being somehow recounted, but was otherwise just a rollicking adventure. I feel like Return existing means a next game doesn’t HAVE to get deep into this if it doesn’t want to, it just has to be aware that it happened, and players’ brains will do the rest on their own.

I added a “never” option. Hope that’s alright!

Confirmed: It happens if you leave the game for a couple days and then load your save!

Yes true it is a remastered bandana.

👕 I beat #Mojole #194 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 4/6 💛🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤💚💛💚 🖤💚💚💚🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

I hope so too.

It is. I haven’t watched the last couple seasons of Star Wars shows (boba and obi wan) because the end of Mandalorian season 2 made me need some time away, but these first four episodes of Andor have been some of my favorite Star Wars viewing of the Disney era. I was never as huge into the EU/Legends stuff as my friends growing up, but Andor captures the most aspirational version of the EU feeling for me: The idea that off in the corners of the Star Wars universe, there’s a bunch of human-scale stories happening that are probably just as interesting (or more interesting) than the operatic drama at the heart of it. Some episodes of Mandalorian have scratched that itch, but nowhere near as potently or consistently as these first few hours of Andor have. Andor also just looks great. One of my favorite things about the main Star Wars movies is that as the story goes on, from scene to scene, you learn more about the universe: you’re going somewhere new, seeing something you’ve never seen before, learning about a new place with its own rules and a history you’ve not yet encountered in the story until now. It’s a type of worldbuilding that leaves tons of pockets for your imagination to explore in its wake. Mandalorian didn’t do that for me - it felt like it was circling the same few places over and over, and even when they went somewhere that was technically new, it either felt the same as what came before, or like it didn’t really belong in the show. Andor though, is delivering this particular Star Wars feeling in a way that’s totally working for me. It helps that all the production design is really inspired, and it’s shot very cinematically. I don’t feel the edge of the virtual set the way I eventually started to on the Mandalorian. (I’m sure they’re using the volume plenty as part of their toolkit, but it’s blended in better and doesn’t feel so one note as a result.)

This release seems fine? It has the soundtrack on CD, the return of the classic bandana, the Corley Motors keychain is a genuinely great idea, and the box looks good. Just ignore the other stuff if you don’t care about it. Limited Run makes boxes full of fun stuff, they aren’t the criterion collection. It would be cool to get very hallowed and grown up style criterion releases of these games because they’re things we liked as kids and are now very smart and tasteful adults, but also, eh. This is closer to what I imagine a deluxe version would have actually looked like in 1995 had it existed, and that’s fun to me too.

This is 100% how I took it. Finally someone builds a museum to Guybrush’s many exploits, but of course he gets credit for none of them (to the point that a character from a whole different pirate franchise gets credit for one of his feats).