elTee

This is what I told ATM yesterday when he contacted me to complain about things I wasn't responsible for. Unfortunately, he was too upset. Acting on the basis that his imaginary thread about MI2 differences was imaginarily deleted, I think he said he wasn't coming back.

Yes, but it wouldn't be much fun! You'd need to decompile a PC copy and an amiga copy (can't remember what tool you'd use for that, possibly scumm packer?) then manually run individual scripts through descumm. Then you'd need to compare the outputs. As far as I know, nobody has ever done this, and it isn't for a lack of interest 😂

I'm so glad other people see Stan in this character. I actually asked Tim Schafer about it in 2004, and this thread prompted me to dig out the email: Me: I was just wondering if the character of Stan in SOMI was based on Kurt Russell in Used Cars? He even looks like him in the early scenes! ... Anyway, still eagerly awaiting Psychonauts, and I *know* there will be a Gamecube version, right? ... right? Response: No, and I am afraid no. Both questions. Sorry to bring you down

I took some quick photos to show some friends the funny pictures in the manual for the Japanese version of the Sega CD Monkey Island, so I thought I'd share here for anyone who's interested in this kind of thing. Apologies for any poor quality etc.

Not sure what's happened here, but people have already been warned about certain topics of conversation that are not up for debate. That does not mean people aren't allowed to make a thread about differences between MI2 versions if they want to.

I found the video in question.

Er this demo functionality isn't new is it? I recorded a video of it many years ago and it wasn't new then either. Unless I'm missing something?

I am going to preface this comment by confirming unequivocally that I adored Broken Age and would love Double Fine to make more adventure games if they want to. When Double Fine did their Tim Schafer Adventure Game kickstarter, I found out about it maybe 6-8 hours after it went live. As I'm sure you all remember, by that point it had already reached its funding goal and was well on its way to setting all kinds of records. It proved, immediately, that there was an appetite for adventure games. I remember thinking about that old infamous LucasArt's quote about "current marketplace realities" and sort of smugly thinking, "see? if you build it, they will come" - or in this case, if Tim Schafer asks us if we'd pay him up front for a new adventure game, the answer would be a three-million-dollar "YES". What we ended up getting from Double Fine, as others have said in this thread, was more than just an adventure game. We got a fully transparent production of an adventure game from inception through to release, and it was truly money well spent as a backer. I got plenty of goodies from my pledge level and in the end I also got an adventure game that I truly enjoyed. Tim Schafer took on the project from the position of a former-adventure game developer who was returning to the genre after a long gap, and wanted to modernise the experience. This was (and is) absolutely fine - just like Ron with Return to Monkey Island, I wanted Tim to make the game that TIM wanted to make. But a part of me felt like the kickstarter had really been about nostalgia, and wanting to revisit the LucasArts days. Had Tim decided to go down that road and make a game in the style of, say, Full Throttle, I'd also have been happy about it. (Actually, I wonder if that was the original intention now - a small low budget, SCUMM-style game. And then it only expanded into what it became because they got so much more money than they were asking for. I'm sure the answer is out there somewhere in an interview or on the documentary, but I guess it's irrelevant now.) What I'm meandering to here is that Thimbleweed Park felt like a conscious response to this. A similar kickstarter to the one Double Fine did, but this time explicitly with the intention of making a throwback, retro adventure game. As they put it at the time, they wanted it to feel like finding an old LucasArts game from the late 1980s in a drawer and realising you'd never actually played it. And I found myself being, for whatever internal reasons, massively more excited by the prospect of Thimbleweed Park than I was by Broken Age. Of course, Thimbleweed Park came and went, and I found it to be a really entertaining adventure game, just like Broken Age was, but it felt way closer to the early LucasArts games of my memory because it used retro graphics and had verb interfaces and all that stuff. It was truly a product for a person like ME, and I was really grateful for it. Now Ron Gilbert is working on his next adventure game, Return to Monkey Island, and we all know it isn't going to be a Thimbleweed Park. It's going to be a Broken Age. It's going to be Ron Gilbert consciously bringing his design sensibilities into 2022; the graphics will not be retro, there will not be a verb interface, and it will not feel like a game we found in a drawer and had forgotten about. And that's fine! But it has made me think about what I even WANT from these old LucasArts developers when they sit down and make new games for us. Do I want Thimbleweed Parks, or do I want Broken Ages? I have a natural tendency towards nostalgia, so it's little wonder I'm drawn more to the Thimbleweed Park style games. But of course, it's utterly unrealistic to expect those games now. It was frankly a miracle that we even got ONE more of them. And I'm not stupid enough to think that the old fashioned pixels and verb interfaces are inherently BETTER than any other way of playing adventure games. The fact of the matter is, I loved Broken Age, and I'm really excited for Return to Monkey Island - I couldn't care less what type of interface Ron thinks is right in this day and age, I just want to explore another world created by these game developers. So in answer to the question about Tim Schafer, I don't really think he's ever going to make another "point and click" adventure game again. But that's okay. Whatever he makes in the future, I'll be there to give it a try.

I definitely think that Thimbleweed Park was a way for Ron to work out some of his residual concepts from Maniac Mansion and the first two Monkey Island games, but I wouldn't say that I consider it a sequel. It certainly achieved its stated goal of feeling like a lost early LucasArts adventure game, at least for me personally. I really want to replay it, actually...

If there's a way to WIN the amiga version of the game without actually playing it all the way through, give it a try

Given that this a Loom thread, I must say I agree with this. Loom particularly has always struck me as absolutely state of the art for when it came out, from the astonishing dithered EGA art to the extraordinary level of detail put into the package. It does not look cheap or thrown together, it feels like the product of an enormously wealthy company throwing all of their resources at a project. None of the later games quite had that same feeling to me.

Okay, I hate to say it but this looks like a bug. I went right to the top with this and asked one of the cleverest people I know, Jimmi (serge) of Scumm Rev fame, if he could help me figure it out and he was kind enough to take a look. We checked the script using descumm and sure enough, Elaine's line about the SPELL is there and it's supposed to be displayed. The best working guess we have right now is that there's a call to the Amiga graphics settings to make the screen fade to black, and unfortunately it does this BEFORE it displays the line of dialogue. Which of course, to the player, is the same as turning the dialogue off because the screen has already faded to black. This may not be the exact reason for the bug, and I may have misinterpreted the explanation a bit, but the dialogue is definitely in the code for the Amiga version so I'm confident chalking this up as an error.

Very interesting! I'd like to see the script for this version and figure out what the reason is... I wonder if descumm can help. I'll have a look in the morning, but I won't get my hopes up 😂

Most of my jokes end up getting adopted as policy, I'm used to it!

I was joking 🙃

Yeah, that's fair enough - I actually haven't played either of those on PC myself which is why I generalised in my post, but I understand Double Fine did a really comprehensive technical upgrade on their Special Editions so I shouldn't have lumped them in with the two that LucasArts did. There's also frankly an air of legitimacy with those re-releases that simply comes from Tim Schafer himself.

I almost think of the Monkey Island and Double Fine Special Editions as console ports. They're a reasonable option if you want to play the games in high definition on a TV with a playstation pad. But it is a crime that you can't get the original PC versions digitally! The originals are the best versions and if you're playing on PC those are the only real choice in my opinion.

We've been known to use facetious acronyms in the past - STFU (star wars the force unleashed), Indiana Jones and the KOCS etc. 😁

This may be as close as we'll get...

For anyone who hasn't seen this, I can't recommend it highly enough. Best $10 I've spent on the internet in living memory! What a brilliant evening it was.

What part of Jake's request are you guys struggling with?

This would make me so happy. Loom has such a rich world and a fascinating lore. After what happened at the start of this month, anything is possible...

What the hell is wrong with people?! I've waited 30 years for Ron to make another Monkey Island game, now he's actually doing it and people are anything other than HAPPY? Gah! I'm sure you won't see this Ron, but from my point of view I just want you to make the game YOU want to make.

Yeah I think the CMI-ness of the MI2 art comes through really clearly when you look at the original marker images. The act of scanning and digitising those images brings MI2 back towards MI1, but that's really just a technical limitation more than an artistic choice I think.

Ah nighttime Booty, with the original Stan's Used Coffins from the MI2 demo I assume