KestrelPi

Yeah, looking at it closely I'm not sure those are red marks, looks like they could be black splotches. Ink splotches make sense.

I do think the EGA portraits skew more cartoony, but not to a degree that I find particularly jarring when moving from one to the other (as opposed to, say, the SE portraits). It still feels to me like the VGA portraits are in the spirit of the originals, even if they stray from some of the details. the first time I saw the EGA portraits I assumed that perhaps the VGA ones were paintovers, even, until I took a closer look and started to see the difference. If you compare Cobb's mouth and general head shape, for example - very similar in all versions.

I appreciate the EGA backgrounds for how much they did with so little, I really think they make ingenious use of the palette... but it's still a palette that I find rather ugly, aesthetically, and there's only so much artistry that can work around that for me, and the same goes for the portraits. That's really why the VGA will always win out for me. I look at the EGA stuff and go 'oh that's really well done' and I look at the VGA stuff and go 'oh, that's pretty'.

Someone (don't remember who) recently mentioned that he didn't even directly say VGA portraits. He just said that he never liked 'those close ups' or something. He was looking at the VGA version at the time, but he might have been referring to both the EGA and the VGA versions, the idea of having close ups in general. Which would make sense since they basically went away for MI2. Personally I don't care too much. I think they're both fine, I slightly prefer the VGA ones but if they'd not been in the game at all that would have been fine too.

I picked that I love Stan's theme but it really could have done with another option: I like it fine. I think it's a decent tune, fits the character, has some interesting little bits to it, was a good attempt at making MI music from somoene who wasn't involved with the original soundtrack. Not the best thing ever, could live without it, but I enjoy its presence perfectly well. Same with the VGA CD version in general: I like it fine. Probably the best way to listen to the music without having a MT-32 hardware to hand, and I'm fine with the extra bits they added. But I don't think it's essential, or necessary 'better' than vanilla MT-32 version. (The amiga version I like and I'm nostalgic for, but hearing it with fresh ears it's obvious that while they weren't quite compromising as much as they were with MI2's soundtrack, they still had to cut some corners to make it work.)

It's a good point, so I checked their twitter feed for this month 0 mentions of Wizard with a Gun 1 mention of Terra Nil (retweet of the Japan twitter account, which mentions it alongside 2 other games) 0 mentions of McPixel 3 Lots of mentions of ReMI, obviously. If they're gearing up for the release of one of those other games, they're doing a pretty bad job of it. In the couple of months before Cult of the Lamb, they tweeted about it quite a lot.

By the way, looking at this year, Devolver have been pretty reliably averaging a release about every month. Jan 25th March 1st March 31st May 5th June 2nd June 21st August 11th They haven't yet announced a release for September (though they are launching a 2021 game Inscryption on some new platforms on the 30th of this month) and the smallest gap for new releases has been about 3 weeks between them. On that basis we can probably expect a release announcement for next month of one of their upcoming games, which could be: ReMI McPixel 3 Wizard with a Gun Terra Nil (though that one just says 'coming soon') You know which one my Pieces of Eight are on.

I'm starting to feel like this is a mid-life crisis kind of moment. He never found it, he's bored, and so he decides to go back to where it all began and try to recapture his youth. Also... Elaine's been conspicuously absent from all the Melee Island material, hasn't she?

Stray observations This voice doesn't sound quite the same as either the CMI voice OR the one he did for MI2SE. Sounds a bit older, to me. Deliberate, perhaps? Hard to say. Not quite sure on some of these line reads but Dmnkly is on point as usual I like the little animation details during the dialogue. Guybrush lowering one arm, then the other, occasional little glances off to the side, it's just nice how alive it makes things look. I wonder what a 'map to the secret of monkey island' means. Wally's last name is of course 'feed' Voodoo shop seems to be going out of business. No sign of men of low moral fiber It's still 10pm but there's another weird hand and symbol (at about 4:30) on the clock... hmm! They're probably continuing to show Melee island because it's the early part of the game and so the easiest to show without giving too much away about where the story is going. Also, since we already know what the location is like, it sort of limits the amount of things that can be spoiled.

here we go

10 in total takes us to mid september, not october. Today is #6, #10 would be 12th of September. #11 would literally be on Talk Like A Pirate day, and I can't believe nobody involved hasn't noticed that and isn't thinking of doing SOMETHING special that day. They CAN stop before the release but that would be a REALLY odd marketing plan. 'We're gonna do a series of marketing videos every week, then just... stop that for a while so everyone can forget about it, then release the game. If we're guessing based on what Devolver would do, well - they just released a game, so giving it about another month before they released another seems plausible. That seems about in line with what they've done before. Not releasing during the heaviest release period of late september through october also seems plausible. So I agree if it's not coming out mid-september the next most likely is November, I just don't think we'll be waiting that long.

I'm just saying the fact that some other games came out later than their dates really doesn't say anything. If that september date in the metadata was the only thing we had to go on, I would definitely agree, that it doesn't tell us anything. But I think, as I said, there are also lots of other reasons to think the game is coming out sooner rather than later. None of them are completely compelling on their own, but I think taken together they make it at least a decent chance that we're looking at September. But if I had to pick, I think by far the most persuasive thing is the Monkey Island Mondays. I don't believe they were planning to start and stop these months before the release. I also don't believe for a second they were planning for a series of ~20 or more of these ahead of a November/December release - I might be proven wrong on that one but I really don't think we're getting 20 ReMI clips before this comes out. So to me the most logical guess at the moment remains september, and all the other stuff around it (Talk Like a Pirate day being after the 10th Monkey Island Monday, gamescom being about a month before that, the fact that it seems like the game has been substantially finished for a couple of months now, with audio implemented and voices in the bag) doesn't prove anything, but it does seem to me very compatible with the actions of a company planning to release a game in mid-september. Let's revisit this next month. Or, well, we might not have to wait that long to know. 😉

Monkey Island Mondays. Do we really think they're planning to do this for 20 weeks? There's just... not much left to do on the game, as far as we can tell. It's been fully playable for a long time, and the voices are in, and they're pretty much bug squishing now and have been for the past couple of months if the tweets are anything to go by. The September placeholder on Devolver at least suggests that's around when they thought it would be ready in April, and they could have very well stuck to that (and there's been nothing to suggest it's slipping, they've always said 2022 with confidence which I don't think they would have done if it was already slipping to Nov/Dec) Talk Like a Pirate day is just inherently a plausible hypothesis, I think. Gamescom. Some sort of gamescom exclusive reveal would be much more impactful if the release was imminent and not actually a few months away still. None of these things are killer reasons on their own, but if I were to put my thumb in the air and try to figure out which way the wind was blowing I'd say it's still blowing septemberwards, regardless of anything else.

I don't think that's something that can really be inferred from this. For example, a brief internet search shows that Cult of the Lamb was first announced last August at gamescom, and so it had at least a 8-month lead time between its announcement and expected release. ReMI only has a 5-month lead time, so they're probably a good deal more confident in the release window by that time. That and while it's common for games to slip their release dates, we haven't really seen any evidence that there's still months of work left on ReMI but we have seen some evidence that it's imminent (in the form of weekly promotional clips which are SURELY unsustainable until the end of the year, and the fact we know the voices are all in, and have been for some weeks now and they're in bug-squishing mode) To me, everything still points to them being on for September and the fact that some other games by other developers published by Devolver slipped by a couple of months is basically irrelevant.

Yes, this kills the 1st theory for me. Cult of the Lamb probably had the correct date because its date was actually announced, during the devolver showcase.

Might it be worth looking at the date information for some of the other upcoming? If they're all the 1st of the month, then that might make it more likely this is wrong, but if they all have specific dates, perhaps it is real.

The 1st being a thurday is perhaps something, since that's the day of the week when switch games tend to get released I thiiiink? Still, it would be quite a surprise for it to be that close.

You said this before and I never remember it being that slow. I'll take your word for it that it's slower than CMI's but it can't have been that much slower or it would have stuck out to me when I replayed recently. As for the non-combination of inventory... there's nothing about FT's interface design as I recall that would make it impossible to combine inventory (with a pretty trivial tweak), If they'd wanted those kind of puzzles they could have just made it so that the inventory looks/behaves exactly the same except when you take an item from it it lingers until you click out of it so you can use it with other inventory. But why do that if no puzzles need it? So to me this isn't an interface limitation, it's a puzzle design decision.

Perhaps it's a new trailer, or exclusive reveal like new platforms/release date Oh, Randy. He and my adolescent self had our disagreements, I admit. And some of that was just me being a teenage fanboy of the stuff I liked, I think. But it is pretty funny to read that now. I agree with some of what he's saying there, these days, but he did have a certain way of putting it, didn't he? (The 'Rugrats Crowd?')

I meant how far ahead of the games getting released does this information tend to be available

A good question might be ... how far in advance of launch does this usually appear?

Right, I guess the rationale here is 'what could be less spoilery than a clip of lechuck saying, well, nothing really?' If I had to guess though, I would say that this is either guybrush recalling what he overheard LeChuck saying and trying to play it back, or that one pirate leader we see on the scene (Captain Madison, perhaps?) doing the same thing. I can see the humour in someone trying to recount some important stuff LeChuck said but only being able to remember vague details, but still showing that play out in LeChuck's voice. Perhaps his voice is supposed to sound a bit moanier in this clip than it will actually be in person, and we'll see a more menacing side to him yet. I feel like the games have always had goofy moments with LeChuck though, even when he was quite scary. I mean, in MI2 even during the end you're having him distracted by picking up coins, offering him a hanky, giving him a wedgie and trapping his beard in an elevator door. And during Guybrush's first proper interaction with LeChuck in MI1 he becomes completely flustered by Elaine's plan. So I definitely think he's always a character who has had the capacity to be the butt of jokes, but I'd still like to see those moments where he can give me the creeps.

This is Largo.