KestrelPi

I don't have much of an opinion on the voice as I feel like it's too early to say, and not even a 'real' kind of line read, buuuuut I am soooo glad they went another direction and didn't just try for a Boen impression.

Chuckie is Guybrush's brother, or half-brother. He's been dead since Guybrush was a child. Monkey Island is his way of dealing with his complicated memories of his brother, who used to bully him but also used to play pirates with him. LeChuck in all his forms is basically a monster of Guybrush dealing with his own complicated grief. At the end of Monkey Island 2 he falls down a hole, and has a strange dream while exploring around a fairground that he somehow brings Chuckie back to life. When he grew up, he stopped thinking about Monkey Island but he never really resolved anything about his brother. He revisits the fairground, and it starts to bring back memories of Monkey Island. The Secret of Monkey Island is that it's a mental contstruct that Guybrush used to used to help frame his complicated relationship with his brother.

Yeah, Earl Boen worked very well for the cartoon villain of CMI onwards, and I even grew to appreciate that idea of LeChuck for what it is, but I do agree that perhaps we want something more weary and broken, and unstable here, just going by visuals.

Mm, I suppose the it's a good point that the HT Marley reveal already appeared to contradict the journal from MI, so it's not so bad to re-contradict it back in the other direction.

I am trying to figure out my feelings about it. On the one hand, I thought it was a silly plot point, then and now. On the other hand, it feels weird to ignore such a big story detail, even if I didn't like it. On the other, other hand WAS it a big story detail? In the end the only thing that happens with it is he ends up being Governor, which we at least know isn't the case in ReMI, so maybe it's fine to just ignore it? On the other, other, other hand, is it STILL going to feel weird to just have that plot point hanging? On the other, other, other, other hand maybe the whole plot frame work and how they get from MI2 to the current story will also conveniently explain any weird discrepancies like this and we don't even have to worry.

Nah, I remember something specific from either Ron or Dave saying that he's back to being a weird old castaway or something LIKE that, but I can't remember where I saw it.

I'm pretty sure one of them basically said as much somewhere, but annoyingly I can't find it

It's perhaps also the MI game that's most self-consciously a sequel since MI2, but I guess we'll know for sure when we play it. CMI was more like a 'reset', obviously at the beginning and end it addressed a lot of MI2 stuff, but the main action was pretty self contained from that story. EMI comes closer I think, In a way it sort of seems like the approach we'll get here - it almost follows on from where one game leaves off and then uses Melee Island as a kind of base camp for the rest of the story. But it's a very different version of Melee Island and so it feels a bit harder to connect the dots back to MI1, and after that the story introduces so many new elements of course. Tales obviously self-consciously wanted to break direct continuity and imagined some other adventures happening between EMI and it, providing a buffer for another sort of 'reset' With Return, we'll see how it lands. Maybe the titles have something to say about their place in the series (this is a little tongue-in-cheek, but fun to think about): Secret was about being let in to a fun but slightly mysterious world. 2: LeChuck's Revenge: was the first and only numbered sequel and already hints at a darker follow up. Curse was about... the simultaneous blessing and curse of inheriting what MI2 left us with. Escape was about escaping from tradition and embracing a maximalist, wild interpetation of what MI could be. Tales was mainly just about telling a cool story in the universe, where there are many stories to tell. Return is about getting back to the story Ron started telling, and finding a new way to tell it.

I consider Tales a good 'first try' for the team and I wish they'd got more tries, in a way just like they did with Sam and Max and got better and better at it. They were clearly limited by hardware, and it took quite a while for the series to hit its stride, but I liked a lot of it and what it was gesturing at. I think a lot of people are kind to it because it feels like it's heart is mostly in the right place, and seems to be trying to get back to some of the the more mysterious aspects of the earlier games, even if it doesn't always completely succeed with it. It was a game that... to me felt like it was interested in understanding what makes a Monkey Island game tick and finding new ways to express that, which I personally found more enjoyable than EMI's 'turn it all up to 11' approach. I do think the puzzles are better than I remembered, when I played it earlier this year. They're not terribly difficult, but I did get stuck sometimes, and honestly I'm not sure I'd especially want a much harder time than that. I've always liked my adventure game puzzles to provide some enjoyable resistance, not to stop me dead. I don't mind being a bit stuck, but I never enjoyed grinding to a halt.

Thinking on in more, I do like Largo, but I wish we knew more of his story. What was he doing during MI1? Did he know LeChuck when he was alive? Why didn't LeChuck kill him and take him with him when he became GP LeChuck? Where did that fortress come from anyway? I think he works well as a vehicle to both delay the start and instigate the story of MI2, but there's so little that we still know about him and LeChuck. At least we know how Bob got to be on LeChuck's crew because he explains it in the first cutscene with him.

The main melody isn't particularly interesting, I'll grant, but the B section I do think has an interesting melody, and goes harmonically off-piste in a way that tickles my ears (and that Cursed version, nice as it is, I don't quite think reproduces - seems to get a bit confused after the 3rd chord of the B section).

Actually, puts a whole new spin on why he's looking over there, doesn't it?

Really enjoying the details in this one by the way. Each time I look at it I notice a new little animation detail, either in the foreground, background or characters. I like all the little blinking eyes, moving fish, and I like the little subtle expressions on the pirates. Just real small eye movements but it really sells the thing for me.

@Rum Rogers pointed out on Twitter that those 3 pirates in the shop look an awful lot like the original 3 pirate leaders. My guess about what the pirate leaders are doing there is that since the new leaders got rid of them, they've imposed a whole new different set of 3 trials that you need to pass to become a pirate, and having been kicked out of the pirate club they are now working in this fish shop while they try to live up to the new pirates' weird demands.

Here we are

One hour until the next drop. Increasingly I think it's going to just be a normal thing, and we'll hear more later in the month, after Devolver's next release (happening on the 11th) is out the way

I think it's more that Guybrush and Elaine are so established as a romantic, married couple now, people have trouble imagining anything different. But people do drift apart. A failed romance can turn into a successful friendship. A breakup doesn't have to be fiery or even extremely sad - it can be a sign of two people growing, or finding happiness elsewhere. We don't see those kinds of stories very often in video games but I think they're just so much more inherently interesting than 'and the couple who are meant for each other get together just like it was supposed to go' There's a lot of nuance and depth to be had in that space of 'there's a world in which these two could have worked, romantically, but it's not this one' I mentioned it before but I loved that for the ending of Full Throttle, and it's so well directed, very little is said but you absolutely understand the emotions at play: There's that moment of 'so what happens at now'. You know that both of them want to talk about some feelings they have. Ben has doubts but Maureen thinks perhaps they still have a future. Then Maureen gets a phone call. She has to take it. As soon as she does, she's back in work mode. She's an Important Person now. She has Responsibilities. We hear a car door open and close as Ben leaves. Maureen gives just a little glance over toward it, before continuing with the call. She's sad, but she knows he's right. Duty calls. Ben knows it's best if he just goes. It's not a bad thing - a little sad, but it's just him playing out the inevitability of what would have happened if they'd tried to make something worse. Best do it now, quietly, and avoid the pain. Duty calls. It's so beautiful to me, brings those characters to life way more than any kind of shoving them together could have done. MI1's romance was absurdly, comically unbelievable, it was played almost entirely for laughs. In MI2 they play a lot of it for laughs too, but via a post-break up version of the relationship because of course they do - the MI1 romance was absurd, there was nothing about that non-relationship that was set up for long-term success. The attraction is still there, and Elaine is definitely not immune to it, but she's wiser to who Guybrush is as a person and doesn't fall for it for very long. Then we had the next few games where we suspend disbelief that they had anything approaching a workable relationship before. Fair enough, that's the direction things went, I'm not going to begrudge it, but it leaves so much unaddressed, that I'm just begging for something that brings a bit of depth to their dynamic.

I may be a little biased but it did feel absolutely robbed at every turn

I would SO love for Guybrush and Elaine to separate but part as friends in the end of ReMI, I feel like it would be a great way for Ron to get what he wants out of their relationship while respecting what came before.

The way I've come to think about 2 in relation to 1 is that I think it's an overall better game than 1. The highs aren't quite as high as 1 - I don't think the comedy and its sense of imagination ever truly reaches the heights of, say, the Milkman part, but also I think the overall experience is much better and the writing is so much more considered, the themes it deals in are so much better realised, and the platforming and combat is much stronger. And as much as I like P1's hub area, I prefer P2's. If psychonauts 1 is always at least 'fine' and sometimes absolutely amazing, psychonauts 2 is always at least great and sometimes 'really great'

I think the most we're likely to get tomorrow is a release date or platform announcement or something like that. But if I had to put money on it I'd say it's just gonna be a regular MI Monday - another 10-30 second clip of something. Maybe a returning character, or something. Maybe a LeChuck voice reveal, at most. What I'd like to see: some behind the scenes footage of soundtrack recording. It won't be the release since doing 3 of these then just flat out dropping the game would be very weird.

I'll probably do similar to what I did when I played Tales and Thimbleweed this time, which is that, first of all, I turned the hint system way down to the bottom, and then looked up a guide or used the system only when I felt I wasn't having fun anymore. I never really regretted looking up the hints when I did, it was either something I don't think I would have thought of for a long time, or something really silly like I didn't realise that I was supposed to return to a particular location because something had changed. I played through MI1 with a hint book first time, and for MI2 I chose Lite mode first time... it was a bit later before I developed a desire to try to play the game without help, but it doesn't seem to have harmed my love for the games, so I guess where I am with it all now is sort of ... chilled out. I won't play with a walkthrough or something, but if I want a hint I'll get one. I suppose theres something nice in that you can only play the game for the first time once and there's accomplishment in knowing you worked it all out on your own, but hmm... if that involves me wandering aimlessly and using everything with everything else until I hit upon the right solution, maybe I'll like the game better if I just get a hint when I'm truly stuck.

This is funny, but to be clear it's less that my opinion on marriage has soured, and more that I don't like its status as the default or ultimate expression of love. I feel like love takes many forms, and none of them require marriage to be valid and many of them are incompatible with marriage as it exists in most jurisdictions.

Unclear actually - the concept of likeness rights is a relatively recent invention, but if we look at the laws to do with california, they are generally in place to protect likeness rights that carry some sort of commercial value - which basically means celebrities. traditionally there haven't really been laws in place to protect a likeness otherwise, just because it's a terribly tricky thing to properly establish in most cases - this Monkey Island portrait example is a very weird one, and you'd want to avoid a situation where anyone who happens to look like a character in something might have a case, because it sets such a tricky legal precedent. I'm not a lawyer so I couldn't say for sure, but my day job is involved with media rights and my gut says they're probably legally fine. But the law still isn't very mature in this area. I always assumed they redid the portraits in the SE to go along with the other art style changes they made. A poor decision IMO, as I feel like they strayed too far from the spirit of the original and a remaster I think should stick to the spirit of the original art.

Possibly! But it's pretty likely the sprites came a bit later in the development (actually I feel like there were versions of MI2 shown at trade shows pretty late on where the Guybrush MI1 VGA sprite was still being used, am I imagining that?) so hard to say whether they just took the ones that had already been made for MI1 VGA and adapted them for MI2 or the other way round. I suspect it was MI1 VGA first though, just because by the time MI1 EGA came out they were probably already well into working on MI1 VGA too, because it only came out 2 months later. Even if Ron didn't like the VGA close ups, I guess there's no reason that he wouldn't have re-used VGA sprites if they had them - especially considering the number of characters in 2, probably they were looking to save on art where they could. (Incidentally, I really love the VGA close ups, but I guess that's not surprising as the Amiga version was based on those so it's what I grew up with. I think the EGA version is really clever, they do so much with 16 colours, I especially like the backgrounds on Monkey Island itself, and I understand why people rate it... but for whatever reason the close-ups never did a thing for me.)