KestrelPi

I don't mind the comparison but I don't know that I'm yet sold on Brrr Muda as a concept. Obviously we don't know much about it yet but between the pun name, the very video gamey conceit of 'what haven't we done before? Ah, an ice level!' it still seems a bit odd to me, almost too on-the-nose as a kind of location MI hasn't done before, but it might make perfect sense in the context of the story. Come to think of it, why DID the ride in CMI have that snow section? All the others were scenes to do with events of the previous games (or their lore) - why snow and yetis suddenly. It would be fun if Brrr Muda retroactively justified the existence of that scene on the ride....

I actually had to rewatch the video to even know what you meant by text wobble. I think that detail must have completely passed me by because I never even noticed it before. I can't say I mind it either way. But if it is particularly annoying to you maybe ron will add an option if you ask nicely. I mean... a month or two ago he said he'd do something for speed runners because they asked nicely (I can't remember what the twitter thread was, now)

Hmm, I didn't get it from an interview though - the phrase is used twice on the website, too. Once when you talk to Stan and once in the overview screen. I've got to imagine it means SOMEthing more than 'the game has dialog trees', otherwise why would they keep saying it?

Cool to see some dialog, but still little idea of what is meant by 'reactive dialog trees' Nice to see those skulls back on the dialog options Nice little dynamic music transition. I might well be wrong, but feeling a little bit of a Bajakian flavour for Brrr Muda?

I think some of this discussion has made me realise something that was important about the humour of the first ... I would say 3 games, which is that for the most part except for extremely heightened moments or twists, the basic bare bones synopsis of the game could actually be played pretty serious. MI1: A young aspiring pirate called Threepwood completes a series of trials to be accepted as a pirate, falls in love with a governor, Elaine, who gets kidnapped by a ghost pirate LeChuck, and gathers a crew to journey to Monkey Island to rescue her, encountering a strange castaway, cannibals, and a monkey-head temple with catacombs leading down to the ghost ship. In the end he returns to Melee, confronts the LeChuck, and reunites with Elaine. Goofiness level: 1/5 - this could be told perfectly straight, really. MI2: Threepwood, newly separated from Elaine seeks a new adventure, since his stories of LeChuck are no longer satisfying his pirate peers. He seeks the most famous pirate treasure of all. After getting waylaid on Scabb Island, he accidentally brings about the resurrection of LeChuck, and begins a race against the clock to find the pieces of the map to the treasure before LeChuck catches up with him. The quest takes him around three islands, and culminates in his capture and escape from LeChuck's fortress, just in time to find the treasure he has been looking for. But when he finds it, it turns out that LeChuck claims to be his brother all is not what it seems with his world. Goofiness level: 2/5 this is a pretty non-goofy plot until the end. Curse: Lost at sea after his strange experience with Big Whoop, Threepwood drifts into port only to get immediately captured by LeChuck, in a battle with Elaine. In his escape, he accidentally destroys LeChuck once more, and finds a ring which he uses to propose to Elaine. The ring turns her into a gold statue. To turn her back, he needs to find a ring of equal value, and the quest takes him to Blood Island where he must unravel the legacy of the residing family and resolve their ghostly troubles to finally get to the ring. But LeChuck, newly resurrected as a demon is not far behind, and the game culminates with a return to the mysterious big whoop, where Guybrush must foil LeChuck's plans to build a skeleton army. Goofiness level: 2.5/5 I'm going to say that the repeated encounter and resurrection of lechuck makes this one a touch goofier, as well as the extended stint in the theme park at the end and weird plot contrivances about why he built the theme park. Escape: Threepwood and Elaine return to Melee island to find Elaine is presumed dead, and a new pretender to the title of governor is in town. Going by Charles L Charles, he is making unreasonable promises. Elaine sends Threepwood to sort out her situation with the lawyers, and along the way he's confronted by the australian Ozzie Mandrill who intends to commercialise the carribean, with chain stores. But this just turns out to be part of a deeper plan he has to find a treasure called the Ultimate Insult, which he plans to use to mind control pirates all over the caribbean. It turns out that LeChuck, disguised as Charles L Charles is also in on the deal, and wants the Ultimate Insult in order to win Elaine, and the two villains are working in cahoots. Guybrush is left stranded on Monkey Island and while there discovers that the castaway, Herman Toothrot was actually Elaine's grandfather all along, and that the monkey temple from the first game is a giant robot, which he gets control of and uses to confront Ozzie and LeChuck once and for all before they can use the insult to take over the Caribbean Goofiness level: 4 actually this game has a pretty convoluted plot so it was difficult to condense it all without missing out important details, but more importantly it's noticeably goofier. Tales: After botching another attempt to destroy LeChuck, Threepwood accidentally turns him human and apparently decent, instead. But before he can get a hold of the facts, he's stranded on Flotsam Island, a place where the winds make it impossible to escape, and manages to unleash a LeChuck-themed disease on himself and the Carribean. He discovers from the Voodoo Lady, someone who had helped him several times before, that only a giant sea sponge can heal the pox, and after fixing the problem with the winds goes on a quest to find it. Along the way, he's swallowed by a giant manatee, reunites with an apparently reformed LeChuck, and is chased by a french scientist intent on studying him to try to use the pox to discover the secret of life, and encounters Morgan LeFlay, a conflicted bounty hunter and admire of Threepwood. His trials lead him back to Flotsam, where he narrowly avoids conviction in court for the trouble he's caused, but at a critical moment, after discovering the Voodoo Lady's own motives might not be pure, LeChuck reveals his true motives and kills Threepwood. To win the day, he must travel the underworld, return to life and defeat LeChuck once more, with the help of those he met along the way. Goofiness level: 3.5 - this is also quite a wacky convoluted plot, but I'm giving it a bit lower goofiness rating because its wackiness still feels like it is grounded in the context of a pirate adventure to me, where a lot of 4's wackiness seems to come completely out of left field. I suppose you could say the same about MI2's twist, but in that it was mainly a bit at the end, and was left very ambiguous. Also because it's episodic, it's not suprising that Tale's plot has a lot of twists and turns in it.

I feel like this came around again later too, because even when adventure games faded somewhat and story driven games in other genres became more common, there was still no real 'theory of comedy' in games. It was fairly easy in adventure games because there's lots of characters and dialogue which happens at a predictable pace, so you can have a lot of control over the comedic timing, and I think it took a long time for other genres to find ways of making jokes land consistently. At the time, something like say... Portal (2007) felt very fresh because nobody was really doing comedy in a first person game, and I feel like there was a bit of 'comedy in games' discourse around that time too, which made me think 'well, I've been laughing at games since 1990...' Even as late as 2011 we had Atlantic articles like ''Portal 2': A Video Game That Gets Comedy Right'. I think that is a very quaint sounding headline only a decade later, when the diversification of game budgets and the different sorts of stories people are trying to tell with varying levels of sophistication, it's not weird any more to encounter games with real emotional resonance, with real laughs, with genuine surrealism, with the kind of breadth that you would expect to see in a maturing medium. I think we're seeing the 2010s and 2020s finish what the 1990s started. It became interrupted in the late 90s and early 2000s because the budgets for games were getting so big, and the tools did not yet exist to make the process of game creation accessible to most, so most of the games getting greenlit at the time were safe bets in established popular genres by well-funded developers. Hence big-budget adventure games dying off. Hence games like Psychonauts only juuuust managing to avoid getting cancelled.

Haha I think you're alright saying this. I feel like EMI was very of its time in that way. In a lot of media we were seeing this attitude of 'Welp, there are all these problems with the world but heck, what can we do but laugh at them?' which now comes across as cynical as I feel more recently the trend has been to create media in which people face up to and fix long standing, generational issues. Often in an oversimplified way, but still nowadays the message does seem to be more 'improving society somewhat is possible' I think you often see these ripples forming first in media aimed at kids. Sometimes people complain about adults being so into kids shows. But I don't think it's because we've become terribly infantilised, as some might claim. I think it's because of the historical moment we find ourselves in. At 40 years old and going through my teens up to the year 2000 with this kind of idealised view of the world of, while the world has problems, things are getting better and they should continue that way, only to have reality hit hard in 2000 and beyond right in time for adulthood, we're desperate for any kind of media which is saying 'you can navigate through this and have a better world', and that's a very different view to the kind of cynicism we were fed on in the late 90s into the 00s, and that EMI was well versed in. Given in ReMI we have an older guybrush, perhaps having a new younger generation of pirates to deal with, I hope the direction the story is going in is not going to be a 'pirating was better and more pure in the old days' sort of thing. I'm definitely fed up with stories which feature the Youngs ruining everything with their confusing ways, we get enough of that in the daily discourse without having to have it be a theme of games too. I hope the subtext of ReMI isn't 'let's get back to the good old fashioned days of pirating where things made common sense', and that's my main worry for the plot of the game at the moment based on what we've seen. For a game that's so open to trying new things, it'd be a shame if it was rooted in a 'people were better in the old days' mentality. I hope it's more optimistic, and if there's any sort of moral to the story I hope it's more like 'we need to move on, but we can't do so by making the same mistakes of the past' or something.

Ah, just about 5 hours before we get a new tidbit to obsess over for a week. I do like Monkey Island Mondays.

In the case of MI2 I'd actually prefer someone played through with the remastered graphics - I think the sprites are pretty good, for the most part, and the backgrounds are pretty faithful to the spirit of the original game, and given the problems with both translating iMUSE to pre-recorded tracks and the botched instrumentation of the MT-32 recordings, I think the MI2:SE music is much better in special mode than old mode. The voices I could take or leave. I like most of them okay, but dislike Largo's voice, think Guybrush's parents are way overdone in a way that sort of ruins the song, and think Elaine needed better direction to get her attitude in this game right.

Having watched various plays on YouTube I'd say the reaction to the SE's visuals runs the whole gamut from 'the old art is so much better' to 'I can't play this with the old art' and everything in between. But people are more likely to be positive about the new art if playing for the first time - probably because it doesn't have the weight of nostalgia and expectation behind it. The new art is fairly unpopular with fans mainly, I think, because for most of us is just doesn't really seem to evoke the aesthetic of the old games, and nor does it seem to respect that at the time SoMI was state-of-the-art. So I suppose there is a bit of a risk of projecting our attitudes of the SE onto people who aren't looking at it through up to 30 years of baggage, yet I can't help but want people to at least know how the original looked and felt and have an appreciation for it. It's just perhaps... a selfish want. If the SE is what makes people play the game, then the SE is good enough. They can always visit the original if they're interested to.

Right, this is a bit of an issue when talking about criticism. It's difficult to offer 'good' criticism in a context where many people are doing so abusively, even if that's not your intention. If people were saying they hated my work, and some were being extra abusive, I wouldn't sift through it just to find the people who were saying they hated my work but in a 'nice' way because... that's not the kind of environment that constructive critiques are welcome. I'd instead take some comfort in the people who liked it. I'm only human, after all. In that environment, even 'friendly' criticism, even constructive comments are just adding to the general pile on. But especially, in context, Rex is someone who played these games very early on, is a fan of them, and was likely very very nervous about showing his work to the world of other adventure game fans when it's been so carefully controlled for 2 years. You only need a little bit of empathy, I think, to appreciate that the discourse turning into an internet argument about whether the art style is good or not, is probably going to be a huge bummer to both Ron and Rex and everyone else involved. They don't want people to linger on this, and Ron is quite rightly trying to shield Rex from the worst of it. But there is a time and place for it all. The reason that NOW I'm willing to be a bit more direct and less circumspect with my EMI criticisms is that I think even the most sensitive creatives can look back on a 22 year old work and acknowledge its flaws - by that time they probably agree with some of them, and besides they've heard it all before (see ... I think it was Stemmle jokingly saying 'sorry' about Monkey Kombat). That's the reason why now I'm willing to be very direct about some of the things I don't think worked so well in Tales, even though I know at least one forum regular here who was heavily involved with the game - because I know that NOW that criticism will be taken in the right spirit, enough time has past that everyone can look back on Tales with a clear head. That's not to say of course we can never criticise something unless we leave enough time - but I think it's worth acknowledging that the context in which the criticism is happening matters.

Look, I'm perfectly fine with you enjoying EMI just as much as you like, but I am going to get grumpy if by way of backlash people are going to start accusing us of a double standard (especially when comparing our reaction to EMI, a two decade old game to a game that none* of us have played). You have to understand, that especially the people here desperately wanted to love EMI just as much as the others. So much so that when it first was revealed and came out my overriding instinct was to try to get people to give it a chance. So it's not out of any sort of glee that we criticize parts of it. We don't 'love to hate' it. Many of us (like me) don't even hate it, we just have a lot of problems with it. When I ask people to hold judgement on ReMI I'm doing exactly what I did for EMI, at the time. I'm telling people to give it a chance. No double standard here, no inconsistency, just literally two decades to reflect on what EMI was, and finding that a lot of it doesn't really work for me. My initial response to EMI was rather positive, because I remember enjoying the puzzles and liking the music and art at the time, and being... tolerant of the plot and writing. It took a couple of years for the initial glow to wear off and for me to figure out where I stood on it all. (also I was 18 when EMI came out, I'm 40 now. My tastes have changed and evolved) Now -- I like your reasons for liking EMI. They're good reasons. I'm glad that's how you've come to enjoy the game, and nothing I can possibly say can take that away from you, nor would I want it to. It's just that those reasons don't work for me. I don't really agree with them, the ideas about EMI that you talk about don't really excite me or feel to me like they fit in with how I see the MI universe in the same way they do to you. And my issues with EMI go beyond plot and setting and into the writing and comedy style, too, so even if I vibed with the story choices I still think I wouldn't vibe with the writing. At the moment I don't know what the story or writing of ReMI is like, and so I can't possibly comment on it or compare it to EMI. And we've seen a BIT of art, mostly out of context. So, much like EMI, when I play ReMI I'll see if I enjoy the story, and the writing, and it'll probably be a couple of years before the dust settles and I'll truly be able to see how I feel about it in the context of the rest of it. By all means be disappointed more of us don't see what you see in EMI, but don't tell us it's because we're not being fair. *okay, one

The puzzles in this part of the game aren't at sea

Ah yes, there's more of this walkthrough on my fridge

agreed, I doubt any of the other islands will be so 'jungly' I don't think we've seen much of Terror Island as I have a hunch that might be a 'skull island' style joke, but maybe this? That's a point actually some of the shots of (maybe) Monkey Island look like they take place at day and the monkey head and some other shots look like night. I'd love it if we got to see some of the locations at different times of day. It's possible to do that kind of transition nowadays without repainting the whole scene, so it wouldn't surprise me if they tinkered with this. I'm still not sure if I really want to see a daytime Melee (aside from that fan one someone did) but I'd be interested, at least.

In honour of some recent rejoiners I also decided I'd go through the thread from the beginning, and may I just say this from page 5 is still on point.

Let's predict what we'll be shown on Monday. We've seen a chapter title screen, the new version of a familiar location so my guess is that the next one will show off something about how the UI works.

That's something I still struggled a bit with Tales lately too. Well. To be clear I think Tales definitely gets to where it needs to go by the end, and I think that's why overall it lands, but I think something that is true about MI1 and 2 especially is that Guybrush himself takes his ideals and goals seriously, even if everyone around him is mocking him. I don't think Tales Guybrush takes himself seriously a lot of the time. Even the winking-at-the-camera parts: In MI2, Guybrush turns to the camera and says: "Ha! Those guys wouldn't know a good story even if they paid fifty bucks for it. " but then he follows it with: "When I find Big Whoop I'll become legend among pirates for generations to come. If I could only charter a ship and get off this stinking island..." He might have just brushed up against the fourth wall, but he's still serious about his aspirations and we're supposed to believe his adventures are 'real' enough to him. In Tales, we open with the conceit that Guybrush has already been on a big adventure culminating in a sea battle with LeChuck. Which is a cool idea! But instead of hinting at some really cool and evocative things, and making us believe that Guybrush has really been through the wringer with some choice allusions to that unseen adventure, we get throwaway jokes like: "I'll never forget the horrible hula of Hades I had to do to get this thing!" Do I buy that Guybrush really had to do something called the hula of hades to get that Cutlass? Nah. It never comes up again. It is written as, and reads as, a throwaway line that sort of winks to the player and says 'eh, don't worry about what his adventure was, we'll just joke our way around it'. And that's a choice. It's not necessarily wrong. It's a somewhat amusing line. But it sets a sort of tone, y'know? Of 'we're not taking the world building seriously' in a similar way to what I think you were alluding to up there. (Again, I think Tales eventually strikes a decent balance, this is just an example of where it doesn't always work for me) Whatever ReMI is, I hope it is commited to its world, and I'm optimistic about that.

Yeah, this is my go-to comparison when trying to show that in some ways MI2 was already halfway toward where CMI would eventually go visually.

I don't think you should have to do that. And I do understand the frustration of liking something lots of other people don't, or don't like as much. Because you want to share in the joy of a thing and it's difficult when there are people who want to criticise it, or not as many people as you'd like to talk about it on the level you'd like to. I get that. There are definitely things in my life I feel that way about. Then again, I think there's always a kind of 'let people not enjoy things' counterbalance to 'let people enjoy things' which is sometimes hard in these discussions. I've been accused in some places, for example, of over-defending Rex's art style when someone has something bad to say about it - I don't think i am, usually, I think I'm just trying to provide a positive counterpoint to some negative comments I've seen, and try to move the criticism at least into a more constructive space than some of what I've seen. But what I have found to be a bit more effective than trying to contradict people's points is to come up with positive points of my own. That's why I spend so more and more time talking about how cool I think the background/foreground details are in this new art, and the animation stuff going on in the background, and less and less time trying to tell people "well I think Guybrush's face looks fine actually" or whatever. (incidentally this is also why I've changed tack from talking about what I dislike about EMI's Melee to what I really like about MI1's Melee) I think there's actually a lot to like about EMI, but if I've taken time to critique a part of it, and given lots of different reasons for it, and tried to be constructive about it, then I guess... it's not really helpful to the discourse for me to hear "well, I don't think that's important." What I would LOVE to hear about though is what IS important to you, and what makes the game really work for you. Maybe not in here because admittedly we're getting off topic. But if it's become your favourite, I would love a breakdown of the stuff that really works for you. I might not completely agree, but I will respect it ❤️

Oh I do that sometimes, but only if I'm addressing one topic in a post. I tend to prefer one topic, one post which is why I was getting annoyed with it. Especially with reactions. Y'know, someone might like the thing I said about topic A, but not about topic B, C and D. Thanks for the explanation though!

nullOne thing I think is true regardless is that I really do like how much the locations in MI1 said about themselves. Especially looking at stuff like Melee Town in MI1. And that path toward the mansion, behind a huge fort wall and then layers of cliffs along a treacherous path. Speaking perhaps of a time where maybe a governor might have wanted to protect themself and conceal their wealth and privilege from jealous eyes and hands, and just at the time just being a really cool visual. And just the whole thing basically being a study in indigo-blue and yellow, really selling the cool stony exterior vs the warm interior. I think it has so much character. ...good location, IMO.

ah, c'mon. That's not fair. I know you like that game a lot, and it annoys you that so many people don't. I don't even hate the game. But I tried real hard with it and I have a LOT of problems with it, and I will bring them up from time to time. That stuff might not bother you, but I don't think it's fair to imply people are just picking on Escape for no apparent reason, or that we're being inconsistent. (I keep having to delete edits because suddenly today the forum is attempting to merge my posts, which is annoying when there are multiple conversations happening at once. What's up with that, did something change on the back end?)

We've sorta touched on it before but there IS a magic to low res, I think. It adds a natural graininess to art without really trying, and the brain is very good at imagining that graininess as detail. Like I pixellate that window frame or door frame and suddenly it magically looks more instead of less detail because of how many blanks my brain is filling. I think a lot of people don't mean what they think they mean when they talk about detail though. I've heard people say that the new Guybrush isn't detailed enough. But in what sense? If you were to take, say, 'number of discernable facial features' as one plausible metric of how detailed a character drawing is, he's perhaps the most detailed Guybrush we've ever had, certainly in 2D. He's got cheekbone details, stubble detail, eye-wrinkle detail and colour detail we've never seen before. And that's before you even get to the animation detail we've seen before. Similarly for the backgrounds, when you take it in total, including animation, background/foreground elements I certainly think there's more going on in these scenes than there was in MI1, and it holds its own with the others too. So I wonder how much of this is what people are seeing going up against the 'imagined' detail of lo-res art. Pitting what you see in front of you against some imagined ideal is always an unfair contest. Anyway, I really don't want to dredge all that up, what I really wanted to get at is that I really think this style blows up well onto a large screen and as lots of people have pointed out in motion, because you start to notice all the (guy)brushwork much more and all the little animation touches going on, which for this style is as much part of what makes it 'detailed' as anything else. It makes me excited for looking at adventure game backgrounds in a whole new way - not like in 1991 when I was enjoying looking at a handcrafted painterly sort of look which was practically nonexistant at the time. But because to me these scenes really feel truly alive in a way that they've never been able to achieve before. Just that gentle swinging of the SCUMM Bar sign makes me really happy to watch.❤️