KestrelPi

Feels to me that based on that title card that by the time we get to part 1, we're already going to be past the carnival and into the main story. So excited to finally find out how that'll work. Love the look of the title screen, and love that the tune is evocative of the previous chapter screens while not identical, and also seeming to quote the MI1 'Journey' music. Not sure if the flute is real or not. Legato instruments are really fancy nowadays at being able to reproduce performance details. It's still true that live instruments are preferable I think, but less and less true every year that imitations can't be convincing and musical in their own right, in my opinion...---- (Also - aside, I don't think it's intentional by anyone, but I do think there's a hint of accidental elitism in the idea that live is the only good and pure way to do it - not everyone writing music for things has ready access to a bank of performers, or the means to pay them (like... well, me), but I still think we should be given a chance!) ---... and here I can imagine for such a small musical moment, they might have opted not to record something.

Yeah, or alternatively they just had a generic skull that was easier to use for some reason and the shot is so quick that it would read as Murray anyway.

Hmm, the first thing that came to my mind was a puzzle in which two people have slingshots, fired at the same time, and the projectiles meeting in mid air. I recall one or two puzzles like that in Tales with cannons.

Finished replay of Tales last night so final thoughts about that: * As I said at the start, difficulty level is fine. * I remember liking the last episode more last time I played it. This time I found myself frustrated by the puzzle structure - so much backtracking between locations. I ended up reaching for a walk through sometimes not because it was too hard but the traversing between locations was getting irritating. * I do think the idea that Elaine planned this whole outcome is silly in hindsight * I kind of liked the end bit last time, but now I'm a bit more sceptical of marriage as an institution and it feels a bit weird to me that's the answer even if it's a clever bit * I'm not sure whether Galeb is oddly written or oddly performed. It feels like they were trying something with the character but I'm not quite sure it entirely came off * Don't mean to sound negative mind, I still generally enjoyed the season but this time it peaked for me at 4 and dipped a bit at the end Not a bad note to leave the series on had there been no more, but my mainvhope in Return is that we see a shift back towards a bit of a less silly, whimsical Guybrush and more of the understatedness I remember from the first few games

It's cool this exists, but weird to me that Rex's name isn't mentioned anywhere. After all, Ron might be frustrated by this, but it's Rex who put all the love and care into that art style.

I'd say there are lulls while playing Sea of Thieves, but I'm rarely bored. It doesn't take that long to get anywhere, and there are always hazards to look out for and things to be worried about while sailing. The most bored I get is when I'm ready to leave for somewhere and the rest of the crew are still mucking around on the island

I guess in the end we got pretty much everything but the date.

I don't want to derail the discussion about Marius' lovely work much more but the repeated comment that confuses me the most e.g in the above tweet is how the art style is being perceived as too 'simple'. That just makes me worry for people's basic critical literacy. It's like people notice that there's a sort of simple sort of shading and use of certain kinds of shapes going on and then just stop there. Did they not notice all the animation detail? All the scene decoration? Are they looking at the jail scene in MI1 and RMI and honestly arguing the former is more detailed? Like, I don't mind if they don't like it but some people don't even seem to understand what they don't like. Which is why I wanna disregard it as noise. And you're right they're using flattery as an attempt to draw you in

Stan is in jail for "marketing related crimes" according to the plot summary but we don't know how much of the dialog tree stuff is real or just a joke. I don't mind if they want to make an NFT joke because honestly that is exactly the sort of grift Stan might get entangled in but at the same I hope they don't lay it on too thick in the game as it would instantly date it and... might be a bit cringey, you know like when your mum sends you anti Trump memes. It's not like she's WRONG but... 😅

Mm. When I think of this stuff from a design perspective I think 'okay, so what do we lose by dropping the thing or gain by having it?' and for me combining items is still one area where adventure puzzles benefit from having that level of depth. But at the same time I don't think you NEED them in order to make an adventure game with good puzzles, especially if you've thought of a lot of other unique puzzle mechanics.

I'm sure Dave Grossman has an opinion about item combination. I mean, they felt strongly enough about including it in Tales that they built it into the actual interface. But something I do have confidence in, is that even if they do ditch it (which I think is unlikely) it'll be because whatever modes of interaction they've come up with now, they feel like it isn't needed for this game to build good puzzles with. I doubt they'd ditch it just for the sake of simplicity.

I should say that while this is my idea for what a way to go from carnival back to MI universe could work, I don't necessarily have an opinion about how much the carnival vs the MI universe is 'real' and I can see this kind of idea working in either case.

Even wilder and more specific theory. Guybrush starts talking to his kids about how he used to come to this place with 'your Uncle Chuckie.' You know, '....before he died...' and then the subtext of the whole game is him returning to this park and coming to terms with the death of an older brother with whom he had a... complicated relationship.

Here's my completely wild stab in the dark guess at how we get from the end of Monkey Island 2 back into the game. Right where we leave off, Guybrush starts wandering the theme park, and we scroll along with him. As he does we see various attractions pass him by in the background and foreground. They allude to the various different adventures he's been on, but not just the ones before Monkey 2 but the ones after too. Perhaps we see a cart selling Goodsoup brand soups. Maybe we see a giant robot monkey ride in the back. Definitely a grog machine. A volcano themed rollercoaster. As he keeps on walking, the boundary between this world and the world of Monkey Island starts to become a bit looser. Maybe Guybrush starts changing, too. Gradually getting his coat back, then boots, etc, when he passes behind foreground items, until he's fully back in Monkey Island again but we get the sense that the timeline isn't so important any more because of what we've seen. Alternatively: similar to above, but at some point it transitions between guybrush visiting the with his parents to Guybrush taking his own kids there. But the park is now older, a little more run down, some of the attractions have lost a bit of their lustre, and it's not what it was before. Guybrush starts to imagine what Melee island would be like now, if he returned to it after all these years...

I think the suggestion is more that especially in the early 90s box art wasn't necessarily intended as something that was making a big statement about the game that could be used as a reliable guide of what the artists intentions with the game art were. And in MI1 with its not-appearing-in-this-game pirates it at least seems like they were playing a bit loose with it. Their main purpose was to be eye catching on a shelf, and basically convey the vibe of the game, nothing more. It's not that the box art and the game have nothing to do with one another, it's more like... we can't necessarily make too many assumptions about what the characters were intended to look like based on what was on the box. After all, if the box art was supposed to be a clear statement of the game artists' intent, then why is Lechuck deep green and slimy looking in MI2 but pale and skeletal looking on the box?

Presumably referring to this I would say... reading between the lines, that is... to really be able to have a conversation about this, we'll have to play the game.

The things I want most in this order are: A do-over of MI1SE. When it's a remaster I think the graphics should at least be trying to be in the spirit of the original, otherwise it's more of a remake. Also adopt the interface and other features of MI2SE. Add in the ability to mix and match any elements of old and new, including being able to switch between EGA, VGA and special edition, switch voices and music over in any mode, independently, etc. Fix the stuff that went wrong in MI2SE. Again, lemme hear the new music with old graphics, if I want. Fix the MT-32 stuff or even better, emulate it so that it's closer to the original. Tales. The Sam and Max ones give some precedent for doing this so it feels less out of reach than the other remasters. Curse. It's well loved enough to deserve an upres and high fidelity soundtrack, and more tools exist now to make this plausible. Escape: Maybe I'd be more willing to replay this if it got a bit of a makeover, and I feel like once you've done the others you should just complete the set.

It's true though, I love how a lot of the praise is accompanied by fan art and such. In my cattier moments I wanna say 'hey, if the art is so bad then why do all the people who are most excited about it seem to be artists and game developers?' Then I hover over the send button... don't press it, and instead press the close window button. Ahem, anyway, carry on

I know a little bit of how to play it. Mind, the maximum group is 4 at a time.

I actually think that Ron himself is probably rather thick skinned about all this, despite being visibly annoyed. My sense is that his concern is more for his team. And it's them and particularly Rex that I feel sorry for in all this. I have happened to meet Rex on a couple of occasions - quite accidentally, since we appear to have a few mutual friends. On both occasions that I've met him he's really come across as very sweet and kind, which is maybe why some of the harsher criticism eats at me a bit. I don't know who people think Rex is, but he's just this very genuine, humble guy who is a true Monkey Island fan who has managed to land a dream project, and all I'd want for someone like that, (just the same as I felt when I found out that Jake was working on Tales) is that people would be encouraging and accepting of his efforts. And if they couldn't find it in themselves to do that, at least to believe that he was making said efforts in good faith, and that he's not here to ruin your favourite thing. I can't imagine how I'd feel if I'd been handed a project like this, only for the headlines on gaming websites to be filled with stuff about how Ron's having an argument with fans over my art, instead of people just being excited that the months-ago-impossible game exists and maybe giving the people who worked on it the benefit of the doubt. And I don't know exactly how I'd feel in Ron's shoes, having handed someone a project like this knowing that for them it's something they never thought that they'd get to work on in a million years. But I imagine I'd feel very protective of them, and hope that this would be a joyful project for them to be involved in, and not soured by years of nostalgia meeting reality.

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, I don't intend to say the box art is irrelevant to the art style. More that we probably shouldn't overthink the intent behind having painterly box art for a game in the early 90s.

Arguably the reason that the Secret of Monkey Island and MI2 had hand painted box art by Steve Purcell is that at that time it was the convention for video games to have these kind of painterly pieces of key art on the box: don't get me wrong, the boxes for the first two games are GREAT - the second one is in particular probably my favourite piece of box art of all time. But they were kind of in keeping with the way game boxes were done at the time. So I don't think we need to necessarily interpret the game box art of the time as anything more than 'a piece of art that the team liked and thought conveyed the tone of the game well'. In fact I'm fairly sure they weren't trying to make a clear statement with them, because if they were, as has been pointed out, who on earth are those random extra pirates in the MI1 box art who don't seem to appear anywhere in the game? Fact is very often box art of the time only had a tangential relationship with the game. Here's Mega Man 2: Weirdly, nobody is saying now that this was supposed to be some big statement about how the creators saw the Mega Man universe. I think it's worth pointing out how different the MI1 and MI2 boxes were to each other too, even though drawn by the same artist. Guybrush looks very different. The whole composition is much darker and more focused on 2 characters. So I don't think they were really THAT concerned with continuity. And indeed, neither was Steve Purcell. From what I heard, he was given the opportunity to make box art for Curse, but decided against it, out of respect for wanting to let the new art style shine. He made some art for the Tales box, of course, but even that incorporates elements of the new style, and he probably felt less conflicted about being asked to interpret a 3D style in 2D. So I think if you were even to ask Steve Purcell himself, his answer would very likely be - let the new artist do his thing.

I play this sometimes, and I do really enjoy it. I do wish that sometimes it was possible to turn the other players off. It can be really frustrating to be doing one of the Tall Tales and enjoying solving the puzzles only to be interrupted by someone deciding they'd like to pick on you. But generally speaking I really like it, I wish I got to play it more actually but it can be hard to organise a little group for it.

There's possibly an agument they were going for some of the same things in that curse seems to establish some series conventions that the games since have followed: a very long, very blond guybrush, a more cartoonish, curvy style of graphics, those curly clouds, LipChuck. And I think at least some of that has remained with RMI too. But that possibly has more to say about how conventions have formed around the series than the actual art style itself.

Right, this is part of what I meant when I said you can't go back but by going forward. If this game had tried to look like MI1, or 2, I don't think it would have felt like MI1 or 2. All it would have done is remind us of how much time has passed since MI1 and 2. Just like I don't -truly- think that Thimbleweed felt like an old adventure game, especially when it was being consciously retro. IMO the moment that the video game made me feel the biggest sense of wonder that reminded me of playing old adventure games was: Which of course was also the moment when the game was at its least retro. I don't remember exactly what I thought of the art when I first played the original games. I probably wasn't old enough even to have particularly complex thoughts. But I remember the feeling it gave me, and that was the feeling that I was on an adventure and anything was possible and LeChuck might jump out any moment and it was going to take me to some weird and wonderful places. And when I look at this, that's what I feel. I accept that others don't, but I can't let it get me down.