KestrelPi

I've talked about this briefly before, but I think it's possible to make a case that when you remove all the technological distinctions, MI2's style has lots of things that are more in common with CMI than MI1. Obviously the biggest difference is in the characters themselves, but when you look at the backgrounds I already feel like MI2 was already halfway or more to getting to where CMI was going. If you take these 3 town shots, for example, and ignore that one of them is at night, and just look at how the buildings are drawn, and how the lines and shapes work: Yeah, I think a case can be made that even though CMI clearly takes it further, MI2 is already starting what it continues. in the way it uses lines and shapes. Funnily enough, while I think RMI is again a departure, I think that in some ways it's a departure back in the direction of MI1 - both styles have a fascination with conveying funky perspectives with straight lines, and although RMI exaggerates this a lot more, I think it's fairly apt given the return to Melee. (edit: or, to put it another way, perhaps one way of looking at RMI's style as far at the backgrounds go is that in terms of the way it uses shapes, it's sort of a combination if MI1's straight lines and wonky perspectives with MI2 and especially CMI's more cartoonish exagerration and foreground/background detail.)

Given that it's my 40th birthday today it seems an apt time to reflect on things I have learned. And one of the things I've learned, I think, is that you can never go back. .. hmm.. but that's not quite right. You can never go back, except by going forward. When, probably almost exactly 30 years ago, someone showed me Monkey Island for the first time, it set my imagination on fire. In the good way. Whatever I thought games were before, this overwrote any of that and it was the start of a real fascination with storytelling in games, it was an immense influence on my style of composing especially melodies and bass parts, and it influenced me in so many other little different ways. So of course when I look back to those days I'm a mess of nostalgia, and part of me wants nothing more than to recreate it, exactly as it was, to experience it over again. But you'll never get that. It's an impossible dream. There's an uncanny valley associated with nostalgia, I feel. You can try to get back to the old house, and you might convince yourself that it's just how you remember it. But you know in your heart that some of the rooms aren't where you remember them, and that picture you thought looked really cool when you were 7 does nothing for you now, and it feels different when there isn't anyone living in it. Even Thimbleweed Park, a game I have mixed feelings about, I thought was at its most interesting when it was being least like a game from 1990. The closest you can get back to recapturing the feeling is perhaps experiencing it through someone else. Watching someone else experiencing something you love for the first time can be its own special joy. So what can you do instead? Well, for me the answer isn't in trying to recreate the same lightning in the same bottle, but to try to do as much as you can to find different lightning in different bottles. And that can only be found with the same spirit of experimentation and risk that the original games were made in. It might not always work, but it's always worth the try.

Yeah, give people a way to communicate with devs and suddenly everyone's an armchair producer. But it's not the first time I've seen this, I'm used to it by now. I think Tim Schafer probably had the right idea by saying from the start he wanted to make the game using Bagel's style, because then nobody could be shocked when the adventure game he made featured a style he hadn't really worked with before. But yes, quite clearly people have no idea of the effort that it takes to produce something of this quality. Even if they have their subjective opinion of whether the art style works for the game or not, as soon as they start to imply that it's cheap or low effort or easy to make or stuff like that they're just objectively wrong. The people I've seen most excited about this are other game devs and artists, and I think it's because they actually have some understanding of what's been achieved here, and in such a short time, all told.

This may be an echo chamber, but it's a big one, and I think the one that is both most representative and most knowledgeable of what they speak. I don't think it's too big headed to say that. The people who built this community are the same people who helped, say, build tools allowing us to play the games easily, still. They're the same people who now work for the people who made those games we love, the same people who have actually now made Monkey Island games. If I trust any echo chamber to have a true sense of what the vibe is around this game, it's this one. And hey, if it is an echo chamber, I don't think it's one to an unhealthy degree - we disagree on stuff all the time, right?

well, that's a wrap for hearing from Ron about the game. Thanks, Internet. Good job. *slow clap*

I just knew that having seen what else Rex had made there was no way he was gonna half-ass an opportunity to work on Monkey Island so I expected that when we saw it all up and moving it really would click. Which has been true for me at least. But I agree that website was a really nice touch too, wasn't it? Really sort of brings it to life. Makes it feel real, and close.

Heh. I allowed myself one more post on Ron's blog after all as a little about-to-turn-40 treat. It's probably a bad idea. But we're all young once.

Well, i'm 40 years old in 35 minutes and if I've learned anything in all that time it's that if a developer says something ever about an upcoming game on the internet, then that thing will be interpreted and misinterpreted in every possible way before the day is out.

I don't want to get too deep into this but I hope they shy away from insult stuff a bit, if they're gonna make a reference. My interpretation of insult swordfighting in MI1 was that it was just swordfighting. It wasn't like a special form of swordfighting, it was just a framing device for making fights work in a format where they didn't want to have actual combat. They never actually call it 'insult swordfighting' in the game. It worked within the logic of the game, but the intent behind it wasn't that 'these are the rules of swordfighting in this world. CMI brought it back and I think it was fun to change it so that they had to rhyme at sea, but I also think it was the start of the games being weird about insult fighting. There's no reason why non-rhyming insults shouldnt be effective at sea, that sort of undermines the whole point of the insult being a way of throwing the opponent off guard. But I accepted it because I guess within the fiction you could have it that at sea the tradition of rhyming insults is so ingrained that even a brilliant insult that doesn't rhyme doesn't sting in the same way it usually would because it would be an embarrassing faux pas. Sure. Then EMI takes it several steps further. First Guybrush can't win against Ozzie because he can't understand the insults (why would you be insulted by an insult that makes no sense to you?) But also they start calling it 'insult arm wrestling' and 'insult swordfighting' and then get all metaphysical about it and introduce the idea of the ultimate insult which in my mind just goes WAY past what insulting was intended to represent in the first game. They calm it down a bit in Tales but it still gets talked about as 'insult swordfighting'. Maybe this is a peeve I and I alone have, but I have no time for making insults and insult swordfighting a 'thing' in the MI universe. It's just swordfighting! Insults are just a game mechanic! ...Ahem

Yeah, the hair is really a lot similar, and obviously a lot of the proportions are similar too. I think that the changes in the shapes and the extra contours on the face make a lot of difference to how I experience the character though.

Well now, what have you given me in return? Oh, riiiiight. Voiced one of my favourite video game characters for 25 years. 😉 (also, you were more patient with that 'they're the exact same art style' comment than I would have been, well done!)

Right, it's the advice I give myself, for sure, but I'm not always good at following it. I want to just counterbalance negative with something a bit more positive but sometimes it's REALLY really hard not to say 'Nope, I think you're wrong and this is why you're wrong and even if you're not wrong you're being an asshole about it,'. Sometimes you want to confront. And confrontation does -sometimes- work. Usually not straightaway. But... like if you've ever thought back to a time in your life when you've had an argument and felt a bit attacked but now realise 'oh, actually I WAS the asshole in that situation' then you'll recognise that sometimes being confronted has a way of working on your conscience. So my thinking has shifted towards ... 'is this confrontation worth my time?' and the answer is very often no. But, as someone who makes stuff myself, I know that no matter how many times I hear it, and no matter how experienced I get it's always a joy to be told by someone that they like my work. So that's always a good thing to do.

Oh I forgot to point out, obviously I was right all those pages ago.

Mm. If anything it makes me more determined to give the game a chance. Like, give it the benefit of the doubt. I'm much more likely to be charitable towards a game that is striving towards something, and doesn't quite reach it, than I am towards a game that does a pretty good job at playing it safe. I guess that's why I can't quite hate EMI, even though I have a ton of problems with it - it's going for something quite unique within the series, and why I can't quite completely love CMI, even though I like it a lot and it gets a lot right in my opinion - you can sense how safe it's playing it (though I guess at the time the art style was bold)

It's a bit sad, but at some point yesterday I think I made peace with it. If some people want to build a personal hell for themselves by not being able to enjoy a long anticipated game that until a few months back we weren't even sure would ever exist, because they don't like the look then... I can't help them. It's their loss. Unfortunate, and also hurts a little to think that any of the creators involved might be disheartened, but also when RG retweeted me yesterday I was reassured of the thing that I have always believed about this, which is that pushing positivity into the world is the best way to help with that.

I think that's her green turban, but the lighting is making it look confusing. As for the lookout, I dunno. I always imagined the original lookout was kind of around his 50s or something. I thought the special edition aged him up too much. Although when he looks out toward the water when the governor is kidnapped, you can see that he's balding in that, so perhaps there's not much difference there.

Yeah, this is the thing that's making me think it's not going to be QUITE as simple as a time skip. There are a few things we know: * The game starts where MI2 leaves off. * The bulk of the game is set in a time where it's been years since Guybrush has faced LeChuck * Some characters seem to look older * Noah Falstein thinks that something that happens in the opening the game is really clever, surprising and impressive from a storytelling perspective. Wildly extrapolating from this, I think that in the opening of the game we're going to discover how you get from a kid at a theme park to an older, washed out Guybrush. And the thing that Noah was hinting at will be something to do with that, and it's not going to be quite as simple as '30 years later'. It's going to be more mysterious, and more clever, and it's going to, perhaps, give us a bit of insight in to just how that carnival relates to what Guybrush and his world are actually all about.

I thought I'd compile the signs of characters apparently aging that I've noticed so far. Sorry for the terrible quality of these: Guybrush's eye wrinkles and seemingly greying stubble: Voodoo Lady's eyebrows and eye wrinkles Wally's eyes too - pretty subtle in this case: Stan has greying temples: Also mentions on the site something like 'At my age you need a bit of touching up' with regard to the visuals And of course the lookout is balding and growing a very long beard:

I don't think Steam tends to go in for exclusivity windows given that they don't exactly need to provide a lot of incentive for people wanting to be on their store. Either way, I have my own reasons not to want to go through GOG (which I won't get into but essentially I really dislike some of the stuff their parent company has said/done over the years) but I hope that everyone gets to download it on whatever platform they like.

Further trailer/website-based speculations: It says 'It’s been many years since Guybrush Threepwood was last locked in a battle of wits with his nemesis, the zombie pirate LeChuck.' But if that's the case, what's been happening? I doubt that LeChuck would have willingly just put his ambitions to capture and marry Elaine on pause. I think there's a clue, here. I think Guybrush and Elaine haven't been in the world of Monkey Island for a while. And I think we're going to get a clue about what that might mean in the early part of the game. In the text, it says: His true love, Elaine Marley, has turned her focus away from governing and Guybrush himself is adrift and unfulfilled, having never found the Secret of Monkey Island. But this is all very vague, isn't it? What does 'adrift and unfullfilled' mean. What have they been DOING and why isn't LeChuck in the picture? If anything this whole setup gives me vague vibes of... remember Hook? And what about LeChuck? A desk with a corporate nameplate and a stress ball? I think life as a ghost pirate has become bleak and tiresome for him. Why? Well, possibly because he's had no Guybrush and Elaine to chase around. He's settled into a bland, corporate version of terrorising the seas, without anything to aim for. Finding out they've returned is probably the best news Hook... er, I mean LeChuck's had in years. It brings out the fire in him and he comes a fearsome force once more. ... Or maybe something different to all that.

Y'know, given the trailer and how much Ron likes trolling his own audience in general, I think he should have followed the modern trend of just re-using old names and called the game... The Secret of Monkey Island.

I wonder what will happen in I Wonder What Will Happen In

Slight change of topic for me: More Tales thoughts * I played through a lot of Chapter 4, last night. At the time Chapter 3 was my favourite, and I still like it a lot, but taking the game as a whole I feel like I like Chapter 4 more. This just feels like a very 'monkey islandy' situation to me -hey, it's not the first time Guybrush has been in trouble with the law, and I think the puzzle conceit of switching between the courtroom and gathering your evidence is done well. * The cartoonishly goofy Guybrush writing is still present, and I don't know how much I like it. I just don't think the Guybrush of MI1, 2 or even 3 would have comic conversations with himself as his own lawyer, or derail court proceedings quite to the extend that he's doing here. He'd stand and make snarky comments about the proceedings, and then probably slip up in some way that makes him seem more guilty. * I'm getting a bit tired of the Pox of LeChuck. I don't think it's a particularly interesting plot point, or at least not in the way it's implemented. If it actually invited truly dark and evil impulses in a subtle way that might be a cool, creepy thing to bring into the game, but as it is is just make people rant angrily, sometimes, and have a bit of a cough. Eh. * I feel like the game is finding its feet a little with the comic style. It's getting smiles out of me more regularly, and I think its finding its voice. I'm looking forward to getting toward the end of the story.

I've played with it, but I don't see anything that really elaborates on it. Did you have something specific in mind?

Actually that Guybrush fall onto the rocks is another excellent example of how Rex uses 'unrealistic' animations for comic effect... Guybrush falls down to the lower rock, then somehow bounces all the way up to the slightly higher rock before continuing his descent. It's a really funny detail that really adds to the disastrous nature of the descent.