KestrelPi

Yeah and/or maybe it's a side effect of what they're doing with the UI. If the UI is designed, as they say to minimise the number of stock responses you get to interactions, perhaps that's encouraged them to write in more bespoke interactions.

I accidentally met Dave Gilbert once. I was at a game event and had struck up a conversation with someone about adventure games, and we started walking and talking because they were going to meet a friend, and so they met the friend and we sat round a table together and gradually during the conversation I realised that it was Dave Gilbert. I wasn't quite sure how to react because I like Dave Gilbert, I think he has a lot of good opinions (like the ones on this talk) but... I'd liked but not LOVED the games of his I played so I ended up in this weird situation of 'oh, wow, I'm talking to someone who I really respect for making his own adventure games and being the other adventure Gilbert, but I have literally nothing to say about his own work, but I'd still sort of like to talk to him about adventure games.' Looking at the start of this talk though makes me want to try some of his more recent work because it looks like he's admitting to not being very good at writing dialogue in the early days, and I think mainly it's his earlier work I've played. Incidentally, dialogue was part of what killed The Longest Journey to me. I was excited to play it but everyone just goes on and on and on and on.

I think I was hoping that people would get from context that I was talking about the comic style. but I see the confusion - when I was saying 'if I can critique the writing' I meant that 'if I can critique the writing of Tales', in contrast the style of the first three games is drier. But yes, I see your point about the writing in TP. Maybe in that context it isn't necessarily a positive that ReMI has so many lines of dialogue, but we'll see

I'll admit that even as I wrote it I thought 'is that too much callback' because I agree to a certain extent that there can be a tendency to overly fan-service things by calling back or bringing in old characters or locations. That said, I do think the time to do it is when you're in unfamiliar territory. I might be reading too much into it, but it feels like Murray was included in here at least in part to remind the players 'see? Still Monkey Island.' But I've long wanted the return of the Men of Low Moral Fiber and when I think of them getting themselves trapped in a whale as their latest misadventure that makes me smile.

I do think sometimes the 'grit' was overstated a bit. MI2 had more cartoony backgrounds and animations, so I already felt that the game's visual language was moving in a more cartoony direction even as the story itself got darker, but you're right, it's tough to balance these two impulses of the game.

Don't get me wrong - 'dry' isn't meant as an insult. It's a style of wit, where the writing style is a bit detached and little bit understated, it's not overly screwball and goofy. I'm saying I like that the bone master thing didn't have a follow on joke, it was just a quick visual gag then done, never referred to again. I like that the humour is a bit dry and understated, and that I think especially in EMI onwards sometimes there's a bit of a tendency to write the jokes a little bit broad. Here's another example of MI2 being dry. When he gets arrested on Phatt: 'Aren't you Guybrush Threepwood?' 'You must have me confused with someone else. My name is 'Smith'.' 'Smith, eh? That's an unusual name.' And that line is left there (they call back to it with Kate, too, I guess) You could miss the joke if you aren't paying attention, but I think in more recent MI games they'd have been tempted to make guybrush make a face, or say 'It is?' or something. Dry wit, to me, is just wit that trusts the audience a bit, doesn't need a big signpost with flashing lights saying 'here is a joke' As you know I didn't LOVE Thimbleweed, but I don't know that I found it overly rambly. That said I do agree that the person I mostly associate with tight dialogue is Tim Schafer. My go to example for this is early in Grim Fandango when Manny asks Eva what she did to get stuck in the DOD and she responds, "What I did back in the fat days is none of your business - you know the rules." It's such a small line but it does SO MUCH WORK. Firstly, it introduces a little piece of slang 'the fat days' which gives us a little insight into how the dead view their living days a little irreverantly. There aren't really tormented souls, they're just people, settled into a new phase of existence. Then it introduces the concept of their being a kind of taboo around talking about the living days - it doesn't matter who you were back then. Thirdly it tells the audience - what happened to Manny and anyone else in the Land of the Living is not a relevant part of this story. Don't worry about it. It's very typical of Tim to write something like that, just a very terse - no, this doesn't matter, and you shouldn't be asking about this - while another writer might have been tempted to serve up a whole land of the living backstory for all of its characters. My hope is that with Ron and Dave having played through MI1, 2 and CMI, they will really pay attention to its 'voice' (while I have some quibbles over CMI's story, I do think that its comic 'voice' was fairly similar to the first two games.)

For clarity I should say I don't think that 'swallowed by a giant sea creature' was a very bad place to take a Piratey game. I just think as a synopsis: 'Swallowed by a giant manatee whose sense of direction has been thrown off by a trio of pirates who have given up efforts to escape so that they can party on ichor based booze. Join their brotherhood to gain access the the cochlea, and then set the manatee up on a date with the help a manatee language phrasebook' skews a bit more cartoon-logic than I want from Monkey Island. I sorta wish the lost crew had been the Men of Low Moral Fiber (hey it's been a while since they've been in the game and it's good to ground the outlandish setting in something a bit familiar - I think Murray also had this role somewhat in Chapter 3). Maybe they spin him a yarn about how they signed up on his crew after their latest business venture failed, and they believe De Cava died. Maybe they've taken up residence on an important organ of the manatee which is causing the problem and the puzzles are around getting each of them to leave.

Oh I absolutely agree, like I said, in terms of the actual writing and design of the episode I think it's one of the funnier and better parts of the series, I just feel slightly conflicted about how wacky the writing gets in parts of the series. If I have to critique the writing in one way, I always felt like the writing in MI was somewhat dry, especially for the first two and a little bit for CMI too. There's a lot of sarcasm, a lot of comedy generated around nobody caring what Guybrush is up to except Guybrush, and occasionally Elaine. And the writing is... understated, a bit? Like, even when it's doing something a little bit goofy, it's understated. In MI2 Guybrush says 'Watch me flip this bone right into my pocket. They don't call me the bone master for nothing." then he tries it and it hits him on the head and there's no follow up. That's the end of the joke. I feel like newer games would feel the need to add Guybrush saying something like. "Yeah, well, the wind was off" or "Glad nobody was around to see that!" or something. It reminds me a bit of something I was talking about with a friend the other week, where a writing problem I think newer Simpsons has vs earlier stuff is that it doesn't know where to stop a joke. They'll make a decent gag, then they'll follow it up one or two beats too far, and the follow ons have the effect of sort of milking the joke empty. One of my hopes for ReMI is that it's written tight. I want a drier, less rambly Guybrush, and story elements that feel more grounded than goofy. Bu I forgive you for the manatee thing

Further Tales thoughts as I play though Chapter 3 and squeak into the beginning of chapter 4: * I continue to be appreciative of the difficulty level, and the style of puzzling in the game. It's mostly straightforward, but they're all GOOD puzzles, they make sense, they're not irritating to carry out, and they're designed well and quite original and sometimes stretch your brain a bit. I thought Chapter 3 had some really nice little set pieces, from the marriage quiz at the start, to finding all the different faces, to the out of body experience, to the manatee phrasebook dating. * While I like the puzzles themselves, I am struggling a little with the tone. I'm starting to think Tales overall strays a little too far over to the goofy side of things. The jokes in this episode are written well - it got more chuckles out of me than the last two, but when I'm trying to think about the vibes of this game against the others in the series, getting trapped in a huge manatee and discovering a sort of party brotherhood inside, then later hooking that manatee up on a date is skewing a little closer to EMI than MI1/2 or even CMI, tonally, IMO. I think I prefer my MI on the slightly less wacky, whimsical end of the scale. * I appreciate the extra work done in this episode to differentiate the characters, even though they're clearly working off the same models. That said, similar to above point, I think the nerdy character and the dude are characterised a little more broadly than I like from my Monkey Island. * At the time I remember loving Chapter 3 and thinking this is where the series gets on track. In hindsight, I think it actually starts picking up in Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 is the best written and executed yet, but not particularly Monkey Islandy to me. * But of course, the presence of Murray helps. Always love a Murray appearance, and I think he's really well done here, moreso than I remember. The credits are a very nice touch. He's also really well animated. He's very recognisable, for what is essentially an ordinary human skull. * Sure are a lot of weird fat jokes about the Voodoo Lady. Feels a bit cheap, and I don't remember this being particularly a thing in the first 3 games. Can't remember about EMI. * I've only played through the lengthy intro to Tales 4, and I'm already excited to get back to a more grounded setting. When I think about the set up to this episode - Guybrush getting arrested and tried for various puzzle crimes he did earlier in the game -- I can absolutely imagine that as something that could have happened in MI2 or CMI, perhaps, and I think I'm going to enjoy this episode, especially because I remember only a couple of things about it. * The switch to night is nice, and the opening moments are moody in a way I like. * Good to hear that Stan voice, think it's going to work really well in ReMI

Haha, great find but I already hate it. The way that the end of FT dealt with Ben and Mo's relationship was perfect - yeah, there's a world where those two might have worked together but they missed their chance. Retreading that and turning it into a potential romance cheapens what the end of that game does. FT showed me at 13 that it's fine, actually if the hero doesn't 'get the girl', that sometimes it's actually more interesting if he doesn't.

Well... I don't care whether Han shot first. Seriously. First, second. Doesn't matter. It makes sense for either of them to shoot first. This is literally the most thought I've ever given it, I don't care. ...I only care that altering it for him to shoot second made it look super weird.

OK. I'm sorry my comment came across as a little hostile. Then again, I also care about UI/UX - and lately it's part of my day job, so it's going to be a bit futile to have a 'who cares/knows more about UX contest'. I'm sure you've been looking at it deeper and for longer, but let's just say we both vaguely know what we are talking about. I do stand by that my comment was a response to this: I don't think it was inaccurate for Laserschwert to say Full Throttle used it first - sure, it might not be your ideal version of the interface but it was the same concept, Full Throttle used it first. I disagree slightly with your later comment that If they're only superficially the same that would mean that they're fundamentally different in some way. I think they're fundamentally the same, but with some details altered. You might believe those differences make important improvements, and that's fine. I just don't think that's enough to make Laserschwert wrong. I'm not sure I feel so strongly about the tweaks, and I agree with the point Jake made about the hole in the Full Throttle one being a good touch. But if someone asks me what the first verb coin interface was I'm still gonna say Full Throttle every time (unless some other obscure game I don't know about got there first ) All that said, once again, I didn't mean for my comment to come off hostile and I'm sorry for that, but I certainly didn't see it as, as you put it, an 'unnecessary drive-by' and like you I wasn't just flapping my gums for no reason.

I dunno what to tell you, they're objectively the same melody but with MI2's version modified a bit to make it fit more easily into a 4/4 time signature. And I already knew it was based on an existing tune, I just couldn't remember where I'd heard it before. And we know all 3 composers were both pretty fond of incorporating trad tunes into their pieces, and it was a well known enough tune in the US to make it into The Simpsons, so it's not even a stretch as far as I'm concerned. This sounds much more deliberate to me than the idea that the LeChuck theme was based on that tune from Dr. Doolittle, which starts the same and then goes off somewhere else. Or the Moleman being a bit like that Poirot music because they both use a 5 note chromatic descending melody. This is the same melody right up to and including the B section (it's an AABA structure melody - there's a tune, then it's repeated, then it does something else, then the A melody comes back again and both the A melody and the B melody at the same here)

I'm a little confused about what the disagreement IS here, given....

Yeah it's definitely that tune. That must have been what I was thinking of. I've no memory if where I'd heard this tune before but I must have done. It starts a bit different but it's clearly the same, it's just that the 3/4 melody has been changed to 4/4 and the first note gets repeated a couple of times to fill up the space. It even has the same B section. It's basically identical if you change the wharf music so that the first 3 notes are one long continuous note and imagine it in 3/4

I think all I was saying was that it's the same concept?

I mean, I'd say that's pedantic to the extreme. It's the same concept. You just like Curse's implementation better... that doesn't make it a different thing.

I'm not sure what weird conventions in other genres has to do with it, I guess? But I'll have a go - I think what Ron is getting at is that verbs don't actually have very much utility, or at least they are given way too much prominence for the amount of utility they have. Those two examples you gave... sure, they're odd genre conventions, but it's useful in a game where your health is important to have a way to heal quickly because I don't think most people would enjoy an FPS where every time you got shot you had to take a trip to hospital. And in a game where scavenging items is important, on whatever corpse is nearby is as good a place as any (I would say how realistic the items you find might be varies from game to game, and that's about how much that game cares about realism vs utility). So the obvious question is... what do verbs bring to the party? And the answer is... usually, very little. I've made this point before, but if you go through the walkthrough to DOTT, for example, and have a look at which puzzles actually wouldn't be as good if you took the verbs away, it's a small handful of situations across the whole game. I can't remember them all - one of them is pushing the speaker over in Green Tentacle's bedroom, another one is opening the clock. With very few exceptions, puzzles are solved by picking stuff up, using things with other things and talking to people. "But those few situations where other verbs are useful still exist" Sure, but they're so rare, and spread out that they might as well not. They could have been replaced with other, equally clever puzzles that didn't need extra verbs. "But sometimes you get a funny response." Yeah I guess, but 90% of the time you just get a canned response you've heard a million times. "But the verbs add detail to the game and complexity that raises the difficulty of all puzzles. Removing them narrows the possibility space and therefore your thinking." Maybe? But like I said, you don't need to fill the game with red herring verbs and canned responses to make a good puzzle, you just need to be a bit creative in how you frame the puzzles. So where I tend to fall on this is: 1. The look verb is cool. Keep that, in some way. 2. The rest can probably be boiled down to one or two actions. 3. Inventory. Inventory is already like verbs, but better because you can gain them, lose them, combine them, spend part of them. Inventory does everything a verb does, and more, and can be ANYTHING, and in this context losing things like Push/Pull Open/Close, and seperate Talk To/Use/Pick Up commands seems trivial. I believe that Ron meant something like this when saying verbs are cruft. And we already know this. Nobody said Grim Fandango's puzzles were too basic, or Escape's, and they basically did away with everything except for Look and Interact. And of the various complaints I hear about Curse, its 3-verb system isn't one of them. In fact, people liked it so much that now call it the Verb Coin system, even though Full Throttle used the same type of thing before it. "

They've said, both before and in recent interviews, some stuff that can probably give us some clues. Back in 2013, Ron's thinking was here: I more or less agree with this with a few caveats, but that's by the by. More recently toward the start of ReMI, he's said: It's unclear what he could mean here. What IS the current status quo. I don't really think there exists enough consistency in adventure UIs to have a status quo, so I'd be interested to know what Ron had in mind here. In interviews, they've said: In my opinion if this were JUST what we saw in Dolores, or just similar to something that already exists, they would have simply said that. It's a fascinating quote because it sounds like whatever they've hit on, they believe that it's truly different to what's been attempted before. This bit... Feels to me like it's hinting towards some sort of context sensitive elements of the intervace, moving away from just a standard list of verbs and moving more towards actions that serve particular puzzles in particular moments. Suggests some sort of dialling down of the ability to do invalid actions which to some people might sound a bit scary, like it'll make the game feel too easy or something, but I wouldn't be TOO worried about that, because it's all about how you design the puzzles around the new interface. Sometimes in Thimbleweed Park, for example, I felt like the puzzles were only 'hard' because the possibility space was so big and not because I actually had to be clever with my working out. But puzzles in Monkey Island like following the shopkeeper to the swordmaster were clever and satisfying even though the only thing you were doing is walking around. Or ones like retaining the grog to go to the jail were clever even though all you were doing was using one item with another. You don't need a ton of invalid possible actions with canned responses 'Mmm.... no' to make the puzzles feel good. You just have to .... design clever puzzles. It excites me that they might have spent more time in this game thinking about what would be fun things for the player to figure out. I've been thinking along similar lines for an adventure game I'm in the early stages of designing with a friend, and it's really fun to try to think of puzzles that use the interaction style and feel of adventure games, but in puzzle situations I don't think I've seen before.

I've taked about this a bit too far but I agree with his comments from years before about how mostly verbs are cruft and getting rid of them isn't as scary as it sounds. Inventory items are more interesting than verbs. But I do think Tales took it one step too far in removing 'look' (except for inventory items, I guess). So whatever the new thing is I hope it either finds a way to make verbs more interesting than they have been before and I hope it isn't so stripped back that we lose what we had in a meaningful way.

Further thoughts on Tales of Monkey Island now I've hit episode 2: * I think Guybrush is written a bit too stupid/silly in these episodes so far. He's a little bit wet and sometimes a bit oblivious - mostly to problems he's causing, but I never got the sense in the first few games that he was a complete buffoon -- he gets stuff done and can hold his own in a battle of wits. Here he occasionally approaches Homer Simpson levels of obliviousness. I don't think it's a bad joke for Guybrush to be so tickled by the idea of mermaids existing that he doesn't pay attention to what Winslow's saying, but it doesn't feel particularly Guybrush to me. * I've only played the start of Chapter 2, but so far I think it flows a bit better than the first, and the dialogue is just a little snappier overall. There's some signs of them settling into the writing style that really starts paying off in the next episode if I recall. * I enjoyed the puzzle at the end of Chapter 1 involving listening out for De Singe's sounds. * I'm worried I'm not gonna love some of these jokes about the Merfolk. * It's done something which is a really nitpicky pet peeve of mine. It's not 'Insult Swordfighting' and shouldn't be called that in universe. It's just sword fighting. EMI is the worst at this, treating 'Insult Swordfighting' like it's a thing, and not just what players called the puzzle about swordfighting, but I think to make a whole thing of it undermines the excellent joke/puzzle in MI1 that this is how they resolved to implement swordfighting in an adventure game. * a friend pointed out something to me that i think I agree with. People are way too nice to Guybrush. Guybrush can be a little bit of a jerk sometimes but it was always balanced out by the characters generally having no interest in being his friend, or feeding his ego. I think it's fun to have the one character, Winslow comically taking everything in his stride, but other characters are a lot like that too, way too tolerant of Threep's bullshit. * I still feel like the difficulty is piched about right, once you turn hints down * It's a nicer looking game than I remember, but that makes me want a remaster more than ever. * De Cava's theme music is really nice.

I feel like we're getting waaaay too fixated on a single example I gave. But ... to your other point - kinda yeah? I would have distinctly preferred this game if it had lost 2 main characters and cut out some of the padding from the middle. It took me... what, 12 hours to go through? I think 9 or 10 would have been just fine because I don't get the sense that they had a very good idea of what to fill most of those middle hours with.

Nothing, I think, but the sign outside the factory said it was being managed by Safely First so I figured out it must be to do with the bank. I realised that it might open later in the game, but I wasn't sure about it, so I spent quite a lot of time around it and calling it and trying alternate methods of entry. This is just one example though, I ended up calling the hint line on several puzzles and finding out the answer was just 'wait until later'. And that was only one of the ways that I found the puzzles irritating. But as soon as they focused the game in any way (for example the ending when you get locked in) then I found it much more enjoyable to work them out, and they seemed to become proper puzzles again, and less busywork. I really do think the middle of the game has a tendency to mistake 'amount of stuff to do' for puzzle complexity.

I'm talking about before it's open.

I want to emphasise that my use of the hint system had very little to do with difficulty and everything to do with not having the patience to figure out what thread the game wanted me to pull at next, and that was to do with the nature of the puzzles and the pace at which they unfolded