KestrelPi

The more I think about it the more I think that Elaine really hasn't had a decent outing in the series except for Tales. In 1 she has a couple of short scenes with Guybrush, one of which doesn't even happen if you do the thievery trial last. In 2 she gets a brief appearance in the intro, a short conversation and then another couple of lines at the end of the flashback. In the context of that, it's little wonder that the later games weren't too sure what to do with her. She's barely there. In 3 she basically gets a bit of dialogue in the intro, then a brief conversation with Guybrush. In Escape she finally has a larger role but also seems to undergo a radical personality change.

I think it worked well in MI1 because it was a subversion of the (at the time especially) expectation of the hero-rescues-the-princess template. In the first game, we know little about Elaine, beyond 'love interest who seems to have her act fairly together'. You get the sense that she can take care of herself, and from the interactions with Fester Shinetop that she likes to take matters into her own hands. But that moment at the end of MI1 is what creates the character of Elaine, in many ways. MI2 deepens this, by making it clear that she's not a character who exists just for Guybrush to have a love interest, and is actually independent, and evolved beyond the need for Guybrush to justify her. I do think there was such a missed opportunity in walking that back in CMI. The dynamic of a couple of characters who had a relationship that they're now beyond, but still sometimes have to work together is so interesting and underexplored in games. I always loved the ending to Full Throttle, where you get the obvious romantic tension between Maureen and Ben, but he realises that it's just not where this is going, and leaves quietly while she's on a call. If there had been a sequel, it would have been so fun to see them interact as an almost-but-not-quite, wrong-place-wrong-time sort of couple, and in Monkey Island I would have really like to see the Elaine and Guybrush who have a bit of history and the wounds have mostly healed enough that they can be friends, but there's no going back to the MI1 days.

The one that sticks out to me is "I should have known better!" when Guybrush asks for the map in MI2. To me that line was always in the voice of someone angry with guybrush and disappointed in herself for getting taken in, but the read in MI2:SE sounds more like a mother who's caught her son with his hand in the cookie jar. It's more 'oh, you cheeky little scamp' and less 'you've let me down again after a long series of let downs'. I have trouble -believing- it, and I think it's possibly true that some of those lines could have done with better direction.

There's never been an Elaine voice I've truly been happy with. I think Alexandra Boyd does a good job, and I think she suited the version of Elaine in Curse quite well. But the line reans in the first two games just aren't quite how I imagined them in my head. They feel a bit overwrought to me, I always imagined elaine as sorta ... cool? Like, too cool and capable for Guybrush, and I don't think that's come through in any version of Elaine so far. It's not Boyd's fault, she played the version of the character that was in CMI, and she did the best she could with what was in 1 and 2, but ultimately I think it's not the voice of the worldly, capable character (with a slightly soft side) that I want Elaine to be.

My prevailing memory of EMI Elaine is that they seemed keen on bringing back a more capable Elaine with a more active role in the story, but mainly that comes over in the dialogue as being really bossy, rather than actually clever and capable. Her main role seems to be telling Guybrush what to do, rather than doing any of it. Mind you I haven't played it lately so this might be me misremembering - but I have watched parts of it recently, and it seems to bear out.

In its defense, I do think there is so much subtle stuff Curse gets right about the tone of the first two games. I never understood the view that it's not funny or it feels tonally too different. The biggest tonal departures were it backing away from some of the mysteriousness of the first two games (which I can sort of understand because MI2 really went whole hog on that, so it felt like a conscious decision to not try to out-weird MI2), the relationship between Guybrush and Elaine, and LeChuck's drift from scary to silly. These aren't insignificant issues, but I really do think that it largely feels like a Monkey Island game in its writing. The most impressive thing about CMI to me was how well it understood the style of humourous dialogue in the first two games. The jokes felt similar to me. Guybrush's attitude in dialogues felt right to me. The use of dialogue choices to tell jokes felt really on point. Something I felt that later games, even Tales got a bit weird about guybrush is that they made him into a bit of a dithering, rambling sort of character in speech. I like the dialogue in Tales but there are some parts, like say in the intro sequence. 'This ship is dry as a bone. And I'm not talking about one of those wet bones either. I'm talking a dry, dry bone.' That's not a Guybrush line to me. He's a bit weedy and inept at times but his jokes are mostly witty and pithy. I think CMI mostly understands this, and I think it's an impressive aspect of the dialogue in CMI that isn't often talked about. '

It's true she's not portrayed as -useless- but I do think they undercook her capabilities especially in Curse. Like you have to be paying attention to notice the rerouting of the rollercoaster, it's a blink-and-you-miss-it throwaway line of dialogue and happens off screen, and so you could be forgiven to think she's fairly damselly in that one. She spends most of the game as an inanimate object and literally -can't- help herself, which arguably isn't the best use of Elaine as a character.

Interesting, he says that in the first 10 minutes they do something with storytelling that he would have never thought possible. I have to imagine that this has something to do with how they get from the carnival to telling a (somewhat) regular pirate story for most of the rest of the game. He also says that the game has stuff to say about the nature of interactive storytelling. To me this is all pointing towards the game having a really interesting kind of conceptual wrapper/device/structure that is really related to whatever's going on in the carnival. He also says, in relation to a question about the Secret: "I was working with Ron when he was working on the very first game, and I know what he had in mind for the secret then, and it has a very significant bearing on what you see in this latest game."

I have to admit, something about the art really clicked for me once I did this and saw an approximately to scale character placed walking in the scene. I'm more convinced than ever that it's going to look really lovely in motion.

I guess there's another way to settle the question of perspective. all this looks fine to me. The box looks a bit odd sometimes but usually guybrush isn't going to be hauling a box so that's fine.

Do we have any real evidence of that? They've said that the camera tech allows them to do all sorts of fancy pans and zooms they couldn't do before, but the screenshots we've seen so far all seem like they would support a side-on guybrush just fine. I can't see any real issue with the same guybrush model being in all of them. It'd be quite zoomed in for the shop, but that's fine, because it's a pretty small location that doesn't look like it has a ton in it.

I don't know that there's anything particularly devoted in this fanbase compared to others I've encountered. And of course many of us became fans long before there was this kind of stratification of game budgets, and long before they became 'niche'. Despite not being the absolute massive sellers, lucasarts adventures in the 90s had the biggest production values, the fanciest music and graphics. They were made for the mainstream. And like... yeah, zelda fans, pokemon fans, sonic fans, persona fans, final fantasy fans,<insert popular mainstream franchise here> absolutely can be as devoted and loyal as we are. But I think we should be fine with not being special here. I think devotion and loyalty are, perhaps, a bit of a double edged sword in the end. They have their good bits and bad bits. They can inspire great community and creativity, but they can also cause a loss of perspective.

Ha! I think we can probably also allow for probably the biggest territory for adventure games, relatively speaking, having a little bit more adventure buzz. I'd be surprised if we ever see headlines like this though: Honestly though, I think you're right that there's a certain segment of the, uh, game-liking population for which this is the most exciting thing in ages. I'm just trying to separate my own personal feelings about it with what I'm seeing elsewhere, and as much as I'd love this to be Devolver's big hope, with all the marketing enthusiasm that might imply... it wouldn't surprise me if they're largely managing the stage door, while letting Ron go with whatever release marketing he sees fit. I mean, clearly they already indulged him with the April Fools' reveal 😆 I s'pose... no matter what you actually thought of their presentation, did you SEE it? That was expensive. I reckon a company with that much money to throw around on a frivolous wrapper around 5 trailers probably also has money to take a punt on 2 years of development for a long hoped-for adventure game revival (possibly with the help of LucasFilm/Disney too, unclear if they put any money into it) without being all that worried about the staging of it.

Mm, I mean, I don't know. I suppose it is true that Monkey Island brings them a new kind of customer, but I don't know that they think this is the hottest e-ticket in town. I think it can feel that way from our Monkey Island bubble, but a brief look at their release list shows that they've had a string of healthy releases and also a couple the biggest indie releases of the last several years. Fall Guys and Inscryption I think both fall in that camp, and I remember a whole lot of buzz around Weird West. There's great buzz about Return to Monkey Island, sure... but.. mainly places like here. Outside of the usual suspects I haven't heard a whole lot of buzz around the internet. I've seen a bit of Let's Play activity from people using this as an opportunity to play the series for the first time, but honestly not quite so much as I expected. It's sorta easy to see why though - the teaser was extremely aimed at people who already knew what to expect from Monkey Island and are, well, like us. There hasn't been anything revealed yet that would give a complete MI newbie much incentive to want to learn more, and I think until we reach that point there's a limit to how much buzz Monkey Island can possibly generate. And even then it's still the 6th game in a series of what has become a relatively niche genre - it's never going to have the breadth of appeal of something like a Fall Guys which is multiplayer, a perfect streamer game, etc etc. I'm comfortable with the idea of MI being a passion project, or a sort of prestige-get for Devolver, rather than something they consider a flagship title.

This is what I had to say about it before, yes. Now. I don't think that the game is very likely to come out as late as November. It wouldn't shock me, but here's my line of thinking: A few months ago they felt confident enough to announce it for 2022, and when asked whether that date might slip, Ron said that barring anything disastrous it would be this year. I think November would be pretty close to be able to say that definitively. A fairly small delay could push something slated for November release into next year. But if you're saying 'we really, really believe it's going to be this year unless something very odd happens' I feel like that puts it into october-at-latest planned release territory. I think if it was a july release we'd have heard more by now. So I'm going to narrow my expected window to August-October. But if it were me, and knowing that Ron has thought about release dates in relation to other games, I'd be looking at getting it out the door before the september-october flurry of high profile releases. August is a relatively quiet looking month, but Devolver are already releasing a game on August 11th, so they won't want to overlap with that, which makes late-August to early September look like a pretty juicy timeslot to me. Counterpoint - November would also be a good slot, and it could explain why they didn't want to put out a trailer quite this early. But I'm still gonna put my money on September for now.

It's a process where audio is processed to be in its released form, and some of the things that might be involved, for example, include applying some equalisation and compression in order to make all the sounds which were recorded across several months and in 3 studios sound like they all come from the same game. There's a -little- bit of a grey area between mixing and mastering, especially when talking about music, but generally mastering is the stage after all the volume levels and FX processing and editing has been applied, the final piece of processing that needs to be done in order to ensure that everything sounds nice and consistent.

I guess maybe, but it could be that they are working with scratch dialogue. When I played an early Psychonauts 2 there were still a few lines in the game using scratch, and I guess it's easier to catch bugs with the audio when you're just replacing like with like, and as long as you keep the audio very organised, it shouldn't be much trouble. Also they could have already been using the unmastered voices and testing with those as they came in. As for mastering the voices, I'm not an expert in audio mastering but my impression is that the main goal of this will be to get all the lines recorded with different actors in 3 different locations and times to sound as consistent as possible in terms of tone and volume, and they should be able to do a good deal of that in a fairly automated way, once they know the changes they need to make. I think it's unlikely they'll be making adjustments to each individual line manually at the mastering stage. The other purpose will be to get it into the final audio format to be used in the game, which is really just a file conversion. I assume work would have been done during recording to keep the conditions as consistent as possible so that not very much processing needs to be done.

I think this is reasonably unlikely to be the reason. If they'd had a trailer they had ready, they could have fairly easily done a quick mastering of the voices needed for that in advance, and then made the trailer with that. just like how occasionally in the past when I've done music for a game the dev has used unfinished versions of the music which I've quickly mastered for the trailer and then re-done when finished. I think the most exciting thing about that is if all those lines have been sent for mastering then it seems likely that the voice recording is substantially done, now, which means that we're one step closer to a finished game

I always thought it was gonna be a coin flip. Remember, trailers take time and effort to make, and maybe Ronzo and co just didn't have time to do something in time for this event, or perhaps they already had a plan for a trailer release at a different time Devolver agreed to. Or maybe Devolver just decided this wasn't the event for that trailer. They showed like 5 games and there there are all sorts of reasons that they might not have included ReMI. Most of them were new game announcements and the one is just freshly released. Sometimes it's easy to forget in our bubble that the world doesn't revolve around Monkey Island. The good news is Ron's already said there'll be more to show before they release the game, so I doubt we're going to be kept waiting very much longer.

Not convinced by either of those honestly being a conscious thing. I mean, it's hard to write a memorable melody that isn't like some other memorable melody anyway, of course. I once asked Peter McConnell if a piece he wrote was consciously based on another thing. He said it wasn't but also pointed out that a piece of mine that I had showed to him had a melody very similar to Somewhere Over The Rainbow, while also having a completely different feel to that song.