KestrelPi

Eh, not wanting to drive this too far off topic, my point wasn't so much about the trailer itself. I don't have strong feelings about the trailer, and I doubt anything you could say about it would particularly bother me. I thought it was enjoyable and looked nice, and I think it's nice to have a FF game backing off from some of the more sci-fi settings we've had lately (I like sci-fi, I just think the variety is nice). Yes, I am someone who thinks the FFXIV story arc which started out mediocre has grown into the best story the series has told in recent years, but that's sorta by the by. My point was more that if you think that a CBUIII led FF game trailer topped with a personal Yoshi P message isn't enough to get a certain segment of the FF fandom as excited as some others are for the ReMI announcement ...I do not agree. So I think it was a bit of a weird pull, with regards to the point you were trying to make about AAA hype vs Indie hype. I do think, to gently nudge towards the topic again, there's some truth in the idea that there's a certain amount of power in keeping the hype cycles short and sweet. What MI is doing here is what I like to see. A little tease, followed by a longer trailer (today) followed by a game, hopefully, none of them too far apart from eachother. An announcement followed by nothing for years followed by a trailer followed by another year of waiting before release doesn't really do it for me, and just seems like this lumbering pace for the cycle to work at. Letting me play a game while my excitement for it is still fresh, is something I wish it was easier to do - but then again, I suppose the kind of secrecy that requires is so much easier with smaller games. I guess, overall... this stuff is difficult to balance.

Ehh.. as someone fairly into FF stuff I think that's a little unfair. I mean I've been playing that MMO for a while and I think it's easy to underestimate the capacity of FF fans to get excited. It's highly anticipated because of the involvement of a much loved producer and music director of the series and contains lots of details which ought to appeal to fans of the series. I certainly enjoyed it and I think it's kinda weird to compare the impact of these two completely different things. They're not even the same type of video (full trailer vs announcement/teaser) Anyway, my own experience of the teaser is that I was idly browsing and found out about ReMI about 30 seconds before going into a work meeting, then had to sit on that knowledge for an hour before finally being able to watch it. No tears from me... I think I kinda simultaneously was excited and apprehensive, as I immediately had so many questions. I've never been *unconditionally* excited by the idea of a new Ronzo MI, for me it's always been about the team, and so until I understood more about how this was being made and who was involved I had to temper my enthusiasm somewhat. The nice thing is everything I heard since has made me more excited, which is certainly the direction I like things to go.

I don't recall any 'firings' happening as part of development. What I do recall was a massive torrent of misinformation happening around the announcement that they'd be splitting the game into two parts. It also coincided with the whole g*mergate thing, so what happened was a ton of people trying to manufacture controversy around how Double Fine was managing funds, while the overwhelmingly most common response from backers was that they were happy for DF to take whatever approach they thought was best in order to make the game they wanted to make.

I'd like to play it again. I remember the puzzles feeling more satisfying to me in the second half. I remember feeling a bit ambivalent about the ending, and I remember feeling like how they dealt with the question of Shay's parents at the start of the second half was kinda weird and anticlimactic and rang a bit hollow. Still absolutely love the mid game twist and the style, and the soundtrack, and most of the writing, most of the issues I ended up having were about plot stuff that didn't work for me.

Based on the prompt 'the secret of monkey island revealed'

finally a use for AI

I bet at least it helps with the voice direction. I mean Khris Brown is amazing so I have zero worries about that in the first place, but I guess it's still possible occasionally for the context to get missed and a line read to have a weird emphasis that doesn't make sense in context. But if the writer is there, they should be able to make extra sure all the reads work in context.

Do you find you get self-analytical when you play the games and hear your voice work back? Or is it easy for you to compartmentalise that in your head and just hear the voice as guybrush?

Oh no listen, you're good. If it were anyone else I might think of this as a taunt but we've known you in the community for years. I was there when you popped up in #monkey-island and nobody believed you until you recorded a voice clip. I seem to remember you just went by Dom at first, until people started calling you Dmnkly because we're such nerds Listen, you're 'one of us', you just happen to be one of us who landed an absolute dream role 25 years ago and you've got as much right to be here and excited about the game as the rest of us. I'd never want to exclude you from these discussions just because there's a bit of me that wants to see inside your head and find out what you know.

Haha, as you can see we're barely holding it together. And now joining us, someone who knows the answers to all our speculation, but can't say anything.

I suspect melee will be a significant location, since otherwise it would be weird to have it there - it looks like at least the shop, the new key shop, the lookout area, the prison and the governor's mansion will exist, but it also looks to be a lot more run down than before. I sort of like the idea of a melee that has become forgotten and run down. Given that Melee originally had very little music, I'm not even sure if Land will do that island, maybe it'll be one of the others. Time will tell!

Hi! When I first played The Secret of Monkey Island at 10 I had a hint book. It made sense to me in context because I'd never completed a game. Games were hard to finish back then and so it never really even occured to me that I could have a go at it without help. Then when I played MI2 I played easy mode and my first game was easy mode. Later on I developed a taste for puzzles and I do like to try to solve adventures on my own as much as possible now, but I always remembered that playing on easy or with hints didn't make me like the first two games any less, and so however people want to approach games is completely valid. Generally in games I think we as players attach a bit too much value to how we like to experience games when I think that the most sensible thing is to let people enjoy them however they'd like. What works well for me doesn't necessarily for the next person, and I think it's nice that 2 people can play a game in a different way and both get some of the same things and some different things out of it.

by the way, that episode is, I believe, the City on the Edge of Forever: "In the episode, Doctor Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley) accidentally overdoses himself with a dangerous drug. While not in his right mind, McCoy transports himself down to a mysterious planet and travels back in time through the Guardian of Forever, after which he changes history to such an extent that the Federation of Planets no longer exists. Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) follow McCoy to 1930 New York and attempt to discover how he changed history and restore their timeline. While in the past, Kirk falls in love with social worker Edith Keeler (Joan Collins) and is shocked when he and Spock realize that, in order to save his future, he must allow Keeler to die in a traffic accident. "

What if guybrush is the spirit of the collective imagination of all children fantasizing about playing pirates.

Guybrush is a child on a starship holodeck theory in 3 2 1

Sure, no worries! I'm glad that you draw the distinction between the criticism here and elsewhere on the internet because I do think there is a difference. Many people here have had literal decades to sit with their feelings about the game. So where we are now is different from the initial response (which from a lot of Mojo folks was largely positive, if you check the secret history) AND the subsequent reactionary backlash. I think also the whole internet is in a different place from around 2000. There are many more lines of communications between developers and fans, and games themselves have changed. Apart from at the real fringes, indie games just weren't really a thing and the financial models that allow ReMI to exist now in the way that it will - as a probably mid-budget game developed by a small team, didn't exist. I was going somewhere with this and I can't quite remember, but I think my point was that I think it'll be a little different this time. In some ways, it'll be worse, because there are a certain amount of people who decide that the privilege of being to talk to the people involved with the game means they can and should say whatever mean thing that comes to mind at the time - and we've already seen a bit of that. But I think we're also past the point where we expect a new adventure game to be a AAA spectacular, bigger and grander than the last one. Adventure games are firmly in a niche, more than they ever were, and I think one of the challenges EMI had that is more obvious now than it was at the time is that it was in that transitional time when everyone still expected adventure games to be a Big Deal, but also nobody was willing to give them funding to match that. I think the mood for most has shifted a bit from 'It's a new Monkey Island game, this has to be the biggest and best thing ever' to 'It's a new Monkey Island game, I never expected this, I'm just glad it's happening... I hope it's good.'

Like, also I don't mind that people like EMI. It was a lot of people's first because it was on console, and of course it's fine to like it. I think there's a lot to like. I liked it, the first couple of times I played it. As I mentioned, I gave it a quite good review at the time. But the more I played it the less I liked it, while the more I played CMI the more I liked it. I don't want to tell people they are wrong for liking a game, and I want to live in a world where that's some people's favourite. But I've also had a long time to think about EMI now, and even recently I've gone back to it (in the form of watching videos) to see if perhaps it's better than I remember. So I do sort of 'check myself' with this opinion of it regularly, because I'm conscious of the thing where a concensus just overwhelms the ability to form an independent opinion. I also understand the frustration of having opinion that goes against a common consensus. You really want other people to see what you see. I know this as The Longest Journey Disliker, and as the (pre-patching) No Man's Sky Liker. As the person who's second favourite Star War is The Last Jedi. I s'pose what I'm trying to say is that people can like what they want, and while I might sound sometimes flippant when I talk about not liking EMI much because that seems to be in line with consensus, it's also not an opinion that I arrived at lightly, nor do I think it's a universal truth. I dont want ReMI to reject EMI. I just want it to focus on other things.

No, here's the thing, because I'm with you to a certain extent. You're misinterpreting what I'm saying. I was NEVER (ever) interested in MI3a, except academically. I was really actually pretty wary of a world in which Ron got to make another Monkey Island but just freely ignored everything that took place after his ones. In my opinion MI has had it PRETTY good overall since Ron stopped working on it. It could have gone a lot worse than one very well loved MI3, one fairly disliked MI4, and one episodic MI5 that people have mixed but generally positive feelings about. So I've NEVER been one to say that we should finally get a 'real' sequel or anything like that. I don't like it being framed that way and I've gone out of my way in the past to argue against that. For example, these tweets of mine from 2017 about what I think about whatever Ron was saying back then about MI: ALL I am saying is that I don't really recognise the things I most love about Monkey Island in EMI. And so I wouldn't want them to take too much from it, personally.

Well, it sort of is. But the root is just a MacGuffin. They could have chosen ANY method of being able to Kill LeChuck and the story would have been the same. I think that's where I draw the line. For most of MI1 and 2 you could take all the anachronisms out and still basically tell the same story. (If it wasn't a T-shirt it'd still be the same world and story, if it wasn't a rubber chicken... etc etc) And I think the same is true with CMI. But with MI2 and CMI it gets a bit trickier juuust in the final chapter. With EMI, it feels a lot harder because the pop culture is much more integrated into the story. You can't really talk about EMI's story without talking about the idea of modern corporate culture taking over pirate culture, without the idea of modern stuff and old pirate stuff colliding and at war with each other. And I never want things to be that lampshaded in MI, except for specific moments where we're doing a twist or something.

I do feel like this conversation has been a little overdone, but I do think there's an extremely noticeable shift in the way they use anachronisms between the first 3 games and EMI. In the first games, they're there - but they are barely referenced in dialogue. You get some star wars and indy jokes, and a few parody moments but the overwhelming feeling is you're in a piratey world where there are a few things eerily out of place. They're there, on the edges of the story but until the end of MI2 - as a deliberate move to introduce a twist, they never ARE the story. They're backdrop, little things that make you go 'huh' but you then forget they exist. They're that moment on the Pirates of The Carribean ride where you momentarily glimpse the mechanism or panel behind the animatronics but then forget about it a second later to lose yourself in the fantasy. My problem with EMI was that it never conceals its hand long enough to let you forget you're in a fake parody of a pirate world. And my secondary gripe is that it's not even very funny about it. Which is more a matter of taste. I remember playing the demo of EMI and wondering why I wasn't laughing. And the reason I know this isn't a false memory is that I specifically remember turning the subtitles on and off, and trying to work out whether the dialogue was funnier with or without. Wrenching this back on topic, I suppose I'm glad they haven't seemed to have really focused on EMI as inspiration, as while I appreciate it has its fans, to me it's become pretty emblematic of the gulf between what people THINK Monkey Island is like in tone, and what it's ACTUALLY like.

I'm going to further guess that most of the additional lines vs EMI are Dom's and it's owing to how they've done the UI this time providing motivation/opportunity for more lines to be recorded - more custom responses to different kinds of action, etc.

Thinking about how 34 actors means at LEAST 34 characters and it's likely they recorded more than one character. MI1:SE had 15 actors play about 45 characters (questionable if all of these are 'characters' - rat?) MI2:SE had 17 actors play about 40 characters (surprised this is less kinda, but see above) CMI had 29 actors play about 42 characters EMI had 40 actors play a whopping 76 characters (about 10 of these are pirate 1, pirate 2 etc, but still) EMI had by FAR the largest cast of characters of any of the games, and this has more lines recorded than that. I suspect they've gone for more people playing fewer characters, like CMI - the special editions seemed to be stretching the voice cast as far as it could go but CMI/EMI seemed to want a lower character/actor ratio and I do think it shows in the quality of some of the performances. I'm going to guess here that there are 34 actors playing about 50 characters.

Well arguably MI2 does this in both the first and second chapter Generally speaking I think the 3rd chapter of MI1 isn't particularly interesting. It has a nice sort of atmosphere, but wandering a huge island and mainly speaking to two characters (HT and the cannibals) just isn't that interesting to me. When I've been watching play throughs I've been skipping chunks of that part regularly. At least in MI2's long part 2 I get to meet lots of new characters. and its Dinky Island chapter feels fairly compressed i comparison to Monkey Island.

to me the new look Melee street suggests passage of time. Things are less uniform than they were, it's not as neat and tidy - there are piles of fishbones, broken roofing, boarded up windows and crumbling walls, derelict buildings. Melee Island here has seen better days, and I think it may have lessened the effect of that to see the same yellow light coming out of all the windows. It's inconsistent now, people are making do with what they have, and the brightest lighting is being used where it's most needed e.g. in the shop areas, where the upstairs areas and prison is murkier. I suppose I mean that there seem to be some deliberate choices here which are telling the story of what has happened to this location.

Something that he talks about in his talks about Knights and bikes is that for the art used for that he limited everything to two brushes only in order to make everything feel that more integrated. I think that kind of thinking becomes very important with digital art as it must be tempting to solve problems with all the tools at your disposal but imposing limitations really lends itself to coming up with creative solutions that feel intentional and cohesive with the overall style. God I can't wait to see this stuff in motion, in context Also for me it's less about what you lose/gain from traditional vs digital and more about what inspired you. It's not surprising to me that people who are inspired by traditional art but have to work in digital art because of constraints might not make their best work. The great thing about this being a digital art project is that Rex is really motivated and inspired by the potential of digital art, you can see him in his talks talking about how when he first got an Amiga and dpaint he was really excited by the possibilities. As a composer my advice to anyone wanting to try their hand is to work with whatever tools get you up in the morning, and I think the same rule applies to art. Take the path of least resistance. It's easy to feel like you're cheating by doing what is easy for you but I think really all it means is that you're free to spend your energy being creative instead of fighting with the medium