KestrelPi

I remember that feeling too, and I definitely agree he used to be scarier, but also I suppose part of that comes from... I was 10. I'm never going to feel the same way about LeChuck as i did back then, unless they make him genuinely terrifying, and I doubt they'll do that, so I think this might also be one of those 'you can never go home' type deals. I think enough time has passed though that I'm ready for a less cartoonishly evil LeChuck and more of a legitimate threat. Something I liked about the first couple of games is those cutscenes you got where you'd find out about LeChuck's progress dealing with you. It was creepy as he felt always just a couple of steps behind you and could jump out any moment, especially in 2. And he was menacing, even to his minions. They did a bit of that in CMI too I recall (I don't remember whether it was in EMI and they couldn't do it in Tales for plot reasons) but it wasn't quite so effective because it was played for laughs a lot of the time. It's difficult to take his Guybrush-tracking efforts seriously when they're being led by a man dressed as a cartoon dog who talks like goofy. I hope in return we get some serious 'Meanwhile...' action.

I dunno, it wouldn't be the first time in the series someone has been replaced with a fairly different voice. The thing is, getting someone to do an impression is I think rarely a good idea especially when the old actor is never coming back. You want someone who can take ownership of the character, and that's never going to happen if they're living in the shadow of a past performance. Plus often you just end up with an 'uncanny valley' version of the character no matter how hard you try, especially when the actor is so distinctive. There are different ways to do menacing supernatural pirate, and I'd rather they chose someone who might sound jarring at first, if I leave satisfied that they nailed their version of the character.

Assuming they fix one bug a day, they'll have this out as soon as 2049

Incidentally, Return To Monkey Island is also an anagram of: Dinky's Lore Tournament, which is a good description of the last few days of this thread and Onto Dinky's E-Realm, Runt which coincidentally is a bad description of the end of Monkey Island 2

wait wait wait I've got this all WRONG It's actually an anagram of Loom Ad Intern Turns Key I think we know who's coming back

Okay, we've all noticed the prevalence of keys in what we've seen so far. But nobody has noticed that Return to Monkey Island is actually an anagram of Moonlit Nerd Turns A Key I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

In all this excitement I forgot to mention that the plot of ReMI came to me in a dream: So there you have it. Looking forward to playing that.

This calls for an animutation

What have I started

TOP NOTCH reply to my tweet about this.

This is all I can see, both ways round. I should add, I don't think this is RIGHT because I don't think it makes much sense with how he's walking, but it's all I can see.

I can't see it even after having it pointed out to me, so I wouldn't be so sure.

All of this is good. It gladdens my poor, ageing, increasingly jaded heart that I can still seen an announcement like this and pin my hopes and dreams to it and hang on every little detail of every little screenshot. Sure, I'm wise enough now to understand that I need to calm myself and go into it with a clear head, but while it lasts I'm going to enjoy being 15 again.

Huh. And from this angle, too. I thnk you can see the top part as a flick of hair, and the bottom part as some sort of beard or stubble, and ... maybe it's just my imagination, but he looks older to me.

I keep going back to this thing I posted on twitter as a way of tempering my expectations: Something I've noticed when nostalgic things return is that it never feels absolutely right, because the brain is just not very good at accepting the new. Like... take that picture of the key shop for example. It looks like it's in Melee, just outside the path to the mansion. My initial, gut response to seeing it is 'no. That's wrong. There's no shop there. And there should not be a shop there. And the very idea of a Monkey Island having a key shop in it is wrong.' - never mind that you can see from other parts of the image that time has passed, and there's no reason there couldn't be a key shop there now. Never mind that there's nothing intrinsically too weird about there being a key shop there, and certainly nothing that makes that weirder than there being a circus, or a voodoo shop, or a tourist trap hook isle, or a swordfighting dojo and so on and so forth. But it's not familiar and so my poor, worthless brain goes: nope, reject! This isn't a Monkey Island thing. Obviously this feeling subsides after a while, and the rational bit takes over and you realise 'actually this is a perfectly reasonable thing to put in a game'. Or else you realise that your gut was right all along (Starbuccaneers and Planet Threepwood are just... locations that I do not believe could have existed in the first 2, or even 3 games because of not fitting the tone of what they were doing with the humour). But the initial reaction is always the same, no matter how trivial the change or addition. "Ahh! Something new! It's wrong!" So when I first play the game I am trying to go in knowing that this gut feeling is going to be happening to me ALL THE TIME and not to pay any attention to it, to wait and see once it has settled how it feels about the whole experience later.

To me that looks like a man with guybrush hair and a MI2 beard, now.

I don't mind it. I mean obviously he won't look EXACTLY like that but to me that reads as a slightly older, perhaps not wiser Guybrush, just like I think might happen.

Well it's only up to the shoulder, so it's difficult to see how big the head is in relation to the rest of the body. But as I said above, I'm less convinced now I've seen the box carrying animations.

Oh. Weirdly I'm less sure now. It looked like a little easter egg to me at first but the way he's carrying boxes back and forth makes me think he's just another ghost pirate. Still, the more I watch the trailer and the more I look at the pictures the more detail I notice - little things in the animation, in the faces, in the background and it makes me really excited to see the whole thing.

Wait a minute. I'm sure this must have come up earlier in the thread but I don't believe I only just noticed what looks to me like a guybrush silhouette walking across the ship at the 50 second mark in the trailer

Ha! For me, it's looking at how expressive the faces are on the ghost and on murray when in motion. If we can expect this sort of attention to detail in the rest of the game then it's going to be a real treat to watch the characters.

Jake's old CMI impressions triggered 2 memories in me about EMI: one was that I felt kind of uncomfortable playing the demo and kept on turning the subtitles on and off to see if it would make the game funnier. Something about the writing wasn't working for me. Another is that I really WANTED to like it, so much so that I gave it quite a poorly written but positive review which now can only be found on the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20010129024900/http://www.adventuregamer.com/reviews/lucasarts/emi.shtml Mojo's first impressions article itself (https://mixnmojo.com/features/reviews/EMI---First-Impressions ) shows that initial written impressions of the game were mostly fairly positive, and it seems to be largely in hindsight people have thought 'hmm, maybe this isn't as good as we all thought' Anyway, here's my review of my review: I think this is a lot of words to say 'the plot is a mess but if you don't think about it too much it's fine' 'nearly all at least witty' - I sound like I'm trying to persuade myself here. Wow, I think I really did believe this one at the time. I do like EMI's soundtrack, and I agree it has a flavour of MI2 about it, but in hindsight CMI was a much more cohesive piece of work. I was one of those people who didn't hate Monkey Kombat. I don't remember this at all. I suppose they fixed these? This whole thing has the flavour of being like I wrote this review in reaction to some of the negative feedback that had started to filter through, perhaps in the hope of convincing them there was a good game here, but perhaps more in the hope of convincing myself.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this never ever ever e v e r would have happened in a million, billion, squillion years, so I wouldn't spend time pining for it. Ah, it could have been worse. 'Voices ruined the game' and 'Ugh, now we're gonna get ICE LeChuck' aren't the worst video game takes I've ever heard, but they are pretty funny.

There's a bit of a danger in the first place, whenever this whole narrative crops up of developers changing their games against their will in response to feedback from the internet. I think it fundamentally misunderstands how the creative process works. I mean, we know Ron is making the game he wants to make, but he's doing it with... plenty of feedback. In that last post he talks about how the game has had extensive external testing. Even Return, with its secrecy, hasn't been immune to this, and that's because the creative process thrives on feedback. We have this idea of the genius creator working in their secret factory and emerging with a fully formed work, but it rarely happens that way in reality. And so in the age of social media, whenever a creator is caught in the act of changing their mind, or responding to feedback, suddenly there's an outcry that the purity of the work has somehow been tainted by external feedback. Sometimes it's silly stuff like people arguing against accessibility features that don't affect them in any way. And it's often, but not always used as a stick to beat marginalised communities with, if things are changed as a result of feedback they gave. (Aside - I know this well. I remember asking a well-meant question about whether there was a place for gay people in Massive Chalice, and the response from Double Fine was GREAT and they did end up implementing some stuff based on it. The response from a small vocal section of the community was NOT great, and I was accused of all sorts of ulterior and corrupting motives for my fairly innocent bit of feedback) I think it's actually (and if you think about it unsurprisingly) very rare that creators are willing to sabotage their own vision for what their work should be, in order to please some randos on the internet. What they might do, is see some feedback, and find themselves agreeing with it and making changes accordingly. It's a pet peeve of mine that a significant portion of the internet don't seem to be able to tell the difference.

Like a lot of Rex's stuff it'll really come into it's own once in motion. He actually makes really expressive characters, so I'm not worried about that aspect at all. By the way, Ron has actually posted a comment on the blog: I think everyone is just very anxious to see it in motion but I trust the art team to have put together something special, I really do.