ATMcashpoint

If you're still in Florence, you can actually see Michelangelo's Dawn for yourself, since it's in the Medici Chapel there. For my money it's not Michelangelo's finest work by a long shot - his knowledge of female anatomy was evidently much less detailed (and probably less personal) than his familiarity with the intricacies of the male body.

That looks like concept art drawn by Peter Chan to my eye. Nice to see him working with Tim Schafer again!

Incredible find! Nice work!

Arguably that was Return to Zork in 1993. It even had context-sensitive options that changed for each on-screen object, like Sierra would later do in Leisure Suit Larry 7 and Gabriel Knight 3 (or the text menu options in Delores).

It's like Tuco Ramirez said in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, in the very scene that was the model for the original SW bar shootout in the first place: "When you gotta shoot, shoot, don't talk!"

Not the original version of MI2, sadly, due to the SE dialogue changes being implemented in both game modes. And even the MI1 SE has a few dialogue tweaks, though nothing nearly as egregious.

This is actually something Bill Tiller has acknowledged borrowing from the unreleased Brian Moriarty/Bill Eaken version of The DIG, in which there was apparently an "idea inventory" for such objects (as well as more abstract concepts like the other crewmembers, for instance).

Apparently the same tune is used for Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and Mary Had a Little Lamb Baa, Baa, Black Sheep. I never realized that. Mind blown.

Personally, I think the Full Throttle interface was kind of clunky, in that it has a "Kick" verb that's only used for a couple of puzzles (kicking open the Kickstand door and the secret switch for the Corley Motors back entrane IIRC). And combining the "Eye" and "Mouth" icons into a single skull element felt like they were crammed into awkwardly small spaces. In contrast, CMI has separate areas on the Verb Coin for the "Eye" and "Mouth" icons, which feels much easier to control when you're holding down the mouse button to select an action (rather than just simply clicking once to make a pop-up menu appear). It's not surprisng IMO why it was the CMI version of that interface that really became well-remembered.

Funny, I'd been trying to figure out for weeks what song the Phatt Island roulette wheel was derived from, because somebody mentioned it long ago and I couldn't remember what it was. I finally figured it out about a week ago:

I do have to say, it would be interesting if the reason we haven't seen any images of Guybrush so far is that I'm actually right in my crazy theory about the Secret of Monkey Island being that Guybrush is actually female. (Or "the Secret of Monkey Island is that Elaine is actually a guy", as one of the Flight of the Amazon Queen developers put it, just turned around 180 degrees.)

I never thought about using the logo only for the SEs, but that's an interesting idea. On the other hand, it would emphasize their "Special Edition-ness" as something distinct from the original product rather than a "restoration", which the makers of such SEs (whether in film or video games) are often at pains to de-emphasize, even when they involve hugely drastic changes to the original works. Both with MI and the Star Wars movies the "Special Editions" have entirely replaced the original versions in the marketplace, for instance, except for the odd releases like the Limited Run Games MI box set and the laserdisc-transfer DVD versions of the SW Episodes 4-6.

Some answers for the prompt "Write an outline for a sequel to LOOM." First try - not quite there yet: Second try - this one's much more in the right ballpark: A few attempts later, the AI has decided the Weavers need a rival Guild of some sort: Another random entry that seems to be drawing from very different source material: Or perhaps a Star Wars crossover: LOOM 2, by Electronic Arts This one's actually rather intriguing: Speaking of crossovers... how about Halo? Some more input that is obviously based on different source material. I don't remember the "Sarans" from the first game. And here's a storyline that pits "Loomweavers" against the "Weaver". I think video-game writers can keep their day jobs for now.

I like that the AI just completely forgot about one of the map pieces.

Incredible! This is a feature I've wanted to see in ScummVM for years! Thank you so much for working on adding this!

Besides On Stranger Tides, I feel on fairly safe ground in surmising that George MacDonald Fraser's satirical pirate novel The Pyrates was something Ron Gilbert read while brainstorming MI1 - mainly because the book's hero is a dashing Royal Navy man named Ben Avery, meant to be a younger version of the infamous historical pirate Henry Every, who seized the Mughal Emperor's treasure ship Ganj-i-Sawai (along with its escort ship the Fateh Muhammad), packed with many of the Emperor's close relatives who suffered great violence, while the ships were sailing back to India from a pilgrimage to Mecca. What happened to the real Henry Every after the raid is uncertain; as far as can be surmised, he seems to be one of the rare pirates who "got away with it". The early design documents for MI1 describe the protagonist (then called "Smear West") as a pirate who seized a treasure fleet and then became a has-been from retelling the story a bunch of times, much like Guybrush in MI2 with killing LeChuck. That detail as presented in the design documents seems to be specifically modeled on Henry Every's career (few pirates ever seized prizes as rich as Every's), and the idea of seeing such an otherwise famous protagonist at different times in his life feels like something Gilbert might have picked up from Fraser's novel (though in this case taking inspiration from the unknown "after" of Every's career rather than the "before"). The early name of Largo LaGrande, "Lord Jack", also suggests a possible connection with Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim, about a disgraced sailor who ultimately finds redemption through death. Whatever bearing such a story might have on a planned storyline for Largo I couldn't say.

If you're interested in trying to re-create the screenshots from the back of the Sam & Max Hit the Road box, the early version of the Wak-A-Rat score box is used in an early WIP pre-release demo (the one with Sam & Max as the LucasArts logo): The left-hand number is the score and the right-hand number is the time elapsed so far. There's also an alternate version of the Wak-A-Rat game background without the score box in both the early demo and the published game: It's the same design in both versions AFAIK. In the published game the regular Wak-A-Rat room is Room 18 and the unused version is Room 19, while in the early demo they're Rooms 14 and 15 respectively. As for the Mystery Vortex screenshot, you might want to have a look at the various random colors of the two other doors in the Mystery Vortex and try borrowing their palettes for re-coloring the doors visible in the screenshot accordingly. And also looking through the costume files to see if the animation of Sam's hat flying off is used anywhere (IIRC it is but I can't remember where). A good tool for that might be Tomas' SCUMM Costume Viewer. And for Conroy Bumpus' "Aooooooooooo..." (with 11 Os) you might try using a tool like ScummTR to alter the dialogue text in that scene and manually alter the text color based on the dark blue text color that's probably used elsewhere in the game. Note that the ellipsis (three dots) in dialog lines is treated as a special symbol in the SCUMM game fonts, so you'd want to see how ScummTR treats that when it dumps the game dialogue into a text file and match that accordingly. (And if you do use ScummTR, make sure to back up your game files first!)

Some of the screenshots on the original Sam & Max box are different than in the published game. In particular, the Wak-A-Rat score box is missing the "Hit 20 Win" text at the top; the screenshot of Conroy Bumpus singing in Bumpusville has him (and/or the stuffed animal heads) singing "Aooooooooooo..." in a blue font; and the Mystery Vortex hallway shows Sam's hat leaping off his head in amazement, while the doors at the front of the room are green and white in color (though in the published game those particular two doors seem to be hard-coded to be red and orange for some reason). I definitely admire the work in making that facsimile box, though!

In that case I wonder if the scene of Guybrush nailing Stan in the coffin in MI2 would be affected as well. The latter was a case where IIRC the programmers (mainly Tim Schafer, if memory serves) turned off the frame-rate limitations ("min-jiffies") to make the animation play as fast as possible. Something similar might be going on with the LOOM intro.

This is exactly what I suspect happened with the origins of LeChuck's theme. As for the Doug the Moleman music, it might be a musical joke of sorts, since it seems (like in the Agatha Christie novel) like everyone in the carnival except the Kushman Bros. either helped Bruno & Trixie to elope or was keeping their secrets safe.

Indeed. I'd never seen it before, but that game looked amazing. I thought when I saw the trailer that it would be the perfect art style for a new version of Sid Meier's Pirates!

This is incredible. Thank you so much! Also, as a longtime LucasArts adventure game fan who grew up playing the Macintosh ports of their games, let me extend my heartfelt thanks to you for coding most of those ports. The DOTT port including the previously-unported Maniac Mansion in particular was crazy brilliance.

I asked Zaarin where we could talk about such things. (Admittedly, perhaps more harshly in the heat of the moment than I would have done with a cooler head, for which I apologize.) Nonetheless, he deleted my post.

Of note is that three rooms (rooms 66-68) are missing from the MI1 resource files between the entrance to the lava maze underground with the mysterious giant monkey skeleton (room 65) and the Giant Monkey Head exterior closeup (room 69). Controls for the Giant Monkey Robot perhaps?

I'm afraid not. They said they would back in the day, but they never did. Which is why the currently available digital versions use Adam Harrington's voice even now.