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TimeGentleman

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Posts posted by TimeGentleman

    Speedruns

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Just watched this interesting video about the history of SOMI speedrunning, and thought I may as well make a topic in case anyone else has any fun stuff to share.

     

     

    The only other one I could think of off the top of my head is this one of Double Fine staff inviting a speedrunner to their studio to show them some strats:
     

     

    • Like 4

    Return to Monkey Island

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    5 hours ago, Vainamoinen said:

    The Ron parts did it in dream sequences ... The throwbacks to Melee Island™ in Curse were for the laughs, I think, and never had any deeper meaning. The only actual 'multiverse' stuff was in part 4.

     

    I know, I was joking :)

     

    What multiverse stuff was there in Escape? Because there isn't any in the picture I posted!

    • Like 1

    Return to Monkey Island

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by TimeGentleman

    Here's something that many of you may not have realised: Monkey Island has always been explicitly set in a multiverse. 'Prime' Guybrush often meets and interacts with alternate universe versions of himself. Here are a just a few instances:

    image.png

    • Like 2
    • Haha 3

    Return to Monkey Island

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by TimeGentleman

    4 hours ago, Toymafia88 said:

    He did do the Tales poster after, but maybe that was more of a one off special favour to Telltale.


    I suspect that he was more comfortable doing that because the in-game art was (outside of UI etc) 3D so he wasn't really stepping on anyone's toes.

     

    EDIT: ah, here's where I got the COMI thing from: 
    https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-12-The-Curse-of-Monkey-Island/5
     

    Quote

     

    You and Larry Ahern drew the game's superb cover art. Is it true that Steve Purcell turned down the offer to do so himself?

    Thanks! Yes he did turn it down, but not because he didn't want to do it. He liked the style we came up with so much that he felt Larry and I should do it. At first when we heard he didn't want to do it we were a bit bummed. I think even Jonathan was bummed. But when we talked to Steve we had the opposite reaction, it was a big compliment, especially coming from him.

     

     

     

    Return to Monkey Island

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Re. a Purcell poster, iirc he was actually offered the job of doing the poster art for COMI and turned it down because he felt it would be awkward/unfair when his art wasn't in the game. So I suspect even if they went to him for ReMI that he would turn it down. Maybe he could do an alternate version for a physical edition, or something...

    • Like 2

    Return to Monkey Island

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I think that further illustrates the problem with making any definitive claims about the creators' intentions, the meaning of a lot of stuff in the games, etc.

    Ron has just recently said that the only thing he had planned for MI3 was 'Guybrush goes to hell and Stan is there', which would seem to contradict that statement by Noah. If we assume both to be true, then we need to reinterpret Ron's statement as meaning that the hell thing was the only idea he had for a story beat, but he did also have ideas of what revelations would be made along the way.  It seems that sometimes we may not even realise that there's ambiguity in their statements to be interpreted. I think that until the day comes (if ever) that Ron announces 'this was the final Monkey Island game I'm ever going to make, and here is exactly what everything meant in all my MI games', they are going to maintain that Lynchian ambiguity.

    • Like 2

    Return to Monkey Island

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    37 minutes ago, Vainamoinen said:

    I guess 50's animators thought of it the same way, especially since 50's televisions were pretty skimpy on the detail.

     

    Just a tiny note that isn't really relevant to any of the discussion here: by and large, these 50s animated shorts (such as What's Opera, Doc?) were made for theatrical release, as household television sets were not yet the norm. This continued into the mid-60s, although by 1960 most American households had televisions so cartoons like Mr Magoo's Christmas Special started to be created for that medium instead.

    • Like 3

    Return to Monkey Island

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by TimeGentleman

    There are two separate things being talked about here: the concept of "the secret of Monkey IslandTM " and the layers of reality in the two games.

     

    I think, like I said before, that the soMITM as discussed in the first game (and used as its title) was a generic adventure concept that covered the island's magical concealment and the monkey head portal etc.


    It feels to me like in that first game the post-modern stuff was purely for humour, but that in the second game they decided to roll it into the story. The Voodoo Lady says: "Big Whoop isn't just a treasure. It contains the secret to another world. Find that world and you'll be able to escape LeChuck forever." And then of course there's the fairground ending. Exactly how literally Gilbert et al intended this all to be taken is left fairly ambiguous, but they certainly intertwined it into the fabric of the story to some extent.

    To me, the fact that they created Big Whoop and connected it to the reality-bending, rather than returning to the location of Monkey Island and tying it all into that, supports the idea that the soMITM isn't that important and the continued questioning about it is a running joke.

    But you know what? The whole thing is intentionally ambiguous, and while we can all have our own theories about how important any given aspect is or what it means, there's no way to be sure unless Ron & Dave lay it all out for us in ReMI. Personally, I don't think they will - I suspect they'll answer a couple of things and ask five more!

    • Like 5

    Return to Monkey Island

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    1 minute ago, Thrik said:


    Do monkey ribs have that weird two-colour thing going on, with the brown/gold bits? I couldn’t find any examples in the 30 seconds I spent on Google, but then there are lots of types of simian.

     

    Yep, costal cartilage, same as we do:

     

    C0111994-Chimpanzee_skeleton.jpg

    • Like 3

    Return to Monkey Island

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    16 minutes ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

    You know, that was a question I've never worried about. Although (now I think about it) I think Ron has been guilty of poking the flames of it, making it seem like more than it was. I mean, surely the secret is just that there's a portal to hell on it that you enter via a giant dead monkey? Why have people assumed there's more than that (unless it's an explanation as to WHY there's a giant dead monkey that leads to hell on it?)

     

    Yeah, it feels to me like the 'secret' of Monkey island was just a generic adventure title meant to refer to how it's difficult to get to, the monkey head portal etc. And then in the second one whenever anyone asks what is the secret of monkey island, that's just a running joke about how the title is no longer really relevant. But that got picked up on by fans (and subsequent games, but to what extent they're in on the joke I'm not sure) as a legit mystery.

    • Like 1

    Return to Monkey Island

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I think it was statements like "we can say with a reasonable security that if Ahern and Chan had worked on Monkey 3 in 93/94, following their research and the trend of those years, they would have chosen the same, deformed and expressionist style" and the argument that therefore a 1993 Monkey Island 3 would have looked just like RtMI does, that muddied the waters a little. But yeah I think we're all in agreement that a 1993 MI3 would have moved the style on somehow, quite possibly in a more stylised direction, and that not having the exact same art style as MI2 is not some betrayal on Ron's part.

     

    Re. Ron and Tim, not that I know them or anything, but I'd be surprised if they'd fallen out over the Microsoft purchase. Surely Ron knows this is the nature of the business and that unless he had a contract with Double Fine saying he owned the IP then something like this was always a possibility. It feels more like a general grumpiness on the state of the industry and how, much like in the comics biz, creators generally don't get to retain rights or even get residuals etc. It didn't stop him making another MI with Lucasfilm Games.

    • Like 3

    Tell me why I’m about to get ripped off (Indy prop replicas)

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by TimeGentleman

    Yeah, the main thing that would hold me back is how amazing that diary seems to be for only £40 (make sure you've got 'prop replica' style selected). 235 pages of content, plus 24 impressive inserts, themed packaging, and it's all hand-aged..!
    Plus they have 'made in the USA' logos, but they're based in China, they don't have a Facebook or Instagram (the links just take you to those sites' homepage) and there are only two reviews for it which are both dated in the last couple of days, and in the video on one of those reviews all the inserts look massive, which is a bit odd.

    If I could find a reddit thread or something with some reviews that didn't feel astroturfed, I might be tempted to risk the £40+p&p..!

     

    edit:
    I did find this while googling around! https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/537089950/make-your-own-grail-diary-200-high
    And also this unwrapping of a pre-made one (also from etsy, but it's £150): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShgKh1WHUDA
    They all seem to be working with very similar material, maybe kittiway bought that pdf pack and are willing to make it up for people on the cheap, I dunno...

     

    • Like 1

    Do you think Tim Schafer would ever make another point and click game?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    2 hours ago, elTee said:

    Had Tim decided to go down that road and make a game in the style of, say, Full Throttle, I'd also have been happy about it. (Actually, I wonder if that was the original intention now - a small low budget, SCUMM-style game. And then it only expanded into what it became because they got so much more money than they were asking for. I'm sure the answer is out there somewhere in an interview or on the documentary, but I guess it's irrelevant now.)

     

    Just as a point of information, yes, Tim has said that if they had only gotten around the $400K mark they were planning on making a low-fi SCUMM/Flash-like adventure game. (Also, I should point out that the budget for FT was over $1mil in 1995 money, so at $300K - iirc they planned for 25% of the money to go on the doc - it wouldn't even have been in the FT range!)

     

    As for if Tim will make another PnC, I feel like maybe he might decide to do something interesting with them again, but it won't be for a good 5-10 years.

    • Like 2

    Return to Monkey Island

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Somehow I had not noticed the acronym at all on the main site, but I just came back here via the front page and noticed it immediately - it's all over the place! I thought it was just a quirk of Thrik's that was getting picked up on!

    Okay, I'm onboard, but I think we're going to have to start referring to the others as SeMI, SeMI 2 LeCh, CuMI, EscMI and TaMI for consistency's sake.

    Back on-topic, though, I wonder if ReMI is going to have any iMuse-y cleverness around its music tech. It'd be great to have high quality music but with really nice SeMI 2 style transitions and stuff.

    • Haha 2
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