TimeGentleman

I was thinking more: Also, what's all this "ReMI" nonsense? It's not CuMI or TaMI, so it shouldn't be ReMI! I'd change to that if the designers had a strong preference, as with COMI (over CMI), but Dave Grossman uses RtMI:

I really enjoy how you've added reggae and old-time spooky vibes to your cover, they're a really nice reflection of the series and make it feel like a version you might hear in the Voodoo Lady's room. To tie in with Chuckie's DETH shirt at the end of MI2, I'd like a death metal version this time round.

Nice try, but you're the one who brought this all up originally, and you're the one who came back to it with your 'culture war' rant. That's the only reason I came back into the conversation.

I'm taking this, posted without context and apropos of nothing, as a sign that Kelly has some secret info on an upcoming Loom sequel: Could Devolver Digital have worked out a RTMI style deal with Lucasfilm Games and Brian Moriarty?!

Ah, that's sad. I know I've said here that I'm not fully onboard with the art we've seen so far, but even if I weren't withholding final judgement until I actually play the thing (or at least see some proper gameplay), I don't feel that as a fan I'm entitled to receive the exact thing I want. I certainly wouldn't go and harass the creators about it.

It's really gross how you keep saying that Nazis are mythical and imaginary, and how no one in the world cares about racism. It's also incorrect.

When I said "I'd also like to add that 'because they might make decisions that anger Nazis' is a shoddy reason to NOT want a dev company to do a remaster", I was referring to you saying "Backlash, less sales, an army of trolls review bombing and warning people who'd want to buy everywhere, people calling each other racists or nazis in the community just because some people happen to prefer the old voice actor etc. I saw that once, it was really stupid, I'd rather not watch the rerun thank you very much." as a reason for not wanting Skunkape to remaster Tales, in the RTMI thread. I won't say anything else, because elTee has already asked us to move on, but I wanted to clarify that.

Pretty much all of my thoughts have been covered over the two threads, but I'd also like to add that "because they might make decisions that anger Nazis" is a shoddy reason to NOT want a dev company to do a remaster.

My first thought for a new LeChuck actor was Jim Cummings, but while he'd do a good job I feel like I'd just hear him rather than LeChuck. Going for Lucasarts alum, perhaps Bill Farmer would be a good fit? I was surprised to learn just how many of the varied characters he played in HtR.

You laugh, Asterothe, but considering the granularity of speculation about the exact structure of the game so far, I think it's a valid distinction to make. Anyway, another interview (thanks MixNMojo front page!): https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/14/23021974/return-to-monkey-island-ron-gilbert-dave-grossman-interview-screenshots

This is great, thanks! It's weird, but in all the times I've played MI2, I've never really paid attention to the shipwreck motif of Woodtick. It's such a cool idea, and the execution is so inventive, varied yet cohesive. It's really impressive.

It starts in the amusement park, to be exact.

https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/ron-gilbert-dave-grossman-return-to-monkey-island In case anyone missed it. To be completely honest, the art isn't what I would have wanted from a new MI game at all. But I appreciate they don't want to do pixel art again, I haven't seen it properly in motion yet, and at least this will age better than the 3D ones. The canon stuff is still so intriguing, I don't think we'll get a straight answer before release - they clearly don't want to give away too much/colour people's judgement too much. I think it'll start at the end of MI2, then move to post-Tales. I suspect it'll be dealing directly with the flexible canon of the franchise, not necessarily a multiverse thing or whatever, but even just thematically - why is this world always pushing at the boundaries of reality, and why has it had so many different tones etc over the years, playing with that stuff the way the first two games did.

Another case in point here for making assumptions on promotional material: just because the lookout is returning, doesn't mean we'll be going back to Melee Island. He could show up elsewhere, like Herman did in MI2. And perhaps they chose Melee Island for the website because it's iconic, even though it's not in RTMI. Will there be a fiddle-playing ghost pirate? Or any ghost pirates? Perhaps not. I'm not saying they won't go back to Melee, just that I don't think we should take it as definite they are until they unambiguously tell us so (and even then bear in mind perhaps it's a five minute segment that will get cut before release!).

I'd argue that the lazy bit was bringing those droids back instead of inventing new characters, rather than taking the only logical step of having Threepio's memory wiped Yep, totally agreed! Re. Tim's involvement, I have no real idea of course, but I suspect that he wouldn't sign up for a contract so rigid it wouldn't allow him to at least informally consult on outside stuff but that's all he'll have time for on RTMI. Much like his chat with Ron in the early stages of Broken Age, I imagine it quite likely that Ron has talked with him about ideas for the game and the state of releasing modern adventures but that it hasn't gone beyond that.

I've seen @Jake say that in the original that wasn't supposed to be Lucas, but I'm not sure if he ever retrieved his source for that...

I think, considering how fiddly it would be to literally start directly after the ending of MI2 while also keeping COMI in canon and having Murray in the game, we should bear in mind that it's possible that Devolver tweet only meant it is picking up thematically/authorially rather than continuity-wise. It's just one early tweet from a PR person, it might not be super-accurate. I wish they and Ron had foreseen some of these questions and pre-emptively organised their communication so we weren't all so confused, but equally it would behove us to remember that pre-release info can often be misleading or subject to change, and therefore not take anything as gospel until the game is in our hands. Personally, I feel like Ron's preference will be to take the least fiddly approach possible, he doesn't seem like one to start creating big tangled plots just to justify canon. I think he'll keep all the sequels in canon but feel free to mostly ignore without contradicting them, while including Murray and whatever else he finds useful/appropriate to the story he's telling, and go back to the themes and events he's interested in.

^^ "MI3 doesn't go out of canon. We were very careful about that. Murray is in this game." I'm intrigued as to exactly what this means. Is he really squeezing it in between the end of 2 and the start of 3, or doing a bit there and then a bit after 3 (seeing as Murray presumably only got decapitated at the start of 3 when Guybrush cannons the boats and Murray floats along straight after along with other skeletal flotsam)? Seems far more sensible to go with his years-old plan of branching off his own continuity but nicking good bits from the other games, and I wonder if that's what he actually means here.

I specifically chose the Devolver tweet to post up top as it includes that bit of information!

Previous thread: https://forums.mixnmojo.com/topic/200421-grumpy-gamer-april-fools/ Ron's fake April Fool blog post: https://grumpygamer.com/april_fools_2022 The tweet: Ron's old blog post about what he'd do with a MI3a: https://grumpygamer.com/if_i_made_another_monkeyisland

I think we're all pretty much saying the same thing at this point! Also, I'd like to clarify that when I'm talking about a 3D characters/2D background mix, I'm referring to stuff like Grim Fandango (which looked great) where it's actual 3D models moving in 3D space, with 2D background art 'pretending' to be a 3D space behind them (or, I suppose, to games with 3D models rendered out as 2D sprites but with no paintover, though I can't immediately think of an adventure game example of this - something like Rise Of The Robots anyway). Not the 'paint over a 3D model to make a 2D sprite' method of MI2:SE (which I thought was a very ugly game) or the 'rigged 2D planes' of Broken Age (which I thought was gorgeous). Incidentally, here's a good talk on the animation of Broken Age (around 8m10s is a good point to start for exactly where that game lies on the 2D to 3D spectrum):

I can't see any comments on that post. But he's saying that he'd add the drawlines back into the backgrounds if the characters were also 2D, but for 3D he'd leave them out? That makes sense. As for the 2D vs 3D stuff - for my part, I'm only anti-3D in the specific case of a COMI remaster. 3D animation in general can absolutely be just as fantastic as 2D. And like I say, if they want to do a 3D remake of COMI, good for them (although the game wasn't designed for it so I feel like it would be a cost-saving measure rather than a creative one). But I personally want a faithful 2D remaster, so if they did a 3D remake at the expense of that, I'd be very disappointed. And perhaps a 2D/3D remaster could match the quality levels of the original's art and animation, but it inherently wouldn't be preserving it. (Besides which, I suspect that simply doing some new art and replacing the original assets with it would simply clash too much against the artistic direction and general design of the game, no matter how gorgeous it is). Now what I would be very interested in is a 2D backgrounds/3D characters remaster of Escape From Monkey Island - imagine how gorgeous that game could look these days! (Also, while we're here, my ideal remaster of the first two games - not that I think they need it, I'm happy with the originals - would be to get them to match the Purcell cover-art style in a way that the low framerate doesn't clash and looks like someone flipping through a gorgeously illustrated storybook. No voice-acting. Stick with iMuse just with better samples. And I wouldn't mind Skunkape Games getting their hands on Tales, doing all their usual polish, plus replacing some of the re-used character models etc. And then get Size Five Games to make Monkey Island 6. There, easy!)

Well, I was imagining that if it were done in SCUMMVM and only graphical/audio assets were replaced, with the other original files still needed, it would be less like a remake and more a mod that might go unnoticed by legal eyes, akin to a Half-Life texture pack or something! Interesting about the sprites. As they're all flat-coloured, I figured they'd be pretty easy to upscale. And I would have thought that if you stuck to the same sprite sheet (or whatever) format as the originals, and ran it all through SCUMMVM, then the game would build the animations as usual with all the higher-res body parts. But I'm no coder either! I can imagine though that if you were crowd-sourcing the upscaling, each animation being split into loads of different bits would greatly increase visual continuity issues.

Even though I'm not a big fan of the direction the DOTT and FT remasters took, I'm still happy they exist because they provided us with a bunch of new behind the scenes stuff, and they included 80-90% accurate recreations of the original versions (some changed sound effects and missing colour cycling are the main issues iirc). I also can play the originals off my CD-ROMs via SCUMMVM, so that's fine (there's also apparently a way to get the remastered voice audio into a SCUMMVM playthrough, but I can't figure it out for the life of me!). It's a bit disappointing to me that the remastered graphics were rather unadventurous and ugly, but never mind. If they made a CoMI remaster, and all that came with it was the original version and a new version that had ugly background repaints (I was not a fan of the ones that Tiller did recently) and 3D character models, I'd be gutted. Because, along with a lot of fans, the one thing I actually want is a very faithful up-rezzing, using the original recordings and art where possible and whatever combination of computer and human upscaling is needed to fill the gaps. Laserschwert has done some amazing up-rezzed samples of the cutscenes (and I think the backgrounds too? EDIT: yes, here: https://forums.mixnmojo.com/topic/200308-share-your-content/?do=findComment&comment=2787399, unfortunately the comparison links are broken now, but the imgur ones still work). Out of interest, @Laserschwert and anyone else in the know, hypothetically what's to stop the fan community achieving this themselves with a combination of ESRGAN and crowd-sourced effort? The SCUMMVM forum thread seems rather pessimistic, but say if someone took charge and started this fan project, and everyone on those forums signed up to do as much grunt work as was needed (e.g. going through every sprite sheet and checking for ESRGAN errors) would it be doable with enough effort or are there some insurmountable technical hurdles?

Hi all, sorry for the spamminess, but this will be the second and last time I post about this, because orders close in a week! Please get your order in by the 30th and/or promote it anywhere you think people will be interested. Thanks!