Zaxx

That's one of the best meta moments in the whole franchise.

Actually the best follow up to ToMI would have been a season where Morgan is the protagonist and it really is just a spinoff "tale" from the Monkey Island universe. I know IP holders would never let anyone do that because "muh brand recognition" but considering what a smart mechanic Guybrush's hook became I'm pretty sure Telltale could have done something awesome with a character that can become anything the writers want to. Based on the ending she could be a ghost, could be human, could possess people's bodies and whatever, that's a lot of tools for an adventure game.

It also would be kind of boring though? I'm sure that if they go that route they'll come up with a twist that makes it interesting instead of "hey wake up it's 30 years later" but the time jump is a pretty overused plot device. Even Leisure Suit Larry could do it well (in the new games Larry is a clone of his 1987 self that wakes up in 2018) so it's not exactly something that would worry me about a new game but I'd much rather see something crazier. What would worry me is if they aged up Guybrush because I just don't like it when a classic character gets aged up but still keeps acting like his younger self. Again it's something that could be avoided but I can't really think of many examples where that was handled well (Rocky Balboa?) and most of it was like "here's 120 year old Han Solo, look he's even wearing the same clothes he did 50 years ago". You know what's the character trait that Han Solo and Indiana Jones have in common? They are middle aged, I don't want to watch an 80 year old man in Indy 5, thank you very much. With comedy that might even be more detrimental to the character and you get something like Dumb & Dumber 2 where the things that were funny 25 years ago just look awkward when performed by 50+ people.

Yep, that's why I don't like ToMI's ending either though I only really don't like the notion of the Voodoo Lady being evil. The game gets over that plot point fairly quickly, it's resolved and then it comes back as a cliffhanger at the end... meh. And yeah, the other aspect of it is that I was fairly certain a season two was on the way after seeing the cliffhanger and then it just never happened. That even kinda goes against the title of "Tales of" Monkey Island since we only got the one and I think the ending at least gave a few nice ideas on where a season two could have gone.

Btw. did Telltale ever update the ToMI digital releases with the version of Episode 1 that has Earl Boen in it? My DVD from the old Telltale CE still worked the last time I installed but that disc is just very old now and I'd love to never have to use it again.

Yep, this was most of the feedback I've seen along with the general notion that Telltale games were "dumbed down" in puzzle design. Most of the people I know who were interested in a Monkey Island game just really hated the art style and the 3D graphics to the point that I don't think they ever played ToMI. I think some of that was fair tbh, I replayed the game a few months ago and it definitely aged worse than the prior Sam & Max games in visuals. Telltale Sam & Max looked flat too but that somehow fit the style of those games while for example ToMI's lighting is just unpleasant to look at in most cases. What I was surprised by though is that it ran flawlessly at 120 Hz, old games usually have speedup or animations issues but nope, ToMI is just really smooth at 120 fps and it's a joy to look at the game in motion. Overall I really like ToMI, I think it has some issues and I don't think it's comparable to the first 3 games but it's absolutely better than Escape.

I guess it can also be a factor that ToMI wasn't exactly loved by the fanbase in general plus the game distances itself from the plot of the main series. It's a bit of a shame because I always thought that out of all the MI games made after MI2 ToMI was the only one that could somewhat recapture the tone of the original 2. Also the MI2 based Guybrush redesign they had going on was just lovely and I always liked that Lucasarts used that design for MI2 SE too.

That's how they'll call the Disney reboot... or maybe it will be a soft sequel reboot (seaboot?) where only the first game happened. Sequel will be called The Monkey Island Kills or The Monkey Island Eternal.

What, there's a Sam & Max VR game?

I'm willing to bet that in the other timline MI2 is called LeChuck Strikes Back though.

While in the other timeline everyone expected Revenge of Monkey Island.

Care to elaborate on this? Just curious really. Anyway as to why I brought the SoMI SE hair mod up: mostly because it's ridiculous how much work went into that thing just to change one small thing about the remaster. That was just always really funny to me (and yeah, I get that in some aspects the mod is a joke) considering that SoMI SE has some glaring issues like the art in the forest just being unfinished and full of stuff that feels WIP. Like I imagine a crazy scientist laughing maniacally and saying "haha, I really should fix the backgrounds with all this free time I have but I'll change his HAIR because it sucks!".

Btw. what I'm "in love with" is the idea that the game isn't pixel art because Ron was influenced by Disney, Devolver and whoever else is involved. Like some people are already making up theories on how they'll rationalize their eventual dislike for the finished game. I don't know how many times Ron will have to tell these people that he is in charge when it comes to every single creative decision. Anyway my suggestions from the toxicity box: - "If Tim Schafer was involved then RMI wouldn't look bad." - "Ron must be on really bad terms with Tim if he's not involved" - "Ron Gilbert failed to plan out the whole trilogy in advance when he was an infant." - "Disney might not be calling the shots but Kathleen Kennedy is."

I won't say that I disagree because I can't even imagine the sheer amount of toxicity Ron has gotten but honestly I don't think it's that big of a deal. MI fans were always quite a bit hardcore and especially the kind of people who can argue endlessly about art styles, heck(tm) this is a community where someone made an elaborate mod because a few people didn't like Guybrush's hair in SoMI SE. This isn't really about MI fans though, every larger fan community always had a lot of toxic people in them mostly because - gasp - being a fan of a game or a corporation is just not a good basis for a community to exist (even if there are exceptions where that can work out fine). And when it comes to the backlash about the art style it's really nothing compared to what Tales got when that game came out, the only difference is that nowadays it's even easier to reach creators. Which is why it was a good call from Ron to temporarily shut down his blog in order to remove the option to comment.

Just another reason to appreciate the Ultimate Talkie Edition even more.

Oh and btw. just because I like to live dangerously by making wild guesses: I'm pretty sure that the reaction to RTMI will be similar to what Twin Peaks season 3 got in that a lot of people will complain for a lack of explanation and closure while the other half will ask questions like "what the hell, you expected closure from David Lynch?"

I'm 100% certain that they'll "stick" to the CMI explanation as in they won't care much about explaining that stuff at all. I think that anyone who wants a "true" explanation for MI2's ending is kind of missing the point in that it's these secrets that keep MI engaging to this day. Some mysteries are not to be solved. This is where Thimbleweed Park differs I think, there the goal of the story was to ultimately solve a mystery that was packaged into the game's referential, nostalgic nature. That's a level of self reference that MI will never go to I feel.

I don't think RTMI ever had a chance to be like that, those references in TP serve a thematic purpose that kind of never been part of MI's identity. I think people tend to confuse TP with the nowadays very common nostalgia bait media but the two things are very different. It's not "hey let's remake New Hope but with a bigger Death Star and the girl version of Luke because nostalgia sells" but rather "Nostalgia is an interesting theme to build a game around, let's see how deep it can get".

Yep BUT if you want your textures to appear nicer I highly recommend using Reshade with moderation. There are some sharpening filters (AMD FidelityFX, Lumasharpen, Quint_sharpen) that can fake some added detail, just don't go overboard with them since they can make the image look aliased or "oversharp" if you're not careful. The SMAA of Reshade is pretty good too, you can mess around with the color balance / saturation too if you want etc. I just wanted to mention this since Reshade gets a bad rep because of all those videos where dem kidz turn on all the blooms and fake HDRs in the world.

Yeah what I actually meant was releasing patches basically, I can't imagine that it could take a huge budget to do something like that. I remember that back in the day a fan even started to clean up the unfinished art in SoMI SE (he never finished it but got quite far) and what he made was absolutely fine and didn't stick out at all. There's a lot less that's wrong with MI 2 SE but if it is indeed true that they could restore lite mode without much additional work then they might as well just do it. And while they're at it they could remove the weird fps lock from the PC port that makes the game stutter (why did they lock to 50 instead of something that made sense?) if you don't hex edit that out of the exe: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2793853397 As for a CMI remaster I'd be actually very surprised if that didn't happen down the line. I mean it's there and it's still pretty much state of the art, when a fan cleaned up all the backgrounds with AI upscaling and some editing it already looked like art that's ready to ship lol.

That would be an interesting find indeed. What I was thinking is that I'm just going to go the ultimate talkie edition route since there is an unfinished beta version of that here: http://gratissaugen.de/ultimatetalkies/monkey2.html I never played this one but as I understand it should run fine and the only thing it's missing is the remastered sounds and the music. Those aren't biggies, MI2 sounds great with ScummVM's MT-32 emulator.

All this talk about difficulty made me interested in playing through MI 2 on easy mode for the first time so I launched MI 2 SE... and there is no easy mode. Okay, remaster, I'll deduct some points for this... On that note I think it might be a good idea to remaster the remasters now that MI is getting a new entry again. You know, actually finish the forest art in SoMI SE, add some of these missing features etc.

That's super true, I just don't know if I believe the "promotion" around Game Pass that says it will give attention to smaller games. That sure is something MS could use it for and to some extent I think they will but my guess is that in a few years GP will be a live service game nightmare. And I really hope I'll be wrong.

I wasn't thinking card game but something it already was: an RTS. I know they'll most likely never do that since RTS doesn't really work on consoles but an actual strategy game in the BL setting would be amazing. There are so many possibilities to come up with crazy unit and map designs and I don't think it would be a huge stretch to imagine DF's usual art style working wonderfully for a Blizzard style RTS game. Add the awesome writing and storytelling from the first game to that and it's a winner.

Oh and just to add to that I don't really see how Double Fine's smaller games could be affected by Microsoft but I think with the number of studios they have now they'd want DF to focus on just one bigger project at a time. That might give us the likes of Brütal Legend 2 but it can really put a stop to any point and click they might want to make.