Zaxx

Considering the kind of reception that Broken Age got I don't think he will. Broken Age was great if you ask me but it was fairly obvious that Tim is on a different wavelenght than what the audience of a classic adventure game is. So Broken Age wasn't a "classic", it didn't have a sense of continuity with his past work at Lucasarts and that created a lot of complaining from people who expected another DoTT or Grim. It's a game that can give off the developer's message of "man, it's kind of a bummber that this is an adventure game, I'd love to do so many different things." Compare that to Thimbleweed Park, a game that pretty much nailed what a classic adventure game is and it just had this sense of a master of his craft doing what he does best.

Well to be fair you most likely haven't seen any other 3D platforming staples since the early 2000s because the genre is quite dead. And sure, Nintendo is still making these games but they have the benefit of countless years of iteration and the fact that a Mario game can be even more abstract than a Psychonauts and when level design gets to be like that you won't really notice invisible walls and such. Double Fine on the other hand is kind of a jack of all trades, master of none developer were mechanical depth and polish usually takes a backseat to world building. It's not like how for example id Software is second to none at making FPS because that's the only thing they've done since the early 90s. I still remember how hard it was for me to get into playing Psychonauts after Prince of Persia The Sands of Time because gameplay wise Psychonauts was a huge step back but the writing and the insane world building still pulled me through. The same goes for Brütal Legend that is all things considered pretty bad at being a third person hack n slash / RTS hybrid (it definitely is better at the RTS though) but it has the most awesome and brütal world going for it. In a sense I think these shortcomings in gameplay design was what always made their bigger games not do that well. I've yet to play Psychonauts 2 but it's nice that I've only heard good things about it and it seems pretty obvious that the switch to Unreal (and maybe all that Microsoft QA) benefitted the game's technical quality.

I think Ron Gilbert might disagree with that because as far as I know even Thimbleweed Park removes a lot of scenes from the game and also alters its progression quite a bit. To me that indicates that Ron looks at the concept of difficulty as more than just "let's make the puzzles easier" and rather he applies that to the game as a whole, meaning narratively too. The result of that is you get less from everything on easy but that might work better for people who have very limited time to play, it truly is this casual narrative focused experience that actually a lot of people expect from the adventure genre nowadays. And it can also have the effect that if you really like the story and want to go deeper then you have the option for a new playthrough where you most likely already possess the know-how on figuring out the puzzles on hard.

That's kind of funny considering that according to Jonathlan Ackley designing the difficulty modes took like a week: I never played CMI on easy though so I believe you.

Yeah, if you can somehow get used to everyone looking like as if they have suffered some extreme and I mean extreme sunburns to the point that you'd want to donate to the nearest skin cancer foundation then you'll like Loom very much in EGA. Mark Ferrari's focus on dithering makes the image look interesting and it gives off an illusion of detail that is lost in VGA (even though VGA has all them colors).

Oh yeah, I'd love it if the game returned to the somewhat more cruel sense of humor of the first two games. Even in EFMI some of the best jokes came from Guybrush cluelessly doing some really bad things in SoMI (like how he just left his crew stranded on the island and how the monkey that opened the gate to the monkey head eventually died from exhaustion).

I think the Supermassive Games titles are good indications of that and yeah, not a fan... but I will still play The Quarry because I'm not above virtual Lance Henriksen and virtual Laura Palmer's mom from Twin Peaks.

I don't think this has anything to do with you being a fan but rather with the fact that Double Fine is a bit... wonky when it comes to the technical aspect of their games especially. They used to loooove having 30 fps hard locks in their games (The Cave is still suffering from that... as a side scroller), sometimes weird bugs pop up (for example in FT Remastered I have some weird audio bug that always happens on the old mine road and just corrupts the music track) and sometimes their PC ports can even miss some random features. For example I fired up Brütal Legend last week for the sake of some nostalgia and the PC version still doesn't have fur on animals, they are just naked and I'm like why? Their games are usually great but it's such an old company for their stuff to still have these easily reproducible bugs and shortcomings. Anyway Brütal Legend remaster when? BL2 should be a thing too, they should just make it a pure RTS.

Yeah, me too except for those weird bike combat parts. I played the game a long time after it came out but I refuse to believe that those sections were considered to be good back in the day. I guess it could be considered impressive for the SCUMM engine but they are just so boring and annoying.

Yeah, I think he's right in that "adventure games aren't that good in a modern context" but I just don't see the mixing of genres replacing adventure games in any shape or form. I was always a huge fan of "action-adventure" games while they actually had adventure game elements so things like the old Tomb Raiders and the Prince of Persia Sands of Time series that combined mechanically dense, challenging platforming and combat with puzzles were always huge winners for me. But then the puzzles disappeared, after that the challenging platforming disappeared and Uncharted arrived with the whole "I'm just a shooter for kids and everything else serves as downtime between two shootouts" thing. Overall I can only name one game that I consider to be a pure action-adventure game that had all the elements of both the adventure and the action: Outcast. That game not only had challenging puzzles but it also had the aspect of exploration and talking to people in order to get hints and a lot of it was really just learning the culture of its open world setting. And while doing all that it even had like 6 upgradeable weapons and a ton of shooting, it's amazing what an excellent game it was for 1998... but it flopped and I'm pretty sure that the sequeal that got announced last year won't play like the original did. The other genre that "almost got it" was the survival horror where some games (like Silent Hill) played like an adventure game with the added survival gameplay based around limited resources. The puzzles almost fully disappeared from that genre too though and they were usually very lonely adventures with not much character interaction and dialogue happening in them. So I'm just not seeing the "Dark Souls" he's referring to and I never really thought about DS as a game with adventure game elements. I think it was Tim Rogers who put it really well when he said that Dark Souls is basically all the old games you used to play as a kid, it's this genre mix that can remind you of absolutely anything and everything except for maybe CoD. It's wonderful but it's doesn't scratch the adventure itch. Overall I think that a possible way for adventure games to improve would be to introduce an amount of "mechanical density" that keeps the gameplay part of your brain more engaged but something that's also not like "okay now shoot a few things before the next puzzle" (and also not how Tim Schafer and co. did it with Grim: by adding tank controls to make your life more complicated :D). Until that magic combination happens I'm perfectly fine with adventure games being adventure games with a lot of pointing, clicking, talking and tough puzzle solving.

And what a great article it is! Yahtzee's video regarding RTMI's announcement reminded me of it a bit:

I don't think it's unfair to consider Ron's responsibility since a lot of what he wrote in the past did encourage this weird "CMI isn't really a Monkey Island game!" cult like behavior. Crazy people like that are created through various factors and one of the 100 or 1000 factors is that previously Ron Gilbert did want to distance his hypothetical Monkey Island 3a from the rest of the series and that he has been saying for decades that he wouldn't have continued the story the way CMI did. That's not blaming him, just admitting something in order to understand the situation better.

Eh, I never agreed with the notion that the SEs aren't faithful enough. I mean the statement is true, I just don't think that being faithful to the original was ever in the cards for those releases. They are very much remakes in that sense just for the reason of the added voice acting. Those new voices weren't there before and they come with some sort of reinterpretation for every single character, it's like what dubbing a silent movie would be. The graphics are in the same boat (the MI2 SE art I consider pretty faithful even with this though): they were very much made with the intention to add "missing" detail. So compared to something like me being bothered by a voice actor change in Sam & Max it's an overload of that to the point where I'm like "okay, these people don't look like how I remember and they definitely don't sound like how they did in my head, I might as well just sit back and enjoy the ride." I guess that's why I never installed the hair mod. The DF remasters are pretty much the opposite, those games already had everything the remastered versions have and those new releases are just cleaned up versions of the original games. What's interesting though is that I think even that approach only worked for Grim and DOTT without fault while it resulted in some interesting scenes for Full Throttle. DOTT has a very specific, minimalist art style and the remaster only enhances that with its lack of detail in HD but for FT that's not true. They realized this to some extent and added details to the characters but the backgrounds and the "pre-rendered 3D" objects (like Ben's bike which looks very out of place in the remaster imo) still maintain their "lo-fi" looks so overall the game is just inconsistent. For example I just look at this screenshot with high detail Ben standing next to that barely recognizable oil can and it's a bit baffling: And when it comes to the vistas basically all of those shots look like as if they were out of focus or washed out because when that stuff is blown up into HD you just start missing the detail that should be there but isn't. Overall I think they did a good job and I certainly enjoyed seeing the old 4:3 aspect ratio backgrounds extended to 16:9 but yeah, I'd choose the MI2 SE approach instead of what's in FTR every day of the week.

Yep, there is definitely a problem with really bored or obsessed people just scanning the land of the internet looking for arguments even when there is no place for that. I value my early internet experience more mostly because it was just easier to find small, welcoming communities where small talk and respectable debates both just worked and even if the occasional "flame war" did end up occuring it was just more tongue in cheek and less "I'm going to destroy you and your livelihood for saying that thing I partially disagree with." It's that lack of "mass social media" I miss the most and in some respects I see those kind of communities resurfacing on Discord but that place got wildly commercialized way too fast too.

I don't think that's the problem, take it someone who used to like having debates: debates are usually "won" fairly quickly if the issue is not that complex. The problem is that people on the internet nowadays just can't admit or sometimes can't even realize when it's time to admit that the other party has fair points, proceed to closing remarks and "shake hands". Debates don't end now, they just devolve into frustration, deliberate misunderstandings, ad hominem arguments and just flinging random pieces of fecal matter at each other. We no longer have a debate culture, we are just savages on the internet independently of intelligence, profession, social standing, religious or political beliefs etc. Now we're at the point where debate is not even an option most of the time and it really hurts society as a whole because this leads to being divided and just on the edge all the time. That's great for consumerism though, you just buy all the things to forget about your problems, then you spend 2 years under full lockdown because our world leaders are just as clueless about mental health as everyone else and you described the rest perfectly accurately: people forget that it's just a videogame. It sucks, it truly does and so far there doesn't even seem to be a way to make things better. Something needs to happen that just eases people's frustrations as a whole I guess.

Yeah, I definitely agree with the classic modes not getting the right treatment. Though I can't help but wonder what kind of release we'd be looking at if Lucasfilm decided to release the classics digitally. Curse got a ScummVM dump which is the "not great, not terrible" way of re-releasing a classic game while Escape is just the old PC version with most compatibility issues intact. The SEs are built on top of the original games though and you can extract those from the pak files in a form where ScummVM can run them. Which kinda begs the question why didn't they just include those files already being extracted anyway...

I get the hard feelings towards the MI1 remaster but what's wrong with MI2? I think it's pretty much perfect: the remastered art is nice and doesn't steer far away from the original, the voice acting work is amazing, the user interface is great etc. I have only two gripes with it, one being that the original intro with the credits wasn't remastered (just partially kinda if you turn on the classic graphics). The other is the bigger one: the fact that there is only English audio for an adventure game, like when I see that in a more high profile release I usually think "dear developers, you didn't do your job" considering that adventure games can depend a lot on good localization and are mostly made for the EU market. You know, at least do a German dub and when it comes to subtitles more than just EFIGS is always welcome. I do agree that the Double Fine remasters are the best though since not only they are super faithful to the source material but DF seems to care about localization whenever they can. Grim Fandango has fully localized audio for 7 languages (EFIGS + Portuguese), that's just incredible, Full Throttle isn't that far behind (4 languages) and even DOTT has German. The only downside that comes to mind for DF is that their PC ports can be a bit wonky, thankfully that didn't affect their remasters at all as far as I can tell.

5 hours?? Holy god, that really is an evening with Ron Gilbert.

Yeah, I think I'll just won't bother if we keep going back to bad faith misinterpretations of the points I wasted paragraphs on explaining properly exactly because I wanted to provide clear explanations. Doesn't change the fact that from hindsight Skunkape clearly made a very unnecessary mistake here since one of the biggest problems of the discussion seems to be a failure to rationalize the decision... most likely because it's irrational.

Clearly the only way to solve this problem is with a text adventure demake: Now the art style can be whatever you imagine.

It's not a rant, just an opinion piece.

Just a few points: - I think it's very much the result of the narrative changes that people hate the added special effects in Star Wars too. With that said in that case I'd restore the original movies as much as humanly possible because of the reason of preserving movie history. - My opinion on perceived authenticity doesn't only come from my personal perspective but (as my comment tried to point that out) also from an analysis of what modern remasters contain. And they contain exactly what I said (updated graphics, cleaned up everything else) so I'd say that's pretty much an objective representation of what the audience expectation is. - As for what's important to me not being important to you: you did say that you prefer the original performance too before so I'm willing to guess that if you were given the option you'd play with the Joey Camen performance. Why can't we just establish common ground in admitting this much? - Yep, I agree that fundamentally Bosco wasn't changed by the voice acting and I didn't say that the change is something super important for everyone, as I've said in my next post I agree that he's still a racial stereotype. What you feel about things is not always rational though, it's mostly controlled by emotions, that's why I was talking about the sense of authenticity and not what actual authenticity would be. I think saying this is somewhat disingenuous. They put their principles before money? Yeah, I guess but the decision also affected a somehwat large portion of the audience's enjoyment and I think that's something we shouldn't forget about. Reading back old posts the change did bother quite a few people, even some Mojo regulars refunded the game and only bought it again after some extensive discussions. Now I pretty much consider Mojo this bubble of Lucasarts love so I'd say that seeing that reaction here most likely means that there were quite a few people who weren't happy about not getting the "100% remaster" they wanted. This is the best part of your comment though, I can't be grateful enough for you pointing this out: Yes, this is exactly how you create an army of trolls that could seem like an army of nazis even but this is also why it's very dangerous to think in principles when it comes to releasing an entertainment product. I'm no game dev, I don't know how that works but I know pretty well how people work: they don't like it if politics cause a disturbance in their lives. That disturbance doesn't have to be huge, it could be something meaningless because it's all about emotions: people fear the idea of censorship so it's enough to do something that could be referred to as censorship when it's being looked at from 1000 miles away. There was a thing, that thing is no longer there, instead there's another thing now = censorship, it's enough. This is why is it that when radical right propagandists / pundits see something like what happened with Sam & Max and Skunkape they are like "oh this is great, they are doing my job for me again, let's make a video and tell people how terrible this is". And yeah, that army of trolls won't really affect the sales of Sam & Max but that audience gets this type of content a lot and you know what they do every 4 years? They go out to vote and they are making the radical right stronger ever since the left started doing this kind of thing. They are like "you think I can't enjoy my old movies again? you're calling me racist? what gives you the right?" and then they go and vote Le Pen, they vote Orbán who all have campaigns built around this thing. So at the end there's this thing that steered a few people away from the product and it ultimately didn't do a huge amount of harm to the product itself but it fuelled a machine that's only running on this thing. This is why I believe that ultimately it's wrong to try forcing a cultural change and it's just much better to ride and support the waves that are naturally heading towards progressive ideologies if not disturbed. I think people actually sense this, I mean it's surely not random that we call it a "war" even though a state of war is obviously not a time of progress but rather the opposite.

To be fair the fanbase was always a bit like this thanks to all the different iterations to MI we've had. We're an opinionated bunch and that's fine, what I never understood is why it is so hard for some people to view MI as a series that just likes to adapt different art styles. Yeah I have my favorites too and I wouldn't complain if those styles returned but overall I'm just excited for the new things Return will bring, art style included. I'd even play an FMV based MI game, throw rocks at me.

I see that you managed to get the point. Don't you think that the conversation could do without this aspect though? Honestly it's such weird baggage to have and sort of only hammers home the point that you guys seem to keep coming back to without noticing it: that the only reason for the change is the fight against racial stereotypes. So it's not something that's needed to improve the game's narrative internally but rather it's a message to send out. Well, a few things about that if you may and I'll try to be brief because I really think it's pointless to keep coming back to this road: - Sure, the new voice makes Bosco sound less stereotypical but it also absolutely doesn't solve any of the problems with his character. His lines are still the same, he is still a racial stereotype and the Apu of Sam & Max, the minority store owner character that makes you cringe nowadays. This is a problem that's inherent to the game's narrative and only a full remake could solve it. The same goes for something like ToMI's merfolk giving off suspiciously transphobic vibes, there is no way to fix that, the joke will always be that it's hard to identify their gender. These are old games, these things happened back in the day and none of us noticed. - Coming back to the same point of fighting racism only underlines that the voice actor switch was unnecessary, it kind of gives off the vibe that the audience should put up with a voice that's less authentic to what the character is so that they could feel better about themselves supporting a game that has such an ugly racial stereotype in it. /s I kinda get the feeling that if the game wasn't self published but some kind of publisher oversight was involved then the voice actor would have never been changed because really you can come up with 500 reasons on why not to make the change from minor financial ones to the audience just not being interested in a new voice actor for a franchise that already had problems with that. When it comes to me personally I'm just curious on how cleaned up OG Bosco would have sounded like and to experience that is kind of why I buy every second game and music album remaster under the sun. Yes, I can interpret that what I would hear is a racial stereotype but as an adult customer I think I'd be able to deal with that just like how I can replay Full Throttle Remastered when I know that Darrel is voiced by a white guy doing the "black guy voice" (and he's less of a racial stereotype than Bosco is, I mean he's a black guy in a motorcycle club :D). I wouldn't want that for a new product but the point of the remaster is to hear a cleaned up version of what was recorded back in the 90s, that's what the term remaster means literally. So yeah, I get it, thinking that nazis review bombed the game, that we're in this war to fight on the right side is a comfortable bubble to be in. And I have to admit I see the potential fun in coming up with Proud Boys jokes too but you know, it's just really far from a realistic perspective on how gaming communities and consumers in general work. And yeah, if I made my purchase decisions based on how something appeals to me morally / politically I still wouldn't have bought the game with these changes because Bosco still kinda sucks as a character.

I think that remasters is a very interesting subject in general and I'd love to hear opinions on this so bare with me, this will be long. I think the idea of "original" vs. "updated" that elTee suggests is flawed or rather only partially true. Just to keep up with my habit of steering off topic: why do you think that a lot of people don't like the graphics of Secret of MI SE? Is it because it's ugly or because some parts of the art (forest...) are obviously unfinished? Nope, I think it's because it fully reinterprets the original art style: it makes the game look more stylized and in general it feels to be more in line with Curse than anything else. (Sidenote: I think the SE looks nice because I was always on the opinion that the original game's art style was inconsistent and SE fixes that but that's beside the point, I still prefer the original.) The point: it doesn't feel like an authentic version of SoMI. I think that's what people in general want from a remaster: a feeling of authenticity. Note that I didn't say actual authenticity, just the sense that what you're playing preserves what people who played the original version felt back in the day. I think it's very much possible to keep a remaster authentic to its original self as long as nothing gets reinterpreted in the sense that the meaning is altered. For example in the beginning of the Sam & Max remaster there's that small bit where they are interrogating Jimmy and in the remaster the lights go out too visually indicating that there's an interrogation going on. Sure, an alteration was made to the scene but that doesn't reinterpret anything, rather it just enhances the original meaning of portraying an interrogation. It's that extra flavor that makes the scene work for a new audience that expects those visual additions nowadays. When a voice actor gets changed however that naturally brings with it a different interpretation of a character, one where Bosco is a bit less crazy and a bit more tame (and sure, less stereotypical). It's how the Star Wars special editions and later releases steer further and further away from the original movie that won all those Oscars back in 1978 and the one most of us haven't even seen. Yes, people like complaining about the added special effects too because CGI just wasn't a great choice for all that old school effects work but the biggest complaints are always directed at things that change how a scene is interpreted ("who shot first?" and the like). So yeah, there is that purist niche who stop at "the original is what was released back then and that's what I want to play", those are the people elTee can refer to and they are being served by Skunkape bundling the original versions with the remaster. There's also the type of player (and there are certainly more of them than of the purist type) who wants the illusion that he's playing an authentic version but "oh well, I won't complain if there are better effects and graphics thrown in there". They look at comparison shots, conclude that they are close enough, have a look at what people are saying ("it's just like how I remembered I swear") and off they go to buy the remaster. If they see a bunch of "they changed some lines and a voice actor" then they won't buy the remaster because that breaks the illusion of authenticity. Now I'm just as selfish as the avarage consumer and I do admit that I'd love it if Skunkape catered to me but if you look at what kind of products are hitting virtual store shelves these days what I just described is the type of person most remasters are actually aimed at. In just a few years companies did their market research and arrived at the conclusion that people want the illusion of authenticity so that's exactly what remasters contain. Of course it's up to personal taste if a voice actor change only hurts or downright shatters the illusion of authenticity but I think it's a safe bet to say that most agree that there was an alteration made in this case. To me that's the perspective that's worth looking at this from instead of imaginary bad actors, the culture war (which is something 90% of the world's population simply doesn't care about so it won't really affect their consumer choices) and whatever else. Is it a good product that fullfills the market requirements for a remaster? Yep, it's 90% there but it's competing on a market that expects 100% as the bare minimum now. And if you read all that you're awesome.