Zaxx

All the analysis of MI's art style honestly just makes me want to see some actual gameplay from Return. I very much share the opinion that what we've seen so far aims to "re-establish" continuity with the first two games' visuals but I get feeling that when we finally see this thing in motion opinions will change very much. The teaser just seems so "dynamic" and full of motion compared to MI 1-2's more static presentation that I think animation will be Return's strong point and that's the missing link we need in order to "get it".

I think there was a comic made from the plot of it.

I think hint systems are great if they never tell you the exact solution but provide hints that give you an objective when you have absolutely no idea what to do. Sometimes when you get really stuck on something all you need is an idea and then off you go and find the solution. What I think is the most useful when it comes to easing the frustration of getting stuck though is just having the option to focus on other puzzles instead of the one that you're failing at. The first two MI games and Day of the Tentacle are especially good at that and there are traps that type of design can fall into too (for example I think DOTT is a bit overwhelming in the beginning) but it can work super well. DOTT even gives you hints to what you should be doing in the other time periods when you're dealing with one, in a way that's a built in hint system too. I always liked the difficulty options in MI 2 and 3 too so I'm glad Return will have that. Hopefully that also means that they won't hold back on the "hard" difficulty.

Eh, that's only half a video card.

Iirc I saw Ron posting a comment under the tweet about Herman being just Herman instead of "Grandpa!" here. That's to be expected though considering when the game takes place and the fact that EFMI was an obvious retcon compared to his backstory in SoMI.

And that's fine too but why be so negative about it? The fact of the matter is that you don't know that, I don't know that, stances, opinions can evolve and change, people too. I've not given up on watching the original theatrical Star Wars trilogy remastered on Blu-ray one day either because why give up on anything that's 100% out of my power? And you really don't have to be so aggressive towards me just because our opinions differ.

Oh, Herman has his original voice actor too:

Yeah well my shelf and my Steam library offer the original version too. And as I've said the fact that you get that too when buying the remaster is kind of just another reason to restore the remasters with a Bosco voice pack to me. On top of that I'm pretty sure that all the lines being intact in season 2 was already a compromise plus I never really heard Skunkape talk badly about the original voice or the voice actor. They said that it made them cringe so they decided to change it, other than that they were respectful towards it which tells me that the fan reaction was overblown in both directions. Overall all I can say in summary is that I'm not seeing a Skunkape developer being disgusted by having to touch the original recordings for some cleanup eventually shouting "why are they making me do this?" while drinking bottles of booze and hugging a bowl of ice cream. On the other hand I see a few happy people getting access to remastered Bosco after 2 years with some trenches of the culture war getting buried behind them. Would be cool too see while an actual war is happening on your doorstep right after you survived a worldwide pandemic. Anyway any chance for a Hit the Road remaster? I replayed that a few months ago and unsurprisingly it holds up really well because it's a Lucasarts title.

Yes, certainly, I'm just not sure that opening (or giving bad actors the opportunity to open) that small front in the culture war was necessary in order to do the right thing. For example why was it important to re-record Bosco with a black actor? Because a black actor should have gotten that role in the first place, once you fix that then ultimately it doesn't matter if you include the original performance or not. I admit it's a utilitarian way of looking at it but since the original games won't disappear it kind of makes the most sense anyway. On top of that it's a bit of the "conservatives watch Star Trek too" problem again where Star Trek has this super leftist, liberal world view while also promoting traditional military values through how the Federation and Starfleet operate. It's hard to take any kind of entertainment and a put a "leftist" stamp on it especially when that entertainment is about two authority figures fighting crime. There are ways to make gestures to the past while working for the future I guess.

That's fair, I didn't make the connection because I identify those people differently. When it comes to that I just think that Skunkape made a few mistakes with the changes that served as easy bait to get people riled up. For example I remember being very confused when it turned out that some lines were changed because none of that was discussed before launch and of course people started to speculate immediately and just blew the thing out of proportion. The altered lines were as unimportant as the stump joke in MI, they didn't matter all, the fact that they were changed was the only reason people paid attention to them for the first time in human history. What I'm trying to say is that I think there were ways to make all the changes they made but present them in a way that avoids the backlash. Yes, a compromise for that would be including the original voice too but that's better than letting people download a mod that puts the original compressed sound files right into the shiny new remaster the developers spent a year working on. Especially when the original episodes are included and available anyway that feels like a weird limitation that says "you can hear the original performance too but only if you play with the old graphics".

I didn't mean that the developers or the public should avoid doing anything because of a fear that they might upset nazis. What I meant is that calling random people nazis has become a "boy who cried wolf" situation where the term "nazi" was devalued so much that it no longer has any punch to it. The only people who you should be calling nazis are the actual neonazis and chances are they don't care about Sam & Max. Of course I can't say if that's actually true for everyone but what I wanted to point out with basically all of my previous posts was that the backlash was caused by a varied group of people who for one reason or another didn't like the changes. That's all there is to it, it wasn't an organized mob, they weren't mythical internet nazis or evil, just people and review bombing is certainly not something that is identifiable as a "radical right trait". I know that it's very easy to antagonize people in a way that ensures that whatever happens we're always right but that's really bad if we want to understand their reasons. And just like how it wouldn't be wise to be scared of doing anything that might upset nazis it's also not the greatest idea to NOT do something "because then they'd win" when "they" actually don't even exist.

Calling people nazis because they didn't connect with the new performance is also very shoddy reasoning I might add. Some people, for example people who have been on anti fascist rallies because they hate the antisemitism and the homophobia they sometimes see in their countries might find "but you must be a nazi because you want the old Bosco voice back in an adventure game" to be an offensive argument even... But hey, we've been bringing back the radical right by calling random people nazis for decades now, we certainly won't stop until they come back to power and cause another world war.

Honestly I've seen a lot of these "oh you're disingenuous and a secret bigot" comments and I could never really place them. Yes, my opinion is one that doesn't really fit into the "us vs. them" thing that is going on culturally now especially in the US but I'm not saying I'm right or wrong, I just think that we'd need time travel to correct the mistakes of the past and we're not living in Day of the Tentacle where that would be possible. For some context about me I guess: I don't live in the US, I'm from Europe, Hungary to be more specific. Now here sadly you can find a lot of people who don't speak foreign languages so dubbing over American movies became the norm and that's a thing still to this day as most people just prefer that over reading subtitles. There's also a thing about us: the vast majority of the population is still white and I can honestly tell you that I have never met a Hungarian black voice actor in my life. Because of that any black actor will be voiced by a white actor in the movies that are released here... and absolutely no one cares about that. I'm only telling you this because I think it's important to see that these games are for a worldwide audience so people from different countries will react differently to changes like this to the point where some people won't even understand what the problem is with the original performance. To them the change just comes off as "oh they replaced the thing that I got used to" and there's already a disconnect that wouldn't be there if there was an option for the old performance. There's also an issue with just learning how to deal with these things on a personal level I think. You know, when I'm replaying an old Leisure Suit Larry game and encounter something that's blatantly homophobic then I guess I deal with that differently than how others do. I don't see it as something I'd erase, I cringe, acknowledge that this was a thing people (including Al Lowe) found funny back then and reflect on how things have progressed for the better and that I'm no longer the stupid kid who laughed on this and thought nothing of it. This can be related to the different culture too of course since Europeans have different demons, what slavery and racism against black people is for Americans is pretty much the Holocaust in Europe. We don't deal with that through forgetting and making amends as much as by "remembering so that it wouldn't happen again." So I don't think that an issue like this could be solved by removing said content but by establishing the context that lets people to reflect on things. No, what I'm arguing is that there is nothing in front of me in that sense because a remaster is not a new product: the audience has already encountered that before and it's better to respect that connection. And yes, there are people who want to live in a world where they didn't have to care too and in that sense there is a purity to things you first experienced as a kid. If you're a super manchild about that then anything that disturbs that purity will offend you and I think that's what we saw at the initial backlash. As for the notion that I came here to argue with Lucasarts superfans because I want my Bosco back: no. I've been reading Mojo articles for 20 years, I was part of a bunch of Lucas and Telltale related communities up until the early 2010s mostly because of Monkey Island. So I know this community rather well as a lurker who got "re-activated" thanks to Monkey Island's return. When it comes to this subject I just think that it was handled pretty badly by everyone involved (including me because I sure have made some comments I'm not proud of back in 2020) so I just feel that it might be worth for the community and Skunkape to have another go at it with the power of hindsight. Yes, I'd love it if Skunkape restored the games and no, I won't hold a grudge if that won't happen (in fact I'm pretty sure I'll pick up season 3 if there won't be anything similar to the Bosco situation in it). Yes, I think that the Sam & Max IP was hurt by the controversy, that's my opinion that I stick too and it would be great if anything similar could be avoided if Tales of MI got remastered by Skunkape. By this I mean that I want to see Leilani Jones Wilmore return as the Voodoo Lady in a ToMI remaster BUT they should keep the original voice in as an option. That's all there is to it, I don't want to change anyone's mind, I just wanted to express my perspective and views on it.

Yeah, it's unreliable at best, even Steamdb displays 3 different estimates and you can just sort of make up your mind from there. With that said I think it's useful if you're looking for a comparison instead of actual sales figures (for a comparison even just looking at the number of reviews can help though).

Oh right, he isn't in DP, what a relief, it will be a controversy free season. Just Steam review numbers, Steamdb estimates when it comes to sales figures. Those give off the impression that season one was a rather slow burn but eventually people picked it up on a sale while nobody bought season two as of yet.

Replied to you in the thread about the remasters.

I'll just post a reply to ThunderPeel2001 here since I don't want to derail the RtMI thread. I think the trick is that I'm looking at it from the perspective of what I prefer and that makes me able to distinguish between me agreeing with the sentiment behind the changes while disliking the fact that they actually happened. For example if I look at your previous post about this then my guess is that you strongly feel that Skunkape was right to make these changes and since they made the right decision you're fine with whatever those changes are. Meanwhile you also say this: So you're basically putting your preference and your personal taste aside because you agree with the changes while when it comes to your preferences you most likely would just switch back to the original voice actor if you could. This is nothing new, it's how basically every old fan feels like, I see this same sentiment time and time again and I feel the same way with the difference being that I don't want to play the game like that. And I don't buy things out of support or respect, that's affecting my decisions to some extent of course but I buy the things that I want to play, that's the basis from where other factors can come in. What I think is an interesting thought experiment is just trying to find out why we prefer the original actor though. I think it's because Bosco was written for that type of performance, like it or not he is a somewhat dated stereotype that benefits from the original more stereotypical performance. That's a lesson for the future that if there is another Sam & Max game with Bosco being in it then he should be different, less stereotypical and funny in a different kind of way. On the other hand completely rewriting him for a remaster is out of the question so there is no point to making any changes to his past iteration. So they way I see it the good solution would have been to leave every line of dialogue and all the voice acting intact and work the changes in as optional extra content sort of as a proof of concept for a future iteration of Sam & Max. I think it's a lot more valuable to make people understand why Bosco is dated in the way he is in these old games instead of just trying to mitigate that. Also "extra content" just sounds a lot better than "we removed the old thing and added something new instead". As for other aspects of this I don't think Sam & Max was benefitted by any of this controversy. I may be wrong here and just have unrealistically high expectations for how much a remaster of an old Telltale game should sell but I just don't see why these are doing worse than even Full Throttle's remaster. Both seasons look really good, I've yet to see one complaint about them and Sam & Max is pretty high profile stuff in the adventure game world but nobody's really talking about any that. It's always just the subject of the voice acting, even if I go to a website like PCGamingWiki that's usually for fixing technical issues one of the key points listed is that you should go and download a mod because the voice acting is different: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Sam_%26_Max_Save_the_World_(2020) So I really, really hope that when season 3 comes out it will have the original Bosco voice too and we'll get a patch that just adds that back to the first two seasons as a toggle option because it's a very unnecessary hill for Sam & Max to die on. It might be too late, who knows but I think it would do a lot of good.

Well, Tim Schafer did say that it was Ron who came up with the idea of time travel in the original concept for Day of the Tentacle so I guess we can't rule out anything at this point.

There are a number of great points in there though I think you sort of misunderstood me. The only things I'm genuinely sad about is that - as you've said - I wasn't catered to and that it was kind of soul crushing to see the discourse on the internet about it. Even when it comes to the review on this very site I'm supposed to be a member of the Proud Boys for missing the old voice performance, I think that says everything. There's this belief that you're a secret bigot if you don't like the changes, for a while I cared about arguing against that but I don't engage nowadays. (To clarify: I 100% agree with the reasoning behind the changes and I think they are coming from a good place, I just don't agree with the changes themselves.) Is me wanting to be catered to entitlement? Sure, I think it absolutely is but I think that one of the biggest benefits to modern gaming is that smaller or bigger groups of people can be catered to. For example just today id Software has updated their Quake remaster to include accessibility options, that's crazy good and without current practices we might not even know that there's a need for these. As for adding the option being "easy" I'm sure it would take time and resources to implement something like that: they'd have to remaster the original recordings, figure out how to implement that from programming to UI design, roll it out in a patch etc. What I meant by saying it's easy was that the concerns that were very real in the past don't exist now: you don't have to fit on a disk, you don't have to be concerned about how file size relates to people's internet limitations that much etc. "The simple reality is that the game I'm nostalgic for still exists. I can still play it." - This is exactly why I didn't buy the remasters. I figured that the new voice is affecting my enjoyment so I'd rather just replay the originals if I get the itch. I might change my opinion on this, I might not. As for the "graphics changes are the same as any other" argument I strongly disagree with that but telling why would be way too lenghty for this already offtopic conversation so I'll just say that I like having options. Your favorite version of SoMI is the EGA version with speaker sounds? Mine is the Ultimate Talkie Edition which is a mix of the remaster and the VGA CD version, it is a fanmade version that was put together for people who wanted to play the SE with the new music and voice acting but with the VGA graphics. That's awesome if you ask me. And I will talk about only MI from now on, sorry for the derail.

How about these people? Anyway I agree that the Sam & Max remasters are absolutely fantastic on a technical level, I'm just very afraid of the "Skunkape baggage" of a similar controvery hurting the MI IP like it did Sam & Max. I didn't buy those remasters because even after two years I don't have the option to switch back to the Bosco voice I grew up on, have like 5 friends who didn't buy for the same reason and I just don't see a company that can't accomodate basic requests like that as a good choice. You know, if a game has a community where the feedback is that there is a large portion of people not liking something that could be fixed and the developer doesn't fix that issue then that developer just doesn't care enough about it's audience. Compared to that there's Postal 4 which is an absolutely dreadful video game if you look at any other review. Fans didn't like that Jon St. John is voicing the Postal Dude in the game, they wanted Rick Hunter back... so the developers brought back Rick Hunter AND Corey Cruise, another fan favourite voice actor from the franchise. See, it's easy, you just add an option for all 3 and it just works: Now what would happen with Tales of MI? The Voodoo Lady's voice actor is a white lady in that game so she obviously has to go. That could work for MI fans if the new voice actor is Leilani Jones, if it's anyone other than her? 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.

I think a lot of people share your opinion and if more sequels mean more EFMI like games then I certainly do too but it doesn't have to be that way. The way I see it the problem with MI sequels is that basically all of them stay very close to the formula: it's always Elaine getting in danger, LeChuck always returning with Guybrush being out to get him. That's a very limited concept if every entry has to be like that and then games like EFMI happen. But even when you look at EFMI there's actually a lot of interesting stuff in there, I always really enjoyed the whole Ozzie Mandrill plot with the somewhat self-referential commercialization of the MI world, I think that was really smart. The game's rehashing a lot of things and the Monkey Island section is pretty much all terrible but there are some genius nuggets in there, it just falls short because just like Curse it has to follow the MI1 formula for some reason. On the other hand ToMI does a lot of new stuff and it's better for it, I always really liked the plot with the pox, Morgan was a great new character, making LeChuck human was a great idea and there are a lot of those "oh, this is very neat" moments. What hurts that game is the episodic structure (the pacing is bad, some puzzles should have been cut, really less would have been more) and that it was made in a time where being a point and click game wasn't enough. No, the puzzles had to be easier, the inventory had to be form over function and the player needs that janky direct control because for some reason bad controls and bad camera systems make playing an adventure game more engaging. And then there's the merfolk where the joke is that it's hard to decide what gender they are (transphobia, yay) and some other weird decisions that most likely come from Telltale's famous crunch. Nowadays point and click games can just be what they are again though: you don't have to add Resident Evil tank controls or other dump innovations, they can be 2D, have good puzzles, nice writing and all that jazz. There is nobody out there wanting to make the genre mainstream again, it can be niche and that's fine. That's a good environment for new MI games and if they manage to steer away from the MI1 formula and offer new stories then I think there's a lot of room for that even after RTMI (and EFMI and ToMI).

Why Skunkape though? I don't want them cutting out random jokes and recasting voice actors (though I have to admit I won't riot if the ToMI Voodoo Lady gets recast to Leilani Jones Wilmore) but I think Skunkape exists very specifically for remastering Sam & Max. At any rate if Lucasfilm or Devolver is interested they should find someone who's not like "well we can change stuff now so why don't we do that?" and understand what the audience expects from a remaster better because I'm sorry (and if you haven't guessed from my avatar I like Larry too) but the German made Leisure Suit Larry games shouldn't do better on Steam than Sam & Max under any circumstance. I don't think any publisher will look at the 100 glowing user reviews Sam & Max season 2 got and go "hey, let's make a new one!" As for other things I somehow think that it depends more on Devolver than Lucasfilm or Ron if they want to do more with the license or not. I certainly hope that they want to do more because Devolver has a good history with taking other people's properties and doing really nice stuff with them, just look at their Shadow Warrior and non-Croteam developed Serious Sam games. They are also not AAA which could be a good fit for adventure games so yeah, I wouldn't complain if there was no 10+ year wait periods between Monkey Island entries from now on.

Anyway I only have one "want" from Return to MI and it's not related to the story at all. I really miss the scale of MI2 from the later games, I'd love to see the structure of Act 2 (when you're looking for the map pieces) return where you can just go to all the islands whenever you want. Bigger and more complex is better.

This is the part that I never got about people who don't like what the MI2 ending suggests: this idea that the adventure has to be real because if it's not real then what's the point? The way I see it the story and the adventure IS real even if it's only in Guybrush's head since we got to experience it and there's nothing more real than that. On the other hand Guybrush Threepwood is not real and we've known that from the moment we launched the first game so the thought experiment of "what if it's all in his head?" has no consequence. But hey, I was baffled at people who thought that Thimbleweed Park's ending was terrible "because nothing matters" too, meanwhile it did matter a lot to the game's characters and seeing them deal with the truth was the best part of the whole experience. As for how it can be both: it already is both, that's why CMI's need to explain it away was a really bad choice (though you can to interpret that as Guybrush desperately trying to keep the walls of the fantasy up and succeeding). Every single game in the series is constantly referencing the amusement park / circus theme if you pay attention to that stuff. On top of that it's also the best explanation to why the MI world is full of contemporary elements: because it's a child trying to imagine a world of pirates. On the other hand the story also works if you ignore all that stuff, for example you don't have to think it important that LeChuck dies with a bunch of amusement park noises at the end of ToMI if you don't want to, he just does that.

When it comes to the idea of making Elaine into Guybrush's sister I can imagine Ron Gilbert just sitting in a room saying "I know what Monkey Island needs: incest!" So yeah, hard pass, how about Kate Capsize instead?