Torbjörn Andersson

I can see why it was removed, though. It doesn't make sense when running the game from CD. (Multi-CD games were still a few years away, I believe?) But I agree it's a shame. Particularly since both MI2 and MI3 make references to that stump joke. It is still in the VGA floppy version, though.

Another musical difference is that the VGA CD version plays music in the Mêlée Island jail. (Sounds like the forest music to me, or possibly the music when following the shopkeeper.) Also, is the music when you see LeChuck's ship sail away from Mêlée Island in any of the earlier versions? I don't remember. Oddly enough, the Mac versions I have both have the CD version's user interface, but apparently none of the musical additions?

I tried to get an online AI to write a plot synopsis, but only one of my attempts came even close: My other attempts were much more vague:

Well, yes, but that's not a mandatory thing, so I figured it was enough to link to the ScummVM wiki page in an earlier post. 😀

The most noticeable difference in behavior I've seen in the VGA CD version compared to the VGA floppy version is that some text was (accidentally?) cut in the scene where you bribe the Monkey Island cannibals. There are some graphical differences besides the user interface, though. Mostly it's subtle differences in colour. I suspect some of them may have been caused by the colours being ordered differently in the palette. At least with things like the smoke from the voodoo lady's cauldron. That change carried over to the special edition, too. Maybe it also explains why the actors are a bit brighter in the CD version? Unless that was a deliberate change. (I had to use a demo for the EGA version, since I don't own a copy of that game. Hence the difference in text.) But the most noticeable colour difference, and one that I'm sorely tempted to fix in ScummVM because I think the CD version is harder to read, is the sign about the dogs: One other graphical difference was probably introduced by mistake: When playing the floppy version from hard disk (rather than directly from the floppies), the close-up of captain Smirk has animated cigar smoke. The same smoke animation as for the cauldron, apparently. I'm guessing whoever updated the game just mechanically removed those checks, and only kept the case without the smoke. Restoring the animation in ScummVM turned out to be easy, but getting it to appear a the correct position and with the correct colours took a bit more fiddling: The only case I've seen where graphics have been redrawn, rather than re-coloured, is the meat in the SCUMM Bar kitchen. The floppy version looks like ribs to me, while the CD version looks like a leg. And while preparing this screenshot, I just noticed that the colour of the grog changed to green. Edit: This change may have been to match the animation when you use the hunk of meat later?

Maybe someone already mention this, but you can also find details in the ScummVM wiki: https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=SCUMM/Game_Enhancements (I started the page, but others have added a lot to it so I don't know the details of everything in it off-hand.)

If memory serves me, the music for the cannibal village is also unique to the CD version.

It's very impressive how much it can do, but you can see some things that would have to be touched up a bit. Perhaps most obviously this sign:

As an aside, I guess the developers at Adventure Soft liked the rap sheet joke as well, because The Feeble Files had it too. With an even longer list of possible crimes: Piloting a Company spacecraft through an asteroid field. Damaging a Company spacecraft by colliding with unknown object. Piloting a damaged Company spacecraft. Failing to report damage to a Company spacecraft. Destruction of Company facility: Ministry of Galactic Uncertainty, Crop Circle Division. Unnecessary flamboyance when starting a Space Bike. Unauthorised messing about with a flashy space car. Unauthorised charging of carbonated drinks products. Lacing a drink with out-of-date Charm pills. Witholding information about treasonous activities from the OmniBrain. Using docking permits under false pretences. Making a treasonous statement about the OmniBrain. Making advances to a member of the opposite gender without a Hot Love Permit. Delivering a package to a centre of rebellious activities. Possession of out-of-date Charm Pills. Attempting to barter for Charm Pills. Attempting to incite other prisoners to escape. Dismantling decorations in Company Correctional Facility. Unauthorised nocturnal activity. Being found several times outside a correctional facility cell. Defacing security equipment with edible material. Tampering with Company property leading to malfunction of a security droid. Watching a traitorous TV channel. Setting in motion a Company production line out of hours. Possession of the traitorous Freedom Fighters Database. Forcing exit of a correctional facility thus damaging Company property. Taking and driving away a Prison Transport Vessel. Achieving release from Cygnus Alpha under own recognisance. Colluding with a known traitor Delores. Developing a sarcastic and critical sense of humour. Unapproved interference with natives from a Class C Planet. Removing a Company number from XDirectory. Phoning Citizens In Need without good reason. Releasing mind altering chemicals into the water supply of a Class C Planet without a permit. Using a Company teleporter without necessary status. Causing destruction of a Company research facility. Posing as a member of the opposite gender. Attempting to remove a captured ship from a junk droid. Endangering Citizens safety by deactivating a junk droid. Taking possession of a space car from a junk droid. Stealing a magnetic tow rope from a Company employee. Deliberately and repeatedly activating a spacebike alarm. Failing to be aware of a miraculous new Company product 'Miracle Mud'. Being spectacularly bad at a Company Entertainment Device. Causing unauthorised repair to an illegal spacecraft by being sneaky. Naughty rebellious goings-on at Asteroid 447. Illegal parking of a space Bike. Attempting to use female charms to gain favours from a Docking Controller. Attempting to use female charms without being female. Consorting with another known rebellious type, Gardum. Entering a Docking Controller's office. Stealing photographic equipment from a tourist. Indulging in a pointless activity: Ship Spotting. Causing a Docking Controller to be buried under a pile of rapidly-reproducing life forms. Removing a set of keys from the prone form of a docking controller. Unauthorised landing in a space car at Metro Prime. Attempting to steal Company Information Publication. Being present at a centre of rebellious activity. Tampering with a Company Robot. Tampering with a Company Robot again. General 'attacking the Company stronghold' type behaviour. Taking a security pass from a recently-vaporised Company Engineer. Having sympathy for a dying treacherous robot. Altering the operation of a Company ventilation system. Experimenting with grenades of unknown destructive capability. Introducing foreign bodily liquid into the OmniBrain's fluid. Taking a Company safety device: Fire Extinguisher. Taking a Company device: Antigravity weight. Taking fluid and matter from the OmniBrain vat. Reducing the temperature of a liquid life form to freezing point. Outwitting an Octoped and making off with a Company publication. Searching for protected information. Failing to lead a happy and fulfilled life. Looking up 'Directive Charter' in Oracle. Not watching Omni TV for long enough. Interrupting a Citizen in the process of validating a Hot Love Permit. Unauthorised knowledge of the location of the C.C.C.C. Using the food machine in Cygnus Alpha during Sleeptime. Failing to use an Apprehender droid for its intended purpose. Posing as a supernatural being. Exceeding Light Wave Soda quota. Collaborating in an extended pun. Wasting an Enforcer's time. Concealing deep-seated misery from a Happybot. Repeatedly defying a Docking Controller's orders. Using Earthspeak. Attempting to use a token to pay for a newspaper. Breaking into a Company Entertainment Facility. Owning in excess of 500 Company Gaming Tokens. Attempting to vandalise Company property. Attempting to use a Class A security pass machine. Poisoning a Company Employee: Ministry Controller. Theft of private property from a doddering Company employee: Ministry Professor. Misuse of a key pass. Creating a laughably unrealistic decoy in an attempt to deceive a loyal Company agent.

The ever growing rap sheet is one of my favorite Monkey Island 2 jokes. The following crimes are always listed: the murder of G.P. LeChuck the use of witchcraft on the person of Largo LaGrande the thievery of clothing and medically prescribed hair supplements for such witchcraft graverobbing trespassing larceny without a permit and releasing a dangerous reptile in a populated area The rest of the crimes are conditional, but I'm not sure exactly what all of them correspond to. Some are mutually exclusive. disturbing the peace illegal gambling on a sporting event use of falsified identification for the purchase of alcohol exceeding allowable FDA limit for rodent parts in vichyssoise premature entombment of a non-dead individual reckless tampering with city-maintained plumbing without prior acquisition of an environmental impact report transportation of animals not in a mental state to give consent vandalizing a historical miniature reckless use of gardening tools impersonating a woman in order to evade prosecution unauthorized exiting from a penal institution two counts of unauthorized exiting from a penal institution unauthorized exiting from a penal institution impersonating a federal mail boat reanimating dead persons within city limits possession of library books not specifically checked out to oneself mixing drinks without a liquor license Also wanted for questioning regarding the disappearance of prescription eyewear I hope I didn't miss any.

Actually, the thing I'm most interested to see from a trailer is a release date. But that wasn't an option.

You can see that the game speeds up, because the animated fires in the background speed up as well. (I wonder if that's why the animation was removed in the VGA talkie version.) Edit: Oddly enough, it seems that (arguably) glitch was worked around in the non-interactive demos.

Replay? I finally got around to playing Maniac Mansion for the first time! And now I'm in the mapping phase (oh boy) of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, which I also haven't played before. It remains to be seen if I'll find the time to finally play Thimbleweed Park before Return to Monkey Island is released.

It's not as if anyone has forgotten the game exists, but someone has to do the work. A lot of game engines have very few active developers. What's most likely to produce results: Complaining, or offering to help?

It is at the very least quite similar to a puzzle in Infocom's game Sorcerer. Whether or not the MI4 developers had played it is, of course, an entirely different matter. I'm attaching an annotated transcript of that part of the game. (It uses Unix-style line breaks rather than DOS-style, but I hope it works.) It is, of course, a complete spoiler for that entire section. coal-mine.txt

The way I figured it, this is the thread where we take our moderate opinions ("Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would have been better if it didn't rely so much on pixel-hunting, mazes and optional-but-sometimes-hard-to-avoid fighting") and restate them in the most blunt way you can think of ("Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is without a doubt the worst Indiana Jones game ever"), all in good fun. I mean, we do still like and respect the games, right? Even the ones we don't like quite as much as some of the others?

Well, I'm grateful for them. I didn't get to play them back in the day (my Mac Plus should have been able to handle Loom and Last Crusade, but I was too busy playing Infocom games; I have no regrets), but now they are how I can at least play one 16-colour version of Last Crusade, or see that scene in Fate of Atlantis that for whatever reason has three different versions. Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for anyone else back then, I guess), both versions of The Secret of Monkey Island in the picture are 256 colours. (I did see the Mac version of Full Throttle in an on-line auction not too long ago, but someone else wanted it more than I did. Oh well.)

My unpopular opinions: Insult sword fighting was clever in the first Monkey Island game, but really quite unnecessary in the others. The Monkey Island 1 "red herring" puzzle was much harder than the Monkey Island 2 "monkey wrench" one. The Amiga versions were inferior to, or at best on par with, their DOS counterparts. (There! I said it!) Day of the Tentacle is a much funnier game than Sam & Max Hit the Road.

One thing I found interesting is that while most Mac versions (that I've seen) stick pretty close to their DOS counterparts, Loom and particularly Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were much more different in appearance. I don't know if you had anything to do with either of those two, though.

I asked it to recreate an object from the Infocom version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but all I got was nightmare fuel. Now I'm too scared to even try "laser-assisted monkey wrench", "ultra-plasmic vacuum awl", "molecular hyperwave pincer", or any other of the weird tools you found scattered throughout the game. 😛

It's a nice puzzle, but I would probably have been more impressed with it had I not seen an almost identical one years earlier, and I though it was better integrated there. (I wish it hadn't been so unforgiving, though: You only have a limited number of moves before you run out of air, and you have to get through a small maze.) That's not to say they ripped it off, just that it was hard not to see the parallels. The game, in case anyone was wondering, is Sorcerer by Infocom.

That's a matter of taste. If you have 2.5 hours to spare, you can listen to two guys comparing the EGA and VGA versions here: Me, I'm on "Team EGA". I don't care about the minor palette differences, but I think the DOS version sounds better than the Mac version. The only replacement music I've used is the Seiji Ozawa recording with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It seemed appropriate, since apparently that was used as tempo reference when adapting the music for the game. Though after all the replaying I had to do to get that, and other things, working properly in ScummVM, it'll probably be a while before I want to play through the game from start to finish again. 😛

By the way, some time ago I made some comparisons between the graphics of the different versions, that some may find amusing. First the three different graphics styles. I don't remember if I used the VGA or FM Towns version for the rightmost column but for these scenes it shouldn't make much of a difference. (The FM Towns version runs at 320x240 pixels rather than 320x200 pixels, though it's mostly just more wasted black space at the bottom of the screen.) The middle column is the TurboGrafx-16 version, showing both EGA and VGA style graphics, as well as the missing tree in the foreground of one scene. Another comparision, this time of one particular scene. The VGA talkie version really... stands out? And finally one where I added the CGA and Macintosh black-and-white modes. I think the CGA mode is auto-generated from the 16-color graphics. I know the black-and-white mode (only available for the 16-color Mac version) is.

That's the big question, isn't it? I haven't even played all versions. 😀 TL;DR - The EGA version is the one I find myself returning to. In some scenes, the VGA graphics look quite nice, but there are other scenes where I think something was lost in translation. I like that we have the VGA version, because it's almost as if two teams were given the same screenplay, sets and costumes, and were asked to make a game. I just dislike that it's the only available versions these days, because to me it's not the best one. And now the long, rambly version... Most of the Looms I've managed to track down, I've gotten from eBay. The only version available for purchase nowadays is the VGA talkie one. I got EGA Loom from the LucasArts Classic Adventures collection, and Mac Loom from the LucasArts Mac CD Game Pack and it remains my favorite. It's apparently a lot easier to find the German version, but I don't want that. The English TurboGrafx-16 version used to be reasonably priced, but seems to have gone way up since I got mine. (The Japanese version was cheaper last time I checked. I don't speak Japanese.) Extracting the game from the CD so that ScummVM can play it is also a bit of work. The FM Towns version has always been horrifyingly expensive, so don't ask me how an affordable one suddenly popped up in an auction one day. It didn't include the box (which probably made the more insane collectors turn up their noses), but it did have both the game and audio drama discs, and the instructions/hint books. The only version that's easy to find is the VGA talkie one. The one sold on GOG and Steam is packaged differently than the original CD, but should otherwise be identical. The EGA version is, as far as I know, the only version that has the Overture that plays when using the Roland MT-32 music. But since this is just a black screen with the word "OVERTURE" and the Swan Lake theme playing, you're not missing that much if you don't see it. The original 16 color Mac version is close to the EGA version, but uses a high-resolution font for the text and notes. The music sounds different too. The instruments are digitized, but not very fancy ones. I don't know how well ScummVM handles it, since the Mac emulator I'm using is having trouble with it. It sounds ok to me, though a bit shrill at times. The later 256 color version is a straight port of the VGA talkie version, as far as I know. The FM Towns version is graphically very similar to the VGA talkie version, to the extent that they show the same scenes. I did notice some minor touch-up in one scene, but I don't know which is the original and which is the revised graphics. Scrolling is done pixel-by-pixel instead of eight pixels at a time. But as mentioned, it plays music pretty much non-stop without adding any new songs, which can get a bit annoying. It adds a few sound effects as well, e.g. a splash when Bobbin falling into the water. The notes you hear are often overlaid with sound effects too, making them even harder to make out. The TurboGrafx-16 version is a bit of an odd bird. Some of the graphics look like the EGA version with a bit less dithering, while others look like the VGA version with less colors. In one scene, a tree has been removed from the foreground. Perhaps having an object you could walk behind like that slowed down the graphics too much? Unlike the EGA version sound effect don't always interrupt the music. The music sounds pretty much the same as the first arrangement of each tune from the FM Towns version. However, some noticeable changes is that when the dragon carries you off it plays the same music as during the final confrontation, and in the caves afterwards it plays the Swan Lake theme. Also, the blacksmith music starts playing while you're still on the plateau outside the Forge. It's weird. When playing in an emulator (not ScummVM), the picture is a bit wider than 320 pixels. This causes glitches at the very end of the game, since some graphics are then visibly cropped. The VGA talkie version is... well, it was the first version I played, so I still have a soft spot for it. Most of the text has been modified in some way (usually made shorter, but sometimes longer). Maybe some of it sounded better when read aloud that way, but I don't know. All of the sound, speech and music was mixed together into one long audio track, which put an upper limit on how much they could fit. (I've seen one game that tried to get around this by putting half of the sound in the right channel and half in the left, but Loom did not use that trick.) Almost all of the ambient music is gone. Most of the distinctive close-up portraits are also gone, though a few new close-ups have been added. There is a bit more character animation as well. Some of it is good, while others is straight from the "Milking the Giant Cow" school of acting. Particularly the Elders and bishop Mandible. I don't have the remaining versions, but I understand that they're graphically like the EGA version. So the main difference is the audio. Since ScummVM can now replace the music, it should be fairly easy to make e.g. the EGA version sound like the Amiga version, if that's what you prefer. Though the sound effects will still be different. The palette may be slightly different, too?

With the development version of ScummVM, you can also replace the music in the EGA version. It's still subject to the limitations of the original music, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out: https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Loom#Audio_tracks