Niemandswasser

I feel like we know this won't happen in the opening, since we Ron's said starts exactly where MI2 ended. (I also feel confident that the "it's all Guybrush's fantasy" interpretation is approximately four days away from the dustbin of history, but I'll indulge it until then 😛)

Oh, I don't feel strongly about it either, and I'm quite fond of the new visual style. It just seems like a possibility, given Ron's statements about why he wants to pick up right from there.

There's a part of me that thinks the graphics in the carnival opening might be based after MI2's before whatever happens to trigger the transition to "present day" or however we're reckoning it. I don't have anything fueling this suspicion except that that one bit in the 2015 King's Quest that flashed back to KQ1 graphics was awesome and worked really well as a comment on past, present and future, and by the same token it might be kind of neat to physically pick up EXACTLY where MI2 left off before moving on to what's new. But also maybe not, who knows!

I feel like if that was the case he wouldn't be so firm about having retired, because if it turns out he's pulling a fast one here then nobody will take "I'm done" seriously from him for the rest of his life. Just seems like it would be a self-created headache.

He's simply keeping up the rich tradition established by Sir Sean Connery of beloved series highlights refusing to come out of retirement for a 21st century Indy movie

I think there's a reason they're being coy with how much and how actively this game connects to Curse/Escape/Tales, as well as where exactly it falls on the timeline in relation. My gut feeling is that being any more specific now would pre-empt something that's central to this game. What that is I have no idea, but the lack of any kind of 100% straight answer feels very purposeful.

What's the fifth in Revenge? Scabb, Booty, Phatt, Dinky, and...? For the moment are we accepting CMI's take that the carnival was actually on Monkey?

Secret through Tales are tied at zero, with ReMI coming in a distant second with one.

Those are all very unlikely titles for Indy 5.

My guess would be that the scrapbook will update as you encounter characters and situations where knowledge of past games would be useful, so that meeting Carla for the first time would unlock her relevant scrapbook page(s) for example. I could be wrong, but I doubt there'll be info pre-loaded in there about Freddy the stick merchant or Jumbeau LaFeet.

Maybe the love bomb was for himself? He certainly seemed to have self-image issues

I second the latter half of this post.

I still like Bounty Hunter.

A lot has already been written on this topic over the past five-odd years, and so, both to prevent our venturing unnecessarily across well-trodden ground and for the benefit of those joining the conversation without having seen its beginnings in the ReMI thread, I'd like to provide a brief summary of the arguments made thus far, as well as to pre-emptively raise such points as I expect will figure heavily into the discussions to come. Thusly: "Yeah, but"

Go ahead--you have The Power.

That's odd--did a mod change the name of the "Let's expend precious time and energy on relitigating the same Star Wars arguments everyone got bored with years ago so that we'll all have one more thing to regret on our deathbeds" thread to "How are you going to play ReMI?" That's weird, I wonder when that happened.

My hunch has always been that the ending wouldn't have been overly metafictional, if only because Sierra had already done that multiple times by then (Leisure Suit Larry 3 and Space Quest 3 in the same year, even!) So much about Ron & co.'s design ethos seemed to be about doing their own thing rather than following established trends in the genre that I can't imagine they would have considered the idea for long if it had come up. (Thimbleweed's a different story, of course, coming 20+ years later and being conceived, for better or worse, as a game very much about adventure games--and possibly as Ron's last word on the subject, with the chance to ever do more MI seemingly out of reach at the time.)

Personally all I got from that sentence was that this adventure game features a puzzle based around an extremely common adventure game puzzle setup, and that as we've seen, there are returning characters and new ones. EDIT: Sentence not paragraph, duh

Oh, I'm confident it'll be an exclamation point. Mind you, I quite expect it to follow the word "Psych"

It's really starting to sink in that in two weeks' time that question mark that's lingered over MI2's ending since Ron stepped away will metamorphose, for good and all, into an exclamation point. I know I, for one, hadn't entertained the barest possibility of that happening for probably 20 years.

Huh, I could have sworn that was one of Guybrush's lines at the end of the game, but looking there now you're right. I must have been misremembering the hint book ending! But he does ask again in MI2, so the point still stands!

I always felt the same way about the way the tunnels below the Monkey Head were treated in MI1. At the end Guybrush says "I never found the Secret of Monkey Island," and I thought, really? The hidden Hell-caves where the dead live on as ghosts weren't secret enough for you?

I'm too lazy to look for a source, but as I recall multiple people have since debunked the "MI1 was supposed to end like MI2 but Tim and Dave talked Ron out of it" story. I also find it very odd that Tiller describes LeChuck's voodoo curse as "the official secret of Monkey Island in CMI" when...no it isn't? Not even a little bit? There's a whole extended gag in that game where Guybrush grills him and LeChuck sheepishly admits he doesn't even know what the secret is, so it's baffling that he'd claim otherwise, considering that's the game he actually worked on.

Bill Tiller has always been very...proactive about establishing his position as a Monkey Island insider, and it's always struck me as a little disingenuous. He was obviously instrumental in establishing the aesthetic from Curse onward, and he deserves all the appreciation he gets for that, but there was a period there where he seemed to be trying very hard to fix his name in people's minds as "the Monkey Island guy" with stuff like this, and that always rubbed me the wrong way. (I think I've talked about this before, so apologies if I'm repeating myself.)

It's my fondest hope that this won't be the case, but based on past trends I feel like it probably will be. The adventure game genre has spent so much time looking backward to the "golden era" and referencing, reflecting on and relitigating its own history that I don't think there's a fresh thought, insight or observation still out there to be made. I'm really sick of the tendency within the medium to focus on stories *about* the medium at the expense of telling the kind of stories that earned its reputation in the first place. It's the main reason I didn't care much for Thimbleweed Park, and I really, really hope that Ron Gilbert got all the knowing winks and meta-commentary out of his system there.