Niemandswasser

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.

Damn right they are. If there's one thing a monkey knows it's that a bunch is better than one.

The "fiction of the game" is pretty porous and reflexive, though--Guybrush addresses the player directly in MI1, and in every sequel he makes some reference or other to being a character in a video game. The fictional world is only ever as consistent as the current scene needs it to be.

Grazie!* *Thank you!

Any links to an English version, by any chance?

The chimp would have eaten their face off in the third week and the ship never would have made it, as of all the great apes they're known to be the worst with a compass. This brings up a great point which my previous post accidentally obfuscated: chimps, orangutans, gorillas, and bonobos are the *great* apes (along with humans and Bigfeets), but there are also the lesser apes of the gibbon family (including the siamang). My point is that...shit, I actually don't think I had one.

I think it's probably fair to say that Hit the Road has the highest number of non-human primates in the non-MI LucasArts canon. Unless we're counting Wookiees? ...Christ, we're not, are we? EDIT: No, damn it, we can't go making that statement definitively! There were a significant number of monkeys running around in Infernal Machine, and I think Desktop Adventures may have had some as well. Wheels within wheels, fires within fires...how deep does the mystery go???

Chimps are apes, along with gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, and, of course, Bigfoots. The latter is the only ape species native to the western hemisphere, so there are no chimps in the Caribbean.

I'll move on after this because we're getting way off topic, just wanted to say I 1000% respect and understand your reasons for staying away from Steam and hope I didn't come off as trying to argue/dismiss them; I was just explaining my own aversion to patronizing GOG given a series of decisions over a period of years that soured me on their public-facing image. (Also, AFAIK Steam didn't pull Devotion outside of China--Red Candle pulled it themselves to edit out the "offending material" and then, for reasons that I've never seen made public, it never went back up. Assuming there was some behind-the-scenes stuff that was never disclosed which may well have come from Valve, but all we can do is speculate.) Anyway. I have a Switch so that seems like a good place to play the game.

This is the only interpretation that makes sense, and again, I implore you all to refrain from making ridiculous claims that my MI2 vote is in any way responsible for my saying so.

I certainly don't think Valve is any better than CDProjekt, but it always seemed like CDPR embraced and welcomed the reactionary assholes on their platform in a wink-nudge sort of way that got to be too much for me to stomach. (Did they ever lock or delete the "Gamergate Updates" thread in their general forum? It sure was there for a long time.) The last straw for me was trying to claim that "many messages from gamers" were behind the self-created PR disaster that was their cowardly Devotion about-face; it read to me like a pathetic, transparent, hail-Mary attempt to blow the "the gamers" dogwhistle so those jagoffs would circle the wagons for them. And it didn't even fool *them*. I definitely don't have any love for Valve or Steam, and I wouldn't advocate supporting one or the other; if ReMI was a GOG exclusive I'd almost certainly swallow my distaste and buy it there. Considering what's required to even make a computer, the mere act of owning one cancels out any good a boycott of one or the other online game store might put into the world (imo). In the end I just flat out don't like CDPR very much, so I don't go to their playground. For others it's the other way around, and I both get and respect that.

I feel like until and unless it's contradicted by ReMI the only sporting thing is to accept at face value--for the purposes of the thread, of course--EMI's assertion that Jojo Sr. never left that totem pole. Elaine's wedding monkey must therefore be a different (more robustly-tailed) simian, and in no way should my apparently-irreversible vote for MI2 be seen as influencing this view.

Personally I don't think this is an oversight--I think allowing it is intentional. At best CD Projekt has tended to look the other way with the crowd who do this; at worst they have a history of soft-catering to them.

Pirate spunk?

I'll go one further--have we seen any evidence to this point that Murray was not, prior to his necrofication, a monkey named Jojo? Note that he says, on his introduction in CMI, "You may call me Murray," not "My name is Murray" [emphasis added]. I think it's entirely possible he was attempting to conceal his true place in.....THE CONSPIRACY!!!!

Even as a preteen I remember thinking the marketing listing "more monkeys than ever!" as some sort of selling point was really bizarre. Like, did they think that to this point I'd been playing these games because of the monkeys?

OBJECTION! There are AT LEAST 5 named monkeys in the franchise--Jojo (MI1), unrelated Jojo (MI2), Jojo Jr. (EMI), Timmy (EMI), and Jacques (TMI). The series' JPI (Jojo Percentage Index) has just dropped from 75% to 60%, and I have a feeling it may drop further!

I'd always interpreted that being because it was part of the mechanism Smirk puppeteered while operating the machine, but yeah, looking at it in motion now that seems unlikely.

I was always under the impression that the monkey on Smirk's machine was a stuffed toy, but now I'm not sure.

I think the ones in the theater are LeChimp's crew, so that would be counting them twice.

But Mama she don't love you

Clearly the solution will be ReMi