Trapezzoid

The LucasArts logo was bad, but so was the rectangular big-L-big-M LucasFilm Games logo. Only the pre-1988 curved logo looked good.

You're probably right. When you instinctively find a melody that "sounds right" it's not always clear if it's The Muse or a faded memory of something you heard years ago. LeChuck's theme more likely used Grim Grinning Ghosts as a conscious inspiration, but maybe another eerie 60s children's song got mixed into that process. The Orient Express melody is a little less simple. Hit the Road is packed with great music, I'd love to listen to inspirational material they used.

A few of the classic LucasArts melodies are a little less original than we always assumed. Some of them are old folk songs and maybe meant to be recognized, but a couple push it and I'm not sure if they just hoped nobody would notice: Doug the Moleman = Murder on the Orient Express LeChuck = Beautiful Things from Dr. Dolittle

I feel like SCUMM games are pretty bug-free for how complex they are. I want to see more exploits like that shopkeeper walk path bug.

A few months ago I had a dream that EMI got remastered to lean into a simplified low-poly aesthetic, and it felt more like a hip absurdist Katamari Damacy type of game. That's how I now choose to remember it.

Maybe a few thousand of those are Guybrush saying "I have ___ pieces of eight."

https://mixnmojo.com/news/A-dead-end-monkey-style Looks like you can end up stuck in LeChuck's torture pit if you sidestep getting the mixed drinks. (Someone commented on that Mojo post from 2008 referencing the MI1 fire dead end, so it's been known for a while.) Am I remembering correctly, can you waste all your money in the grog machine in MI1?

MI2's art is scanned and digitized kind of poorly IMO. The retouches are minimal, they left in a lot of grain and smudginess. By DOTT and Sam & Max their process got a lot cleaner. Those games' paintings are totally repixeled over with solid colors and handpicked palettes, using the scanned artwork as more of a guide layer for the final pixel art.

With the NASA connection I wonder if they're gonna continue on with the alien lore, Chariots of the Gods stuff. Either that or Indy proves the Flat Earth theory.

Thanks, and yup! I actually showed Ron some screencaps when he was demoing Thimbleweed at XOXO Fest, he said he liked my art 🤩 That's a pretty interesting thought, that you'd get used to the one-click norm and only think to check for other options on intuition. I think it depends on your completionist urge-- sometimes you need to feel like you've fully swept a room before moving on, and I'd probably never stop right clicking on everything.

Re: verbs. I played a little bit of Delores, and the context-menu system is pretty snappy, but most hotspots can only be looked at so it's effectively a menu with one item. Sometimes two. If I see an object that looks like it can be picked up, I'd prefer to try and fail, rather than be prevented from even trying. This means either you write a lot of tailored responses, or rely on canned responses. It's annoying, but I think it contributes to the "never know until you try" aspect of solving these games. I designed a game interface with a menu that always had at least three options per hotspot-- eye, hand, and mouth. Like CMI, the exact verbs changed based on context. Rather than being able to talk to inanimate objects, most items had a "look at" and a "talk about", which meant writing both Sierra-style popup descriptions AND an in-character spoken line. Might've been descriptive overkill.

Context lists can cheapen the experience a bit too. You ideally want to come up with an idea and try it. Clicking a hotspot and seeing an interesting option you hadn't considered pop up on the list defeats the purpose. That's just the game telling you what to do.

Best way to fuzzy up the timeline would be to make Guybrush into a folk legend like Baron Munchausen.

I don't really have a beef with the performances, I just think it's a quality of the writing in those days that works best with your inner voice. They weren't expecting anyone to act out those lines, they were crafting them with the intent of their words rendering in glorious pixelated text. The dialogue has a pithy, Far Side cadence to it. So deadpan it's silent. Now that I've seen a bunch of SCUMM script I appreciate what a great creative tool it was for letting multiple people write a game collaboratively. That's what gives MI its charm, writing it was functionally pretty close to just some dudes making each other laugh on a BBS.

The old games are written to be read, tbh. The delivery and timing in your imagination is better than any voice acting.