Vainamoinen

Who even needs a trailer if we get that instead?!? 🥰

You lucky bandbard! On Stranger Tides is a main inspiration for one of my favorite game series, and James Gurney ... I wish he was my dad, that's all I'll say.

This is what I read into it: weird_fantasy: "I've got to believe that we will have something before Pax West" Dom: "Yes. (You've absolutely got to believe that because the truth would drive you insane)"

Now that's a post that would have belonged in one of those patented "waiting threads" on the Telltale forums. Back then, we gave users 24 hours timeout on episode release days when they cried "IT'S OUT" even though it wasn't. Ahhhhh fun times. 🙉 No news means they're pretty busy getting this game done, I swear. The announcement is juuuuust around the corner, I can feel it! And even if the ReMI buzz is short lived, for one sweet sweet moment when I looked up Dave Grossman on google and twitter, the first results gave me the excellent game designer and not the less than excellent "I train cops to be killers so what" dude.

All right. Life-size Guybrush statue with Dominic's likeness it is.

Surely this AI could write Frozen parts three to one hundred and forty-eight.

Or even that Monkey island was the site of a past apocalyptic event. Remember all those anachronisms ... ? Well.

(Note: I've copy-pasted this quote from Marius' Details of Monkey Island thread, because I'd like to keep that one a thread of full blown positivity) I guess it's really maddening if you have some inside knowledge and can't share it, especially when people are talking about that exact thing and visibly lack the knowledge that you have. 😞 I'm not clobbering Disney at the moment, they've made a new Monkey Island possible and they have a B rating on the Yale/Russia list after all (I will, however, clobber them if they interfere with the excellent Devolver/gog.com relationship and/or will only sell a PC version of ReMI through a company with an F rating. But enough of the politics stuff). But Disney is huge, Disney holds innumerable monopolies, every employee has an infinite number of higher-ups with quite different ideas about how things are done. What mere opinion prevails in the end is a game of chance, and some decisions will necessarily feel absurd and damaging to both the individual franchise as well as Disney as a whole. Somebody, somewhere, at Disney has made the decision to get rid of the original "Adventures in Babysitting" artwork by Drew Struzan by just throwing it out with the trash. Somebody then made the decision to place it lowest in a pile, face down in a puddle of water. But some Disney employee also made the decision to call the artist and bring the ruined artwork back to him, free of charge. Good guys, bad guys. I don't know, I just hate it when companies get so big that the left hand never knows what the right does. Some will always be there for the money. Others still have dreams, principles and compassion. 🤷‍♂️

Oh how I tried to get On Stranger Tides with the James Gurney cover. 😭

One of my pandemic efforts. I had a really good surge of creative energy back in 2020. But, alas, didn't finish much. Back when I showed it around, one of the most common comments was "That's not Guybrush Threepwood!". I mean, I can't taylor the outcome that much to what's in my brain, but this one is coming pretty close to how I imagined high res Guybrush in the original The Secret of Monkey Island. Hope you guys like it ... ... because I have tons of that stuff back from 2020, especially Swordmaster sketches ... I have so, so many Swordmaster sketches ...

Which was, again, a Disney decision. Apparently the steward of the brand feels the wind blowing from a different direction. 🤔

I love the screens that have that kind of repoussoir in the foreground. It really gives the whole scene that much more depth and credibility. By Monkey Island 2, they had perfected the technique and we even had out-of-focus elements directly in front of our noses that framed and guided our view. The two slanting ship masts that guide our view into Wally's home, for example. The map room under Rum Roger's house. The foreground of the Booty Island shop. Sometimes I feel like it's a lost art form as well and would today be considered a waste of space by modern designers. It really, really isn't. It's an early example of interactive storytelling, and I love it dearly. From the guy who brought you "cut-scenes", here's a story that actually changes depending on how the protagonist acts. There's more of course, with an entire cutscene (Elaine meeting Guybrush on the dock) being optional depending on what order you do your tasks in. I really, really hope Ron brings this back. There may be even more hilarious applications of the paradigm. 😄

And here I was thinking ... with just a teensy bit of rearrangement, they could have made a stylized key out of the o of Monkey and the I of island. That was a freebie, Disney! Next one's going to cost ya. URhhghhhhhnnnn slow weekend. I'd like some news. 🆕

Oh, I was pretty certain you typed those woods. 😇

Also, the subtitles call Guybrush "Mr. Threepword". 😊

Same thing that drove me up the wall in Firefly's "The Message" episode though: Elaine has a plan, but she doesn't tell Guybrush, thereby infantilizing her husband. It's definitely not nearly as bad as punching him four times in the opening cinematic, but EMI and ToMI both share the problem that Elaine and Guybrush are never a team, never equal partners in the thing they're doing.

Oh, right. It's that scene that I completely missed, like, my first five runs through TSoMI because I always solved the idol task last. 🥇❌ 🥈⚔️ 🥉👩‍🦰

TEH HUEG NEWS There's a galley, and a ship, and a lamp, and a soup, perhaps even a vichyssoise, and and and ... a Guybrush! Seriously folks, interactive lighting effects in a Monkey Island game, I feel good about this. Might help Mr. Brush to reveal all those pirate symbols on that dozen islands that we're going to visit. Also! Dave tweeted that roughly half are Dominic's lines, and of course hilarity ensued. So, 8,357 dialog lines in CMI, and about 5,000 of those were LeChuck explaining his evil plan. Sounds better and better for Return to Monkey Island.

Then again, we're supposed to identify the parts that Ron wrote himself when the characters suddenly get all grumpy.

If Ron observes canon, that's indeed the central roadblock to bringing his version of Elaine back. He previously commented on how marriage is the central thing he would have never done. That is completely understandable. Elaine likes Guybrush. But Guybrush isn't ready for a relationship, and that was the central takeaway of LeChuck's Revenge. Most of us have probably tried to worm their way back into Elaine's heart back in that infamous party scene. Which was a game of trial and error, one that always ended in failure. Eventually, Guybrush would choose Big Whoop over Elaine for us and in spite of us. It was a line in the sand that we could not cross. Sure, he'd take Elaine AND Big Whoop, but if he only got ONE, well ... sorry Elaine, pirate here. 🏴‍☠️ I'm pretty convinced now that Ron and Dave have cooked up something really special with the story and the segue from MI2:LCR. But I'm not convinced they can fix Elaine as a character.

I don't really remember EMI-Elaine, and I'm pretty okay with ToMI-Elaine (where she enters some kind of berserker mode due to the Pox), but the more I thought about Curse, the ickier it got. So after an unconditional confession of love to the protagonist (that is in no relation to the predecessor's ending), she is turned into a statue. Which is its own damsel trope for a reason. And it's a gold statue, pretty much a trophy, a prize, a treasure that gets stolen and redistributed over the course of the game. Objectification doesn't get more obvious even though the sexualization might be missing for a bit. When the curse is lifted, we get seconds before we see her tied up and gagged. And if you click through all the LeChuck dialog, you can watch her react to LeChuck's confession that he killed her dad. That's literally torture (and not particularly funny). Last scene, wedding dress. I like Curse of Monkey Island, a lot, but to quote somebody who really figured this sh*t out, it’s entirely possible to be critical of some aspects of a piece of media while still finding other parts valuable or enjoyable.

Or re-recording. Subversive thought: What if Alexandra spent just an hour in the studio, total, and Elaine's role in Return to Monkey Island is more or less as much as in LeChuck's revenge?

I hope this topic isn't drowned out by delivery ghost memes. 😅 Of course Noah will exaggerate a bit and who would blame him, but I'm confident that he wouldn't draw this much attention to the beginning part if it was just a bad segue from LeChuck's Revenge to Return to Monkey Island. We actually have a rather clear idea what those first ten minutes are about: We're starting off at the Carnival of the Damned, Ron always wanted to, and we're resolving a situation that's been left unresolved for over 30 years. But they can't just render a solution, they also immediately have to hook us onto a new story arc. The first and the latter are difficult, but both at the same time especially so. I'm so excited to see what they have cooked up!

It looks like he has Leia hair buns. So I'll call him Lester. He's probably the protagonist.