Vainamoinen

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.

I'm at work, somebody do one with the Raiders of the Lost Ark storage depot. 😂

This community really rubs me the right way. 😊

No, they're two different companies. On the left is some guy from Damned Heists of LeChuck (DHL) and on the right is a ghost pirate from Undead Pirate Shipments (UPS).

It would simply be awesome if the Guybrush sprite changed with the perspective. It wouldn't be without precedent – we had a top down view during the rope attachment scene in TSoMI, the conversation with the fisherman in LeChuck's Revenge used a more detailed Guybrush model. No idea how probable this is, but I wouldn't rule it out. The graphics and animation team's effort is definitely going somewhere, it may just not be where you'd expect it. Now for the important thing: Can we start with a "ghost guy delivering boxes to all the places" meme already? Listen, don't tell anyone, but I figured it all out. The "real" secret of Monkey Island is that the Carnival of the Damned contains a lot of doors that lead to different places and moments in Guybrush's life, past, present and future (most of them are locked though, so he'll need a lot of keys). But once he passes through such a portal/door, he'll look just like he did in the respective game, costume and body build included. That's it, that's the game. Strange, it's much more dayofthetentacly than I thought. 🐒

It certainly is the last truly original Monkey Island costume design we've had. SE1, SE2 and even Tales were derivative designs. I so hope they're going for a completely new design in ReMI.

I did look that game up. It of course can't hold a candle to Dynablaster on the Amiga, but it looks pretty fun to play. And, absolutely, the assorted twitchables will always reach a larger and younger audience. Then again, this is how the gamestar.de main navigational bar has looked for the past two months: Not seeing those Fall Guys anywhere ... but ... 😍

Thanks for that! It is, of course, an English interview that was translated from the German but was originally English, so shrug emotes galore. Could mean anything. The interesting thing in this tidbit, for me, is less that they want to bring you up to speed with the other games, but rather that they feel a need to. You can play any of the Monkey Island games without knowing squat about the others. So what has changed in the series? Is it possible that they'll jump wildly through acts of Guybrush's life like I predicted all those pages ago ... ? 🙃 This also points to quite an acceptance of MI canon, if that feature includes scenes from 3 to 5. Dammit, we COULD see Morgan again!

Uncharted has really developed. I started the series with part four / A Thief's End, which still had way too many combat sequences for me. I went back to play the Remastered stuff, but never finished part 1, this long long line of shooting sequences. Lost Legacy, for me, was almost perfect. The story focus was strong, the main characters great, there was the flirt with an open world (and even a map). Still too many repetitive mechanics (I am a P&C adventure fan after all). I don't think that MachineGames would ever make "my dream Indiana Jones game", which would be a FOA reboot anyway, but if they tailor it after Uncharted, it would be great if they'd take lessons from what Uncharted did not so badly in their earlier parts. And Indiana Jones was never the guy to frantically jump around, climb rock faces, go into a gun fight armed with more than six bullets. He's never been a Nathan Drake. Also, Game companies these days seem mortally afraid of releasing a game that takes "just" ten to fifteen hours to complete. That's a trend that could really change.

Yeah, I loved the gold guy and his/her shenannigans. And it really set the game division apart from the rest of Lucasfilm. They started with nothing Lucas, not even Indiana Jones. I liked how this was reflected in the logo. Downrep killed the GOG forum. Hate this stuff, even if the guys with the rep in the negative four digits may have deserved it. Besides, there could never be an actual "Unpopular Opinions" in a forum with thumbs down mechanics, which is what downrepping is. No one would post in this thread for fear of posting an actually unpopular opinion. It enables users to gang up on someone. It gamifies bullying. So glad they removed it, hopefully completely. I may even post my truly unpopular opinion one of these days. Didn't lie up there. It exists, and I'm ashamed of it.

What do you mean, "removes reputation points" 😱

THANK YOU. 🧡 Any kind of emote that can instantly express negativity towards a post/member will be used as such. The thumbs down, the rolling eyes and for fuck's sake the middle finger can be slapped on a post as negative value judgements. This is an extremely dangerous social experiment. Communities have been ruined by less. 😬

In an apparent second round of raising awareness, German magazine GameStar published an interview with Ron and Dave just two weeks ago. It's behind a paywall, but I have no doubts that absolutely no new information is contained for the English speaking world. The journalists have sent their questions right at the beginning of April and have only recently heard back from them. The Italian, Spanish and Portuguese are similarly crazy for the ol' point'n'click (no, seriously, I am not kidding. Tim was wrong), I guess they've gotten their "exclusives" these days also. And, seriously, these guys are all (still) happily falling over themselves to promote ReMI, and they're a bit insulted that it took Terrible T. so long to use them. There is only so much buzz you can create with the extremely limited info that they repeatedly divulge at the time, but from the looks of it, marketing for Return to Monkey Island has never stopped. The "backlash" created by really just a few people has had no effect here. If anything, the buzz is much greater around ReMI than around any other Devolver game in recent history. As has been demonstrated in this forum and elsewhere, reviving the Monkey Island brand has brought Devolver new customers, and they're likely aware of it. And come to speak of it, I haven't heard any kind of overly negative comments during the last weeks. These people are not gaining a foothold in actual Monkey Island or point & click communities. They rant in completely different communities that wouldn't play ReMI anyway – and in those Oceans of Eternal Rant, a single thread about Return's aesthetics really doesn't make a difference.

Well good morning Jake, I hear somebody's been playing cards with Ron Gilbert yesterd Uhm, nothing to see here.

If that guess was accurate, Telltale would have closed down some time in 2006. 😘 Pretty sure Bay Area Sound is doing the good work here, and they know their ship.

Where could you possibly be going with this line of inquiry? 😅 I get it, you'd like to know whether they'll release next week. Now, that's fairly doubtful, but there are some good signs. We've been given the estimate that ReMI has 14,000 lines of dialog, now Ron has told us more than 13,000 lines are going to be remastered. He has also joked that it would be impossible to re-record the "forgotten" line about the real secret of Monkey Island, so we can assume that count is final. Larger budget productions often do voice recordings in earlier parts of the development process as they complete slices of the game. That's likely not in the budget here. So, yes, it's probably fair to assume that we're in the final stage of production. But as that includes not just audio, but also bugfixing, it's unclear what that means exactly for the schedule. A positive thought is of course that we can clearly expect ReMI to be "on schedule" for a 2022 release. And as November and December, and even the latter half of October traditionally are a release window that indies don't touch because of the dominant AAA releases ... ... four months to wait, max.

Ron's undeniable affinity to Apple products and the chosen ReMI graphic style should work in your favor here. I've found that my processor or graphics card didn't really outdate that much these last years. It was plainly RAM that forced me to upgrade (which was 4 GB though). I think you'll be able to run the game. Save that money for merchandise. 😇 13 inch? Well, someone here won't be complaining about not enough detail.

The strange thing isn't just that there was no trailer. It's also that Ron and Dave were apparently very aware of how the hardcore fanbase was sitting at their screens around the globe expecting a trailer, and they never mentioned a reason for the no-show, not before, not afterwards. Dave even retweeted Majus' Trailer Reaction Simulation (MTRS™), still not a word (well, technically, there was a word, but it was "dededeledeleldeldelele"*). Something is afoot here. Maybe good things are simply right around the corner. 🤔 * which is even wrong. It should clearly be "dedededelededededeledeledede". And, yes, I spent almost 15 minutes checking this one. See what the absence of a trailer has done to me?

I love how Dave Grossman's twitter account now basically is a Marius retweet bot. 😆

What's a trailer? A miserable little pile of spoilers. We don't need no stinkin' ... Yeahhhhhh a trailer would have been nice, and would have shown the appreciation that Devolver hopefully has for the franchise. After the reaction to the first screenshots, however, it kind of dawned on me that the clever marketing would be to not show the Guybrush design at all until the game came out (or do a real live action trailer with Dom as Guybrush. Just sayin'!). I guess if we really need a trailer, we'll have to do one ourselves. If need be, I'd draw some backgrounds! 😌

That was of course just a reflex like. I am of course fast asleep like a normal person at midnight. ... ah well. No trailer. Darn!