Vainamoinen

Maybe we should ask every few months and as soon as Dom declines, we can be dead certain a new Monkey Island is secretly in the works.

Considering the fairly complex lighting situation, he might have used reference of his own face for all the pirates including Guybrush. Working that way, I'd assume that likenesses aren't purposeful, but just happen. 🤨 Shhhh!! 🤫 That's his personal business!!

Here's the shadow shape interpretation, colored. Yeah ... I really want to up this coloring game.

My mood hasn't shifted, at all. I never thought it could be the biggest and best thing ever, but, in true Monkey Island style, I think that Return will be the second greatest Monkey Island game I've ever seen. 🐵🏝️

I think it may all boil down to what we expect from an adventure game. As Telltale's later "adventure" games have shown, it's not just a question of whatever interactivity. What adventure games traditionally did great, besides the puzzles, was the social interaction (conversation trees) and exploration in any given scene (what's this? What does the protagonist think of it?). And some of my favorite adventure games could go on for quite some time with just that, making friends and experiencing new surroundings (like The Longest Journey, especially the Alatien settlement scene). If you fall into the socialite-explorer category of the Adventure Gamer Holy Alignment System Typecasting (AGHAST™), I guess there's absolutely nothing wrong with "I don't do puzzles". I'm torn though. I love puzzles, but I get easily frustrated nowadays. I love the feeling of accomplishment, but often wish I didn't have to accomplish so damn much before earning that feeling. I don't know. Back when Ron Gilbert made Thimbleweed Park, I think he said something like "I don't want to make an adventure game like it was back in the 80s, I want to make one that feels like it". Maybe he had the right idea back then already.

Welllllll actually, if Escape from Monkey Island remains canon, Guybrush "washed up on the beaches of Mêlée Island™" and did in fact not ... OUCH!! PAPAPISHU!! WHO THREW THAT?!

Still feels like Star Wars to me. Honestly, I'm so glad Han Solo didn't turn out to be Leia's son.

Ahhhh folks, can we not do this right now? At the very least, LucasArt's willingness to revive the Monkey Island franchise this side of Y2K made Tales of Monkey Island possible, maybe even Return to Monkey Island. It certainly made the Special Editions possible. Had Maniac Mansion or Zak McKracken received the same treatment, who knows where these franchises would be right now. At the very least, the composer trinity did stellar and enduring work for Escape. If they draw on their EMI Scumm Bar theme, the lawyers, the peg leg shop for ReMI, come on! That would be great! EMI is definitely a central part of their body of work. At the very least, Escape from Monkey Island found a way to use the insult sword fighting paradigm without reapplying its strict and stale mechanisms over and over again. My rejection is now 20 years old. I played it once and rejected it out of a variety of reasons, none of them strictly speaking objective. When I watch how people see the art style of Return to Monkey Island and instantly reject the game before it's even out, I'm reminded how I rejected EMI's art style. Maybe I should just buy and try it again. Give it another chance. I really doubt it will ever become my favorite, but if I can find some moments in that game that I might have missed back in the day, that's certainly worth it. 🫂

the T-shirts (invented 1971) the Hook Island neon sign (1910) the cereal box (1863) the grog vending machine (1890) diverse printed brochures (1946) breath mints (1790) glass wine bottle (not in this shape/form before 1821) the giant Q-Tip (1926) the staple remover (1971) gopher repellant spray can (1970) wax lips (1924) root beer (1876) rubber chicken (early 1900s) electronic door lock (1976) "fuel economy" sign (not relevant until 1960s) circus poster (1840s) the circus, actually (since 1768, yet not in its modern form, "clown" as on the poster not recognizable until the 1800s) Things get REALLY wild in LeChuck's Revenge of course.

This is so important. And I'm pretty sure that's where we're heading! With LeChuck's Revenge, Ron has been dripping the personal on the character already. Suddenly he was a person with a mom and a dad, possibly even a brother. Who has tried but failed to practise playing the piano. Starting with Curse, Guybrush has become more of a projection figure / wish fulfilment for the player again, more of a blank slate, suddenly of slim build and possibly even handsome. I'd love for the question Who even is that guy(brush)? to come into focus again. Have Ron and Dave answer questions about the character that really only they should be allowed to answer.

OR!

Oh come on, now he's just trolling. 😂

14,000 lines of dialog? That's nothing. woodchuck jokes - 1,500 lines possible answers to Toothrot's latest zen question - 250 lines Guybrush's renewed attempt to "pick up" Kate Capsize - 500 lines Stan's latest sales pitch - 5,000 lines insult swordfighting - 200 lines Guybrush getting back together with Elaine - 143 lines Elaine breaking up with Guybrush - 1 line LeChuck explaining his latest evil plan - 6,406 lines

Three times in a single day ... I mean, come on. 🙉

All those years we thought it was always 10 PM on Melee Island when in fact it was 10 AM!

The palette seems fairly close to the original to me. The yellows and oranges are there in the original – as variants of the same hue though. What's new to Rex' depiction of the same street is a tinge of cyan, I think. What still pervades the scene is, of course, that strong blue. Which certainly is the traditional choice for "night" (not necessarily " the correct" choice of course). In any case, we'd need Guybrush to enter that church and light a few candles in there. That would bring us some of those right hues back.

I love those Scabb Island original paintings especially. Even though it's clearly nighttime, they still have great light/dark contrast and very strong hues. I was playing "Gibbous" some time ago, which is mostly a night time setting as well, and even though it's a nice point & click, they really haven't thought about contrast and color. At all. It's all way too dark and muddy, the vast majority of the backgrounds are. Traditional art on paper is great (so great that it's the only art I create at the time), but it seems to me that the main problem with modern adventure games is not that the art is "digital". It's that sometimes the traditional, time honored knowledge seems to have been lost in the transition, and that knowledge could easily be applied to the digital process. It's just another thing that Rex understands and applies. The Melee Island color palette just feels right, the contrasts are all there.

Last year I started one of my patented never-going-to-be-finished™ art projects. The ingame artwork of Captain Dread's map gave me next to nothing for this, and the "high res" variant found in the MI2 Special Edition was ... insulting. So I sought out the original Purcell painting. Which had a different format and was even more confusing (but such is Dread). It did have all the intended detail though. It was shocking to see what was lost. The detail on the sea monsters was completely lost, they had to redraw the numbers completely to make them legible. And of course the format was wrong so they had to compress the whole art vertically. I guess sometimes after scanning, the digital cleanup crew back in the 90s still had a whole lot of work in front of them. 😬 So, like you said, nostalgia fanatics like myself have become attached to their own interpretation of less legible loose pixel collections. Then there's the fact that a whole lot of work was done on the backgrounds after scanning. AND then there's this tiny little problem that these backgrounds were painted in a ridiculously small format, I'd guess around 25 cm / 10 inch in width. The detail that we have thought to recognize in-game might have never been there. When the Monkey Island 2 Special Edition came out, I heard a lot of people asking "Why didn't they just take the original art and scanned it in high resolution?". I think we're dangerously close to several good answers to that. Where was I heading? Ah, yes. I think Rex is bringing back, intentionally, what was unintentional in 1990, this search for meaning in areas with less detail. It's a bold, a dangerous path, it will go wrong for many. But it also kind of makes us co-conspirators and accomplices in his crimes. I kind of like that. ✊

Not even ...

Damn those lineart island maps are great. I think I'll make some for Return to Monkey Island. 😇

We don't need no stinkin' books to learn insult swordfighting! You'll have to learn that directly from the dairy farmer's mouth. 🐄

The director has courted Struzan publicly, via twitter, so I still won't rule it out completely. Then again, it was the Cringedumb of the Rectal Dull poster that broke Sallah's camel's back in 2008. According to "The Art of Drew Struzan", it was literally the poster that forced him into retirement. It would be neat to have this "end of an era" bonus too. The last Indiana Jones with the last John Williams soundtrack and the last Drew Struzan poster. But you can't have everything, I guess.

Here we go, whenever that screenshot is posted, I keep clicking on the book with the crossed swords cover. In my defense, I really want it.

On top of that, superverbs can have symbolic meaning and be used to perform symbolic acts (like e. g. the very last puzzle of The Longest Journey). And I'm a huge fan of those, because they can drive the story in an unparalleled way. But when I look at the history of the point and click during the last two decades, what's happened is that developers primarily focus on inventory items and reduce the verb system to plainly just one, which is "click to do something with that" (CTDSWT). It's my main (and possibly only!) gripe with Broken Age and a whole lot of other adventure games, some of which at least reserved right clicking for "look at" – an extraverb that was swiftly abandoned once mobile gaming came into focus. 15 verbs in Maniac Mansion and 9 in Thimbleweed Park, I would assume that Ron hasn't cut down verbs to one yet (PHEW 😌). But context sensitive verbs have been done before. Take Full Throttle, or better yet, Curse of Monkey Island: the open mouth could mean "eat", "talk to", "inhale" etc.; the hand could mean "take", "push", "pull", "touch" and so on. Ron seems to have taken a late liking to CMI, which is wonderful but odd to experience, sooooo ... ... a variant of the verb coin with fitting inventory items, maybe? Anything besides the CTDSWT would be nice. 🦊