Vainamoinen

Still some telltale signs of OCR to report.

Not convinced! Now if you had said that the Prothesis Shop theme is like Beautiful Things from Dr. Dolittle, THAT I might have bought. 😉

Oh god I'm so happy I never translated my full "Poké(sum)mon" trailer review into English. That would have further endangered our relationship. 😅 But it's true, that trailer had nothing for me besides a three second reminiscence to Uematsu-san's "Prologue" theme. I assure you, I come from an initial position of rabid FF fandom as well, it's just that this love has stopped being requited for nigh 20 years. Which could lead me to compare the change in target audiences of the MI and FF franchise, but ... ⛔ Ohhhhh but those are so cute. Particularly when they speak in the social "we". The Devolver thing will air at midnight over here. So I'll have to make a similar decision. I think the basic question I'll have to answer to myself is: "How crazy am I?" Does Raphael twerk at April? Of course I think so! 👍

You're not alone with the tears, but 🤫 Watching this really feels like a rude invasion of your privacy. Thanks for sharing. 😆 I've only recently become fascinated with interpassivity, with Let's Plays and movie reaction videos, and from what I can tell, your pure joy or Marius' joy is something that the AAA game industry can only dream of. I'm pretty sure last week's Final Fantasy XVI 'summon' trailer easily cost ten thousand times as much as Devolver's teaser did, even though it's really just a bunch of black dudes on a black background (and they stole Sauron's armor for Odin), but I highly doubt it elicited even a fraction of the enthusiasm.

I had @Marius' reaction video and that simply made the day for me. April 4th, it was all sunshine and monkey wrenches.

You just wait until I get home. I have a truly nasty, absurdly nitpicky, entirely subjective and completely senseless preference that dumps on all of the greatest people directly, and this thread is just right for it.

The exact way I phrased one third of a sentence in an overwhelmingly positive, glowing review of Broken Age was probably incorrect, but fueled not by misinformation, but misrememberings. There were layoffs, in November of 2014, after an unannounced project fell through. And 12 people, for such a small company, yes of course it made waves. I can't find the exact scene in the documentary, but these people were definitely mentioned and missed, Tim was visibly affected and gloomy, and for some reason I remember a lonely christmas tree in a next to empty office. The way google remembers it, no one was fired from the Broken Age project directly. But I and others might be forgiven for thinking that even with a three million buck infusion (sorry for the inflation adjustment earlier 🥸), people could not be ... redistributed. I in no perceivable way question the torrent of misinformation that came from the alt-right precursor née attempted game culture suicide that stupid Adam Baldwin got to christen. I've spent nearly eight years cleaning up the tons of 💩 that these dudes clogged the streets of the internet with. It was a whole lot of it, and it took until this year that I finally started to see parts of the street again. You have to know about three thousand percent more than your average angry Joe about gg proceedings, but if you do, you can actually get some people to reconsider nowadays. Even if it's just the begrudging acknowledgement that "Yeah well, but Totalbiscuit was more of a simple mind anyway."

A few pages back, I compared the idea that Return to Monkey Island could be anything besides "Monkey Island 6" to the equally absurd notion that you could funk up the Doctor count by retroactively inserting an in-between doctor into the story. Adding to that, in my completely objective opinion, anyone who did not madly fall for the Donna-Doctor-duo back in 2008 can not possibly possess a soul. But back to the topic at hand. 🥰 At the beginning of April, back when hell froze over, I was pretty sure that Monkey Island fans would be so starved for a new part, one with Rondave at the helm and the iMuse trio at the instruments (plus JEJ, I'll have to add), that they would not utter a word of criticism and just enjoy this new entry. Sure that was naive, but it was a naivity that was specific to the Monkey Island series. I've bathed in that fandom's positivity back in 2009 and that even sold the concept of episodic gaming to me. I'm pretty disappointed by game culture as a whole – so much in fact that I sometimes wonder whether the bulk of "gamers" nowadays even like their own hobby, or if it's just something they started because there's nothing else for them, really. The criticism up until now was by a select few who dislike – rather "strongly dislike", "hate" or "despise", evidently, because there are no grey zones in gamer country – the early screenshots and animation shown in the teaser. However, I guess at least 97% of MI enthusiasts have taken a rough assessment of the dominant three negative nelly archetypes* and decided that those dudes will have to battle it out amongst themselves, to the death. I of course reject the notion that this will be "perhaps the last" Monkey Island game. Chances for Monkey Island 7 are so, so much better now than they were, say, in March of 2022. We'll just make sure that Disney has their payoff, and a sequel is inevitable. * [1] the 40+ year old "how could Ron ever do anything besides the pixel art he promised" archetype, [2] the younger "It should be like CMI but in HD" archetype and, of course, the default [3] "Ron can do whatever style he wants, but NOT THAT ONE" archetype.

Their 'presentations' have great entertainment value and I'm looking forward to them each year. The caveat is huge here though: The game trailers and the hilarious frame narrative are in no relation to each other. You could substitute the trailers with any other trailers and still wouldn't have any inconsistencies with the live action video. They have until the very last moment to decide what trailers to put in there, that's a plus, but I kind of wish that the names of some of the games slip from the mouths of the fictional corporate figures that are portrayed.

I didn't go easy on Broken Age, especially on its development process. To me, the whole documentary, dozens of hours, was a superflous and horribly repetitious product of mere vanity and all money that went into it, wasted. On the other hand, I was being a pompous donkey myself back then because I seemed to know in detail where those three million Kickstarter bucks went, my fifteen included, and it certainly wasn't where I thought they should have gone. Eventually, what I got for 15 bucks was far more than my money's worth. The story was just weird enough to force you into thinking in the narrative's reality, but not so weird that you felt alienated. The themes of adolescence and coming of age, of parents lost and parents questioned, were masterfully implemented. The game had a huge narrative twist that I didn't at all see coming, but was completely obvious in retrospect – a mark of great storytelling. I'm a "part one puzzles" guy myself. Those were easy, certainly, but the actions performed for their solution were also very iconic. It's kind of what I'm after in adventure games these days, where the satisfaction in solving a puzzle is not so much how difficult it was and more how peculiar, iconic, and memorable the solution was. This is all consistent with the adventure games of old. It wasn't really all that difficult to put the hamster in the microwave, the pulley on the cable, the bucket of mud on top of the door. But once you did it, you would never forget the solution to the puzzles. Same goes for the humor, which was more endearing than it was drop-dead funny. Dead Eye Dawn and Dead Eye Courtney, I still chuckle about that one. The music was epic a.f. and the only thing that was a bit sad was how short the soundtrack turned out to be eventually. Distribution was fair, varied and thoughtful. Promising a DRM/Steam free version on Kickstarter was setting a trend that brought so many great games to other vending platforms than just the quasi-monopoly. I think that a special thank you to Double Fine and Tim is in order for that one. And a year after I enjoyed the DRM free Humble installer, Double Fine gifted me the GOG version as well. What can I say, 10/10. 🏆 Yes, of course there were disappointments. Background and music reuse in episode 2 was brazen. It was clear that Double Fine was running on fumes for the latter part. I hated the mobile optimized "click to do something with that" mechanics and would have preferred a few verbs. There should have been a map to bring you back to key areas of the game. The way too sudden spike in difficulty for the final puzzle complex was a major disappointment. But on the whole, I think these gripes felt far worse back then as they do today. Sudden layoffs in November 2014 were particularly disheartening, as they showed the business to still be very vulnerable. Fans had of course hoped Double Fine would emerge from the DFA as an invigorated, strengthened company. Might have to replay this one soon.

Well, no, it's a wreench with a pulleey in the middle. Likewise in Return to Monkey Island, we'll have a rubbeer chickeen with a monkeey in the middle.

I haven't played a lot of Devolver published games sadly, but one I definitely got into hardcore-like was Death's Door (by two-person developer Acid Nerve). Bought the game, pretty immediately also bought the awesome soundtrack. The characters in this one are whackadoodle crazy. I of course completely failed to whack the final boss (or rather, the fake final boss even), which is always horribly disappointing when you've wracked your nerves to even get to the final boss in the first place. Good thing that's not much of a problem with ReMI. 😝 I could post a trailer, I won't. What I'm going to do is post one of the music tracks. Then you're going to hear the same track but as it occurs in the game – literally synched up to the sound of piston platforms that go up and down. Official, as in the soundtrack: With piston clanking (which they phase in and out in the game):

Miserably failed prompts: "Steve Purcell puts himself in Monkey Island poster" - "band Sparks composes Monkey Island soundtrack" - "Stan sells entire carribbean" - "Mancomb Seepgood's day off" - "three headed monkey goes to tokyo" - "manny calavera gets a real face" "Guybrush's dad eats bananas" at least turned out a little raunchy: "Elaine finally marries LeChuck", here's the good stuff folks: "El Pollo Diabolo kills Hitler": I had hoped they wouldn't show us HOW Pollo kills Hitler. But here we are. Obviously, "Monkey Island Star Trek crossover": Look behind you ... another Spock head is growing out of your shoulder! "Indiana Jones and the Red Sock of Antioch" 10/10 I mean it's all there, more or less "Green T and the Sushi Platters 3rd album cover" "Why the third?", you ask. Well, EVERY AI could generate the FIRST.

I didn't think it was possible, but these eyes are even more effed up than Guybrush's left eye, Elaine's right eye, and Ozzie's right eye on the cover of Escape from Monkey Island. 😏

What @demone said. "The secret" is likely just a bit of personal background information about Guybrush Threepwood that ties him in some way to Monkey Island. I don't have any great expectations, and I'm not even enjoying the speculation, because it so often is in the very center of discussion when other things could be discussed*. I'm much more keen on hearing more about Guybrush's family background than I am to find out whether Ron has or hasn't placed info in TSoMI and LCR that could be considered hints/foreshadowing about some secret. Whether there is or not is not important, the appeal of the "secret", for 30 years, has always been that no one knew squat about it. Once it's revealed, the whole enigma goes poof and we'll kind of wish it was never revealed. 😬 * You're still waiting for the speculation? Well okay then. Guybrush is actually cannibal no. 4 on a special mission. In Return to Monkey Island, they will heal his amnesia and call him carambolahead again.

Wouldn't that be 7 AM UK time?! Well, if I skip work for the first hour or so ... ... yeahhhhhhh I'll be watching it live. Damn it, my time zone calculation skills have taken a nose dive since Telltale times. Now I think it would actually be midnight UK time.

How about a weird clone that sells the Caribbean? Oh don't worry. If that were true, we'd know. I really hope they will go the LeChuck's Revenge route and give us the opportunity to travel between several islands in the same act, including Mêlée Island™. Not sure they're close to telling us a release date yet. But yeah, we'll have news, and in the wildest and most franchise fitting fashion imaginable: As part of a Devolver Presentation on June 9th. If anyone here hasn't got a clue what Devolver is pulling off during these marketing stunts, I highly recommend hitting the ol' youtube for a primer. Here's the 2021 presentation: I'm so looking forward to this! The sheer chance that Dave and Ron could be in there somewhere. Whoooooaaahhh. 🤯

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.