Vainamoinen

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. 🦊

Didn't develop the idea any further than this ... maybe I should have.

400 threads on the Telltale forum before episode 1 even launched. I'm definitely on board with this.

And another Murray sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

I'm with Jake here. Every Monkey Island part built on the previous, just like every Star Wars part, regardless of chronology. The order in which they were made seems right for a marathon. You could of course play them as a countdown to ReMI in ToMI - EMI - CMI - LCR - TSoMI order. Think about it – that would save those games the memories to which you want freshest for last, like a slow trip in to the past! As to what ReMI is or isn't, chronologically, I don't think it really matters that much. Im fairly certain it has some overarching elements and only starts at the CotD. With Return to Monkey Island, Dave and Ron will undoubtedly try to carve a path for the series' ongoing existence. We might have another Monkey Island in a few years. That Monkey Island will be Monkey Island 7 and in retrospect, ReMI will by then have become "part 6" anyway. ♻️ For those whovians out there: In like everybody's head canon, David Tennant still is the 11th doctor regardless of them funking up the reincarnation timeline two doctors later, making him technically the 12th.

And with this I will agree, unconditionally.

Thimbleweed Park was great. It's been a long time since an adventure game world opened up like this, without overwhelming you. It ruthlessly plunged you into the unknown with that central LucasArtsian parachute: There's always a way out and you can not die. It wasn't a trip down nostalgia lane for me, because I started out with TSoMI (yes I did play Maniac Mansion on my C128 when I was eleven, but besides finding the key to the front door, there really was no getting through any puzzle). So I think I gave it credit on its own merit. Variety of puzzles, design of puzzles, the music was great, the lighting really set a mood, and the flashbacks to introduce more player characters were a great idea. It was the first game where *bleeps* were funny instead of plainly annoying. Ohhhh Tim is Rock'n'Roll, Tim is song and dance, Tim is anarchy and rebellion, Tim is chaos, he's unchecked emotion, he's overconfidence and cordiality. When Ron grumbles into his beard and Dave keeps all silent, Tim will boom like a kakapo on rimu overdose. He's the fresh mints that Guybrush keeps in his pockets until in Chapter 13 he needs to really freshen things up. He's making one vastly successful, brilliant game after another and still has to fire a whole lot of people pre-release, let alone sell his company to Microsoft. He's introducing tank controls into what could have been one of the greatest point and clicks ever, for the mere sake of innovation, and still seems to be proud of it 25 years later. I don't know where in the game exactly, but I'm sure I'll miss him one way or another. Some great reharmonization at the beginning there, plus the seamless transition to Captain Kate's theme – I love it!

Then again, the only reason why the Grog machine didn't look more like a Coke machine is that Coca-Cola would have sued their butts off. I do absolutely agree that the humorous moments or "bits" often feel less forced. They often feel like an in joke. I mean, modelling a character after Lucas, naming a character after Spielberg's wife, playing the first four notes of the Raider's March, dropping the names Tim, Dave and Ron in the same sentence ... it's not as in your face maybe, but it is still there. I love that latest interview in that respect, but I also really love the dynamic suggested in the early adventure gamers interview. Ron Gilbert, he seems to be all impulse, creativity, he's got drive and energy, he's ready to try everything both new and old, he's taking all the risks, oscillating between the extremes, but he's of course also grumpy as ever – thin skinned, vulnerable to negative comments, and prone to self doubt. That's where Dave Grossman comes in. He's got the motivation, he's all zen, he brings the "yes we actually can", he balances things out, he's at the theoretical and conceptual level when Ron has long since turned to his wonderful but not infallible instinct. I think they're an incredible team of two very strong and very different characters , and I strongly believe they're going to give us great things. ❤️

Funny that you should mention Mel Brooks films as hardcore parodies. Back in the day, I watched Spaceballs just about five years before my first Star Wars part (the reasons are complex, let's just say "didn't have cable"). And even though it was spoof galore, the story worked, you took those characters seriously and you felt with them. Mel Brooks himself said it on the DVD commentary: Ruining the story for the gags is a no-go. Monkey Island certainly had less direct spoof/parody moments than, say, Spaceballs – but on the other hand, Ron was always fond of demolishing the 4th wall every five minutes. Which is something that can take you out of the narrative in a much worse way than a spoof moment that still parodies the same genre. Maybe it's less about "how much" parody you have and more about keeping the integrity of the story intact. And I won't talk about the Thimbleweed Park ending right now.