Vainamoinen

Njargh, thanks for the update! On the plus side, more time for JEJ to weave his magic.

What I wouldn't give for a bit of Remastered Devil's Playhouse right now.

I knew the specific game immediately, but I still failed getting the exact title right.

Monkey Island Heardle #342 🔊🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ #MonkeyIslandHeardle Ahhhh the memories.

I love how Jason immediately draws the Beyond Good & Evil 2 comparison – a game that is highly unlikely to ever release especially since all it ever should have been will now be poured into Star Wars Outlaws. The new Indy game was clearly meant to release with Dial of Destiny. That failed. But Dial of Destiny also bombed, so there's reason number two to never even finish this. 😩 I'm so fed up with this industry.

Monkey Island Heardle #340 🔊🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ #MonkeyIslandHeardle Too easy! 😎

Fourth attempt. Not bad for a game I haven't played since it came out. Thanks go to Helena Holmlund (spoiler!) for still getting it right.

I blew my solo movie theatre venture on Asteroid City, so this will likely be a Blu Ray thing for me ... still nobody going with me.

Well, at least I can say that I got all the MI heardles I attempted on the first second.

Are you kidding me? ... it's one of my favorite tracks though.

Pirates of the Caribbean lives and dies with Johnny Depp. And as much as I love Ron or Dominic, the same laws do not apply to the Monkey Island franchise. God's grandma doesn't even know what Disney will or will not do. Disney is a pure monopoly. They can do what they want. Remember – Pirates of the Caribbean was a huge gamble by Disney back in the day, because large budget pirate movies were considered money overboard since the epic flop Cutthroat Island in 1995. They since took a lot of gambles with some other Disney theme park rides. Didn't work out, shrug, what are we doing next? Disney can take any gamble they like now. They have unfathomed money reserves and an unprecedented iron grip around the juvenile target group. They could sell them literal piles of shit if they stamp Frozen, Marvel or Star Wars on it. So maybe they will give Monkey Island a little boost just to see how it develops. They could give it a fifth of just one of their five thousand annual superhero things, just to see if somebody's interested. I'd be.

This forum needs a proper search function. I'm pretty sure that at some point last year I wrote that we wouldn't need to be afraid that the Monkey Island license would be buried with Return. Which was the prevalent notion, mind you. Now we have the opposite reaction. Because the license resurfaces once in a predictable gaming context that paid hommage to MI before. Disney won't bash the Monkey Island license to death, while my personal horror vision has a fair chance of becoming a reality, and is a reality in this particular case.

I'm kind of happy about the universal enthusiasm in the comments but ... it shows what absurd expectations Ron Gilbert had to fend off for Return. These are the fans that the Monkey Island franchise would have needed last year. I haven't seen a single commenter go "well, the cheap graphics don't really fit the franchise" or "actually, Guybrush couldn't grow a beard" or "why have they emasculated the main char" or "so Murray is gay now?!?" or "actually, this would look so much better with MI3 graphics" or "did they have to steal the tired old Spaceballs joke?" or "they better not have an MI without Elaine!" ... They just enjoy the whole thing. Now I do want to play it. Damn.

Oh great, now they're locking Monkey Island into Xbox AND Steam, just wonderful. I have to pass with heavy heart. Goodbye, cruel world of Monkey Island. Given the gameplay, I might be better off with a good ol' youtube video anyway. 😔

I don't have another "deranged take" on this.

It's definitely a Bauhaus kind of story. Form follows function, and the function is the mad puzzle action! Revealing where Atlantis really is and getting there is the fun of it. It's still my favorite LucasArts adventure game, even though I had to wade through 12 Amiga discs back in the day. Come to think of it, most LucasArts games don't really have a particularly good story. One day we'll make a "Describe the story of a LucasArts game in five sentences so that newbies would never ever touch the game" thread. I think I'd make a pretty great TSoMI entry. Making a movie out of the Fate of Atlantis story would have been a disaster. A proper reboot in game form however, I'd be behind that 100%. If Dial of Destiny bombs hard, I guess the announced Bethesda Indiana Jones game will be quietly cancelled (after it's been put on hold, all hands on deck for the belated Starfield) and all hopes to ever get an orchestrated FoA soundtrack are out the window. 😔 But, uhm, it's still seven days until Dial of Destiny releases, so I guess the myriad of youtube 'reviews' are mostly from people who have not even seen it. I'm keeping up some desperate hope like Jake. But it'll be difficult finding anybody willing to even watch it with me in theatres. Most people I know who were into the franchise once will not even give it a chance.

Desperately trying not to write something horribly cynical about IGN and unbiased reviews in connection to their favorable treatment of Hogwarts Legacy. Ooooofs noq I acciadfwally mada a knop im ny fingweras.

I had a whole paragraph about that up there and eventually I just did not open that can of worms. There are enough cans of worms opened here I guess. Here, let me put it this way. Back when Grim Fandango re-released, gog.com held an art contest. The deadline was brutal. I had a weekend. I opted for a messy technique with graphite dust and just went at it. I took a few minutes in photoshop to apply a brown tint. This was the result: As gog summarily ignored the effort, I posted the artwork on my favorite art forum. One of the members jokingly asked: "Is that old school or remastered?". I answered: "Ten hours old school and then five minutes for the Remaster. Just like the game.".

I played Curse of Monkey Island in 2000 on my first PC, because stupid LucasArts wouldn't port the game to my Amiga No, wait, maybe a less abrasive approach would be great for this discussion. I hadn't started to learn about art and style, so I basically took it all in uncritically. It was a great game! It had great music and the German voiceover was good too. It wasn't until much later that I started to question some of the stylistic and narrative choices in the game. Like making Guybrush a lanky, possibly even elegant pirate and of course making Elaine a literal gold statue with eyes bigger than my fist. Escape didn't tickle my fancy as much, it's true, but its individual style at least prevented a repeat performance of the irks that I had with Curse. Grim Fandango definitely is near or at the pinnacle of anything LucasArts ever did. But with the exception of polygonal main characters and pre-rendered backgrounds, technically it was just about as much 2D as its point & click predecessors. What's proposed here is literally in the title. It's not about "making EMI 2D". It's about "making EMI with CMI graphics". But that means stamping Bill Tiller's individual style on the sequel, or worse, on more games in LucasArt's legacy. I'm not opposed to remaking, rebooting, remastering Grim Fandango properly, not at all (tank controls and flip through inventory were a mistake in my opinion). But it should be remade in the originally intended style as clearly laid out in the breathtaking concept art by Peter Chan. The game just didn't succeed in communicating all those suggested moods, the grit, the wide open spaces, the stylistic references, the vertigo inducing perspectives, the distorted architecture. If you have to look at the concept art to understand how it was originally meant, something went wrong from concept to execution. What I never understood, particularly as we were gearing up towards the Return to Monkey Island release last year, is this weird and worrying fan obsession with CMI's graphics culminating in sometimes aggressive demands to model sequels after "that style". Bill Tiller is great! CMI's artwork is great! But it has no business in Grim Fandango. It has no business in Escape or Return.

Maybe Harrison is just trying out some new facial expressions ... ? Might just be an oddly selected shot. The second foto has the ancient and scruffy Indy I want and I'm pretty sure that's the whims Disney will be catering to.

"Disney left us with a whole lot of creative freedom, but decided on the logo design for us". Sounds familiar ... 😇 I'm actually undecided on this. They use the font, they have the sort of cheesy gradient that suggests the flames. It's just that they don't use overlapping letters and the clunky shadows we're all used to so much. In any case, I appreciate that what we have here is a traditionally painted poster. For the most part at least – artist Tony Stella works in much the same way that Drew Struzan was forced to work in for Crystal Skull (an experience that directly led him to retire). These are a number of individual traditional paintings chopped up and pasted together digitally. I never really liked those posters that try to put in a gazillion characters, and don't really show what the movie is about. The poster kind of stepped into both these traps. And Disney really doesn't need to worry about spoilers any longer. We have a pretty clear picture of what the dial of destiny does at this point. I love the strong red splash with its orange and grey accents. I love how for once Disney doesn't do photorealism and goes for the strong abstraction. I love how basically one sixth of the entire illustration is Indy's whip, painted with just a few brush strokes. It's so iconic, there's no need for more. Last week I fell into the trap of reading some of the more deplorable 'news' about the movie, and it was so full of forced negativity and in some cases pathetic theories sold as utter truth ("This youtuber who's wrong all the time heard this rumor but won't tell us where so let's write a 700 word article about that"). And I thought, damn, I need the mojo forum back now.

I invoked Ron's name today already when my gaming website of choice tried to tell me that Elon Musk would be buying Steam. ☠️ In that vein, we ... could probably make the thread title a little lighter on the clickbait. My excitement is pretty well documented in the respective Mix'n'Mojo thread. I tried to discuss the game elsewhere, but was appalled at the level of negativity. That feeling persisted for much of the nearly eight months that passed until I could play the game. I drew a lot of fan art, vowed to never touch any spoilers and then of course consumed all of them two dozen times, minutes after they were tweeted. The community interaction was really great, just as I remember it from the Telltale forums back before (and while!) Tales released. It was wholesome to see that this kind of collective community hyping still works in these dark times of the net. When I finally played Return, almost three months had passed and the Mix'n'Mojo forum had become a barren landscape again. But my best friend, who had played it with the original PC release, has jotted down all the things she wanted to talk to me about while playing the game. And then, back in December, we started re-playing it via Discord. Thank god for technology. We're having great fun, but we seldom find the time for those sessions (which, in retrospect, makes those recap things pretty swell). We'll probably finish the game next time. Monkey Island is an old franchise right now, it's in its sixth instalment, and it still felt fresh and exciting for me to sail the seas again. Of course I have some quarrels with how the story was going, and the ending, but Dave and Ron have definitely woven an intriguing story. The first sharp shock was of course the tree scene. That one froze me for a minute or two as I was slowly understanding what it means when a protagonist never changes. Guybrush was back, and it was the old Guybrush without a care or consideration in the world. A certain Dominic told us that this game would have 'a depth to it'. And it does, I think it contains some fundamental truths about life that can hurt sometimes. But in that moment, I had to get over the fact that the protagonist of this series might not be as likeable as I made him to be in my mind. And that was difficult. Of course when Elaine found out about Guybrush's shenannigans, I thought that she would leave him. Which tore me in two. On the one hand, Guybrush would definitely have deserved that. On the other, we knew from the framing story that any break up would not last forever. And how odd would it be if Monkey Island 'ended' on that note. Eventually, the game ended in a bizarre way. Bizarre, maybe in a good sense, because while some layers of the game world's reality have been torn down while others, like setting and era are very much intact. The graphics shine and the details - hearing the criticism, you'd think no detail exists - are amusing my friend and me to no end. The twitching kid caught in the climbing frame back on the playground had us rolling on the floor laughing. Dee's ridiculous anchor lesson became a favorite of ours. The music was everything that I hoped for and even more. It didn't at all feel like a re-hash to me, especially since many new musical motifs have been added to my personal MI canon. The engine is, hands down, the best 2D adventure game engine I have yet seen, and I would love to see it used not just for one game. Bottom line, I'm desperately waiting for another true point & click adventure game of this magnitude. Not necessarily from Dave and Ron (I would of course be on board with that!), not necessarily a LucasArts franchise (I'd be over the moon and halfway on my way to Mars about a Fate of Atlantis Reboot/episodic five parter), but very similar in the approach to user interface, interactive story elements, dialog heavy, musical collossus, smooth movements of the protagonist, closeups of faces and important actions in the story.

I was so looking forward to her. That was a great design, and she would have sounded great in a combo with Jojo.

I was thunderstruck by the ending as well, but after attempting to jot down my feelings several times, decided to take a step back and just let the thing sink in. Now I think that I should have seen it coming. Of course Ron would double down on the bewildering ending of LeChuck's Revenge. There was no other way. And it's more complex than I thought at first. We're not switching from the reality of the Monkey Island stories back to the frame story. We're switching to kind of an interlude reality, with which Guybrush trolls his son in the same way that Ron trolled us all those years ago. Boybrush becomes the fans, the fans become Boybrush; and Ron becomes Guybrush just like Guybrush becomes Ron. All too fittingly, Guybrush-Ron would hastily concoct an alternative one sentence ending after Guybrush/the fans tell him what they would have liked to see. But that is of course no kind of "satisfying" ending within the self contained reality of the Monkey Island series. Like many others, when I hear fans lamenting how the ending of Return destroyed the Monkey Island series, I have to think of the same criticism voiced about LeChuck's Revenge. It's actually true: The Monkey Island series was destroyed back in 1991. The hole that Ron tore into the fabric of his creation's reality could not possibly be closed. LeChuck's Revenge made a sequel impossible, and more than that, even undesirable. ... ... it's still the best game of the series and has spawned no less than four sequels. 😎 Maybe it's not so much the ending of Monkey Island 2 that Ron wanted to recreate, maybe it's what happened to the series after that final and all breaking ending. A new tree arising from salted earth. The new steward of the Monkey Island series will have to honor the series' spirit yet they will be utterly forced to completely ignore the authoritative ending of Monkey Island 6, the final word of its original creator. What a delicious irony. Whoever takes up the baton to conduct these characters in the future, I'll definitely be in the audience. The monkeys are listening.