Vainamoinen

Better yet, presenting the pirate leaders with evidence of trial completion could be the first actual side quest in the Monkey Island series!

Not in this life.

While I am in panic waiting for the GOG announcement, I found out what Return to Monkey Island really is about and this is the spoiler thread, so ... The three pirate leaders from Monday's clip say they moved on, but of course it is a huge burn mark on Guybrush's soul to never have completed the three trials or rather, brought back evidence to the pirate leaders. These three artifacts have to be brought back to them. And, what do you know, we already spotted the idol in one of those screenshots! That leaves us with just two T-shirts to find. We return to Melee Island, present the pirate leaders with the evidence, screen says "Act I of The Secret of Monkey Island completed", game ends.

Huge can of worms. Depending on your definition of "island", Tales could win by a landslide. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-makes-an-island

Let me ask Gunther von Hagens about this. * ring ring * "Hello, Gunther? Vee hav an interesting der kwestshun for you [...] " Well, good news. Gunther says that plastination is possible with chicken as well. He's just not too certain about the sound effects.

I will not admit this new evidence to the trial. It is the court's understanding that Mike was the result of a failed beheading attempt that left the chicken with almost its entire brain stem intact.

OBJECTION A chicken can run for three to five seconds in "head off" mode, but only if the escape command was previously executed in "head on" mode.

... if we're counting live chicken heads displayed on screen, the count for TSoMI is zero.

There was just a single dev quote, I don't even remember who said it exactly (neither does the Monkey Island wiki), to explain the very basic concept of the in medias res beginning of the Tales. And somehow that idea took fans' brains hostage. It was everywhere. People kept parrotting it on the forums. They talked about how that would affect canon. They wanted Telltale to "do Monkey Island 5 next" so that horrible gap would be closed. The Telltale forums mod squad spent ridiculous amounts of time trying to get rid of that false info that Tales was "actually Monkey Island 6". And see where it led us. 🤣 Maybe planting the seed is easier than removing the tree, so I think I'll start talking about a "fictional Indiana Jones 1" in which he finds Shorty and the Nurhachi. By the way!

Ohhhh mirror/light puzzle coming up.

Maybe I should watch Memento again to prepare for this.

Pretty sure they will not substitute that question mark with an exclamation point. I think they'll just change the question mark's font. 🦊

Just another reason why I want to do a real one.

It certainly gives the game a bit of a cinematic vibe. I hope they're also doing closeups of Guybrush once in a while (which would be notably different from TSoMI). I won't try to find that interview again, but at one point in the last months Ron said that he loves how they've put a team together where everybody has some input and they can rather spontaneously insert a wacky idea somebody has at any point in the game creation process (heavily paraphrasing, but I think that was the gist). Pretty sure you won't have to worry, these nooks and crannies and bells and whistles will be there, and not just in fourth wall breaking stuff that we won't live to see missing in any Ron Gilbert game. 😉 It's become so customary to self-reference, comment on, jump to the meta level, to lament the downfall of adventure games. As I said above, we'll have to expect certain in-jokes as Ron will not do without, but I don't think that is what's teased at here. Return is probably not a game about the personal lives and careers of Dave and Ron, it may just allow the analogy. In the same vein, the new pirate leaders could symbolize the game industry if you wish to interpret it that way, no problem. If we're going for the kind of analogy that high literature would give us, it could be overt AF but would never be spelled out for us, but it also wouldn't be to the detriment of the storytelling. Let's attempt to interpret the new pirate leaders as "the gaming industry" for a moment, because I think we're running into some really interesting roadblocks. So let's assume Guybrush wants to get his game, I mean expedition, financed. He turns to the people who once were his patrons (say, an analogy for the LucasArts of old). But those were anything but perfect patrons. They were just higher ups who looked for some doofus that made the work for them, handing out honorary titles in return. They were just leeching of of Guybrush! So he presents this expedition to the new pirate leaders, asking for substantial amounts of money to finance it. The new pirate leaders are not interested, because Guybrush is trying to do exactly the same game/raid he did 30 years ago. He wants to go to Monkey Island AGAIN (= make a point & click adventure game). The new pirate leaders' rejection, therefore, is just, because Guybrush/the game idea is essentially completely unoriginal. At the same time the new pirate leaders will, without a second thought, finance the 15th expedition to the final fartasy fairgrounds, so at the very least there's some bigotry involved. Well, wouldn't that be bizarre.

Then again, what in the game says that it's not the same timid monkey, smelly monkey, strapping monkey or brawny monkey? It's of course absurd but I always seem to employ an ensemble cast kind of logic here. One monkey actor for "the smelly monkey", one monkey actor for "the monkey who walks in the background", and all the waving arms, legs and tails don't count because OF COURSE they're animatronics. Anything else would go way over budget! Those monkeys don't come cheap, they're unionzed. 💸

Do all the shirts have that backside printing?

And here it is, probably the first Dave Grossman foto since E3 2010. I'm just so glad he's involved.

Didn't want the thread to end with post 2. Worked out marvellously.

So I think we've got the TSoMI count down, plus minus one (5 + 1). Three heads on one monkey (3) + Donald Duck hat monkey (1) + Banana swing monkey (1) + optional wedding bottom monkey. LeChuck's Revenge is at 3 and that will pretty definitely make it the winner. That must mean I'm going to cast my vote now. 😘 Escape has doesn't have "infinite", of course, but a definite count may still pose a serious problem. If only we had an Escape expert @madmardi around. A definite count for Tales is impossible, as there is definitely overlap that we can't fathom. I'm still wondering where all the additional monkeys on top of the thirteen Montevideo monkeys are coming from. Can we get a definite count for Curse, provided that (a) background monkeys are the same, they're just making their rounds and (b) arms and legs are just prosthetics waved into the screen (don't you know anything about movies?)? On that note, are the monkeys in the theater the same as on LeChuck's ship? Certainly you have an answer.

If it has a tail, count it in. No tail, no cookie.

Authoritative Word on the Matter of BOX ART for the purposes of this thread, by N. G. P. Vainamoinen Steve Purcell is wholly incapable of painting box art for a Monkey Island game without any monkeys on it. We've known that for some time. In Rex' key art for ReMI, the lack of monkeys with pirate hats, eye patches, peg legs, pipes, swords, or sai is frankly disgusting. Come to think of it, has it occurred to y'all how we're seeing all sorts of animals in the Return to Monkey Island teasers, trailers and screenshots, but never once a proper monkey? Guys, I'm telling you, ReMI will be about bringing the monkeys back. These special cover/poster/key art Purcell monkeys are of course not represented in the game, but we have to ask ourselves whether the none-embellished ones on the TSoMI and LCR covers actually are. I think the TSoMI BA monkey could be one of the Jojos, even though his/her eyes are woefully unblue. But no way is the monkey to the left of the LCR BA the Jojo in the game (he's not nearly stiff enough). In the case of Escape from Monkey Island, the playstation cover doesn't throw off our count because infinite plus ten equals infinite. So with a certain prejudice I'd say there's no monkey that's not in the game on the TSoMI box, two new monkeys on the LCR box, one unseen monkey in the ToMI key art and whogivesashit in the Escape artwork you're showing (which I have seen for the first time, thank you for that). The rules state that the live monkey heads counted has to be IN THE GAME. Box art isn't. So Box Art doesn't count. Funny, I should have made that the first point, but here we are.

Let's ... give other forumites the opportunity to keep some cans of worms tightly shut. I'm trying to keep this short, but I will fail. 🥴

LIVE monkey heads. 😆

We've debated that it uses the word "conclude", but we didn't debate that they've changed it. Back then I said that a successful series will never be concluded, but marketing is of course hell bent on telling people that the narrative will give you closure. It's interesting that they changed it, because it raised exactly the right, diffuse idea in the customers' heads: That this would be the final last crowning finishing ultimate Monkey Island game and if they're not on board, they will have eaten fries and slaw yet not the fried chicken. 🍖 It doesn't mean that part seven is in the works, it doesn't mean that they got a gazillion pre-orders and will definitely continue. But it's nice to think that was the case.

I really didn't want to introduce any obscure rules here, it just seems fair to me that three monkey brains are counted as three monkeys. 😬