Vainamoinen

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 unionized. 💸

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. 😬

They've developed their platform 14 years ago, back when we really had no clue what power a disgruntled (non-)customer really has, and how destructive to social media the mere downvote is. That was the good old time when games were mostly sold in boxes from brick and mortar stores, when 'freespeechy' wasn't an insult, and Leigh Alexander had not yet spoken the immortal words about creating or curating a culture in your spaces. GOG has recently removed downvotes from their forums, so they've finally seen the error of their ways, but I don't think that right now they even have the budget to rectify the review situation. They have a whole system set up with a verified owners rating, an all reviews rating, and a "combined score" that means jack shit because a few positive owners' ratings can not counteract a tide of review bombers who don't own the game. You remove a nail, the whole system collapses. From my perspective, Valve also has a history of looking the other way for the very same reasons GOG/CDPR did: They always tried to look like an advocate for the customer against the industry bigguns. Although that was always an obvious and a bit pathetic marketing ploy, it has worked out marvellously for Valve, what with the Lord Gaben and ambrosia from heaven sales memes. Glorification and even deification by the customer for a power hungry monopoly, I don't really see many other companies that achieved that besides maybe Apple back in Jobs times. I don't blame CDPR for trying to step in exactly those footsteps, obviously, but they never had the fanbase, the budget nor the developers to make it work. They should have reacted wayyyyy sooner to the rise of the shitstorm, but I think their options were always limited. They couldn't risk upsetting their customers. Valve eventually bowed to their business clients with sensible and solid safeguards against review bombing. I kind of dread the unavoidable shitstorm when GOG finally introduces those very elementary and extremely necessary culture war blow softeners. Valve eventually introduced those safeguards, GOG stuck to allowing everything because they couldn't risk upsetting their customers. But to be fair, Valve can dictate the market entirely on its own and won't have to ask their gazillion business clients when they introduce e.g. no questions asked refund policies, "bigger cut for higher sales" exclusivity fostering/competition squashing mechanisms, or continues sales to Russia. CDPR/GOG never had any of those options.

@Thrik @NoirReservoir I admire your spunk. But you're wrong. 😆 Don't hold it against Jojo. He was eating a whole lot of bananas recently.

That was a time when 4.3 million copies sold was perceived as a moderate success or even a disappointment by Nintendo. Ah well. Let's hope Return to Monkey Island sells 4.3 million copies. 🤑 Mostly, it was about coarse ground shit. Some self declared investigators found a handful of lines cut from Season one to be "censorship", then went on and wrote that lines were cut from Season 2 as well even though that wasn't the case. I wrote to GOG, but before they even replied they had all the respective reviews deleted already. At the time, the most upvoted review claims that Season 2 is "still censored", because of Bosco's voice. Which is a claim they can make, because it's true, but a one star rating because of that is of course still coarse ground shit by a pathetic loonie who didn't buy the game. If GOG finally deleted all reviews that aren't written by game owners, they'd have 80% more positive reviews, and that is that.

She must have collected them from somewhere at least. It might not be far fetched to think of the monkey cast as an ensemble. Elaine could have collected Smirk's Monkey and the one she found hanging around the great monkey head. And those blue eyes ... maybe we should wait for official word (it's pretty obviously the same monkey in the Special Edition, but by my own rules, the SEs don't count 😬). On that note, @Jake can surely rectify our ailing ToMI monkey count?

I think we have probable cause to knock the TSoMI count back to 5.

OBJECTION! LeChuck means "dozens of islands", not dozens of monkeys. The monkeys on deck are identical in appearance, so they could be the same monkeys. Out of goodwill, we will assume that Telltale is showing all of the total THIRTEEN monkeys of Montevideo at least once. Plus Jaques makes 14. Objections to that?

We count every live monkey head that's shown in the respective game. If you can't see it, it doesn't count. I think Tales still has a decent shot at the throne, but that's a long, five part game. There's one monkey being mishandled by LeChuck in the opening scene and one that Guybrush uses to escape the Marquis (I think that's not the same monkey). But I also remember a scene later in the game when LeChuck and Elaine bring back those Monkeys of Montevideo, and they're showing some more monkeys there, I think. Anybody with a screenshot or youtube link?

In Guybrush's immortal words: Mmmmmmmmmno. But hot damn you guys are good! So we're up to seven in TSoMI now?! I thought it was four! Come on, you can find me some more Monkeys in LeChuck's Revenge. I love how nobody votes for Escape because of the mass monkey scene. 🙈