Aro-tron

I think it's great that this has been a fan conversation that's been going on since literally as long as I've been able to use the Internet as a pre-teen. Surely all that could possibly have been said and speculated has been said ... and yet we've all come back to add our two cents one more time The portal to Hell is clearly THE intended secret in Gilbert's "Mutiny on Monkey Island" pitch document. That document is really just three pages, and mostly sets up a). the treasure of Monkey Island as a mcguffin and b). the twist that there is no treasure, it's really a portal to hell that turns pirates into an undead army. That seems to be the pitch that Gilbert started with, and everything else built from there. However, I think during the design process, this original 'secret' began to feel less important as the characters, jokes and puzzles became compelling in their own right. The structure of "treasure hunt as a mcguffin that leads to a third act twist" ended up being a narrative hook to hang all the fun stuff on, rather than being the main conceit of the game. Heck, in the finished game, the 'secret' is dramatically undercut by the reveal of LeChuck's ghost ship on a river of lava under Monkey Island at the end of the first act. When you finally get to Monkey Island, Guybrush is almost nonchalant about the 'hot breezes of hell' ... I think this twist was no longer a big deal to the developers, and they may have even forgotten that it was supposed to be THE secret of Monkey Island. However, as a kid, the stuff about Hell in the first game spooked me SO much. I remember laying awake at night after that first cut scene with LeChuck and Bob and feeling that I had witnessed something unholy and deeply wrong. I only returned to it because my parents were ahead of me in the game and said it wasn't too scary. And there's enough silly stuff undercutting the horror of the original 'secret' that it was palpable to keep playing. The second game I mostly played on my own, and I did NOT understand a lot of the subtext. Since the secret of the first game had been so horrifying to me, I remember being almost giddy with dread at the prospect of experiencing whatever Big Whoop was. I vividly remember pixel-hunting over the smashed treasure chest to find ... an "e-ticket"? I was too young to have understood this cultural reference, and it totally befuddled me. I had to get grown-ups to explain what it was, and still felt totally confused. I understood the self-depreciating meta humor of "never pay more than twenty bucks for a computer game", but this was all too oblique for me as a twelve-year old. In hindsight, I think the original intention in MI2 was to reuse that same narrative structure of "treasure hunt mcguffin leads to third-act twist", but with the understanding that both the treasure AND the twist could both be kind of hazy since they weren't really the main point of the games. The things that vexed me most as a kid are, in hindsight really just obviously lampshading that the plot is arbitrary. The deliberate pointlessness of Big Whoop is almost obnoxiously obvious, but because the first game had such a strong central twist I refused to believe that it was meaningless. My hunch is that the 'e-ticket' was an in-joke reference to how the design team regarded the ending sequence before it was written: the big finale that we'll dream up later. Gilbert has said that he didn't know how it would end until basically the last minute. I think the truth is that Hell was the secret of MI1, and the secret of MI2 was that they started making it before they had an intended ending. Ron managed to come up with a twist that simultaneously built on and undercut the dread I felt from having experienced the 'true', hellish secret of MI1. It also managed to make the jokey unreality of the first game feel retroactively creepy, like the Grog machine and the circus were also somehow portals to a nightmare. None of the other games has recaptured that feeling for me (although I think the Rise of the Pirate God chapter of Tales came closest). There is no 'original intent' for the ending of MI2, because they started the game without a clear ending, or intended twist. I suspect the theme park stuff started to seep into the first game during the design process, but it had just been a background element that got pulled to the foreground when a twist was needed. I think Ron Gilbert is happy with the improvised, ambiguous ending that the game shipped with, and after all these years, I am happy with it too.

Agreed - I think it's actually almost all the 1950s stuff that works the best in KOTCS ... I like the opening scene a lot (although it hits differently if you've read the early draft of Back to the Future before watching the film, like I did), and the cold war paranoia at the beginning (which mostly gets dropped) seems like a good mood for an Indy film. I also liked the '50s film references. Shia-as-Brando is great in the diner scene, but the relationship between him and Indy never seems to have a lot of tension after that point. The aliens are a cool idea that were just not executed in an interesting way. If anything I wish there were more winks to sci-fi b-movies (even if the 'atomic ants' scene feels like a film nerd gag that doesn't seem connected to the themes of the rest of the film, I still thought it was cool). The story and creative direction are all pretty promising, but I agree that the execution is just not there. By the end of the film it's hard to care about the characters They had tried to make the film for so long, I think everyone was either exhausted by the process, or relieved to be making it. I wonder if the team kind of coasted through because they didn't want to add any tension to the process, or threaten to overturn a finely-balanced apple cart.

In terms of the themes, I have a meta-theory of the mcguffins of the Indiana Jones films that is only speculative, but at least amuses me, and the new film slots into it well enough - the idea is that each chronological Indy film deals with a newer form of spirituality. The first three films do this very clearly: Temple of Doom has its roots in Hinduism, while Raiders is about Judaism, and Last Crusade is about Christianity. I think one reason they struggled with what to do about a fourth film is that if they continued that trajectory, the next logical step would be to have a mcguffin connected to Islam... which I think would have been probably impossible for either Lucas or Spielberg get right. They're also not going to do a more modern organized American-born religion like Mormonism, Christian Science or Scientology for similar reasons. Instead, Crystal Skull jumps straight to "new age mysticism", a more modern, but less specific kind of spirituality. I think that's part of where the story fails, because no one making (or watching) the film has any real reverence for this belief system. (This is also a problem with Temple of Doom, but it at least goes to great lengths to show a whole variety of rituals of the Thugee cult, so that it at least feels tangible). There's a line in Dial of Destiny about "it's not what you believe, but how hard you believe it", but hardly anyone in Crystal Skull really believes in the aliens at the end of the film. That brings us to Dial of Destiny, where Then there's a whole other question about how the film deals with time and with aging. I quite liked the fact that the villain was

I enjoyed it. The ending was a big swing, which my date thought was ludicrous, but I thought it was great. There were a few points which felt too much like they were just remixing elements that people remembered from the earlier films, so I enjoyed that the ending felt surprising and like it was at least about something. To me, the de-aged Indy looked only a little better than a Zemeckis motion-capture film from 15 years ago, but even the present-day scenes had a computerized sheen that was distressing to me. Harrison Ford is old! To me the question of how they tackle that is some of the appeal of a new Indy film, and 'AI-brushing out wrinkles' was not a satisfying answer. Still, I liked the overall story of film. Waller-Bridges was great, and played off of Ford really well.

Well, the Melee Island™ joke would become less funny if the trademark actually had significant value... I don't think there's a risk of that happening with Monkey Island -- it's not like they're making LeChuck Happy Meal toys here -- but it does feel like a 'brand extension' that mines what was special about the original games. I probably wouldn't feel as annoyed if it was like, a tie-in novel, or a orchestral recording of the soundtrack. I guess it's the idea of subsuming the world of Monkey Island into a larger and more commercially successful game that bothers me... and I'm generally depressed when the people who created the value of the IP aren't at all compensated when it's licensed or exploited. That's the world we live in, but it still seems deeply unfair.

I think I had not finished my coffee and was grumpy. I didn't see the repeating plaid at first, and then when I did see it, I realized that it didn't really change how I felt. Which means it wasn't really about the plaid. I guess it also seemed like his arms weren't moving fast enough. But that's not the point either. Really, what I reacted against was seeing something that I strongly associate with a context that I have a lot of nostalgia for (pixels and dialogue trees) adapted into a context that I'm ambivalent about (open world RPGs). It was also just once scene in a trailer, and I probably reacted too quickly. I'm prepared to find this more interesting once I wrap my head around what it is, rather than focusing on what it is not. The part that I liked the most was like was the scene with Guybrush, since it seemed like an attempt at a new story. It was cool that they got Dom back to do the voice, and I actually thought he did a really good reading of the scene.

Ok, I re-watched it and I can see that they did keep the pattern static. I just don't think the effect is the same in 3D. I feel like the original effect was a design solution borne of the limitations of the technology they had. It was one of the places in MI where you could see the seams of the game, and I always liked that part of the experience. This, on the other hand, just feels like a call-back for the sake of nostalgia. But I am clearly not the audience for this game - I never felt the desire to walk around the islands and feel immersed in the pirate world like I know some people have. I'm happy for those of you who are going to enjoy this, and also relieved that Return came out before this did.

I kind of like that Guybrush looks a bit wonky. The hair style even seems to homage the hideous MI:SE hair, which is actually very funny. Other than that, I'm not at all invested in the art style of this game. Seeing Stan swinging his arms around in 3D without his jacket being a repeating pixel pattern was almost painful. It made me reflect that a lot of what I liked about these games was not what they represented, but how cleverly they were designed. Like, I don't care if LeChuck actually has a dead crow on his hat. I really appreciate how Purcell worked that into the sprite design, but to me it's not an interesting choice in 3D, even though it's now become a calcified part of the character design. Part of me feels a little bit sad that so many fans who were repelled by Return just wanted something like this - a Mario Movie version of Monkey Island. On the other hand, it does make me appreciate Return a lot more.

I'm Australian-adjacent, and immediately thought naughts and crosses, too ... and so did the people responding to the Twitter post, from the looks of it. Plenty of comments on the post are also assuming it's Psychonauts 3, so if it's something else the Australia/NZ social media manager really misjudged this one. On the other hand, it seems like a very odd place to start teasing the game. Does Psychonauts have a particularly large antipodean fan base?

I would love a Monkey Island art book! Especially one that includes RTMI, since I think that it re-contextualizes the visual style of all the other games in the series in an interesting way.

That's some nice looking art, and I about to crowd-fund the project on the basis of that tweet, but the actual cover of this issue is apparently devoted to a gory horror title and I can barely stomach looking at it. Seems like a cool publication overall, but I'm going to have to pass on the basis of my own personal squeamishness.

This song got periodically been stuck in my head for 20+ years, despite the fact that I surely hadn't heard it since 1998. When the game came out, the idea that there would be over a minute of animation and an original song just hidden behind a non-essential hot spot was like an audaciously opulent use of FMV. I don't think Humongous ever did anything quite like that again, but it was cool. When my kids first played Putt-Putt I was interested to see what they would think about that part. They had been playing for about ten minutes before they clicked on the 'Topiary Creatures', and then kind of sat there dumbfounded as the song played. At the end, my seven-year old announced "Ok, we are NEVER clicking on that EVER AGAIN". But by the second or third playthrough they willingly clicked on it several times in a row, and since then we have sung the song while walking to the park, so its power as an ear-worm is enduring. 🥲

I've bought the two Putt-Putt games for my kids (ages 4 and 7) to play together, and they have enjoyed them. They played through Saves the Zoo probably half a dozen times, but found Travels Through Time to be a bit trickier and haven't been able to finish it. My impression was that Travels Through Time has a premise that is a little less accessible for small kids, and the puzzles seem to be more esoteric - I haven't been able to help them through it! The younger kid still asks to play Putt-Putt, but the older kid finds it hard to get excited about Putt Putt when the Switch also has Mario Kart on it. To be honest, the market for kids games is so different to what it was in the 1990s. The pace of the Humongous games is so much slower than almost any other game my kids have played on something with a screen. Modern games have an abundance of ways get instant feedback by clicking or tapping or swiping, and constant incentives to keep playing and progressing in some way or another. Compared to this, Humongous games are much slower. I would say that they are less engrossing than watching cartoons, since there are plenty of times without a lot of action, or where you might just be sitting there thinking about how to solve a puzzle. The level of engagement is more like reading a picture book, which I personally think is good for kids, but that's not where the market is. Obviously, the market for these kids of games is parents rather than kids, but again the market is way different than it was in the 90s. I remember seeing Humongous games at Costco and electronics stores in the 1990s, but that casual retail market is gone. I honestly have no idea where to buy good 'edu-tainment' games for my kids. Interestingly, the Humongous graphics and sound have held up better than I expected. My seven year old nearly started to cry when he saw what Mario Kart 64 looked like, but had no complaints about Putt-Putt.

I think this is the same list games are already available to download in the Nintendo Switch store, but it's cool to see them get a physical release. I wonder how/why they chose these particular games for porting to the Switch. They seem to coincide with the height of the brand's popularity, or at least when they really hit their stride, launching with several franchises. I believe the chronological order of the main, adventure-style games was (with the games that have been ported to Switch in bold): Putt-Putt Joins the Parade (1992) Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise (1993) Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon (1993) Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds (1994) Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo (1995) Freddi Fish 2: The Case of the Haunted Schoolhouse (1996) Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside (1996) Putt-Putt Travels Through Time (1997) Spy Fox in "Dry Cereal" (1997) Freddi Fish 3: The Case of the Stolen Conch Shell (1998) Pajama Sam 2: Thunder and Lightning Aren't so Frightening (1998) Putt-Putt Enters the Race (1999) Freddi Fish 4: The Case of the Hogfish Rustlers of Briny Gulch (1999) Spy Fox 2: "Some Assembly Required" (1999) Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat from Your Head to Your Feet (2000) Putt-Putt Joins the Circus (2000) Spy Fox 3: "Operation Ozone" (2001) Freddi Fish 5: The Case of the Creature of Coral Cove (2001) Putt-Putt: Pep's Birthday Surprise (2003) Pajama Sam: Life Is Rough When You Lose Your Stuff! (2003) They're all available on PC, but just the 95-98 games are on Switch. The curious outlier is Freddi Fish 2. I wonder why it's been excluded, and why the later games have not been ported. Any Humongous historians out there?

I haven't ventured to MI Reddit or Twitter lately, and now I'm afraid to. I'm afraid if I check I will go down a rabbithole of negative fan emotions. Can anyone briefly sum up the discourse for me? I remember when Curse came out, and it coincided with an explosion of fan activity online since it was the days when anyone could start a fan site. There were so many of them! My memories of Curse are really entangled with the experiences of checking sites like The SCUMM Bar and other early Mojo affiliates every day in the lead-up to its release, and then regularly for years afterward. I mean, just the fact that Curse had its own website was a big deal at the time - were there any earlier LucasArts games that had dedicated websites? For me, a big part of the Monkey Island was this transition from a world in which Monkey Island consisted of just two games, to a world in which it became a franchise. It was exciting and confusing, and a very fun time to be a fan. I still haven't finished playing Return, so I don't think I can do an updated ranking, but mine would be pretty non-controversial: -Revenge -Secret -Curse -Tales -Escape

I think we're at risk of turning this into a BTTF thread, but I am going to come to the defense of part 2. The Almanac is just a McGuffin, the film is about him saving his family and preventing a Biff-led dystopia. I don't think you can criticize BTTF2 for coasting on all the things that made the first film good, when it subverts and changes the formula of the first film in ways that I think are as ambitious as the Godfather Part II (while admittedly not as successful, but in a fun way). The easy thing to do would have just been to have Marty have to travel to 1965 and prevent his parents from splitting up again. To bring this back to Monkey Island, I think it's fun when a sequel to an impeccably crafted Part 1 take some liberties to do weird things that stretch and extend the concept in ways that are less 'perfect', but more interesting. Raiders, MI1, and BTTF1 are all structurally very tight, inventive and nearly unimpeachable. They all have sequels that are darker, weirder and messier, and threequels that are safer, cuddlier reversions to a more crowd-pleasing structure. Still good, but less exciting. I suppose the original Star Wars films are a bit like that as well. That seems to be the "trilogy" format that I grew up with, it seems!

I have only just now gotten to the start of Part 3 of RTMI, due to having two kids and plenty of other responsibilities, and I'm definitely enjoying it. As a kid, I only got limited pockets of time to play games, so I would work puzzle over an adventure game for (what seemed like) months. I have introduced my kids (4 and 7) to Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo on the Switch and they have replayed it half a dozen times now. The four-year old finds the controls difficult (mostly navigating the cursor precisely with the joycon), and my seven-year old is now starting to find it a bit simple. They enjoy playing together though, so I think there's a very narrow sweet spot for the Humongous games. The three most recent purchases on my Switch are Putt-Putt, Thimbleweed Park, and RTMI, which I thought was funny. --- To chime in on BTTF3, I think I agree with Kestrel that the first is nearly perfectly structured, the second is a glorious and ambitious mess, and the third one is a genre exercise that is well-made, but which doesn't feel as personal as the first two. I think what makes the first two movies more than just adventure romps is that they are about Marty's relationship with his family and his own past/future. The third film doesn't add to this in any significant way, and it feels kind of extraneous to me - like an episode of the animated series or something. They lean on the "Are ya CHICKEN" bit so hard in 2 and 3 that I was convinced it was set up in Part 1 for years....

When my family got out first PC with a CD-ROM, it was packaged with the CD versions of Loom, The Secret of Monkey Island, and like ... the Encarta encyclopedia. I know this is not the preferred version of Loom among aficionados, but it had voice acting and was in some ways more technically impressive than the CD version of MI. I liked both games, but Loom was generally confusing to me, and it seemed so solemn. To me it always felt like more of a niche title than Monkey Island. I would be surprised if it sold as well as Monkey Island did! On the other hand, maybe if they had made Loom 2 instead of LeChuck's Revenge, history would regard Monkey Island as the forgotten niche title. Hindsight is weird.

Whoa, Maniac Mansion with FMV feels like a very wild idea in 2022...I dunno. Live action FMV cut scenes seem like such a late '90s kind of thing. Do any modern games use them? The idea of using a grainy filter to make the games feel like a low-budget horror film could work, but I think most video game live action FMVs already feel kind of uncanny and low budget. There were some live action cut scenes in Jedi Knight that made the game feel like a big-budget ordeal, but somehow even with the full weight if ILM music and SFX it kind of felt like the game was playing dress-up with the license. It would be a different case with a license like Maniac Mansion, but I don't know if it would work. Maybe they could re-create the sets of the old TV show while they're at it ...

Complete speculation on my part, but once the pre-orders opened, it seems like Ron and the rest of the team started being a lot more open in interviews to the possibility of a follow-up game. It made me suspect that sales have been fairly strong, and that Disney/Devolver are amenable to another go-round. I actually would be surprised if Return to Monkey Island didn't post the best first-week sales figures of any game in the series, since it's 'legacy sequel' that some fans have been waiting decades for, and the press has been fairly breathless. It seems undoubtedly to be the best-selling game Ron has made for the past couple of decades (he seemed a little disappointed in how Thimbleweed Park sold). It's the kind of trick you can't easily pull off a second time though, so I'm skeptical that a MI7 would match the general interest there has been in MI6. I'm still enjoying Return though, so I'm not yet champing at the bit for another game ... I think they should do another MM first, tbh.

In this first part of the prologue, is it possible to tie Chuckie up? There's a place with ropes that prompts you to try, but I couldn't figure out if it was a puzzle to try and solve or not. Please don't tell me HOW to do it, but I'm curious if anyone was able to do it ...

It's meant to be an audio-animatronic parrot, like they have at the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, isn't it? But yeah, I think it is meant to make us question of what is real and what is a simulacra.

The prologue presents the idea that the world of the games is part of a storyworld that exists somewhere between how father Guybrush retells his adventures to his kid, how Guybrush remembers them himself, and how his kid imagines them. It cleverly speaks to the subjective nature of video game narratives, where the players inhabit a story the developers programmed, and re-tell it in their own way. It also strikes a delicate balance between resolving the LeChuck's Revenge cliff-hanger and honoring the previous three Monkey Island games that came after that cliffhanger. In fact, the neat way Return's answer to the Revenge cliffhanger builds on the narrative baggage of the previous games, especially the idea of Guybrush as an older, married, established as pirate who has had lots of adventures, makes me wonder whether a satisfying resolution would have even been possible in 1992. I feel like both MI1 and MI2 benefited from this sense of nagging dread, which helped to balance the general corniness of the world. Both games are constantly hinting that there is something actually quite terrible about treasure you're seeking. In Secret, it's a portal to Hell, which gave me the absolute heebie jeebies as a kid. It sort of feels like you're on the edge of unraveling the entire world. In Revenge, that same sense of dread is still there, in particular with the cutscenes that show LeChuck closing in on Guybrush each time he finds a map piece. However, Ron has admitted that he wasn't sure how to end the game, and I think he went with something that felt uncanny the same way that Hell did, without really knowing how the cliffhanger would resolve. So there's this great sense of the world collapsing in MI2, but how do you come back from that? I can believe that Ron possibly intended the games to be sort of like a child's fantasy, but I think that idea works more as a vibe than as an overt plot point or M. Night Shyamalan twist. I think he was able to get the dread of the MI2 ending by sort of subverting that child-like vibe and making it overt in a way that feels uncomfortable and wrong. But it does kind of write the story into a corner. I never wanted a Monkey Island 3a that revealed that the previous games were imaginary, and I also never though the anachronisms were something that needed to be explained. Even if you do want those things explained, that's nowhere to start the first chapter of a computer game that might be another player's entry to the series. Return makes the Childbrush section work because seasoned players understand it in context of Revenge, while newer players will just experience it as a 'junior pirates' tutorial section. No one was doing in-game tutorials in 1992. It's possible that Ron had a great resolution planned for the start of MI3a, but he certainly didn't stick around at LucasArts to tell it. I find it hard to believe that it would have felt as natural of a resolution as what Return delivered. And in a weird way, I'm kind of glad to have had 20 years of speculating about what that resolution could have been. It's been fun!

Guybrush had no way of knowing the ring would turn her into a statue, right? If I remember correctly, he doesn't know it's cursed until Wally shows up and tells him and Elaine right after he proposes to her. I guess his mistake was proposing to Elaine with a ring that he stole, but LeChuck is presumably the one who put the curse on the ring. It's on-brand for Guybrush to not accept responsibility for it, of course. It is kind of funny how the scrapbook glosses over it like "here's another crazy thing that happened one time - Elaine was a statue for a while, and was got briefly swallowed by a snake! Anyway... "). Boy, I'm glad to have stumbled into the Curse of Monkey Island spoiler thread where we can discuss the plot intricacies of this groundbreaking follow-up to Ron Gilbert's Monkey Island 2. 😇

I've only played the prologue and explored Melee so far - all the characters keep telling me to go to the docks, but I've been resisting it so far and just wandering around. I've been enjoying the dialogue a lot, and haven't felt the need to turn on subtitles like I thought I would. My favorite part so far is pestering Locke Smith by asking what every lock and key do. Her answers feel very Grossman in their specificity, and are just the kind of detail I love about these games.