LuigiHann

Ooh, that seems like it'd be one of the tougher ones to do, given the variety of licenses. Would be very neat though.

That is pretty neat. Nice to know that they do intend to update more games, and it seems like that'll just come down to which licenses they can get their hands on. I'm still picturing Strong Bad being an early one because there's no giant corporation to deal with, just a couple of guys

I'll be impressed when AI gets to the point where you could feed it the concept art and the pixel art and it could map them together and fill in the gaps.

I don't think he's entirely right or entirely wrong. The concept of "a point and click adventure" is almost anachronistic in itself at this point. The genre is a product of a time when it was the best possible marriage of story and gameplay. Back then no other genre of game could incorporate as much of a compelling narrative and still have enough interactivity for the games press and audience to accept it as a "game." Nowadays, every game of every genre can potentially have just as much story content as The Secret of Monkey Island. Every game can have cinematic cutscenes and relatable characters and comedy and drama beats that land. Everything from the old text adventures to visual novels to Myst to Monkey Island to Ace Attorney to The Cave to Gone Home to The Walking Dead to Life is Strange to The Stanley Parable to Coffee Talk to Harold Halibut are all part of that same legacy, and even games like Psychonauts and Half-Life 2 and Portal and Mass Effect and Fez and The Last of Us and who knows what else are building off of that legacy. If you set out to make a game that just tells a great story, it can look like anything and feel like anything and play like anything. The Adventure Game genre didn't die out at all, it just invaded every other genre. Which means that if somebody sets out specifically to make a "pure" point and click adventure game in the current era, it is a conscious decision to make a game that feels more like Monkey Island than it does any of the thousand other things that it could feel like. Nothing wrong with that, but when that's the direction a game takes, those are the comparisons that it will invite, and those are the fans that it will attract, whether it overtly references the older games or not.

Yeah, SBCG4AP doesn't need much more than it already has in terms of geometry, but the resolution of the textures for things like signs and posters, even the UI, tends to be a little low by current standards. Would be nice to have those upscaled or even vectorized for a cleaner look. And the improvements in cel shading tech since that game came out could make it possible to get the character outlines looking even nicer. And combining the game into one shared launcher would be good. But yeah the big thing would be to have it available at all. Oh absolutely. Wallace & Gromit would massively benefit from the sort of attention these Sam & Max remasters have gotten. There are modern shaders explicitly designed to evoke clay-based stop-motion animation that could breathe a ton of life into the game's look. And a point and click interface would be a blessing.

ToMI would definitely benefit from a new coat of paint with the Skunkape touch (imagine having more than 6 character models!), but at least it's still nominally available. At the moment I'd put my hopes on Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People - it's currently unlisted on storefronts, it wouldn't take a ton of re-lighting or anything due to its art style, and the Bros Chaps are probably easier to negotiate with than Disney is. And they've been establishing their presence as Videlectrix with their retro-style point-and-click games on Steam. Good fit.

Harrison Ford has one of those voices that's deceptively hard to imitate. But it does seem like he's settled into the character. The extended cutscene here definitely felt like an Indiana Jones scene. Not certain I'll be able to get into a first-person action game like this, depending on how forgiving it is, but it seems like it's got the right tone for sure.

Come to think of it, Lili's eyes are a little off in a similar but subtler way, with the rotation and eyeshadow not quite placed right. Wonder what happened there. Maybe they just wanted the plushies to look cheery compared to the kids' usual serious or sassy expressions.

Haha I do not have the photoshop skills so I appreciate you following through. Doesn't that look so much more like Raz?

Lili looks great. I find their interpretation of Raz's facial expression somewhat puzzling. His eyes are almost... upside-down. Almost every expression Raz makes, outside of the stylized box art, involves his bottom eyelids being nearly flat and the top of his eyes a half-circle - they've done the exact opposite here, and it makes him look sleepy or eerily calm in a way that doesn't match his whole vibe.

Something charming about the idea that Ron Gilbert is in the middle of reading three different books at any given time. Relatable.

For me it's one of those things that really depends. HD reskins that mess with the art style too much, or get too ambitious to work with the geometry at all, can be a mess. But sometimes it can work well, when the old textures are just grungy enough to look dated on a modern screen, but not so grungy that painting over them involves a ton of reinterpreting. The good remasters just make the game look like you thought it looked already

Hopefully there are some accessibility options to turn the action/combat difficulty way down. I'm not gonna say no to a first person puzzle/adventure game. Troy Baker does seem to be becoming a go-to guy for games like this, but the voice he's doing here sounds enough like Indiana Jones not to faze me.

Yeah the titles usually evoke some specific mythical concept, but it didn't look like there were any superstitious or occult associations with the geographical Great Circle, at least in my very limited search.

Also worth noting that this sort of "The End... Or Is It?" twist would already have been a recognizable pulp adventure cliche when they were making the game. Combined with the "it was all a dream" twist before that and the full "Empire Strikes Back" gag that led up to it, there's a degree of overt silliness to the ending that people tend to set aside when trying to determine the true underlying reality of the story. But in a sense, the overt silliness is the underlying reality of it all.

If we accept that Guybrush was imagining effectively the whole game, it's not a stretch to think he might also have imagined the glowing eyes and Elaine's line on his way out of the park. I accept that the ending was likely intended to be taken literally, and that if there were a third game shortly after MI2 it likely would have elaborated on that and had Guybrush going in and out of the imaginary world. Could've been neat. The only thing it leaves me wondering is that if "the secret of monkey island" was that Guybrush was just a kid playing, why would Ron pretend it hadn't been revealed when MI2 had effectively revealed that. So I think the titular secret may have been something else altogether.

That's fantastic!

Yeah, I was definitely mostly picturing Telltale-era art, though I'm also thinking that art is pretty consistent with their "default" expressions in their Hit the Road sprites. And just from scrolling through images it seems like Max is presented either with the gritted-teeth grin or the wide-open grin pretty interchangeably, if Sam is smiling with his teeth showing, it's usually with his jaw wide open. Very rare to see his teeth but not his tongue. Found one exception but it's a very different look for Sam. I'm sure I'm overthinking it now but the expression on the plush continues to puzzle me. Still pretty cute regardless.

It looks pretty good. I'm a little surprised they gave him the same sort of toothy grin as Max, though. I know Purcell tends to draw him with a similar smile but I still picture him with a somewhat sterner expression to better contrast against Max.

For a franchise as seemingly video-game-friendly as Indiana Jones, it's wild that the game projects never seem to come together. You'd think they could simply throw it to Naughty Dog, since Uncharted is basically as Indiana Jones as it gets. Alas. Neat concept art; Chorney's definitely got the Struzan vibe down. Fun to see those Agents of Shield posters in that style as well.

Looks neat! Image upscaling/restoration feels like one of the less-controversial applications of AI-enhanced image manipulation, so I think you're good here.

While voice actors are part of SAG-AFTRA, I don't get the impression that the current strike against the Hollywood studios and streamers impacts games directly, since it's a different set of companies and negotiations involved. Video game voice actors went on strike separately in 2016-2017.

Thank you for all the screenshots! Funny Ron said they had to canonically decide where the alley was for Return, but it looks like they left it pretty ambiguous in the final art. Clearly not "3" here, at least (I think I always assumed it was 3 in the original, despite evidence to the contrary)

Oh haha yeah, a version of this gallery laid out like https://skins.webamp.org/ would be pretty fun