LuigiHann

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

Great collection! I agree that it'd be amazing to have at least a lightbox view, and it does seem like a good fit for mixnmojo's media section (which could, honestly, also benefit greatly from a lightbox implementation). If you're looking to set up a unique collection on Archive.org it may be worth shooting a friendly message to Jason Scott (https://mastodon.archive.org/@textfiles or jason@textfiles.com I think). I don't know him well but he was a big part of setting up the Winamp Skins archive (https://archive.org/details/winampskins?tab=collection) so we've chatted a bit and he seems nice enough. He manages a lot of the interactive gaming-related collections on there (eg. https://archive.org/details/consolelivingroom?tab=collection) so he'd probably find the backgrounds collection intriguing and he wouldn't stress much about the copyright status.

I may be tempted to get the Max mech for my adorable super robot collection Edit: Dang, the site says these ones will be about 9 inches tall? They'll tower over the other figures, which will be fun to see.

I wouldn't think it was that cynical. I think it's reasonable to assume the conversation started with "How on earth do we make a movie about an 80-year-old Indiana Jones?" Having the prologue set in an era much closer to that of the original films is a natural choice from a storytelling perspective, linking the new elements to familiar ones. It lets them tell a story set in 1969 that still feels connected to the Indiana Jones we know. I think they would have written it largely the same way even if they had decided to go with a lookalike/impersonator for 1940s Indy, though I'm sure the tech emboldened them. And yeah, I'd probably refer to the prologue as de-aged Indy sequence too, mostly because that's how everyone else talks about it, but also because that tech feels so new and potentially jarring. Whether it works for you or not, it's interesting to discuss how the technique was used. I think they did a pretty good job not calling too much attention to the effect, filming the character more or less exactly as they would have otherwise. And I wonder if a generation from now when all of the movies are "old," whether new viewers will hone in on the de-aging specifically or if they'll look right past it. No real spoilers, but musing on the themes:

Saw it tonight. I didn't hate it. It kind of dragged in the middle there. The ending managed to surprise me, which tends not to be the case with big blockbuster films, so I'll give it credit for that.

That is fantastic!

I wouldn't rule out that it will happen eventually, but I feel like if they wanted to time it to cross-promote with the movie specifically, they probably would have announced it by now. But you never know. There is also that announced but elusive new Indiana Jones game being developed, so maybe they were hoping to get the timeline to sync up with that. I'd worry about the licensing being more complicated than the other adventure games, but LRG has been allowed to do a bunch of Star Wars games too, so it doesn't seem like Disney is being stingy with the properties. So I'm sure it's on their radar.

That's at least decent, though the wording of this and other posts would suggest that they were more or less done making it before they looped him in. But I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it's because they intended it as a licensed equivalent of a fan tribute and not necessarily a True Monkey Island Game that would necessitate Ron's input Yeah, it's just wrong enough that I'd almost prefer he be recast for this incarnation, or at least I would have directed Dom to deliver the lines differently. Feels like he should have a more grizzly gravely voice compared to Dom's perpetually youthful performance. Regardless, it should indeed be fun to walk around these islands in 3D. Since Tales opted to avoid recurring locales and Return returned to 2D, the only "3D" takes we've seen for Monkey and Melee islands were in Escape, which wasn't especially aiming for nostalgic immersion or authenticity the way this is.