LuigiHann

Maybe "Galbrush"

Personally I'd flip it, and assume the plaque is an anachronism (effectively a fourth wall break) and that the stuff we see in the frame story setting is realer than that. But it is open-ended enough to read it either way. Curse of Monkey Island establishes that animatronics exist within the pirate world, at least as a concept

Nothing I caught in-game. I don't know why but I didn't question it, my brain was just like "Oh, 'Bob' was short for 'Apple Bob', good to know" and didn't think anything of it

That's somewhere between Telltale's episodic structure and Myst Online's periodic content updates, and I think the issue with an ongoing one is generally that you end up doing several games worth of work for one game's worth of sales, and adventure game content gets consumed much more quickly than something endless like an RPG or a sim game. Always a bummer because the idea really is beautiful in theory. Would love to see somebody make it work

Fun other thought since it's all meta-storytelling, combining two separate people into one character for narrative convenience is a very common thing that arises during the editing process and when adapting a story into another format. Furthermore, given the frame of RtMI, it works out just as well if HT really is based on Boybrush's great-grandfather, or else he just envisions him as such. The actual surprise twist that one is the other perhaps didn't really play out as such, but if everybody in the story is somebody in real life then HT being somebody's grandfather makes as much sense as anything. It definitely didn't bother me that there are hotspots not tied to puzzles... in fact, I prefer it, since the games where every single interaction ultimately ties into a puzzle, the world ends up feeling small. I liked that there was stuff that only existed for worldbuilding or characterization. The one thing, puzzle-wise, that did feel a bit unresolved to me was the graffiti around Melee's shops. But Guybrush's most notable response to those is "this looks unfinished," so maybe that was a nod we were intended to understand in retrospect

I do miss the days when choosing what your software looked like meant more than just choosing between light mode and dark mode. I definitely keep Winamp around (or WACUP, a community-driven Winamp update) to tinker with from time to time, but I can't say I sincerely use it for playing music anymore, since so much of my "library" is streaming now. Also miss the feeling of "owning" my music collection, but what can ya do . Edit: to keep from going too off-topic here's one more tangentially-relevant winamp skin https://skins.webamp.org/skin/748c25bb10fe1e7b93bc9099915bc38c/teen_girl_squad_2_0_by_luigihann.wsz/

Very few, but not none, and generally mostly still in the Adventure/Puzzle/Mystery genre. "Her Story" was a fairly significant indie game played by examining live action footage. "Contradiction" was a quirky British detective mystery done in live action. Throwback adventure games like Tesla Effect (Tex Murphy) and Obduction (in the vein of Myst) made use of live actors in their cutscenes. In 2018 Netflix put out "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch," an "interactive film" that was functionally a choose-your-own-adventure game. So it is rare and somewhat gimmicky, but not unheard of, and depending on the techniques used it doesn't always feel retro. Now, one thing I really haven't seen since the 90s is the Toonstruck-style use of a live action character being used as the player character in a digital environment during actual gameplay. Occasionally a stop-motion animated game comes out and works just well enough to convince me that you could incorporate photographic sprites in that manner, but it is hard to imagine it looking right with a real person. But it would kind of fit Maniac Mansion's schtick. Edit: also worth noting how many modern games since like L.A. Noire have incorporated real actors using 3D facial scans and motion capture. It always still looks a bit uncanny to me, but nowadays you could probably pair gameplay made that way alongside live-action cutscenes without it looking totally dissonant.

Old news for some, but since I'm apparently new to this forum (so good to visit a real forum again!) here are a couple of my relevant Winamp skins. You can click the Webamp links to play around with them online without downloading anything. Sam & Max, based on Telltale's game and their website at the time: https://skins.webamp.org/skin/b30e9850296ec14bd7db0bb222f9d292/sam_and_max_season_1_by_luigihann.wsz/ Day of the Tentacle: https://skins.webamp.org/skin/caba216aa93f4c3d995d6ba7ee03770e/day_of_the_tentacle_for_winamp_by_luigihann.wsz/ Strong Bad (technically not directly based on the Telltale game, but close enough): https://skins.webamp.org/skin/95df60f7546b7e69d5f38ab83d26203c/lappy486.wsz/ Some less-relevant ones in my gallery may be relevant to fans of other adventure games (I have Myst, Neverhood, and several Ace Attorney ones, along with more Homestar Runner ones and a million other game-inspired ones): luigihann User Profile | DeviantArt I've taken a few stabs at a Monkey Island one, but none have quite clicked. Might be motivated to try again now.

I do think it's super weird that 1730 (four years after the starting point of 1726) is even an option. It seemed like the only four-year gap among all the year options, so it really felt like the "correct" answer, and that it continued to not work made me feel like I missed another clue. I did ultimately solve it semi-accidentally when I was attempting to "reset" the wheel back to the starting point for the umpteenth time. I did find myself wondering about that myself. I really thought there would eventually be a twist wherein they turn out not to be such bad guys, since they were working against LeChuck just as Guybrush was, and Guybrush had no more "right" to The Secret than they did. If it turned out that they actually had altruistic goals, and Guybrush's refusal to move on with the times was a net negative in that story thread as well, I think it would have served the themes. Super agree. If nothing else, I hope this current MI resurgence at least greases the wheels for Skunkape to do a light remaster of Tales like they've been doing for Sam & Max. Punch up the cinematic music and lighting, tighten up the graphics and diversify the NPC's just a bit, so it feels a little less constrained by its time. (I would honestly similarly love another coat of paint on Escape, just cleaning up the resolution and implementing the PS2 control scheme on PC. Curse mostly holds up but I wouldn't say no to an upscale.) I definitely enjoyed the escalation of his forms among the first 3 games, so I do find myself a bit sad that the escalation plateaued and then settled on Zombie seemingly forever, but... This also becomes one of the quirks easily explained by Guybrush embellishing the story, and Boybrush's limited awareness influencing how it's visualized. If Zombie Pirate LeChuck is the version that he's seen depicted in paintings or whatever, that's what he'll envision as he hears the story. This honestly also explains why Guybrush and Elaine look exactly the same in and out of the story, a kid's not going to be able to envision his parents much younger than they are.

IMDB says Gullet was voiced by JB Blanc, who seems to have a long history of voice acting in games and animation, alongside a few live-action roles: JB Blanc - IMDb Gullet's voice didn't strike me as especially LuChuck-like in RtMI, but it could have worked. The one they chose was pretty good for the characterization of LeChuck they were going for. (If I wanted to find somebody who naturally sounds closest to Earl Boen, I might have asked Tom Butler - who most recently played Commander Walters, the "Olive Garden Guy" in the Sonic the Hedgehog movies... Doesn't look like he does much if any voice acting so it'd be a stretch, but I feel like he'd be game, and I just felt like he had a Boen-like presence in those movies. But anyway)

Yeah, I don't think it'd need a full MI2->Curse artstyle jump, but a subtler MI1->MI2 jump expanding on RtMI's art style into a new distinct look could be pretty amazing. Would also hope they leave a big gap before doing or announcing another one, as that tradition has also become meaningful. Let the current generation of players discover Monkey Island, consume it all, and then wait long enough to miss it so the next one becomes an event as well... then let's see how MI's themes evolve with an even older Guybrush as protagonist.

Loom was SO ahead of its time that I think it'd be perfect for the current era. It was a post-adventure game too soon. The game probably isn't notorious enough to sell a sequel with the assumption that players would recall the first, so a remaster would make a bit more sense, but... Honestly, my dream would be a full game that has the story of the original Loom as its first act, then adapts the plans for the sequel(s) into acts 2 and 3. The Dinky engine from RtMI, implemented with a more painterly and less angular art style, would probably work really well. I am curious what kind of art style you'd land on for a Maniac Mansion remake. Ron's speculation about doing it with live action FMV is extremely appealing to me, especially if the cutscenes were FMV but the gameplay was point + click using live action sprites in a CG environment. I don't think that's really been attempted much in the HD era, and a kludgy b-movie grain filter could help paper over the seams.

I will say this: I'm not certain if the flooring inspector line in RtMI is meant to be taken literally at all. It's just another self-aware throwback joke intended to play up the anticlimactic nature of that sequence. If I did want to read it a bit more literally, I'd assume Guybrush as a kid either overheard or just imagined the "you look like a flooring inspector" insult, then grew up to be a flooring inspector himself... talk about unsatisfying! And yeah, it did occur to me that Guybrush might have really had an old friend or brother named Chuck, and that RtMI's Chuckie might be Chuck's son, for sure. Could even sketch between the lines that Guybrush and whoever Chuckie was repaired their relationship enough that their children are friends, which is a nice thought. Even then, can Chuckie the person and LeChuck the theme park animatronic coexist? Maybe the theme park pirate is unnamed, and Guybrush just calls it LeChuck? Works as well as anything, I suppose. But I do enjoy how it only really works when read on several levels at once, never entirely works on one level alone.

Vaguely vaguely on the topic of details and versions and voices. In the original MI2, when you "look" at something with no description, like a door or a rock, Guybrush will dynamically say "Nice door" or "Nice rock" or whatever it is. Easy to do with text, but a fun touch. MI2SE didn't have Dominic record a voice line for every object in the game, so now whenever he looks at anything, he just goes "Nice!" At first that bugged me a little, but the more it went on, the more I love it. I think there are at least a half dozen distinct readings of "Nice!" and they're all fun

I guess it's two adult tickets and a child's ticket? Because Guybrush and Elaine had to take Boybrush to the park after telling him about it? Cute.

I think it's just my imagination and bias, but it really feels like this could have been an homage or parody of Myst. Forest, ship, mechanical structures, some kind of star chart viewer (as close to a planetarium as you're likely to get in MI) and a grandfather-clock-styled clock tower. If it were just one or two of these things I'd shrug it off but it adds up a bit.

Agreed all. I played a bunch of this on the Steam Deck, and while I was expecting an awkward experience using the touch pads for mouse cursor control, it instead defaulted to the gamepad controls and it was so smooth I didn't attempt to switch away from it, and even started playing using a controller when I swapped back to my desktop. Running around as Guybrush felt great, and the two hotspot selection methods worked well enough. I do agree that I kind of wish that the right-stick method would let you reach further-away hotspots more easily, like you could with a mouse, rather than sticking to the cluster closest to where Guybrush is standing. Still, easy enough to just move him around to get closer.

I do wonder. "Back to the mansion!" is a direct quote from the beginning of Day of the Tentacle, so it could just be a joke. But I wouldn't put anything past him at this point, he seems to be doing what he can to pay respect to the legacy of LucasArts.

Took two days to read through 14 pages of this thread. General thoughts replying to the thread: - I too had a moment of "huh" when I finished the game, but by half an hour later I was quite pleased. - I also found the last puzzle very confusing even after discovering all the clues. Guybrush moves the top of the wheel left and right using right and left motions... and I kept setting the date to 1730 because it's 4 years after 1726, rather than tapping the year 4 times. Ah well. Once I wrote down the 4 combinations it could be, I resolved it quickly. - Did Wally have a theme song in MI2 outside of the Woodtick theme? I figured it makes sense for the map because Wally made the map. - Makes sense that Elaine comes across as maternal in the story, since Guybrush has known her as being a mother for several years by the time he's telling it, and since he's telling it to Boybrush, he may well be referring to Elaine as "mom" in his unheard narration. - If you told me that Ron's idea for what the MI2 ending "meant" involved the kid at the end really being Guybrush's son, I'd believe you. In any case, the segue was impossibly perfect. Maybe the first game I've played where the beginning was a bigger revelation than the ending, and I'm so very glad I got to play it unspoiled. New thoughts from my brain as filtered through other media: - Satoshi Kon's Millenium Actress All of Kon's films are known for playing with the blurred lines between reality and imagination. But Millenium Actress in particular feels relevant, as an aging actress describes her career... - The Lego Movie Spoilers for that film's ending: - The dueling Myst continuities: After the first Myst game came out, surrounding the release of the novels and the sequel Riven, a running gag emerged that the stories were adaptations based on centuries-old journals that had been uncovered, and the events of the game "really happened" in the 1800s. A couple of games were made by another company set in the same continuity as Myst and Riven, but when Cyan made Uru it was set in the present day and the "Myst is based on stuff that really happened" concept became canon. This had the benefit of making it easy to gloss over any continuity issues in the games by chalking them up to "artistic license," but it could also feel unsatisfying, so fans continue to form headcanons for what happened between games in the "game universe" separate from what happened in the "real world." So... yeah. My brain I guess is primed to read the ending of RtMI in an extremely generous way, where the pirate adventure story is real on one level and the theme park imagination story is equally real on another level. The setting in which Guybrush tells the story still seems to be a piratey world, so I certainly still belive Guybrush's adventures were real, in his timeline, but I easily accept that this one was colored by his storytelling flourishes, and it's equally plausible that the previous games were told that way as well. It's also easy enough to explain it all as a series of "real" things that happened, if desired, since Curse depicts a theme park built on Monkey Island, Escape expands on that, and during one of the long stretches when LeChuck was presumed dead it would make perfect sense that Stan of all people would buy it. From there it's possible to imagine that Stan really does contrive wild goose chases that end at his theme park, or just that Boybrush was familiar with the park and Guybrush incorporated it into the story to mess with him. Final final thought: - It's interesting that the game ends with Guybrush silent on the bench, and it's fascinating that different people read different emotions into it. I definitely read it as a sort of "well, that's it, not sure what happens now" vibe, potentially nodding to The Graduate. Which seems appropriate, given that the nod to The Graduate as SoMI turned out to be so pivotal.