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Gins

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Posts posted by Gins

    How i understood LeChuck's Revenge when i played it first time

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    I think I was too young to interpret much else other than what Elaine spelled out.

     

    I found it weird that they were brothers. Spell.

    That Mêlée is reachable through the elevator? Spell.

    The treasure being a ticket? Spell.

     

    And I was disappointed, and was so happy when CMI explained it all away.

     

    Only years later did I understand the implications. And MI2 became layer after layer discovered and peeled back my favorite MI game and one of my favourites, period.

    • Like 1

    Root beer (i think it is better that people reading this post have finished RTMI)

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    25 minutes ago, karmo said:
      Reveal hidden contents

    It might be even more farfetched, but what would be equivalent of new form of undead in case of destroyed animatronic ghost that unreliable person thought was real? Maybe person in undead costume. In that case guard who wears LeChuck costume foreshadows fact that Chuckie is really wearing costume.

     

    Yeah it definitely fits the whole substitution game that is constantly played throughout Secret, perhaps that alone is hint enough as you've substituted countless things to get to that part.

     

    You substitute so many things in Secret and without checking, I'll hypothesize that you substitute less in later games. In Return I'm not even sure if you substitute anything at all. Maybe the sign of a more grown up mind who has a harder time playing along with that.

     

    Or I just misremember 😆

    Root beer (i think it is better that people reading this post have finished RTMI)

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    10 minutes ago, Remi said:

     

    There were a couple, including one saying it goes well with some vanilla ice cream -- a root beer float. Not sure how well those translated outside of the US, though.

    Ah that explains it. It probably didn't translate well to my culture (Austrian) so I missed these, even though I played in English. I kinda got that it references root beer (because I knew the solution from earlier playthroughs), but I'd wager it was quite more on the nose for Americans. Thanks!

    Root beer (i think it is better that people reading this post have finished RTMI)

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Would be cool but so would water or grog. Also it was established in MI2, that root beer only works on ghosts, not zombies, as you can douse LeChuck in it and he doesn't die. (The new leaders didn't get the memo though 😂)

     

    Related to root beer though, something that I've missed maybe throughout my many playthroughs:

    What are the hints that root beer is a substitute for the magic voodoo root?

     

    Just the color and the "root" in its name? Or were there more elaborate clues?

    MI Fangame Memories and Recommendations

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Fangames recently came up in another topic and they seemed a good topic to make a ... topic about.

     

    I played a few back in the day. I remember in particular having played The Devil's Triangle and M:I2, but my memories of these are quite hazy since it's been perhaps over 10 years since.

    I was also working on a fangame myself at some point but abandoned it for other projects before I showed it to anybody. And now I spent some time today thinking about that one and what I would do differently if I'd do it today, hypothetically. Most likely I will never do it, but there is a certain itch...

     

    Also, there seems to be a list of some of the most relevant MI Fangames on Mojo, which put a smile on my face (https://mixnmojo.com/media/filecategories/Fan-Games), and if I saw that right, despite many of these old creators' pages being offline now, Mojo still seems to have mirrors. Too bad there are no screenshots to find some more easily.

     

    That said, I was thinking about maybe revisiting some of them that I might still have somewhere in my old Downloads folder, to make up for not mentioning much more here than just the title of two games I remember.


    So how about you guys? Any fond memories of some creative fan games?

    • Like 3

    POLL: Now the dust has settled how do you feel about Return to Monkey Island?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    11 minutes ago, Lechuck said:

    But there is a difference between playing a computer game and running amok in a theme park with vivid, lifelike delusions.

    Touché too 😁

     

    I do hope that Guybrush didn't actually ruin people's lives and burned down attractions. If he did, and both Elaine and Stan are so casual about it, it doesn't put them in a much better light either 😄

    • Like 1

    POLL: Now the dust has settled how do you feel about Return to Monkey Island?

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Gins
    bonus conversation

    1 hour ago, Lechuck said:

    But an adult living in a fantasy world to the point where his wife chaperones him to the amusement park so he can go and play just feels.... a bit weird and uncomfortable.

    "I know you've looked forward to this new game/attraction in the Monkey Island series/amusement park. I'll do some work/cure scurvy in the meantime and then go to bed/home. Take your time and enjoy yourself, just make sure you turn on/off the dishwasher/lights when you're done, ok? Love you honey 😘"

     

    You're right that would be weird in real life 😉

     

    Bonus:

    "I wanted to surprise you and fixed you old code wheel/ship from Monkey Island 1 with some tape/tape."

    Theme Park Allusions (Series Wide)

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Colorfinger said:

    Much as I hated it at the time, Star buccaneers seems like a perfect example of the incursion of outside businesses into Guybrush’s favorite park…

    Like a McDonald's in the middle of Disney World.

     

    Also a foreign takeover by an Australian who has influence over the whole world at once, with Mêlée changing too and the Monkey Head maybe being a giant robot because of executive meddling.

     

    Also explains why in Return there is like, NO trace of anything from Escape's changes (the shipyard, LUA bar, etc.) because they simply built back again after the original manager, or someone sharing their vision, returned.

    • Thanks 1

    Return to Monkey Island 🚨GAME-WIDE🚨 Spoiler Chat

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    2 hours ago, Wally B. said:

    In short, there is no real way the things in the Monkey Island games happened, there is only the way we decided they happened by playing the games. In an incredible moment of brilliance, the game and the developers are giving the players complete freedom of choice and interactivity with the game, not only in a gameplay sense, but in a storytelling sense.

    What I also really like about this is, that it even canonizes various fangames, e.g. The Devil's Triangle (I don't know if anybody here has played it too, or if there is even still a way to find them these days). There were some that I played and enjoyed tremendously back in the day, which try to fill in the gaps between e.g. MI1 and MI2 (how did Guybrush end up with all this money and how did he split up with Elaine?).

    Hypothetically somebody, or really, multiple independent people, could make fangames with the goal of ticking all the boxes on Ron's "If I made another Monkey Island" blog post.

    And all of them are kind of canonized by Return to Monkey Island, since they are all possible stories that Guybrush could have made up in the theme park, that he daydreamed about, that he told Boybrush, that Boybrush is reenacting, or that might just have actually happened, and it's up to a fan to pick and choose what stories they like best.

     

    Monkey Island is no longer a series of games with a strict canon, with Return it entered the realm of mythology, where you can make up all sorts of stories featuring the Gods and explore their core personalities and interactions from so many different angles, that it doesn't matter what the canon is, you're simply using mythical characters of legend to tell a good story, or explore some scenario that nobody might have thought of before, and some fans might elevate to the status of "plausible enough to be canon" and others might simply get a good story out of it regardless.

     

    What sours this a bit is that I am quite sure Disney is quite likely to crack down on such fangames than the old Lucasfilm would have been back in the day ;_;

    • Like 3

    POLL: Now the dust has settled how do you feel about Return to Monkey Island?

    in General Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Gins
    quote marks for clarity

    I think one of the messages of Return, even if it is an uncomfortable one, is that, as you age it becomes unhealthy to remain invested in fantasy worlds the same way you've been as a child.

     

    As in, you can still be invested and have fun, but try to not get real life issues take the back seat to questions such as "what is the Secret of Monkey Island"?

     

    Of course, many players already realized this for themselves, so they don't want to be reminded of this uncomfortable idea while trying to enjoy the limited free time they still have as adults. ("Congratulations on figuring it out too Ron...")

     

    There are those who know this and it resonates because of that ("Yup Ron totally gets me"), and I think this group might just enjoy Return the most.

     

    Then there those who didn't think about it that way before and they say wow and might change their lives because of it. ("Ron is a genius!")

     

    And you have those who got their bubble burst and refuse to accept that message. ("Don't judge me Ron.")

     

    I want to make sure to say that I don't intend to mean any judgment, and that the quotes in brackets are just there to paint a picture, not to put people into boxes.

     

    I just tried to formulate the four quadrants of two arbitrary categories and probably most players can freely put a dot for themselves anywhere on that space.

     

    And of course such that dot can likely move about over time.

     

    My guess is that those in the first and last quadrant tend to be more disappointed with the game than those in the second and third, and that the emotions are stronger for those in the third and fourth.

    • Like 3

    Your favorite Monkey Island game

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    16 minutes ago, Jake said:

    As an example of this disconnect, the original Curse design document called it “an apology for the end of Monkey 2” in a kidding-not-kidding kind of way. If you’re a fan for whom Monkey 2’s ending needs no apology (or for whom the tone and ideas that game’s ending were grappling with were one of the big draws to the series for you) a sequel whose initial seed of thought was a need to “apologize” for it, is probably not going to resonate with you as much as it does for other fans who don’t share that same specific interest in the series.

    I imagine if a team wanted to do this again after Return, they could. So it's hard for me to fully see the extreme reactions to it's ending, since it could just be undone with a quick throwaway intro.

     

    E.g. Boybrush could simply be abducted by LeChuck in the beginning of the next game.

     

    Boybrush: "But dad said he made you up!"

    LeChuck: "You will find I am quite real."

    Boybrush: "Like the graphics of my new Playstation 6?"

    LeChuck: "Perhaps... but maybe more like... your uncle!"

    Boybrush: "Noooooo!"

    • Haha 1

    Your favorite Monkey Island game

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Jake said:

    Anyway back on topic, my favorite Monkey Island games, in order:

     

     

    * On any given week Monkey Island 1 and 2 bounce between being my favorite. Secret is just so clean, the bar it set is so high, it came out of the gate as such a singular experience that it was able to define a template that five other games could follow and be judged on whether they “feel right” based on those amazing first choices. Its mood, across the whole game but especially on Melee and beneath Monkey islands, is still some of the most potent and pervasive in the series, and Guybrush as he’s written in Secret still may be the perfect balance of naïveté and snark, earnest and detached, as a passthrough for players desires, and somehow as his own person. … …

     

    Monkey Island 2 is still, to me, one of the most beautiful looking and sounding games out there. Monkey 2 is just the distillation of “evocative” and “intriguing” to me. When I first played it, walking around Woodtick, I wanted to fall into the screen and live there. The game seems built with every pixel to ooze mystery, to invite you to wonder what’s behind every corner you can’t see, what’s hidden in the cracks of its world. I love that the story is about peeling back layer after layer of a huge pirate mystery that seems way bigger than you.


    * Return has quickly flown up the list to third place for me. I’m not as purely in love with Return as I am with Monkey Island 1 and 2, but it’s given me more to think about than any other Monkey Island game (and more than most games I’ve played). It’s not a game whose world I want to tumble into the way I did with 2, but I felt an almost manic need to drive through the game and learn what it was about, and when I reached the ending for the first time I realized that I’d been on the same sweaty journey as Guybrush. It felt awesome. Return is less about disappearing into the cracks of its fictional world like 1 and 2 are, but it’s replaced that with a game that is full of nooks and crannies to explore, all of which reinforce and ruminate on the central themes, whether it’s the contents of the scrapbook that bookends the game, the different endings, the frame stories within frame stories, or, of course, the world and puzzles and plot of the game too. I don’t think I’ll ever have the same pure love for Return that I have for 1 and 2 no matter how much time passes, because it always wants to keep me a little more at arms length than the rest of the series. But, it’s the first game since 2 to both keep me on the edge of my seat the whole time, wondering what’s going to happen next, what kind of a story I’m even playing, and also to give me questions to chew on for weeks and months after finishing it, and for those reasons it’ll probably always stay this high up.

     

    * Curse, for me, has never crackled with the same weird immeasurable energy as 1 and 2 - it just doesn't seem interested in the idea that there is some unspeakable creepy underbelly beneath the story like those games did - and that’s something I struggled with for a long time because that feeling was what defined Monkey Island to me, but I think with time I’ve gotten over my own hangups and really appreciate Curse on its own terms. As a comedy pirate story filled with swells of adventure, intrigue, melancholy, it delivers; in my opinion it’s one of the best adventure games ever made. It’s just really damn crisp, a game that feels like it matches the intention of its team in the execution of it. It’s obviously beautiful, made by a team at the top of their game who clearly was having a good time making it. The music is still unmatched in the series imo, especially on the production front. It has a huge cast of memorable characters you really want to spend more time with. Guybrush and Elaine and LeChuck feel more flattened to me as characters in Curse, another knock against it from me personally, and while I think it sets an unfortunate trend in the series, I can’t fault Curse for it entirely: Curse is aiming to be Monkey Island by way of Disney cartoon, and the way they “flatten” the characters could just as easily be seen as “heightening” them in terms of making them feel like they fit in, or even pop, in their new animated setting. Not quite what I’m after personally, but so it goes. (Also the voice casting rules. Earl Boen as LeChuck will forever be a beautiful and inspired gift Curse gave us.)


    * Escape is harder for me to square on all fronts. I love that for some people out there this is their favorite Monkey Island game, but it’s not for me. The art, engine, writing, mood all seem kind of at odds with each other, like many different people all had ideas for how a new Monkey Island game might work, and they all got thrown into a room together and started working, but never ended up on the same page. It has gags I love and still remember, some puzzles I think of fondly, themes and plot points that I think are pretty inspired and clever, lots of great animation and music, but at least for me as a player, the whole is definitely less than the sum of its parts. Guybrush, LeChuck, and Elaine slip into even more one-note versions of who they are, almost parodies of their characters from the earlier games, which I wish I could find fun and laugh at the way the game itself sometimes does, but it mostly made me sad. And it’s got some real bummer moments that for me will never work (the giant anime robot duel at the end especially). 
     

    * At times, even though I worked on it, Tales is at the bottom of my own list. When I first heard we might be licensing the series from Lucas to make the fifth game, my first response was “no, we shouldn’t do it,” because I knew the budget we’d be operating at was tiny compared to the original games. When I heard it would be a WiiWare game my heart sank because I knew each chapter had to fit in a 40 mb footprint, which means the whole season would only get 200 megs of storage — less than half of just one of the two CDs that Curse got a decade earlier. And I still feel that crunch whenever I go back and replay: The dialog prompts that result in the same voice line said regardless of what you choose, the repeated and reused pirate models, the soundtrack buried under bad midi. I was worried we’d make a Monkey Island so cheap it would be an embarrassment and I often still feel that way. I can’t speak as definitively of my more positive feelings because they’re about our own creative choices as a team, but we tried to tell a rollicking pirate adventure that went places the previous games never did, we tried to infuse things with an air of mystery that built up over the season, we tried to start the process of pushing Guybrush, LeChuck, and Elaine back to the people we knew from the earlier games, and we tried to at least acknowledge the weird edges and undercurrent of the story even if we didn’t feel like it was our job or place to fully dive into them. I don’t think we fully succeeded at any of those things, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for going as far as saying we didn’t achieve any of them. Sometimes I think of a moment from Tales, or an aspiration we had for it, or a memory from making it, and I’m filled with enough happiness and pride that it shoots way up this list! With time I’ve settled on mostly being proud of Tales - I think what the team achieved with the budgetary, platform, and managerial constraints we were handed is still impressive, and our love for and thoughtfulness around the world of Monkey Island shines through. But I completely get if that isn’t enough. If it doesn’t work for you for the same reasons I have misgivings, or for some completely different combination of reasons, that’s just how it is! 


    I love that with this series basically no two people have the same list with the same reasons. My favorites are the weird total outliers that have, for example, Escape at the top or a total dunk on one of the earlier games down at the bottom just because it’s such a break in the trend, but even within more conventional orderings there are always hopefully some fun details and reasonings. 

    What a great write-up and thanks for your honest (😜) opinion on Tales despite working on it. I remember how excited I was about it, and it really picked up around episode 3. I still remember fondly the LeSinge escape room, the manatee, the "technical limitation" jokes (Guybrush tossing items into Anemone's fountain to avoid animating a giving animation 😂), Morgan LeFlay was an amazing character and I'd have loved her to return in Return.

     

    I also remember how, due to how I perceived Elaine and Guybrush's marriage, I was rooting for Guybrush to split with Elaine and get with Morgan in the end. Was such an outcome ever considered in the writing room or was I just reading too much into it?

     

    I believe I really need to replay Tales and maybe distanced from the times back then, it might surprise me.

     

    It was after all my favorite Telltale game. Thanks for trying so hard in the face of the limitations @Jake

    • Like 2

    Your favorite Monkey Island game

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    With all the stuff going on among fans since the announcement of Return, especially outside of here, I understand everyone's a bit more on edge, even here.

     

    I hope we manage to not let that get to us in the same divisive way as can be seen on e.g. Twitter or Ron's blog.

     

    I'm so thankful for everyone here doing their best to course correct and clarify whenever a situation shows signs of escalation, rather than leaning fully into the conflict and going scorched earth.

     

    We're all in the same boat after all, even if it looks different for everyone. Monkey Island is a magical boat that can take a crew to multiple places at once, unlike LeShip where everybody has to agree on a single destination. 😁

    • Like 3

    POLL: Now the dust has settled how do you feel about Return to Monkey Island?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    To @Lagomorph01 and others who say they cannot suspend their disbelief after playing Return, I want to say I understand. Yet, not all hope is lost.

     

    Do you remember the first time you consciously realized that movies, books or even cartoons are not real, likely as a kid? Yet you probably still play games, watch movies and read books.

     

    The world of Monkey Island was clearly never real to begin with. They were video games that many people worked on, not the accounts of a historical pirate.

     

    The classic "it was all a dream" lazy ending often comes out of thin air because the writers really ran out of time and energy, but in Ron's games (also outside of MI) this layer to reality has always been hinted at from the first game, to the degree that it is even subconsciously in the DNA of the Non-Gilbert games, e.g. with the theme park references in Tales mentioned by @Jake. For Monkey Island this didn't come out of nowhere, it was the inevitable conclusion since 1989.

     

    You can still be disappointed of course, e.g. because you simply didn't like the idea or how it played out.

     

    But if you truly want to like these games, but are worried that you can't suspend your disbelief anymore, I guarantee you, you will be able to again, the same way as you can still do it for all sorts of other fictional works you already consume.

     

    All you need is a shift of perspective. Turn your head like this and squint. And the duck will look like a skull again.

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