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Posts posted by ATMachine

  1. An interesting article from The Verge:

     

    Quote

    As [Frank] Cifaldi explains it, there are frames of animation for a bridge collapsing in the original artwork for the game, but there’s no code that calls for it. It’s just there. So they took it to Gilbert, the creator, and asked about it. “Ron’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s not anything that was ever in the game. I’m not really sure why that’s there,’” says Cifaldi.

     

    This bit seems particularly significant:

     

    Quote

    The Secret of Monkey Island is a seminal game, not least for Cifaldi, who cites it as “maybe my favorite game, depending on which day you ask me.” He says it taught him what games could be — like that they could have funny, memorable worlds and characters. The Foundation received the game the way they receive a lot of them, which is to say, on the sly. (Cifaldi identifies this as another problem the Foundation is out to solve: making it safe for people to donate games and such to the archive, even if they don’t own the rights.)

     

    When they got in touch with Lucasfilm about making content around the game, however, the studio was supportive. “I mean, they’re the guys that make Star Wars, right, they understand,” says Cifaldi. “They understand that fans really enjoy this behind-the-scenes material, and that it directly benefits them if people are talking about it.”

     

    Interesting.

    • Like 1
  2. I think that bit in the original game may be bugged in ScummVM - when I tried it I got an error message in the backend window about "can't play sound, too many ports".

     

    EDIT: is it a stock sound clip of a screaming woman? I think I remember hearing that among the sound effects in DOTT or Sam & Max Hit the Road also.

  3. Do you mean

    12 hours ago, Blondebeard said:

     

     

    That’s a really good score which means you already know that if you destroy 2 turrets will give you more points. You can get close to 400 if you get it in less than 30 seconds and only use 6 shots.

     

    The game also includes another small easter egg (also included on the original mini-game). Only one person found it so far but he did it by looking at the source code. It’s the kind of easter egg that only ATMachine would know. Besides these easter eggs, it also includes some other minor details like leaving holes on the fort. Most of the game should be a pretty good copy of the original with a few exceptions. For instance, the pirates don’t cheer as long as they do in the original game when you hit the fort, but I couldn’t be bothered to fix it.

     

    And the proudest moment of publishing the game was Jonathan Ackley sharing it on Facebook. He was most likely the one who did the coding of this part on the original game.

    Do you mean the Shift-V key to automatically win? I tried it and it didn't seem to work. (I went looking on Archive.org for what Mojo's World of MI hosted site said about secrets in CMI because their archives were ridiculously comprehensive.)

     

    Another thing I recall from the original game is that the complaining skeleton pirates have different voices, depending on whose boat your cannon shot is nearest to. That doesn't seem to be implemented here.

  4. Looks like the Indy LC guide still has its vintage errors in the Grail Temple section - in the actual game the third Grail Trial depends on crossing the chasm right away, not where on the far side you click; and there isn't actually a "ring mark" denoting the correct Grail on the Amiga version AFAIK. (This idea possibly derives from the fact that one or two of the glowing Grails' images aren't completely erased from the background when Indy picks them up. It would be an awesome real feature though.)

  5. 48 minutes ago, Jenni said:

    Plus, Ron wanted to make adventure games for children, to get them interested in adventure games young so they'd carry that interest into adulthood, something LucasArts wasn't keen on doing (Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion being the sole game in that genre by LucasArts, quite a bit after Ron left).

    That's rather odd considering that Brian Moriarty allegedly chose to work on educational games at Lucas Learning instead of making the LOOM sequels.

  6. 2 hours ago, Scummbuddy said:

    During the MixNMojo visit to LucasArts (and became a featured article), didn't the mojo crew snap a picture of some MI concept art that included the "pre-cannibal village lookout area"? I think that was the major first time that screen was made general knowledge.

     

    I couldn't find that image on MixNMojo so I had to go with this poor quality image from the internet. Ignore the red arrow and someone incorrectly thinking the image was of another part of Monkey Island topography. (The image is from this other article from a few weeks ago where other people just happened upon this image for the first time, but apparently within a broadcast news segment. https://kotaku.com/1990-tv-news-report-is-for-the-monkey-island-fans-in-th-1844598533 )

     

    I had thought about working on "finishing" up the location properly.

     

    I also wonder as to the general point of such a location. I could see it as a preparation room before going to the cannibal village, as once you enter there you have to interact with them in some capacity. It might be a bit of a reprieve room, like when you need a reprieve from dealing with LeChuck hunting you down in the final acts of the games.

     

    Screenshot_20200827-221213.png

    Right, and it might have been originally where Herman Toothrot showed up after you got the banana picker and were ready to trade it to him.

  7. Maybe so. But The DIG apparently supported that in-game somehow at least.

     

    On the other hand, as Marius posted in another thread, screenshots on the MI1 German version box instead go with a font that is totally different for the inventory, while keeping the same font that's in-game for the verb bank. Plus a dialog font that was seemingly ripped straight from DPaint - but nonetheless has only one space between letters, like the font in MI1 proper, instead of the erratically wide letter spacing of actual DPaint text.

  8. Here's a screenshot from the manual of the Spanish translation of Monkey Island 1, showing a different font than in the published version:

     

    mi1spanishmanual.png

     

    It looks like the GUI was pasted onto the lower area of the screenshot. But the text is fairly accurate (though not exact) to the game. What's more interesting is that the font looks very similar to, but not quite the same as, the font used in the published game - like an in-house variant of the same design.

     

    In the second line the "h" in "Oh" has a tall stem to match the capital O next to it; in the fourth line, where it's not next to any capitals, the "h" has a shorter stem. Likewise, the "u" in "Cuanto" on the third line has a pixel in the lower-right corner that's absent in the "u" letters seen elsewhere.

     

    Now this could be a SCUMM feature that never appears AFAIK in any published games: letters whose design varies based on the surrounding letters, for the sake of legibility.

     

    Or it could be just a simple Photoshop job.

     

    In fact, I'd have opted for the latter, if the same feature didn't appear elsewhere - in early screenshots of The DIG, no less.

     

    digjoyc.png

     

    Here the letter "r" in Brink's surname is shorter than the "r" in "tourniquet".

     

    Mind you this is supposed to be a screenshot of actual gameplay. (Aside: there's also a graphic filter that's visible in this image; probably the same one that was put into various LucasArts adventure-game Macintosh ports by Aaron Giles, which he later imported into MAME as the Advanced Mame 2000 filter.)

     

    It'd make sense, in an in-joke-y sort of way, for Brink to have a letter glyph in his name that differs from other instances of that letter - because Toshi Olema's surname too has a very un-Japanese L in it.

     

    But that would require special coding, and probably isn't the sort of thing one might do for a one-off gag. It'd make far more sense as a borrowing from an already existing codebase - like that in the Spanish MI1 image above.

     

    That in turn raises the question of why this feature doesn't appear in other LucasArts games. Not least the published version of MI1 in Spanish. Too buggy? Too much work to program? A combination of these with wanting to save some stuff especially for a crazy "secret library archive project" time capsule thing?

     

    Hardly conclusive evidence, but it does make me wonder.

  9. 3 hours ago, Udvarnoky said:

    There probably wasn't a huge gap of time between Last Crusade and the first version of The Dig, and Falstein has credits during and after that period which indicate he was lending a hand with other projects. When the first version of The Dig was shelved, its team was dispersed to assist with Monkey Island 2 and Fate of Atlantis, and I believe Noah was laid off shortly after Fate.

     

    The earliest design doc we have for that version is dated December 1990, while the infamous kickoff meeting (the one with the Loma Prieta earthquake) took place on October 17, 1989. That's over an entire year, at a time when it wasn't unheard of for LucasArts to put together entire games in nine months.

  10. Some food for thought:

     

    Several of the drafts in LOOM are in-jokes or puns of some sort: eg, the Closing Draft is DECE (as in "deceased"), while two possible combinations for the Rending Draft are ABBA and BAAB (suggesting that Brian Moriarty doesn't much care for Swedish pop music or similar songs like Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe").

     

    But the Waking Draft includes the combinations EFGA (AGFE backwards) and DEFA - allusions to German Agfacolor film stock, which was used by famed Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein for a scene in Ivan the Terrible; and to East German film company DEFA, which made the SF film The Silent Star, which influenced The DIG in things like the naming of Ludger Brink.

     

    The use of these combinations for the Sleep/Waking Draft suggests that Moriarty may have intended them as allusions to a future project he wanted to do. Which naturally brings to mind The DIG, since as I've said in the past his design for that game was heavily influenced aesthetically by East German and Soviet SF films.

     

    But according to the official narrative of LucasArts history, Moriarty had no intention of taking up The DIG at that time, since Noah Falstein was supposed to be working on it. (Though between Last Crusade and doing The DIG at the same time as MI2, what was Falstein working on exactly?) And yet, here's Moriarty with science fiction on the brain already.

  11. I personally think the falsified GUI (which doesn't appear on other LucasArts boxes of the era) might be a hint to the Secret/"no man is an island" Guybrush gender-reveal thing. (Basically, that what's "below the belt" isn't as advertised.)

     

    Also, the fake GUI bits were done on a PC of some sort - if you look at the box closely enough you can see they were done at apparently a 640x400 resolution.

     

    mi1usboxzoom.png

  12. Jake reminded me (in that roundabout, lady-doth-protest-too-much way of his) that the closeup of Spiffy is the only screenshot on the MI1 box that isn't a digital fake:

     

    mi1usboxsm1.png

     

    mi1usboxsm2.png

     

    The other screenshots all have a fake high-res GUI that is clearly a photoshop job of some sort. In fact, it's a screamingly obvious one: the spacing is completely inconsistent, and the letters in the fake GUI don't even have the same design from word to word (check out the L's in "Pull" vs. "Walk to").

     

    However, the UK White Label box shows these screenshots in their original form - including Spiffy, who is unchanged.

     

    mi1whitelabelboxsm.png

     

    mi1whitelabelboxsm1.png

     

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