ThunderPeel2001

Looks like I found the original on Etsy: Same images and same wording. £150... much more expected! https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/730309245/the-grail-diary-last-crusade-inspired

I went to https://www.kittiway.com and it’s made me think the whole is very very dodgy. Bah Also the image on the header of the Indy page looks weird. Why would they pick they of they really were fans and not a fake store. Need to discover where those images are from. #iwanttobelieve

Yep, it really is Easy mode! So many changes and entire sections, characters, etc. cut. Same with Thimbleweed Park. I know I keep harping on about it, but with CMI the Normal mode doesn’t cut anything. It just has different puzzles, so basically you’re getting extra puzzles rather than having things removed. They didn’t even bother including Easy with the SE edition, did they?

I just came across this insane Indiana Jones prop replica store. Everything on there looks far too good to be true. Am I about to get ripped off if I buy a Grail Diary? My excitement is clouding my reason. What am I missing here? https://www.kittiway.com/collections/indiana-jones-collection-50-off - DO NOT TRUST! UPDATE: THE ABOVE LINK LOOKS DODGY - WITH IMAGES FROM OTHER ETSY SELLERS! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Yep, when given the choice, and I stop and I think about it, that's the route I'd take, too. I think I'd rather see Tim (and Ron) fully flexed than them constrained by a deliberate attempt at recreating the past, for example.

Yes, Tim has said that that's exactly what happened. When the budget exploded, they updated their plans. Tim's original idea (as seen in the Kickstarter pitch video, IIRC) was to even help program the thing like a Scummlette. He used the example of tweaking the timing on the scrolling on the Fettuccini Brothers circus tent scene in MI1, which he said he took ages to get "just right". He wanted more of that low level experience again. But when they had the money to do something more polished and modern, he took the opportunity instead to do that. Edit: Scrolled down and Ben beat me to it.

Bear in mind that Mario is Nintendo's flagship game. They literally use that franchise to sell hardware, they have a lot of money and a very good reason to spend lots of it... They have a lot more resource available to them than Double Fine. That said, honestly for me Psychonauts 2 was one of the most polished gaming experiences I've ever had. I just loved it from top to bottom. (And am sad DF didn't get any BAFTAs despite so many nominations.) I'm still hoping they take the Psychonauts 2 engine and remake the first game with that level of polish one day. So anyway... any more news about Loom?

Yep, he certainly put more effort into MI2's and TP's difficulty levels than the CMI team did... but having tried them all CMI's was far more satisfying to me. I guess I don't think an Easy mode is worth the effort. Fans won't play it, and I doubt newbies are about to jump into the fifth instalment of a franchise? 🤷‍♂️ (Unless Devolver are hoping to snag new fans with this?)

I thought it was utterly flawless. Far less glitchy than other games I was playing at the time (Mass Effect Remastered being the one that leaps to mind). The whole experience felt massively polished to me. I didn’t see a single bug. I was really impressed with just how gorgeous and slick it all was. I haven’t played SMO.

Yep, that does make more sense. Doh. I stand corrected! Well this Chris chap did a good job. MI2 felt heavily edited by comparison, whereas Normal on CMI (which is how it’s described — rather than being an “Easy” mode) felt well designed and very deliberate.

Agh. Yep, I think you’re right. My bad. Strange because unlike MI2 it definitely feels like the other way around when you play it. With MI2 whole sections were pulled as I recall.

CMI didn’t have an “Easy” mode, that was whole point I was trying to make. It had a NORMAL mode which was the same difficulty as Sam & Max, Full Throttle, etc. As Ackley pointed out in the Tweet you quoted: The game was designed as Normal mode and then more difficult puzzles were added for Hard. Whereas MI2 had whole puzzle sections removed for Easy.

YES!!!! Ha. That’s so true. It would get me every time, and I’d always feel like a satisfying conclusion when I finally got it.

Anyone got any thoughts on the difficulty modes? I believe Ron has said there's two again (Easy and Normal). For me, Monkey Island 2 completely got it wrong: There were originally supposed to be three modes: Easy, Normal and Hard, but Normal fell by the wayside and we were left with Easy and Hard. Larry Ahern and Jonathan Ackley perfected it with Curse though: Normal and Hard. I've played through Curse probably more than any other LA game, and I always do Normal followed by Hard. It's SO much fun to do with this way. Normal is a fantastic, challenging, well crafted adventure game. It's perfectly in line with other LA adventures of the era. And afterwards you get to play on Hard and uncover some tricker puzzles... which means you basically get two solid adventure games for the price of one. It worked SO well. Oh the other hand, I don't know anyone who played MI2 on "Easy"...

I so want to love TP. I think I made the mistake of playing the "easy" mode first, and by the time I got to the end I was so disenchanted I couldn't bring myself to go through it again and never played the "full" version. I tried and just couldn't bring myself to continue, beautiful looking though it is.

I wonder how many people thinking Broken Age had a troubled development have watched the whole documentary? The backer forums were a calm place throughout the whole process, but that's where everyone knew what was going on. Outside of those forums you'd think the DF offices were on fire or something. It seemed like all the non-backers totally freaked out on behalf of the mostly happy backers.

Welcome! Thanks for those thoughts and for sharing that Moriarty quote. So interesting! Glad I know which version to play should I ever revisit Loom again. They can have issues sometimes, but Psychonauts 2 was incredibly polished from beginning to end. They really pulled out all the stops!

The fades in Amiga MI2 were particularly slow, clunky and CPU heavy as I recall. Wouldn't surprise me at all if they were playing around with possibilities. (The limited Amiga palette did make one thing more obvious in the next LA game: In Fate of Atlantis, Indy's eyes would grow accustomed to darker rooms and gradually get brighter. It's so subtle on the PC version, but way more obvious on the Amiga one.) Oh THAT! I don't think there's any secrets left these days! (I do remember reading a comment once where a player complained that the ending from ALT-W sucked, so why should they bother playing the whole game. Made me die a little inside.)

It does make you wonder what a triple A adventure game would look like. But I think ZP summed it up correctly that the PC aspects and console aspects have merged. There are adventure game mechanics in mainstream action games now.

Please spoil! What’s the other one? Thanks for the incredibly detailed response. Definitely seems like a bug, or possibly a limit of the Amiga (which could only support 32 colours comfortably instead of the PC’s 256).

Interesting! Thanks for discovering that. I had a feeling it would be a bug as I remember the Amiga barely showing certainly lines before fading to black (eg. "Death was so close I could smell his hairy armpits").

There's a new niggles in the Double Fine remasters that irk me to this day, but on the whole they're amazing. The Grim Fandango Remaster in particular is worth it for the new controls alone -- but add the massively improved music and WOW, it's more or less perfect. Schafer promised a "Criterion Edition" level remaster. He talked about getting the symbol on Velasco's cap correct, for example... That's extremely detailed. Except they didn't touch the texture on Velasco's cap. In fact they didn't touch quite a few textures. And sometimes when they did change them, they added silly mistakes. They removed the originally intended numpad tank controls for some reason. And they also changed the beautiful transition before the end credits. Plus there's a few bugs (I have a list somewhere.) They also massively lowered the available number of save slots (due to a PS4 limitation, but contractually it had to be implemented on the PC version, too -- because the PC version couldn't be better than the PS version), which is unbearable for a huge game like Grim that you might want to explore. Still, overall it was VAST improvement, and definitely the version everyone should play... just not quite Criterion Edition level. Full Throttle also had some oddities introduced (some character designs were changed, some background animations were lost, and there were some strange choices during the animations). Plus the background on the road animations were altered so they didn't match the rest of the game. And whoever was in charge of uprezzing the fonts did not have a very good eye. Still, again, the improved music was worth the price of admission. Watching the intro sequence on my big TV with the music blaring in HD gave me goosebumps. The Day of the Tentacle Remaster was probably the most faithful overall. Very nicely done, although I wish they didn't have music playing in the menus. It drove me insane after a while. Of course all of this is just because I'm an uber fan. 99% of people will just enjoy the DF Remasters, and so they should. They're fantastic. (But I still have dreams of modding them for to my own taste just to scratch that uber fan itch.)

I only just became aware of this, but apparently the Amiga version didn't include the "I hope LeChuck hasn't put a SPELL on him or anything" line at the end. Those of us who played the Amiga version had even less of a clue what the ending meant... no wonder we were traumatised 😆 I know there's some other minor artwork differences, but it makes me wonder when that line was added... or if it's just a bug? (Also wasn't aware until now that Tami Borowick led the Amiga conversion... I wonder what her memories of that project was, given that it was the version we played for so many Europeans.) Video below will jump straight to the scene in question...

It seems unfair for a certain sect of fans to expect him to walk a higher road than the rest of us Ron is just a human being, with all the normal contradictions and inconsistencies. It seems people want to hold him to everything he's every said. I'm sure when he wrote that "If I Made MI3" post, he sincerely meant every word.

It started as a tongue in cheek request on the news pages: And for some silly reason it's stuck 😅