Udvarnoky

Thanks to both Jake and Laserschwert for joining forces in this contribution to humanity.

I've never heard this complaint about Psychonauts before. Unless we're talking about playing the PC version without a gamepad?

I think they realized they made a tragic mistake in eliminating the Ultimate Insult sketch and are willing to pull out all the stops to atone for it.

Unceremoniously pushed back again, to 2022. I prefer to think @Laserschwertfound a subatomic flaw in the box art and halted productuon by heaving his body into the gears.

Won't say no to that!

I've been re-downloading my LEC purchases from GOG, and I noticed some of the games have the native interpeter stuffed into a directory called "other". So that's pretty cool, even though it appears to be an inconsistent inclusion. Another wrinkle is that some of the earlier Steam releases of the LEC SCUMM catalog (the two Indy games and The Dig) came with the Windows-friendly executables that Aaron Giles made for LucasArts in the 2002ish area. Allegedly he actually updated all the SCUMM games this way, but only Hit the Road and Full Throttle surfaced at the time (as part of a UK compilation box, I believe), then those few others quietly appeared on Steam years later. The majority never saw the light of day, and at some point it seems Lucasfilm just found it easier to bundle ScummVM for all subsequent digital releases. (GOG may also use ScummVM instead of the Giles executable for the aforementioned Steam titles, though that needs fact-checking.) Cataloging exactly what data files and launchers come bundled with the GOG/Steam releases seems like a worthy mission for someone unburdened by my laziness.

I fixed all the broken links in the Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix article caused by the fact that Aric Wilmunder, who hosted the design documents, let his domain expire. I've noticed that this snapshot of his site seems to have functional PDF links to all the docs he'd uploaded before abandoning the effort: https://web.archive.org/web/20171216013851/http://www.wilmunder.com/Arics_World/Games.html

For the record, the U.S. version of Psychonauts did not require you to swap discs after installation. That would have been outrageous, leaving me with no choice but to mail a letter so mean that Tim would still be recovering from it. I think the game might have required you to keep Disc One in the drive while playing, but if so that was for asinine copy-protection reasons rather than anything needing to be read off it.

I presume they are only de-aging him for a flashback sequence, but that he will be playing his own age for the majority of the story that's set in 1969 or whatever. The horror scenario I had in mind was quite a bit more far ranging.

It seems like the more pessimistic reports were true and that production has been more or less suspended since Ford injured his shoulder in late June. They did proceed without him for that much-publicized Glasgow shoot, but maybe that booking would have been particularly difficult to break and they decided to go ahead and get coverage of the wide shots and stuntwork for that sequence. In a way I'm relieved, because this suggests we aren't going to be subjected to some pioneering experiment in grafting Ford's performance onto a stand-in for the duration of the movie or some other CGI horror along those lines. Allegedly filming finally resumes sometime next month, and let's hope it's without further incident.

I still fondly remember installing my PC version of Psychonauts with five, count 'em five, CDs. That nonsense was exclusive to the U.S., I guess because some smart-alecks showed Majesco a study that claimed a significant number of domestic consumers didn't yet have a DVD-ROM drive. I find it highly dubious that anybody with the specs to run that game in 2005 didn't almost by definition have a DVD-ROM, but I enioyed the unintentional throwback to the diskette days all the same.

You may want to experiment with running CMI in compatibility mode in addition to following all of Benny's steps.

Okay, I got the latest dev build and sure enough, iMUSE sounds like it's working as it should in CMI. That makes me happy. There should be some sort of PSA for people who are buying CMI that they ought to get the latest ScummVM binary, because whatever build the game comes bundled with when purchased off GOG/Steam is probably falling short.

@ATMachineYeah the ScummVM project is...known for that. I don't want to rag too much on ScummVM because Lord knows it's been a godsend for as long as it has existed. You can't beat it for convenience or for the ability to play various wacky versions of titles that you may find yourself for totally innocent reasons not happening to possess the executable (or maybe even the platform) for. But I think the quiet disregard of the native interpreters over time poses an archival issue. I have mixed feelings because there was a time when I would have considered it a pipe dream to have all the LucasArts SCUMM games officially available again. And now, here we are: they're all easily obtainable from GOG and Steam...bundled with ScummVM.* Which I don't object to, as it's free and a great way to ensure every game "just works" out the box for roughly every end user imaginable. But because ScummVM functionally replaces those EXEs, it seems Lucasfilm saw no need to toss it in with the data files while they were at it. Luckily, Archive.org is surprisingly well stocked in this regard, but it's kind of sad that even with the games legally available, people are still left to turn to Warez sites if they want to pursue the option of running the games exactly as they did when they shipped. Or, worse, they have to put down the cheese popcorn in order to walk to their closet and disinter their old bit-rotting floppies. *I believe the Steam versions of Indy3, Indy4, Full Throttle and The Dig may use the upgrades executables Aaron Giles made at LucasArts circa 2002, which is cool. Shame LEC didn't spend the extra five cents to do all the games...unless they did and just never cared enough to put them out.

Anyone should feel free to check my work on this. I did a comparison this morning but between different versions of ScummVM and different hardware setups, who knows. I have no memory of ScummVM ever being able to do this quite right, though.

It also let you configure your sound boards! Which may have resulted in nothing more than appending an "s", an "a", or an "i" as an argument to the EXE, but consider the cultural losses of denying modern players this screen.

Was he able to fold those into the codebase? The issue persists for me but I don't know that I have the latest and greatest ScummVM either.

What with recent talk about CMI's music implementation being iffy in ScummVM, I thought it might be worth trying to compile some of the known behavioral differences in the SCUMM games when comparing the original executable (as run in an emulator like DOSBox or, for you nuts out there, an actual old IBM or Amiga) to ScummVM's interpretation. I'm doing this mainly for my own benefit, as I get the impression certain folks are aware of more discrepancies than I am, but I'll kick things off with some that I know about: - Most obviously, ScummVM does not reproduce the original UI for things like pause state, "Are you sure you want to quit?" and Save/Load menus. In several of the games, the save menus were pretty generic, but Maniac Mansion for example gave you a unique image (Syd running away from Green Tentacle in v1, Green Tentacle's band jamming out in v2), and Last Crusade had a graphic representation of your IQ score. - In Maniac Mansion, saving was not allowed once you reached Dr. Fred's lab. Hitting F5 at that point brought up this text: "The Meteor has control of your computer and he won't let you save the game." Last Crusade similarly wouldn't let you save once you hit the Grail Temple, as an in-game sign warns. ScummVM lets you freely save your state in these final sequences. - Starting I think with Hit the Road, the games shipped with custom launchers that ScummVM bypasses. Unlike the creepy teal/purple one for configuring sound on Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle, these GUIs were visually designed in the flavor of the game. - Maniac Mansion NES is rather graphically glitchy, most noticeably when characters climb thin air instead of the stairs to the third floor landing. ScummVM also makes it so that the steel security door is always open as it is in the PC versions. That is done to bypass the copy protection - a "crack" which became part of the official executable when bundled with DOTT - but there was never copy protection in the NES version. The security door was simply unlocked. - CMI's iMUSE isn't faithfully replicated in ScummVM. It appears that local hero AndywinXp corrected this within the last year. Note that folks who purchased CMI off of GOG/Steam will probably need to grab the latest dev build of ScummVM, as the version that comes bundled with the game almost surely predates the merge of this fix.

CMI's implementation of iMUSE doesn't seem to be fully functional in ScummVM. The best locations to conduct a comparison would be the Barbery Coast and the Goodsoup Hotel. The original interpreter transitions between the themes smoothly, while ScummVM abruptly jumps from one to the other.

Authentic iMUSE lives.

I'd like to see some off the wall stuff. Defenders of Dynatron City reprint with an issue of the comic and VHS of the failed pilot, anyone?

Seeing as they've done Monkey Island, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, and Sam & Max*, it's clear that LRG is willing to put their licensing agreement with Lucasfilm to more use than re-releasing Star Wars games. Assuming the love for the boutique IP continues and considering LRG seems to emphasize console titles, what games from the LucasArts catalog do you most hope to get a novelty re-release? As I've probably made clear several times, the NES version of Maniac Mansion is at the top of my list. A reprint of the N64 version of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (which was a Blockbuster-exclusive cartridge) would be a pretty cool idea as well. What's your pitch? *Okay, admittedly Save the World is not a LucasArts game, but still.

While we wait for Mojo's review (courtesy of ThunderPeel), I'm curious if anybody else got a chance to play this yet. I'm sure those of us without one of those extortionate Facebook helmets would be interested in local impressions.

Noteworthy that as with the Nintendo Power preview, these screenshots are pre-censorship. You have to squint to make it out, but there's the "For a good time, call Edna" graffiti on the shower wall, and Ed's dialog about Fred having not "eaten" in years. Good find!

I dunno how one gauges these things, but I've always gotten the sense that it was a fairly beloved cult classic of the 16-bit era. At any rate the Limited Run Games business model seems to be based on retroactively creating the supply (manufacturing a specific number of units) after accurately measuring the demand (taking all orders in a closed period before going into a one-time production cycle), so I suspect it's all budgeted in such a way as to always be profitable - albeit at what I imagine to be razor-thin margins - regardless of how much demand there ends up being. They've done way more obscure stuff than Zombies, anyway. Heck, Monkey Island might well be less mainstream than Zombies, who really knows.