Udvarnoky

It's interesting how Bill Tiller gets routinely credited/blamed for the CMI art style, but people forget that his role on the project was Lead Background Artist, not Art Director. That would be co-project leader Larry Ahern. And there's this, from our interview with Bill for the CMI retrospective: I love the look of CMI, but it's certainly different from the first two games. I actually find Day of the Tentacle's take on the Maniac Mansion universe far more radical a reinvention. And I adore Day of the Tentacle as well; I just find it interesting that its bold departure never seems to have engendered the controversy the post-Ron Monkey Island games did. Maybe the MI fan base is just more protective, maybe Maniac Mansion was relatively forgotten by 1993, or maybe the fact that Ron and Gary Winnick openly supported Day of the Tentacle's hairpin turn made it more acceptable to the audience. But that sequel outright shifted genres, let alone art style. I intend to write up my thoughts on this in an article some day.

Eighteen months ago I unveiled the first phase of an ongoing undertaking to bring old Mojo articles back online. To make a long story short*, the various redesigns of Mojo over the years, and the not-always-diligent efforts to port previous features over during these transitions, would cause articles from the sunsetted version of Mojo to simply get left behind in the process. The cumulative effect was that well over fifty percent of Mojo's content ended up missing. For years I've been keen on addressing that travesty, but the more I dug into it the more I came to understand why prior staffers gave up on the challenge. Mojo backups are woefully limited when it comes to the really old stuff, and though the backups have come to my aid many times on an individual basis, generally speaking the only strategy you really have when you want to recover an old article is to turn to the Wayback Machine and extract the content of a snapshot/crawl (hopefully, one even exists) by hand. This at least gets you the text if not always the media -- and without the media, many articles are borderline pointless, such as the Gold Guy Exposed article, which I only recently got the images for with the help of Jake. Not all articles have such a happy ending, though. Aside from the major issue of lost media, the other problem is that modern Mojo is way more restrictive on the presentation of features in terms of layout and available markup tags. This lockdown was deliberate and undoubtedly a good thing going forward, but it makes for an absolute nightmare when trying to adapt old articles, which were written with a laissez faire attitude toward handwritten HTML, to MojoEx. (Gabez in particular seemed to love to make his articles as bespoke as possible, and I'm going to die five years sooner than I otherwise would have died due to my traumatic experiences in trying to recreate them with any accuracy.) The end result is that it's often impossible to replicate the appearance of older articles even when you are lucky enough to have all the actual materials on hand. Sidebars, for example, once used regularly in Mojo, are simply not a thing in MojoEx. The compromises pile up. I'm still committed to getting everything back in whatever form possible for posterity's sake, and I've made a point of linking to Wayback Machine snapshots at the end of the retrofitted articles for reference. I also make a point of putting a link to the original news posts at the end of the resurrections, though hopefully Zaarin will at some point be able to associate the articles with their originating news posts the "real" way that modern features do. Similarly, we need to get the old articles properly backdated in the system. I have to say I consider what has been achieved even now to be a minor miracle, but there's plenty to be done. The reason I've made this thread is because I need the readership's help. I think/hope we're at a point where every legacy article is at least in the system now, in variable states of restoration. But I've pretty much taken this as far as I can bring it by myself. Now that the forums have returned and the community has a place to gather again, I am relying on any readers who share an interest in getting the old stuff back to help me fill in the remaining gaps -- by pointing out missing, incomplete or faulty articles, and maybe even helping me track down some of the stuff I could not. So if you spot something funky, point it out here, and I'll see if I can address it. With multiple sets of eyes on this, it'll be a lot easier to bring this insane excavation to the next level of polish. And then we'll really be cooking with Spaff grease. *Sorry for lying

Absolutely stunned that those links seem to still work.

I too await the comeback of Laserschwert's poster thread, though in the meantime there seems to be a quasi-backup of that humanitarian work over at Adventure-Treff: https://www.adventure-treff.de/Features/14067-hochaufloesende-adventure-poster

So, this is something we have to contend with in October. A big, physical collection of the first four Monkey Island games (Why exclude Tales? It is over ten years old now and shouldn't pose special rights issues...I think?) that is poised to attack our wallets with ravenous hunger. Judging by past LTR releases, there could be any number of weirdly conceived collectible extras. Will we finally possess our own Monkey Bucks, or perhaps a Planet Threepwood coupon? Speculate.

For me it's never not been Monkey Island 2. The only thing that has fluctuated in my mind is how thin the margin is. The original is an undisputed classic, the game that showed off the true potential of a SCUMM adventure game and more or less represents the best of a genre and the halcyon days of LucasArts as a spirit. I don't think the series ever really did fully recapture that kind of Princess Bride storybook flavor it had going here. I can't imagine arguing with anybody who would rank it first, though I find it hard to find any new way to sing its praises at this point. Monkey 2 feels like it builds on the first game and offers a deeper, richer, more ambitious experience. It ups the ante in every way, and to this day you can pit the Four Map Pieces segment against pretty much anything the genre has produced since. Again, three decades worth of discussion sort of leaves me at a loss to come up with some kind of original take on the thing, but for me this is still my favorite game. CMI is an undeniable departure from the first two in overall feeling for reasons both unavoidable (major technology gap, different creative personell) and chosen, and it probably honors the template of the original a little too much in the first half (get ship and crew, insult sword fighting) but it's just such a well-made adventure game top to bottom, with stupid good production values, that I doubt a convincing, objective argument could be made for it representing any kind of misstep from a strict quality standpoint. It's another installment where I can't object to it being ranked first. It is also as influential as the first game in a certain sense as it seems to have spawned, or at least been released at the right time to soak up, that initial burst of online fandom. Many people seem to have met the series through CMI. EMI is the least of the games, but I think it deserves reappraisal in terms of what that really means. What I see is a satisfying, rock solid adventure game with a lot of funny moments, good animation and very possibly the best voice acting in an LEC game -- and that's really saying something. On the other hand it delivers a somewhat off brand story for a Monkey Island installment, it comes dangerously close to making the world feel too small (that Tri-Island Area map: hilarious) and it unquestionably fails its pedigree on the graphics front (both because using GrimE to create a cartoony-yet-lush 3D world with the target specs of the average turn-of-the-century Windows user isn't setting yourself up for success, and because Chris Miles, by all accounts a talented animator, probably wasn't the guy to sit in the Art Director chair for the series' delicate transition to 3D.) But visuals aside I think it's held up reasonably well, and I would like to think its status as a kind of "side trip" story will gain some appreciation/perspecitve now that it is a middle installment and not the last game, which admittedly was not a good look for it. Monkey Island is an exceptionally good series, and in this case being the worst of five great games still leaves you: a really good game. TMI is a bit of a rebound that to a large extent feels like a course correction or return to form, especially in terms of a moody atmosphere and a general sense of captivating piratey-ness (both of which were a bit lacking in EMI as a consequence of its story), and the Telltale engine really upped the ante on the "performances" in my opinion, allowing the installment to go into some new emotional territory. On the downside, the decision to develop the episode with WiiWare in mind and general corner-cutting absolutely and unnecessarily hurt the production values. The art direction is good, but the 3D is up against limitations it should not be up against, and it is kind of funny how the Xerox-character-designs-for-background-NPCs strategy never really improved on Monkey 1. And while the MIDI score has a certain nostalgic feel that I like, it is kind of shameful that Michael Land's excellent compositions were not given the respect of a proper production, which might well have resulted in something that could have usurped the CMI score. The game's qualities more than overwhelm these drawbacks, it's just frustrating that they feel so self-inflicted. On the quibbles front, the equal-sized chapters necessitated by the episodic structure made me weirdly sad, I object to the absence of Alt+W, and the abruptness of the last moment felt like the one real shortcoming of CMI wasn't learned from. Short version: All these games are great, and I question the value of rankings, but I give the crown to MI2 if coronating one is a life or death matter. And I look forward to buying them all yet again in what promises to be a truly absurd anthology package in October.