Udvarnoky

Replaying Grim Fandango in order to do my part in beta-testing DREAMM was an interesting experience. I loved it, and I remain as convinced as ever that the game is such an amazing achievement in the overall that its issues can’t do it fatal damage. But I’ve never appreciated just how major those issues are. The Petrified Forest stood out to me. It’s not a huge segment in the grand scheme of things, but it makes time stop. It’s a fairly uninteresting location in such a cool world, and the puzzles are of a sort you would expect from a more routine adventure game. I have similar complaints about Year 3 – the machinery puzzles that populate it are such a drag. Figuring out anchor controls, reversing conveyer belts, unfurling chains, operating cranes, aligning tumblers…isn’t this the kind of thing we turn to LucasArts in retreat from? If the Petrified Forest is worse, it’s due to its placement. From a pacing standpoint, it’s exactly the wrong time for padding. If there were a Casual Mode, it would be a no-brainer excision. I wonder how many players gave up on this game because they were manipulating a fucking wheelbarrow over hoses in order to reason through some dumb timing puzzle, when the game’s best stuff was right on the other side of it? Not even worth thinking about. I’m actually in the minority on the tank controls. They are undeniably clunkier than point ‘n click, but the “drive the character” conceit is a tradeoff in order for the game to fully exploit the cinematic possibilities of its explicitly film-inspired 3D world. It’s a little creaky, but more or less justifies itself. But it’s one component of a bigger agenda of Grim’s presentation: getting rid of UI altogether to maximize immersion*. Tim’s vision of that is a noble one, but I think an aesthetic choice that comes at the expense of gameplay clarity is a liability. Using Manny’s head as a purely visual substitute for traditional hotspotting is an elegant solution, but it’s imperfect in practice. It’s way too easy to misapprehend what Manny is looking at, which can lead to you thinking you’ve ruled something out when you haven’t. The issue is exacerbated when you have a puzzle that requires you to “use” what Manny is holding by itself (like biting the mouthpiece). He needs to otherwise be looking at nothing, which isn’t always obvious. It’s exactly the sort of ambiguity that I imagine some design dictum would contend must be avoided at all costs. I understand why EMI restored the sentence line even if it made things more “cluttered.” If the player thought they tried to spike Naranja’s drink but were actually interacting with the tattoo book, and Manny’s “I can’t do that” response was too generic to have alerted them to the mistake, and they only found out what the disconnect was after looking up the solution in frustration, that’s an F minus. I’ve never understood the people who would argue that Grim Fandango is a great movie trapped in the structure of an adventure game. It’s a wonderful fit as an adventure game. I just wish it had been a more merciful one. It’s sort of amazing to look back on, because everything about the game’s presentation represents this big, forward-facing gambit to take the genre to a new frontier – we can make graphic adventures competitive in the AAA arena! – and yet it didn’t occur to anybody that, while they were boldly jettisoning so many old standbys in their embrace of their shiny, ILM-abetted new engine, that like, maybe forklift puzzles are just as expendable as a visible cursor? From today’s vantage point especially, it’s so clear where they could have taken it easy without really betraying the essence or scale of the experience. So many more people should have gotten to visit this world and meet these characters. Why we gotta dare them not to with Myst puzzles? Anyway: Happy 25th, Grim! *Ironically, the Remaster kind of destroys this, at least on the Switch. Those gigantic overlays the screen gets slapped with when the game is auto-saving – including during in-engine cinematics – are hilariously disruptive.

EMI is a night and day difference on my machine with the latest beta. Acknowledged issues with some of the water effects aside, I got through the whole first half without any weirdness [that isn’t inherit to the game]. It took until the LUA Bar for me to hit a problem – for the puzzle where you have to meddle with the boat system to get the chef out of the kitchen, he gets stuck in front of the little bridge, blocking my way. I seem to vaguely recall that the potential for an NPC’s route to get foiled by an obstacle was always a thing in EMI, but in DREAMM this situation happened consistently. It would have blocked me from any further progress, but I was eventually able to brute force my way past the chef, somehow. After finishing the second Melee Island segment, the game crashed on me upon reaching Jambalaya Island on the map. A bunch of reloads confirmed that it happens ten times out of ten, so that was it for EMI. I don’t know if it has any relevance, but this was the disc-switching moment of the game back in the day. I decided to keep things GrimE-y and turned to Grim Fandango next. This was my first time playing the as-shipped-in-1998 version of the game since the Remaster came out, so I had some nostalgic fights with those elevators. DREAMM, though, seems to emulate the game near flawlessly. The one significant issue I encountered was a strange one. The original Grim automatically resumes you when you relaunch the game, and this feature is messed up -- it restores Manny geographically where I left him, but his inventory is wiped (just the scythe) and the game otherwise seems to have no awareness of my progress, complete with dialog trees being reset. It’s as if the only part of the game’s state that got remembered was the location, and in all other respects its awareness reverts back to the start. When I manually reload my actual saved game, all is well. I only picked up on a single visual glitch: Jepito’s lantern not being illuminated during the scene where you meet him underwater. That was all. Got through it start to finish. Any other rickety stuff I observed was all the same stuff I recall it having shipped with, complete with the legendary “can’t talk to Domino in Year 3” bug. This is a very stable beta. I encourage anyone with some free time to check it out with some of the newly supported games.

Now that's just some conspicuous assholery, putting Mojo well within its rights to snark it to the moon.

I'm hovering around 80 MIPS, so yeah, massive difference there. The laptop I'm running this on is no show-off: Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10210U CPU @ 1.60GHz 2.11 GHz Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.8 GB usable) System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor Edition Windows 10 Pro No sound issues with the SCUMM games through DREAMM, though I haven't attempted Grim yet for what I imagine is a more useful comparison. The GOG version of EMI runs fine natively on the same machine.

Windows user here. I toyed around a bit with Monkey Island 4 in the new beta. If this is meant to represent a first pass at getting the game running it's pretty impressive. Main issues are with audio - voice and sound effects are significantly delayed (this is true of the soundtrack to the cutscenes as well), while music isn't present at all except when launching the menu and on the Act I screen. Visually, I've only noticed that some water effects are missing. In terms of gameplay and general performance it seems quite stable, though I haven't done much more than run around Melee for a bit.

Yup, ISOs are working for me. Weird! Unlike Grim, which is only sold in remastered form, the digital storefront version of EMI includes the native executable. Maybe Lucasfilm mucked with the fileset in some other way that's tripping DREAMM up.

You sure? The page doesn't mention the support of those games, and that build of DREAMM isn't recognizing my GOG install of EMI. Perhaps if I pulled out my actual discs I'd get a different result.

A new interview with Bill comes with the most substantial A Vampyre Story 2 update in...I'm gonna say a decade. He's currently working on a demo of the sequel to pitch out to financiers. No word on a Ghost Pirates sequel, to @Remi's regret.

Exciting stuff. Loom deserves the Criterion treatment.

Wow, sounds like he has ambitions to turn DREAMM into an all-encompassing LucasArts emulator, or at least a certain subset of non-adventure games.

That works!

First the insane Hit the Road package, now this? In truth, I'm to blame. I recklessly make threads like this, and now the monkey's paw has twisted. No more money for anybody. Also if the EGA version isn't on that disc, we're talking war crime.

Tried to collect all the press images that have been released so far: https://mixnmojo.com/media/galleries/Indiana-Jones-and-the-Dial-of-Destiny

If SPUTM has in fact been ported to Switch, I got some letters to address to the North Pole.

@Bennyboy brought this to my attention: It seems the Humongous games may have bona fide native Switch ports instead of running on ScummVM, possibly with an assist from Brad Taylor himself. Anybody have more information on this?

https://youtu.be/ZfVYgWYaHmE

Did we ever get the signatures, by the way?

Front page'd!

I know I’m late to this, but I think it’s an interesting area. With regard to the CMI team’s perspective on MI2’s ambiguity: I always figured that literalizing its predecessor’s ending was more about making a judgment call not to disappoint what they perceived were the audience’s expectations (“What’s this soluble daydream hokum doing in my pirate game?”), rather than it necessarily representing a personal distaste or rejection of the innuendos Ron was making. Skirting that stuff may have in fact been partly out of respect, with the thinking being “Only Ron can wrap up whatever it is he was driving that, so we’ll just proceed from the escape hatch we were given instead of trying to divine intentions he himself might not have mapped out.” Which, by Ron’s own admission, he in fact hadn’t. Maybe I’m giving too much credit for forward-thinking here, but just look at the way, by intention or by accident, things worked out in the end: Ron was able to complete the statement he was making without having to pretend the other games didn’t exist. Those interim sequels successfully kept the bench warm for the creator’s eventual return -- they didn’t override Ron’s vision so much as postpone it, and it’s probably ungenerous to think this happened entirely by dumb luck. Every team brought their own tastes to the way they grappled with that shoddy seventeenth century electrical wiring, but it was grappled with. CMI seems to have the reputation of being the Monkey Island game that steers the clearest of the meta-angle that Ron was toiling in, but I think it’s a little underappreciated in this regard. It definitely carries the torch of the first two games in terms of perpetuating that surrealistic undercurrent, the anachronism/fourth wall jokes, and the near-constant theme park evocations. Both Plunder Island and Blood Island have plenty of Disneyland nods both subtle and overt, and of course the entire final act takes place at a danged theme park. The fact is, a game that truly flouted the weirdness of the series and insisted on being a pureblood, risk-adverse pirate adventure with an inflexibly straight face would not look like CMI. We know Ron wouldn’t have made CMI, but that game’s team was neither unconscious nor careless about recognizing the substructure going on in his games, in my opinion, and they made an earnest attempt to do that aspect justice. In the wake of Ron finally getting to have his say after thirty years, I actually find myself more impressed than ever with the ways the middle chapters walked that tricky line they were lumbered with.

At this point I think it's certain Mutt won't be in the movie, but I'm sure his absence will be acknowledged in some way. Marion I'm betting gets a cameo. Helena, the character played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge who seems to be Indy's main sidekick, has been called Indy's goddaughter by producer Frank Marshall. It's been speculated that she might be Marcus Brody's daughter, but who knows.

First glimpses of Mads Mikkelsen and Boyd Holbrook, with some new quotes. https://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/indiana-jones-5-nazis-1969-exclusive

https://mixnmojo.com/news/Indy-5-sizzle-reel-leaks-in-dubious-qualty-Willow-now-streaming-in-optimum-quality

As with the commercial success of most of these games, the data is too sketchy to be confident either way. By some accounts, the game sold half a million units over its life, which if true is quite a hit for an adventure game. I don't know that I buy that number. But I definitely wouldn't be surprised if the game sold at least as well in its time as Monkey Island 1 did. I think it's possible that both things can be true: that Loom was a genuine hit in its time, but the IP being left fallow allowed it to be forgotten to the point where its own studio was cracking jokes about its obscurity in The Curse of Monkey Island. Awareness is largely a matter of continued exploitation. Monkey Island got sequelized, and Loom did not. In 1990, I doubt that Loom was necessarily considered less fit for a sequel than Monkey Island. But its creator wasn't interested right away, and other attempts to get a design greenlit didn't work out. When the moment passed, inertia had its way.

The "Seckrit" sign that Captain Madison and co. use as LeChuck bait is misspelled the same way Dr. Fred's secret lab is in Maniac Mansion.