Udvarnoky

It's a shame that, as with Loom, they didn't think to throw in a reproduction of the Hint Book with the PC version, even though Hit the Road is getting one. Guess there are just brighter, more handsome minds behind the latter package. Also, it would be a total power move if the uncensored ROM is what wound up on that NES cartridge.

WHELP Three options: a Standard and a Premium for the NES version, and a Collector’s Edition for PC.

There are always a handful going on at any given time, and they’re always good for a chuckle. Whether you want a Fate of Atlantis poster for $750, or a factory-sealed copy of Maniac Mansion NES for $3,999.99, this is the thread to document and admire the breathtaking nerve of people who were brought up incorrectly – sort of the evil twin of the bargain thread.

Just EMI keeping the bench warm for the return of Ron and his preferred brand of humor.

True, but when they do it for the less obvious IP it feels like a little more meaningful a precedent where our prejudices are concerned.

The fact that a soundtrack album is being included in the ReMI box from Limited Run is an encouraging sign that the red tape has gotten a little more surmountable with Lucasfilm-owned (and thus Disney-owned) soundtracks. Even the Willow show's score has received a three-volume digital release from Walt Disney Records.

I was able to pick up EMI where I left off with the latest beta. Just finished the game. All water issues were fixed from what I could tell as well. I noticed only two minor things along the way: -Every time you perform a dive in the diving contest, there's a little scene where Guybrush walks back to the judges to see his scores. He gets briefly stuck along the way, every time. It only lasts a second or two, and he is always able to press on, but maybe whatever's causing this negligible issue relates to the one stalemating the chef in the LUA Bar. -In Monkey Kombat, some of the banana overlays representing health would occasionally linger behind when damage was taken. So for example, if three bananas were supposed to have been lost on a hit, you might only see the second and third of those actually disappear, creating a gap. That was all. Good stuff!

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!