Udvarnoky

Truly excellent soundtrack by Pedro Macedo Camacho. There was a proper CD album pressed as part of a limited collector's edition of the game that Crimson Cow put out at the time (possibly Germany-exclusive?) that I need to find my backup of. I wonder if Bill has the rights to the score -- it'd be nice to see it up on Bandcamp.

Earlier this month saw the release of Mark Griskey's soundtrack for Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. The occasion was probably the new Switch port of the game, but to my knowledge it represents the first official release of a LucasArts game soundtrack album by Disney's music label, which all Lucasfilm music ended up under after the acquisition. Hopefully a sign of things to come?

EMI received a native Mac port in April 2001, courtesy of Aspyr. Now, I'm not a Mac user, but I'm assuming if that version was capable of running on modern macOS, people would hardly be resorting to ResidualVM/ScummVM or WINE. I've always been curious, though, how severe the incompatibility issues with that port are that emulating the Windows version became the shortest path to a workaround.

You probably mean Duke Grabowski: Mighty Swashbuckler!, the bite-sized game that was also a spinoff of Ghost Pirates. Ghost Pirates was a full-length, traditionally published (by the defunct DTP Entertainment) game and came out not long after Vampyre.

Everyone likes an underdog, so how about a little sugar for Bill Tiller’s studio Autumn Moon Entertainment, which produced all of two games – A Vampyre Story and Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island – before the funding opportunities went the way of Mixnmojo’s press credentials. That was thirteen years ago. While these games do not reach the heights of the LucasArts classics they were clearly looking to as a beacon (with Bill’s best known resume entry, The Curse of Monkey Island, being specifically quoted interface-wise), I do think they are a substantial cut above the usual LucasArts Reminder games that the point ‘n click genre turns out so regularly. Whatever their issues, I always thought the games were a pretty auspicious opening salvo and was really eager to see the studio continue to hone its talents…which is hard to do without more projects to do that on. As of only a few weeks ago, A Vampyre Story got plucked from Steam and GOG to be exclusively hosted on a digital platform called ZOOM. Ghost Pirates, which is reputedly @Remi's favorite game of all time, remains available on Steam. The future of Autumn Moon: still unwritten. Here’s the place to place to discuss Bill’s curtailed efforts at running his own graphic adventure studio. Turns out, it's a tough racket.

Arguably even more prestigious is that it's been Mojo'd.

I think EMI in general really plays up the "Everyone thinks Guybrush is a boob" angle. It may be an extrapolation of something that was always there, but it just gets taken a bit far. There's a lot of laughing at Guybrush's goofiness in the preceding games, but he constantly takes so much guff from everyone in EMI that I start to feel sorry for him, which I don't think is supposed to be the idea. It's kind of rich too because he spends the game ingeniously and indefatigably solving crazy challenges in order to save the world, but will at turns be made to behave like the planet's biggest simpleton for a laugh. Yes, that's always been a thing to some extent, but it feels somehow out of balance in EMI.

EMI makes a terrible first impression with the opening credits, which reprises the CMI arrangement of the theme almost exactly while using those cheap-looking PowerPoint transitions. That said, I don't think "reused music" is a fair complaint. Audio is one front where EMI does live up to CMI's production values. Though I favor CMI's score just because it's that good, EMI delivers a varied and original soundtrack. Off the top of my head I know the Tiny LaFeet scene features a rearrangement of the Smuggler's Cave music from CMI, but isn't that about it? The occasional reprisal is fair, and no different from CMI reprising "The Journey" when Guybrush is about to propose or Kate Capsize's theme when Guybrush is falling off the cliff. There's no meaningful recycling in either game, though I think it's unfortunate EMI didn't have a new rendition of the main theme. EMI is definitely inferior to CMI on the polish front, but I think it was also made under heavier constraints. CMI and Grim were the last "spare no expense" adventure games out of LucasArts. I dunno exactly what EMI's production schedule was, but it was definitely tighter. And if you're comparing it to Grim, which took three years, it was probably turned around in literally half that time.

I think Charity James gave a good performance (all the voice acting in EMI is top notch), but I think the writing for Elaine in that game wasn't especially careful. Sure, Guybrush has always been a goofball to some extent and Elaine has always been capable, but the marital dynamic there gives the impression that the writers thought it was a zero sum game: that Elaine only looks good when it's at Guybrush's expense. I think this risks making Elaine unlikable in a way that could easily have been avoided. And in a way, it makes her a dependant: If you need to make Guybrush extra stupid to underline Elaine's qualities, you're not really doing Elaine justice. A summary of how EMI views that relationship is in the game's opening cutscene. How does the game choose to recap their dynamic? With a montage of Elaine punching Guybrush in the face. It's funny in a "don't think about it" way, but also a really lame and sitcom-y distillation of the couple.

True about Meathook, but the tables were more than turned later. ("Excuse me, Guybrush. Does the word 'keelhaul' mean anything to you?") Re: Elaine's line, I took it more to mean, "That fool's monkeying around with a nuclear weapon!"

Guybrush goes through a fairly significant personality change with each outing. He's a likable combination of nebbish and plucky in MI1, and becomes more of a blowhard and a jerk by the events of MI2. He's more humbled and easygoing in CMI, almost like the trauma of Big Whoop restored some perspective or something. In EMI he reemerges as "first gentleman" Guybrush, a role he seems to take to pretty enthusiastically, even while he spends the whole game being emasculated as a punch line. There's something Spongebob-like about this version of Guybrush, where everybody seems to find him stupid/insufferable and he just barrels forward unfazed. Then the game ends with he and Elaine recognizing that the two of them aren't meant to be the landed gentry, and they return to a more rough-edged piratey life, which is where we find them in TMI. Elaine's trajectory is also interesting because as some have noted, Guybrush's feelings for her in MI1 weren't necessary requited in a totally unambiguous way, and in MI2 she seems over him -- and yet, she has feelings enough for him to sail all the way to Dinky Island to try to bail him out of his latest mess. How we find her in CMI is a bit jarring though it could be read that her thinking Guybrush was dead clarified her feelings for him. There seems to be a bit of lost time between MI2 and CMI in which much can be read.

It's intriguing how organically that fellow fits into the EMI background. I'm willing to kick in a few bucks for a remaster with Rex Crowley character designs.

Sounds like nothing Indy-related came out of the event. I don't think the game is particularly far along at this point.

I've no doubt the publisher would love that, but my suspicion is that this game is still years away. Would be happy to be proven pessimistic, though!

I don't know how unpopular a sentiment this is, because I've seen it parroted with reasonable regularity since 1997. And it comes off as gatekeepery as it ever did. I don't direct this at you specifically, but so often over the years misgivings with CMI have been framed in terms of legitimacy, and it makes me feel like I'm in church. The ways in which the game may be a departure from what came before make for interesting discussion that I have thoughts on myself, but interesting discussion is out of season once the dreaded "authenticity" angle comes in.

Guess we didn't already have a thread for this. Making one now because there's something called the "Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase" happening on Sunday, and some people seem to think there may be a peek at Indy out of the event. Whether that's true or whether they're gonna pull the ol' Devolver Special on you poor saps remains to be seen, but there it is.

I was tempted to fuel the fire by saying something outlandish like "Night Shift is the crown jewel of the LucasArts catalog," but I realized everyone would see through this puckish provocation because we all know in our hearts the studio peaked with Ballblazer.

Wow, multiple people dumping on Fate of Atlantis. This thread isn't messing around.

EMI certainly throws a gauntlet down in terms of puzzle difficulty. Which is strange, given that it was the final LucasArts adventure game. While the progress wasn't exactly a straight line -- MI1 and DOTT arguably had more logical puzzle design than any game after, and Loom was truly ahead of its time -- there was a general evolution toward accessibility. No wonder EMI came packaged with a walkthrough. There are these contradictory tensions in EMI that I think make it fascinating. On the one hand it is aggressively pushing "forward" (moving to 3D, adopting console friendly controls) while arguably regressing to puzzle logic aimed at an older-school player. It's a game that's brash and bold and irreverent (including toward canon) in a way that pissed off lots of series fans, yet at the same time it's also the most desperately fan-serving, with a truly staggering volume of callbacks and reprisals that stands out even in an in-joke heavy series. It's something else!

Yeah, it always felt more like a mic drop than a setup to me. I thought it baffling when Ron started publicly pushing the idea that he imagined the saga as a trilogy, with a third game paying off the mysteries. I am not surprised he walked that back. When Ron alludes admiringly to the ending of Blazing Saddles, he suggests an intention that I find way more convincing than anything supportive of a "master plan" idea. I would also contend that there's nothing coincidental about the fact that MI2 should be developed at a time when Twin Peaks was at the height of its influence. Dreamy/ambiguous/middle finger punchouts have always been a thing, but they were kind of in vogue at that time in particular. Examples like Barton Fink or Raimi's original ending to Army of Darkness come to mind. By no means does the early 90s have a monopoly on these Deal With It type endings, but they certainly seemed to be "in the air" for a while there.

I agree. Memorization and maze type puzzles are way more off-putting to me in a Monkey Island game. While I understand why Monkey Kombat isn't a favorite of people (it seems to answer the question "What if we took insult sword fighting and stripped out the part that made it charming?"), it's really not the grind people make it out to be. As I recall, you only need four victories to be ready for Jojo Jr. So while it can definitely be tedious, it's really over with before it gets into truly objectionable territory. I am pretty sure the insult swordfight training sections in Monkey 1 and CMI last longer. The real issue with Monkey Kombat is that it doesn't have some sort of UI to track what you've learned, which is weak design (as is anything that requires you to write stuff down in an adventure game). I have always chalked that up to EMI's compressed production schedule. That the PS2 version addresses this is probably a sign that it's the sort of thing that would have been smoothed out on a project that had the luxury of lengthier polish time. The Mysts of Time Marsh segment is another example of this: you pretty much have to write those directions down or deal with the aggravation of making Guybrush bust out his inventory (which means waiting for a slow animation of Guybrush slamming his rowing stick into the marsh) every time you raft onto a new screen. There should have just been a key assigned to bring that up during this section. There are a few areas in EMI where it feels like the need to ship by Thanksgiving deprived it of that last little layer of user-friendliness that could have made a substantial difference.

The two GrimE games aren't really missing, though. They fall explicitly outside the purview of DREAMM, which is dedicated to the SCUMM games. Since it emulates an x86 machine, supporting EMI would be a totally different project in the most literal sense. Unless I'm mistaken, doesn't EMI already still work natively on modern Windows machines? (I know the GOG version runs on mine, and I don't think Lucasfilm did anything to update it, but I could be wrong.) Since Windows is the only platform DREAMM runs on, it would be a moot point for EMI. For getting EMI working on other platforms or jazzing it up with retroactive enhancements, ScummVM is the (eventual) answer since the ResidualVM project got folded into it.

Me and my snail-shaped pause icon stand humbly corrected.

In retrospect, that's fair. So much about what made the cancellation of Freelance Police a drama was the context. Removed from that, it's more of a fascinating historical moment (at least for people of a certain scene) than anything else. It was pretty wild at the time to experience a community be in open contempt of a studio it essentially existed for the sake of. If you start the story in 2006, you're already in a post-divorce world where anything that made the situation visceral was over with.