Udvarnoky

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.

You gotta love how the cover made him a smirking asshole: Presumably they went to the same seminar that the Dreamworks marketing department did where it was explained that the douchiest possible expression on a character's face is also the most ingratiating.

The essential difference is that DREAMM relies on the original interpreter (the .exe), while ScummVM replaces it, trying to replicate its behavior -- which, given a talented and fastidious engineering team plus 20 years, it does remarkably well. But DREAMM will get you total accuracy to the original experience, or as close as you are going to get short of physically building a vintage IBM with a Roland MT-32, plus the streamlined convenience you won't get from a general-purpose DOS emulator. In addition, some of the UI stuff in the SCUMM games (such as save/load screens and the displays for pause and quit confirmation) were built in to the .exe, which is why ScummVM has to provide its own generic replacements. With DREAMM you'll see all that stuff as it was, which is cool because sometimes there were unique images (Maniac Mansion save screen) or information (the Indy Quotient on the Last Crusade save screen) involved. There's all kind of other little things that would be difficult to thoroughly catalog. For instance, ScummVM lifts some restrictions on when you can save. Thanks to Aaron's efforts, future generations will no longer be deprived of the sacred terror of being told the Meteor has control of your computer when you try to save in Dr. Fred's lab! ScummVM is still unbeatable in terms of platform independence and being able to run any given version of these games. If you wanna run FM-Towns Loom or Nintendo Maniac Mansion on your toaster, there is no substitute. DREAMM is ideal if you're more of a stickler, happen to be a Windows user, and are playing the DOS-based versions of these games (or CMI). The two programs really complement each other quite well in my opinion. DREAMM is much more a replacement for DOSBox than ScummVM. What's unfortunate is that many people will be denied DREAMM as a (legal) option. The official versions of these games as sold nowadays (that is, through GOG/Steam) mostly leave out the .exes because they come bundled with ScummVM. It's annoying to think that paying customers are getting incomplete filesets, but Lucasfilm probably made the unfortunate assumption that they would be moot to the end user. I wonder if something could be done about that if the situation was brought to the attention of the right people.

This is a gift. I'm particularly grateful you went beyond your original charter to bring CMI into the fold. Never thought I'd see those Save/Load screens again.

I like Broken Age, but there’s something distancing and drowsy about it that keeps it from being the really captivating experience I associate with my favorite adventure games. It’s beautiful and polished and uncompromised (in that it comes across as exactly the game Tim wanted to make), but as a matter of personal taste I never found it that involving. Its existence is justified by the documentary alone, though.

We were able to retroactively include Lead Designer Steven Chen’s participation into the article. Here’s our new interview with him. Since he worked on Staff of Kings, we interrogated him a bit on that, too.

No Fate of Atlantis merchandise I'm afraid, but it looks like there will be some official prop replicas down the line:

Shame there won't be one more Struzan poster to go with it.

First image:

Fun fact: A design for a Monkey Island 2 floaty pen had also been pitched, as Tim bitterly recalled on the product page for the Double Fine floaty pen that was offered way back in 2005 when the company store originally launched. There was an accompanying Double Fine Action News post that elaborated on the design: it was going to be Guybrush in the coffin paddling to the International House of Mojo.

It's grimly relieving that this game was announced well after all the primary creative decisions were under glass. It seems unlikely that a team of professional game developers would ever depart from their own tastes and instincts in response to men's room graffiti, but between Ron feeling the need to put his blog in timeout and Dom directly engaging with Reddit comments to address the feedback, it's unfortunately clear that there is some personal impact here, so knowing that the shrillest voices were denied the ability to have even a subconscious influence on the game's development is satisfying.

Doesn't the scene with Morgan and the Voodoo Lady take place after the credits? I just view that as a coda. Sure, that thread could have been continued in a hypothetical second season, but I don't know how likely that ever was, and the game's primary conflicts were resolved. Kissing off those characters on an ambiguous note works fine. I don't see it as like, egregious unfinished business for the series.

Yeah I think TMI in aggregate felt of the proper scope. The budget constraints were more evident at the episode level, where there was clearly an exact number of environments that could be afforded. But so it goes. A proper remaster where Land's score gets the live instrument treatment and some tertiary characters actually get designs could be revelatory. As with Sam & Max, the bones are good, and an upgraded audio/visual presentation could show off the quality that was already there in a potentially dramatic way.

l could just be out the swim but I don't personally recall either this supposed minced enthusiam from Dave when promoting the game nor any particular rejection (at least beyond what any of the latter sequels were met with) from the fans. I seem to remember TMI being seen as something of a rebound from EMI, but I'd be lying if I said I did any deep digging or that an appetite for doing so has been worked up since.

While Dave was involved with TMI, it's not totally clear to what degree. After the first Sam & Max season he assumed the role of Design Director at Telltale, which seems to have been an overseeing role on all of the studio's projects. Judging by the credits, the project-level creative leads on TMI were Mike Stemmle and Mark Darin, while each episode had one or two primary directors and writers. While I am sure Dave had a non-trivial role in shaping TMI, he didn't assume any of those key titles on that project, so it's hard to gauge his direct contribution.

What an embarassing confession that Mixnmojo isn't your home page.

While we're all relying on the perpetually incoming Mojo review to know if the game itself is any good, it's tempting to put this big box on the shelf on the basis of Purcell's cover art alone.

The "Chris" by the way is Chris Purvis. He and Chuck Jordan were roughly the equivalent of Dave and Tim on the first game, in that they largely scripted and wrote the game's rooms.

The first half of the slogan was put in an unfortunate place in the official poster, but that's still no reason to scare it away. ;