Thrik

All that trouble to get Boen after the release and it never got patched in. The mind boggles. That version also becoming the standard option now is just a sadness, compounded further by this definitive collection including it. When we were trying to check this I skimmed through loads of ‘Let’s Play’ videos and found that almost all of them feature the non-Boen voice. I’d imagine that most PC players have played the digital non-Boen version. I did think while doing this (separated from the immediate disappointment of it not being Boen all those years ago) that the original voice actor did a pretty good job of mimicking many aspects of the performance. But when you hear the Boen version it’s like a brick to the head — in a good way, like.

Indeed. Disgraceful behaviour from anyone who considers themselves a fan in my opinion. It’s one thing to provide balanced feedback and maybe knock a bit off, but rampant one-star bombing is nothing short of nasty. I mean heck, we all disliked Guybrush’s hair in the special edition so much we created custom patches for it, not to mention the numerous poor art execution — but I wouldn’t dream of trying to destroy its saleability and effectively end interest in developing the franchise.

The same can’t be said for Rodi.

So what’s on the disk?!

LRG’s product page says DVDs, and suggests some of the game are shipped in their entirety in different languages.

Yeah I went for years believing I’d imagined the ‘LeChuck’s brother’ thing until I saw it on an old box.

Haha, yeah true I have heard that sort of thing can become quite desirable in some circles.

In not-so-great news, it seems that the mis-ordered game list on the side has made it into the final shipment.

Very nice actually! A bit rich for my blood but great reproductions.

Anything on the back?

Fabulous to see.

I know almost nothing about the new movie but they can’t really use the Nazis unless it’s in flashbacks can they? The original movies were set not long before the end of WW2, and Crystal Skull was set in the 50s — long after the Nazis were a thing of the past. This movie is presumably set even more recently, i.e. 60s or 70s? So Nazis are off the table really. I guess they could contrive some top secret Nazi group that lives on, but it really wouldn’t have the same gravitas as the actual German war machine at the height of its power dedicating resources to the supernatural.

It would be really interesting to see some of these found. If I understand correctly, slide format would allow for extremely detailed captures to be extracted much like how old film is used to create amazing-looking 4K remasters — because all that detail is there in the analogue format. It might even be preferable to the original art itself given physical degradation may have occurred to that.

At this point I’d probably say that it’s a volunteer project and so perhaps there simply haven’t been people interested enough in the LucasArts games to work on them. However, I have also seen the… warm and inviting… conversations in some of the code repository threads and pull requests, and it seemed unnecessarily challenging and thankless getting a change accepted. That sort of thing can quickly lead to people not wanting to bother with the hassle, hence a decline in contributions. It may stem from good intentions like not wanting to break all the (Now almost as ancient as the games themselves were!) ScummVM code, but if nobody wants to touch that old stuff it also means those imperfections may stay baked in forever. I agree though Thunderpeel, ScummVM does achieve its goal of making the games functional and portable, albeit with a range of issues from minor (SOMI quirks) to quite major (CMI iMuse, thankfully fixed after 18 years). It has done great stuff allowing people to enjoy them in an accessible manner.

Has nobody picked this up then?!

Yeah it’s an interesting one. The archivist in me thinks that fixed versions of games should be versions of games, and not a pseudo version that sort of arises from the emulator/tool massaging the implementation. For example there are numerous editions of Monkey Island 1 & 2 that were released for various platforms with many small variations. Should the tool be smushing those variations into one definitive version, or letting the differences stand — like a missing prop description, or minor dialogue fixes? If so, then what about bugs? Different versions of classic games have different bugs because of how patches didn’t exist back then. Should the tool also smush those fixes together? I think for casual players or those seeking the ‘best’ experience then it does make sense to do the above. However, few casual players are going to be using ancient versions of games and trying to run them on modern systems — they’ll just pick up the Special Editions. It’s going to be enthusiasts playing these old versions, for whom I feel the tool’s primary job is to preserve the original game exactly as it was, and if there is any ‘fixing’ that is done very transparently in a toggleable way. Otherwise, what if you do want to play SOMI with its bugs intact — whether it be for the experience, or to check something (i.e. research)? With that said, I think the ship has sailed as far as ScummVM being a serious archival tool goes. It seems the only real avenue for that is using something like DOSBox, or another way of simulating the original runtime conditions, so that there is no interpretation or decision making happening. BTW this wall of text isn’t meant to savage your contribution Thunderpeel. It is more a general concern I have about the scope and direction of ScummVM, which is admirably volunteer-run but also constitutes the only official way of playing a lot of games, and the primary way people play them unofficially.

Perhaps yet another time Archive.org is our saviour: https://archive.org/details/Win95OSR2

Has anyone played around with virtual machines? As I understand it Dosbox-x can basically reproduce a simulated 90s-era Windows environment, meaning that as far as the game’s concerned it’s on ‘home turf’. Whether or not it is that simple I don’t know, but it seems like it’d be the most reliable way of getting as authentic an experience as possible short of literally setting up an ancient computer. Of course you’d lose any ‘special’ options like upscaling tricks, but that could be fine…

That would be crazy if it didn’t support Rift. Hope you can confirm!

Very quickly — I checked several hours after that post and they were already gone. A very hot commodity it seems!

To be fair, that was De Niro himself being de-aged, so the issue was that he moved like an old chap despite supposedly being younger. In this case, it sounds like a younger model is being used with a replaced face, probably using deep fake whiz-bang tech that’s all the rage now.

Nothing new obviously but I do just love the detail of doll Guybrush wearing the MI1 outfit.

You might have a Rolls Royce Phantom, but do you have a PS5? I thought not.

I’m a bit sad it’s not launching with a proper PS5 version, as I was lucky enough to get one but there’s a shortage of stuff to give it a run for its money. I understand that the Xbox Series X is getting a new-gen version, which makes sense given Double Fine’s new ownership. I hope it doesn’t take long for that cut to make its way to the PS5.

Adventureland is just such a good place for Indy too. I’d love to see more of it there.