Thrik

Too soon.

Maybe it was my expectations being exceeded after the, er… not so convincing performance I watched recently in Rogue One. But I thought the whole de-aged sequence was excellent. It felt Proper Indy and although my eye kept looking for the usual uncanny valley gaps, I gave up quite quickly and just became immersed in it as if I were watching lost footage. it probably doesn’t help that the cinema was not great and it won’t hold up so well under the ruthless scrutiny of my home OLED, but I thought it was a shockingly large jump from efforts in this arena even only a couple of years ago.

I’m enjoying a couple of fresh ones at the moment. Firstly, I’m Too Young To Die, my latest purchase from the reliable Bitmap Books. I love their books as they’re always so lavish and get my nostalgia engine going. This is the first-person shooter fan’s equivalent of the adventure game book I mentioned in the article — a wonderful trip through history with lots of developer involvement. On a more philosophical note, The Courage To Be Disliked is essentially an introduction to Adlerian psychology. There’s a lot to it and I’m not really that into this sort of thing, but I have found some of its principles intriguing, such as challenging the notion that our pasts define who we are (notably the opposite view of his contemporary, Freud). It has made me think differently for the better about how I see myself and how I interact with others, so has been a worthwhile read thus far.

News post: We asked some game writers about good books they've recently read Article: What do Game Devs Read? … But screw those guys, what books do you recommend? Are you still reading On Stranger Tides?

There is definitely a lot of variance in the alignment. An interesting detail I never noticed until looking at the separate layers just now is that the back piece actually has a lot of redundant face that is covered by the front layer: It’s a shame they didn’t just go all the way but you could probably get a perfect version of each character by using the two, even if the wheels themselves don’t align quite right.

Haha. What a deliciously rubbish shitpost on their part. You’re playing with fire when it comes to joking about beloved franchises like this though. Leave that sort of thing to Mojo.

It was great to see Curse’s pirate literature make a return.

Are you aware of Return to Monkey Island?! 😀

I was just apologising for the forums being toast. It was really all @s-island but he is currently being used for coolant on the new server.

Sorry!

If you want a somewhat canonical alternative, MI2 has a literal costume of MI1 LeChuck that could fit the bill:

Love it.

Random thing I noticed a few months ago — there are two versions of the newer art (not the text and cropping which varies a lot anyway).

Agreed that it’s great to see the original cover art back. I was never sold on the Remaster version.

I’d also like to add that I found LeChuck’s face each time he heard Guybrush shouting hilarious.

This seems interesting. I’m not sure how I’ve never come across this! Unless it’s what the upscaled BGs I’d seen turned into. The site seems to be in a wonky state — the menu has dead links and the videos are gone too. I can’t really get a feel for what this thing is actually going to look like, so there’s no alternative, I’ll have to give it a go tonight.

I’ve not heard of anyone getting anywhere in earnest with the updated game, however someone did AI upscale some of the extracted backgrounds and yes it produced promising results. There might be some harder work in the areas where video clips are overlaid upon the backgrounds, as they’d need to be upscaled too in a way that blends. Examples are the mail sorting room, underwater sections, Rubacava’s water, festival, etc. It’s a project I’d love to see happen. I found the camera-relative controls worked great on the PlayStation controller, however point ‘n’ click or tank are my favoured on computer.

This is a thing. See below an unmodified screenshot of the original game taken 10+ years ago vs Remastered: The lighting of the 3D models is generally softer too but I think this is preferable, causing characters and objects to blend in better with the environments. There are even fancy reflected lighting effects, such as Manny's green lockers illuminating his face slightly with green. Overall the game looks and sounds better for sure. I suspect there may be a platform aspect to this. The original game shot was taken on a Windows PC, whereas the Remastered shot was taken on a Mac, which to my knowledge uses a higher gamma than Windows across the board. Indeed, the effect is that of increased gamma, as it's primarily the shadows that are affected. Gamma is pretty easy to adjust on any platform so it is possible you could just tweak that and still enjoy the Remastered edition. Similarly, the Xbox is known to use a lower gamma to the PS4, leading to many a 'graphics comparison' where the Xbox version is said to have richer tone. When I played Remastered it was on PS4, and on my TV I use the film reference darker gamma, so that probably masked this issue for me if it was present on the PS4. It is more noticeable on a computer for sure. As for playing the original, I think it still runs on a modern computer but it increasingly became plagued by rendering issues where the graphics technology moved on. For example, anti-aliasing started causing all sorts of bugs, and so really you could only play it by turning the nicer graphical effects off, leaving it looking more like 'Classic' mode in Remastered, even though many people would have played the original game's better-looking hardware-accelerated mode. Unfortunately I think DREAMM is targeting the inferior mode too as I imagine it'd be much more complex to emulate the graphics card, but I may be wrong.

It's daytime outside! If it's Melee Island, maybe it's from the cut content somebody here speculated about where Cog Island and the Melee clock were intertwined in some sort of time of day puzzle.

I think overall the world would be a better place if nobody used the term ‘rose-tinted glasses’.

It did and it didn’t. There was enough ambiguity — Chuckie’s glowing eyes and Elaine’s comment about the spell being the usual suspects — for there to be never-ending debates about it during the last 30 years. I think it’s good that some closure has been given to that particular hole in all of our childhoods, while at the same time introducing new layers of intrigue that will torment us until we die.

I know what you mean, but for me that tonal shift was something I liked. I am totally guessing but I feel like they tried to make Monkey Island feel more like a safe, gentle place this time around that Guybrush knows well. Getting there is no longer some big mystery, and there’s actually not much there any more — or so it seems. Obviously it becomes quite unsafe in the end but it generally has a warm, nostalgic feel that I enjoy.

I think it’s a gotcha more than a puzzle. If you try to follow its logic it’s pretty time-consuming, but just ticking limes or I guess any box is probably enough. I was in no mood to keep reloading and trying options. 😀 He does give a subtle clue when you examine the fish at any point, saying that the portion is essentially bottomless (or something like that). This of course is how I was able to try 10,000 contest attempts before resorting to the hint book. But it also nods towards the fish always being there to use.