Thriftweed_ Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 So I just finished Mi-SE.. overall I thought it was ok but it didn't really add anything to the experience for me, it took away if anything. I thought the voices were pretty good and by the most part can get over the way Guybrush looks.. But the backgrounds were far too sloppy... they were so ameteur, I have seen flash based web games that have more care and attention than these. especially in the forest.. there are so many errors and bad cut outs that I can't mention them all but have a look at the image at a couple, oh and the interface.. man! even knowing exactly what to do it was difficult combining items... god knows how someone who has never played it is going to cope. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guy.brush Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 Yes it is "fixed". The things that stand out as lazy are way more subtle than that Dunno if it ever was unfinished, cause there are clouds moving over the mansion in that part of the screen. here it is: Oh and I'm playing as LeChuck in that screen Thanks to XML modding. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SyntheticGerbil Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 I just wanted to say that the sound effects in the special edition are really realistic. When the piranha poodles were barking, my cat woke up and was on alert mode, until I poisoned them. I guess they must have used real dogs to record that sound! Ahaha, I had a similar problem with out cats and dogs when playing Minish cap and talking to the animals around town. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guy.brush Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 yupp the forest seems pretty sloppy. You can see the pixel parts sticking out from underneath some of the parts. Dunno what happened there with quality management. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SyntheticGerbil Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 Yes it is "fixed". Hooray! Thank you. Any word on a boxed release in the UK or Europe by the way? If that happens, that's how I'm hoping to buy. But the backgrounds were far too sloppy... they were so ameteur, I have seen flash based web games that have more care and attention than these. especially in the forest.. there are so many errors and bad cut outs that I can't mention them all but have a look at the image at a couple, Yikes that stump is nuts. Can't wait until someone hacks the audio to work on the old game... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guy.brush Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 Been in the forest for the first time and it really feels as if someone forgot to deactivate the original 320x200 pixel layer he painted on before saving the images. Weird. So who is the mysterious internship artist who did the forest? He paints like a cow Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Silvor Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 It's a shame that when you play with the old art it's stretched to completely full screen. Unlike the dos version which has some black bars on around the image. Makes it look more blocky than the dos version. That and the music can be a bit buggy when playing with the old art as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SyntheticGerbil Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 Been in the forest for the first time and it really feels as if someone forgot to deactivate the original 320x200 pixel layer he painted on before saving the images. Weird. So who is the mysterious internship artist who did the forest? He paints like a cow Over at Idlethumbs, resident complainer Toblix said the shopkeeper's large pixels from the original version kept sticking out under the new hi-res version. Are the old 320x200 versions flickering maybe? Maybe that has more to do with the coding and being able to switch between game modes on the fly... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guy.brush Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 No, some of the blocky pixels are interpolated on the forest screens. They aren't perfectly aligned with the old art in some cases. It really looks like the guide layer you'd use when you start painting the enhanced art. It seems as if the artist painting the forest was a bit baffled about how to enhance the very sparse original forest screens and did a lot of copy and pasting. Carla's house looks very nice. It's just the forest screens. I guess some of the errors come from cutting the art into the scumm rooms, but most of them are from the painter directly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guy.brush Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 Here is a .GIF comparison I made: You can clearly see the old parts sticking through at the tree and the golden water. I really like the loose style they painted the backgrounds in. Otherwise it would have been a gigantic work to get everything on 1080p level. But those sloppy parts are really amateur. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SyntheticGerbil Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 Here is a .GIF comparison I made: You can clearly see the old parts sticking through at the tree and the golden water. I really like the loose style they painted the backgrounds in. Otherwise it would have been a gigantic work to get everything on 1080p level. But those sloppy parts are really amateur. The pixelated edges around Carla's house isn't too bad, but it would have been nice if someone had turned the original layer off before saving it out for the actual game. Maybe they can do an update or at least fix this stuff if a European boxed release comes? That's very frustrating. But to make sure... on your animated gif of the forest, all that ugly light blue around the trees and white spots around the top of Carla's house are actually in the game? How do you not catch that stuff? I get the feeling no one played through the game before release to check this stuff? Or maybe they just didn't want to go back and forth with the artists in Singapore to fix this stuff? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
irishmile Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 Actually they had only 3 artists working in house... 2 gals and a guy... they did a fan interview on facebook not too long ago with the three of them that is why I know. It honestly looks more like laziness than mistakes missed. Like the art directer was not stern with them so they did what they could get away with. That is the way it seems to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guy.brush Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 well the white edges on Carla's roof seem to be on purpose, they are moon light edges. there are other instances in Melee town where there are white cutout edges. Maybe they didn't implement PNG transparency for the edges? Most of those problems seem to stem from the need to cut out the background for the cloud animations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guy.brush Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 In their defense: Looking at it at max resolution is a bit like looking at a scanned frame from 300 or any other vfx movie up close in 2048 k resolution. Edges normally are a bit apparent when you view something in the max resolution the stuff was worked on. But fact is that frames in a Monkey Island game stand a lot longer on the screen and there shouldn't be any of those sloppy mistakes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SyntheticGerbil Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 Actually they had only 3 artists working in house... 2 gals and a guy... they did a fan interview on facebook not too long ago with the three of them that is why I know. It honestly looks more like laziness than mistakes missed. Like the art directer was not stern with them so they did what they could get away with. That is the way it seems to me. Were they all confirmed to be in Singapore? I'm guessing the art director didn't care or didn't feel like either fixing it himself or sending the art back to the Singapore team (if that is the case). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Giant Graffiti Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 http://www.gamingbits.com/content/view/6193/2/ "Another chance to get some stuff signed by the creators of the game! Go to the LucasArts booth to get The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition signed by LucasArts Producer Craig Derrick, Art Director Jeff Sangalli, and Artist Dela Longfish. Signatures will be offered from Thursday to Sunday from 11AM-Noon." Are they signing various Xboxs and PCs? O_o Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SyntheticGerbil Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 http://www.gamingbits.com/content/view/6193/2/ "Another chance to get some stuff signed by the creators of the game! Go to the LucasArts booth to get The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition signed by LucasArts Producer Craig Derrick, Art Director Jeff Sangalli, and Artist Dela Longfish. Signatures will be offered from Thursday to Sunday from 11AM-Noon." Are they signing various Xboxs and PCs? O_o Haha I dare someone to print out a screenshot with the white cut out edges and tell them instead of signing, you would rather have them fill in the cut out parts with a magic marker for you. But seriously, I looked up who I could find personal websites of in the team and found Dela Longfish's. Longfish's work is extremely amazing. I don't know who the other two artists are and Jeff Sangalli has worked on some artistically unappealing games but I can't find his website, so maybe he's the weakest link here? Dela Longfish doesn't do 3d work, so whoever made the decision to have him paint over 3D models made a bad one. I bet if he weren't told to do that, the results would have been a lot better. None of them seem to work or live in Singapore by the way, so I'm guessing that the press release was wrong. Either that or all of the coding was done in Singapore... who knows? None of them show any signs of enthusiasm of working on Monkey Island or having been Monkey Island fans in the past on their personal sites, though. Oh well. Actually they had only 3 artists working in house... 2 gals and a guy... they did a fan interview on facebook not too long ago with the three of them that is why I know. It honestly looks more like laziness than mistakes missed. Like the art directer was not stern with them so they did what they could get away with. That is the way it seems to me. Is there a way you can copy and paste some of the best questions on the interview concerning the art for me? Or was it on the Monkey Island Adventures facebook page? Maybe I can find it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sven_Q45 Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 I´m ready since ca. 1 h, too. Good. I´m stupid! Now I noticed for the first time: Jail and Wood are the same background music. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThunderPeel2001 Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 I gotta say, I don't think it's fair to say the team was "lazy". I'm sure they worked their balls off, if you know what I mean. It was a tough project, to be sure. I do honestly have to ask though: Do the devs say the themselves, "THIS is the version of Monkey Island I've ALWAYS wanted!!!" or do they go, "Gee, we thought people would like this". Because it seems to be missing a lot of the former to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SyntheticGerbil Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 I gotta say, I don't think it's fair to say the team was "lazy". I'm sure they worked their balls off, if you know what I mean. It was a tough project, to be sure. I do honestly have to ask though: Do the devs say the themselves, "THIS is the version of Monkey Island I've ALWAYS wanted!!!" or do they go, "Gee, we thought people would like this". Because it seems to be missing a lot of the former to me. Well it's possible they didn't care that much to do a thorough job themselves on the project if we aren't to blame the art director as the perpetrator in terms of quality control issues. I mean like I said Katie Cook and Dela Longfish are great, but they also do a lot of freelance work for other companies according to their sites, so maybe a Monkey Island remake wasn't much of a priority to them? I also I get the feeling most of the team really didn't play Monkey Island previously before getting this project, as on their blogs and things I've found so far when they have posted about Monkey Island, there's no comments on what a great opportunity it was and such. So when they say, "This is the version of Monkey Island I've always wanted!" it's probably more of a promotional video. The 3D model stuff I think harmed the the character work more than anything I think. The two artists I've found don't work in 3D, so why not let them draw as they normally would in a 2D game? They can definitely draw great strong poses on their own. Dela Longfish: http://www.longfish.blogspot.com (Really great stuff here I think!) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
irishmile Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 Is there a way you can copy and paste some of the best questions on the interview concerning the art for me? Or was it on the Monkey Island Adventures facebook page? Maybe I can find it. it was either facebook or twitter BTW my son age 6 was watching me play earlier and he likes the old version much better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guy.brush Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 I dunno how strict the original SCUMM room layout is. My guess is that there are certain architectural/pixel size rules to adhere to. Maybe they didn't want a constant back and forth between the artists and whoever was gonna split it up and implement it ingame. I think due to their decision to base everything on the original code (which I love btw) the artists most certainly were restricted when it came to room borders. Doesn't excuse some of the sloppyness of course. The loose style is great to imply detail without going into too much fiddling, but the obvious copy-paste bugs and some of the blatant instances of the original art shining through from underneath are a little embarrasing. But who cares. We got a shiny new Monkey Island with new music and voices and the ability to fix all those bugs ourselves. (well not me, I don't have time I'm still curious about the Guybrush digging up the logo thing. When I start the game, there is like a 10% chance that he pops up for a splitsecond but then the logo appears. Maybe my PC is too fast? Here he is the little bugger: He starts to look through the spyglass and then the title art appears. Seems to appear only when my QuadCore is somewhat busy or I move the mouse a lot...strange.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LordTrilobite Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 Holy carp that forest is sloppy, if someone manages to hack the SE, I'd be more than happy to help 'clean' or 'fix' any backgrounds and such. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SyntheticGerbil Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 ...the obvious copy-paste bugs.. Yeah, the copy and pasting of those leaves in the screenshot in front of Carla's house is pretty ridiculous. They used the same pattern of 12 leaves arranged a certain way like 100 times over. Oh well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guy.brush Posted July 16, 2009 Share Posted July 16, 2009 Just had the conversation in the prison where Shinetop appears and it felt great! The sheriff really is more menacing with that voice and I like Otis too. The gags worked nicely with the voices. Regarding hacking: it seems that someone at LucasArts was nice enough to incorporate a neat feature. All you have to do to alter something, is place an alternate file in a directory path that is similar to the one in the .pak file. The game browses the game directory first and uses the alternate version instead of the one inside the pak. So we won't need to inject new textures into the pak! As I mentioned earlier, I already played as LeChuck just be putting a certain definitions .XML file inside a directory "art". (you can get the little hack in the SCUMM forum) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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