The Monkey Island box set from Limited Run Games

[ThunderPeel2001]

A blank disc. That is a bit disappointing, but I suppose it makes sense. I guess it was just designed to be a prop, which is fine. The book sounds incredible... I want it so badly. Thanks for sharing those insights from it.

 

How many pages is it? How is it divided?

Edited December 17, 2021 by ThunderPeel2001

[ATMcashpoint]

There are no page numbers, but it's pretty thick! The lion's share of the book is devoted to MI1 and MI2. CMI gets several pages of interviews, EMI even less, and TMI barely any pages. I was a little disappointed to see that nobody who worked at Telltale was interviewed about TMI, aside from Dominic Armato and Chuck Jordan (who mostly was working on The Devil's Playhouse rather than TOMI during that period, if memory serves). But the MI1 and MI2 sections are very interesting, and I feel like clamming up about them for now to avoid further spoilers!

[Jake]

I think Tales of MI was on the cusp of not being included because it’s not a LucasArts-owned game and so much about Telltale was in flux for a while there. That would at least partly explain why it gets short shrift in the book. But I’m personally glad the bulk of it is dedicated to MI1 and 2. They’re the games that truly predate the World Wide Web, and the least dissected in real-time by fans and journalists when they were released. 

[ThunderPeel2001]

For anyone who wants to see the contents of the book (240 pages, officially known as Monkey Island Chronicles), see here:

 

https://www.facebook.com/1436618846/videos/pcb.4398616666933596/437137791466024

 

(Link may not work? Not sure.)

 

 

[Lagomorph01]

Whoa! Thanks for uploading!

I can’t see it as I don’t have Facebook. Any chance you can put it in Google Drive or something?

[Udvarnoky]

Someone posted an unboxing video:

 

 

[ThunderPeel2001]

9 hours ago, Lagomorph01 said:

Whoa! Thanks for uploading!

I can’t see it as I don’t have Facebook. Any chance you can put it in Google Drive or something?

 

It's not my video, sorry. I don't own the boxset.

[Laserschwert]

How can there be no numbers on the pages, but page numbers in the table of contents?

[ATMcashpoint]

I was wrong - some of the pages have numbers. Many, however, do not, and those that do have numbers appear to always be left-hand pages for some reason. On a lot of pages the lower area (where the page numbers are, when present) is taken up by factoids at the bottom of the page, but even where this is absent the page numbers aren't always included.

Edited December 19, 2021 by ATMcashpoint

[ATMcashpoint]

Another update: after contacting Limited Run Games' support on their website, I've received an email with a digital downloadable copy of the contents of the USB drive. Hooray!

Edited December 22, 2021 by ATMcashpoint

[KTrimmer]

Hi! I had the same issue regarding my USB and they sent me the zip files as well. I have tried to add the games MI1 (EGA,VGA) to ScummVM to no success. (the EGA versions are displayed as an .IMG file) Do the files need to be converted? I'm still new to understanding what a kyroflux is regarding those files.

[Sebastian.Zissou]

Hello everybody,

 

I have a question to all forum members living across Europe: of those who have already received the anthology, how many days did it take to reach your home after receiving the email from DHL with the tracking numer?
I live in Barcelona, I've received the email a week ago and still don't know anything about the package, should I start worrying or what...? (pandemics problems aside, the DHL website still says the estimated time of delivery is 6 business days).

 

[s-island]

1 hour ago, KTrimmer said:

Hi! I had the same issue regarding my USB and they sent me the zip files as well. I have tried to add the games MI1 (EGA,VGA) to ScummVM to no success. (the EGA versions are displayed as an .IMG file) Do the files need to be converted? I'm still new to understanding what a kyroflux is regarding those files.

The img files are images of the original floppy disks. They can be opened in DOSBox with the IMGMOUNT command. You can then install the games to your HD.

 

Kryoflux images are a complete record of the magnetic field of the floppy disk platters. They can be used to create clones of the original disks with a Kryoflux device and floppy drive.

[Glokidd]

So my copy of the Anthology arrived today and I did the obligatory Twitter praise vomit post because it's wonderful 😀

 

I also made one of those silly unboxing video thingies if anyone is interested 🙂

 

[KTrimmer]

On 12/22/2021 at 12:14 PM, s-island said:

The img files are images of the original floppy disks. They can be opened in DOSBox with the IMGMOUNT command. You can then install the games to your HD.

 

Kryoflux images are a complete record of the magnetic field of the floppy disk platters. They can be used to create clones of the original disks with a Kryoflux device and floppy drive.

Thank you for your help! I was able to get the files and play the EGA version finally. 

[MurraySchull]

Recieved my set in the UK today. Merry Christmas to me! Arrived in great condition and the product itself looks really cool. So great that this finally turned up after ordering about a year ago. The USB and CD's seemed to work fine for me as well.

HOWEVER, one thing that I noticed upon loading up Tales. Episode 1 is still the original Harrington version, both on the USB and the CD. I saw that Mojo has listed in their newspost that the Boen version is in this set, and I also remember an interview with Limited Run where they stated they thought that would be the case too, but upon loading up the two versions of the game found in this set, that doesn't appear to be the case. I haven't seen anybody else bring this up yet, so I thought it was worth flagging and seeing if anybody else happened to have the later version of Tales with this set. (I did check to see if a setting had been incorporated into Tales to choose between which version to play, but no such luck. I doubted there would be any additions/enhancements in any case, these are basically direct ports of the games as-is.)

 

Aside from that, the box itself is bigger than expected. The face on my Guybrush statue looks normal, thankfully! Murray is about 3-4 inches tall and is, appropriately, a candle holder. The artbox is very cool, it's great to have physical posters of all of the official game art at last, Will be checking out the book over the Christmas holidays, but it looks like a lot of work went into it! It's a real shame that the order of the games on the side of the box is incorrect. They are correctly ordered on the back of the CD case, so lord knows how this error was made. But yeah, overall, great looking set, and of course... official, physical Monkey Island merch for the first time in... maybe ever? I couldn't say no to supporting this.

 

P.S. From dispatch to arrival, it took eight days for the set to arrive from overseas.

Edited December 24, 2021 by fentongames

[ATMcashpoint]

Interesting! I played through the DVD version of Tales recently and noticed that Alexandra Boyd's dialogue as Elaine in Episode 2 was a lot cleaner and less compressed than I remember it being in the original episodic release. If Limited Run Games is using the original web-based versions of the episodes, I'd expect that Episode 2 would have the original, heavily compressed versions of Elaine's dialogue lines as well.

[Benny]

Before Jason made the Mojo post we checked that it was Boen. I installed episode 1 of TMI from Limited Run and extracted a few bits of LeChuck speech to confirm it. Now I'm second guessing that and wondering if our ears failed us.

[MurraySchull]

An easy way to tell the difference between the two versions, as well as Harrington’s HAR HAR HAR’s, is the way the music is timed in the opening scene. Since Boen’s delivery was generally faster, they had to reposition the music in that first scene to account for it (Guybrush’s first line of “Alright, LeChuck, put down the monkey...” is timed to roughly the same part of the music in both versions, and the timings before and after then vary.) You can tell it’s the Boen version if you hear the first few notes of music over the Telltale Games logo. If the music only begins after LeChuck says “At last!”, then it’s the Harrington version.

 

Very curious if there are multiple versions of the USB/CD contents out there if other people have the Boen version. Would be worth checking over, I think. If a downloadable PC Boen version of TMI1 exists, I’d prefer to play that one. Otherwise, this is 100% the ideal way to own and play the whole series. And while Harrington wasn’t bad, per-se, there is only one Earl Boen, and his version really should be present in a complete set like this.
 

P.S. The Murray figure IS a really evil looking doorstop!

Edited July 1, 2022 by fentongames

[Benny]

Our ears failed us, the version in the Limited Run pack is the original Harrington one.

[Lagomorph01]

What a total bummer!! That’s like getting a product that’s not finished! Real sloppy work!

[SGTflippy]

I GOT IT ,SO HAPPY

[MurraySchull]

21 hours ago, Bennyboy said:

Our ears failed us, the version in the Limited Run pack is the original Harrington one.

 

That is a shame, thanks for confirming. It’s the one thing that holds this set back from being the ultimate collection of all five games. (Not that the set itself is perfect, there are a few things here and there I’d have liked to have seen done differently, but it is the best we’ve ever gotten.)

 

I know Boen was patched into/initially released on other platforms, but for PC, I believe the only way to play the TMI1 Boen version is the original TellTale DVD release, and the downloadable version from the website was never updated, is that right? Luckily I still have my DVD copy, otherwise I guess I’d be out of luck.

Edited December 28, 2021 by fentongames

[Benny]

Yes, on pc the DVD release is still the only way to get the Boen version of episode 1. I remember them saying they would update it for everyone else, but they never did.

 

By way of penance for the mistake I've made this.

Its the voice files from the DVD version backported to the older downloadable version. To use it, backup the original voice .ttarch and replace it with this. 

Benefits:

• It has Earl Boen's voice for LeChuck.
• The quality of some of the voices will be better. The original release stored some voices as ogg and some as speex which is lower quality. In the DVD version all voices are ogg.

Drawbacks:

• The lipsync and animations were redone for Boen's LeChuck. So LeChuck's lipsync will be wrong. This is particularly noticeable with longer lines of dialog like in the intro.

How was this made?:

• The DVD version uses a slightly newer version of the Telltale engine so you cant just drop the DVD bundle into the original release and have it work. I dumped all the voice files from the DVD voice bundle, wrote a quick program to parse the .aud files and make them the same format as the .aud files from the original release. Then I built a new .ttarch bundle with the modified files.
• I had a look at backporting the .anm animations to fix the lipsync issue but the format is noticeably different between the two versions so after a quick try I abandoned it.

[MurraySchull]

Wow, thanks so much! I’ll try this out tomorrow. Just tried loading in my 2010 DVD and my modern machine doesn’t recognise the disc! Looks like this may be my only shot now! Don’t worry about the lip sync, it was never Telltale’s strongsuit at that point in time anyway!

 

Replaying the series now in full for the first time in 8-9 years. Damn, Boen as LeChuck is absolute pitch perfect casting. Almost all of the voicework in the series is great, mind, but Boen is flawless across the board, even with all of his dialogue in MI1SE that can be awkward to read aloud.