Return to Monkey Island

[Jake]

1 hour ago, ATMcashpoint said:

As for easy mode, probably the biggest change, besides Largo's folded dress shirt as Jake mentioned, is that Guybrush escapes the acid pit by asking Wally to pee on the candle.

All time great easy-mode-only gag. A+++

[MurraySchull]

Did easy mode in MI2 skip over the Captain Kate plot entirely? I have vague memories of just walking into the Booty Boutique and simply buying the map piece. Was it really as easy as that?

 

(If that's the case, I guess that removes the need for the spitting contest and library puzzles as well.)

[OzzieMonkey]

1 hour ago, fentongames said:

Did easy mode in MI2 skip over the Captain Kate plot entirely? I have vague memories of just walking into the Booty Boutique and simply buying the map piece. Was it really as easy as that?

 

(If that's the case, I guess that removes the need for the spitting contest and library puzzles as well.)

Yep, no Kate and no spitting contest. IIRC, the map pieces go as follows:

 

Rapp Scallion: Woodsmith just lets you take the nails without needing to saw off the peg leg; lock Stan in the coffin and take the crypt key; open the crypt and each coffin already has the pirate names on them so no Famous Pirate Quotations needed. The map is just lying in the coffin so no Ash 2 Life necessary, therefore no Rapp Scallion resurrection sequence.

 

Captain Marley: The map doesn't fly away after Elaine throws it out the window, you can just pick it up. Therefore, no cliffside, so no fisherman, so no treehouse, so no bone dance.

 

Young Lindy: Buy it outright from the antique shop. No Mad Monkey, no Kate, no spitting contest.

 

Rum Rogers: No monkey wrench puzzle, the waterfall is already shut off. Rum Rogers is gone so no drinking contest, you can push any brick and go down to the skeleton and grap the map piece. 

 

I don't think you have to enter the library once in Lite mode.

Edited April 29, 2022 by OzzieMonkey

[MurraySchull]

Woah, sounds like you can pretty much knock through the lite-mode of the four map pieces chapter in 20 minutes! I think I only played easy mode once and forgot about half of these expedited solutions.

[Scummbuddy]

No bone dance sequence? How is navigating LeChucks fortress different?

[OzzieMonkey]

1 minute ago, Scummbuddy said:

No bone dance sequence? How is navigating LeChucks fortress different?

I believe you just push any random bone door and you go straight to the big door with all the locks on it.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Yep, it really is Easy mode! So many changes and entire sections, characters, etc. cut. Same with Thimbleweed Park.
 

I know I keep harping on about it, but with CMI the Normal mode doesn’t cut anything. It just has different puzzles, so basically you’re getting extra puzzles rather than having things removed. 
 

They didn’t even bother including Easy with the SE edition, did they?

[Lagomorph01]

I remember looking this up a couple of years ago and being absolutely baffled. Lite mode doesn’t just simplify puzzles, but it cuts out a lot (most of) the story.

Give me Curse style difficulty anytime (although, looking at that tweet, technically that does cut puzzles too though.)

 

I’ve got a LeChuck casting question that’s been burning a hole in me for a couple of days now. Maybe @Jake can answer this for me?

When casting LeChuck for Tales of Monkey Island, initially two actors were chosen, Adam Harrington for his zombie form and Kevin Blackton for his human form. I think pretty much everyone agrees that Blackton had the stronger performance. Why wasn’t Blackton chosen to do both? It would have been an easy solution since Telltale was recasting the role anyway?

[Zaxx]

All this talk about difficulty made me interested in playing through MI 2 on easy mode for the first time so I launched MI 2 SE... and there is no easy mode. Okay, remaster, I'll deduct some points for this...

 

On that note I think it might be a good idea to remaster the remasters now that MI is getting a new entry again. You know, actually finish the forest art in SoMI SE, add some of these missing features etc.

Edited April 29, 2022 by Zaxx

[MurraySchull]

I do remember at the time the SE came out, somebody found that tweaking one of the settings in the games' data did enable easy mode in the SE. The easy mode dialogue is all voiced and everything puzzle-wise is accounted for, though I think I remember one or two glitches being present here and there given that easy mode was never meant to be included.

 

Will report back here if I find it...

[OzzieMonkey]

13 minutes ago, Zaxx said:

 

On that note I think it might be a good idea to remaster the remasters now that MI is getting a new entry again. You know, actually finish the forest art in SoMI SE, add some of these missing features etc.

What are the chances they'd actually bother with that? Don't get me wrong, I'd love it (especially for MI1), but it's a lot of time and money invested into something that's already been done. Not to mention I doubt people would be happy having to pay for things they should've gotten right the first time like the unfinished backgrounds. A patch of the SEs that we already own would be much more preferable. Honestly the one thing I'd love to see is the stump joke added back in with Dom's voiceover. It feels weird that it's still mentioned in the hint line on Dinky in MI2:SE when people who only experience the series through those versions have no frame of reference.

 

I think the only chance we'd have of getting another take on remastering MI1 and 2 is if they decided to remaster the whole series in one game like the Crash and Spyro trilogies. 

Edited April 29, 2022 by OzzieMonkey

[Zaxx]

34 minutes ago, fentongames said:

I do remember at the time the SE came out, somebody found that tweaking one of the settings in the games' data did enable easy mode in the SE. The easy mode dialogue is all voiced and everything puzzle-wise is accounted for, though I think I remember one or two glitches being present here and there given that easy mode was never meant to be included.

 

Will report back here if I find it...

 

That would be an interesting find indeed. What I was thinking is that I'm just going to go the ultimate talkie edition route since there is an unfinished beta version of that here:

http://gratissaugen.de/ultimatetalkies/monkey2.html

 

I never played this one but as I understand it should run fine and the only thing it's missing is the remastered sounds and the music. Those aren't biggies, MI2 sounds great with ScummVM's MT-32 emulator.

[Zaxx]

50 minutes ago, OzzieMonkey said:

What are the chances they'd actually bother with that? Don't get me wrong, I'd love it (especially for MI1), but it's a lot of time and money invested into something that's already been done. Not to mention I doubt people would be happy having to pay for things they should've gotten right the first time like the unfinished backgrounds. A patch of the SEs that we already own would be much more preferable. Honestly the one thing I'd love to see is the stump joke added back in with Dom's voiceover. It feels weird that it's still mentioned in the hint line on Dinky in MI2:SE when people who only experience the series through those versions have no frame of reference.

 

I think the only chance we'd have of getting another take on remastering MI1 and 2 is if they decided to remaster the whole series in one game like the Crash and Spyro trilogies. 

 

Yeah what I actually meant was releasing patches basically, I can't imagine that it could take a huge budget to do something like that. I remember that back in the day a fan even started to clean up the unfinished art in SoMI SE (he never finished it but got quite far) and what he made was absolutely fine and didn't stick out at all.

 

There's a lot less that's wrong with MI 2 SE but if it is indeed true that they could restore lite mode without much additional work then they might as well just do it. And while they're at it they could remove the weird fps lock from the PC port that makes the game stutter (why did they lock to 50 instead of something that made sense?) if you don't hex edit that out of the exe:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2793853397

 

As for a CMI remaster I'd be actually very surprised if that didn't happen down the line. I mean it's there and it's still pretty much state of the art, when a fan cleaned up all the backgrounds with AI upscaling and some editing it already looked like art that's ready to ship lol.

Edited April 29, 2022 by Zaxx

[Niemandswasser]

3 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

They didn’t even bother including Easy with the SE edition, did they?

 

As I recall it wasn't included on the "Monkey Island Madness" CD release from the late '90s, either.

[Jake]

3 hours ago, Lagomorph01 said:

When casting LeChuck for Tales of Monkey Island, initially two actors were chosen, Adam Harrington for his zombie form and Kevin Blackton for his human form. I think pretty much everyone agrees that Blackton had the stronger performance. Why wasn’t Blackton chosen to do both? It would have been an easy solution since Telltale was recasting the role anyway?

I don’t know the answer to this! Maybe he DID do an audition for zombie LeChuck and it wasn’t as strong? Or maybe the team was hoping Boen could be used just for those parts so it was cordoned off as a separate smaller role (which obviously didn’t happen at launch but wouldn’t surprise me as an attempt that was made by the team)? Honestly I don’t know for sure; I wasn’t involved in the casting really other than in the communal team pressure to get Boen back for episodes 4 and 5. 

[ATMcashpoint]

56 minutes ago, Jake said:

I don’t know the answer to this! Maybe he DID do an audition for zombie LeChuck and it wasn’t as strong? Or maybe the team was hoping Boen could be used just for those parts so it was cordoned off as a separate smaller role (which obviously didn’t happen at launch but wouldn’t surprise me as an attempt that was made by the team)? Honestly I don’t know for sure; I wasn’t involved in the casting really other than in the communal team pressure to get Boen back for episodes 4 and 5. 

Cordoning off the role in the hopes of getting Earl Boen back seems likely as I remember hearing the press builds of Tales episode 1 had a different voice for Elaine that was later replaced with Alexandra Boyd. Adam Harrington's voice might have been similarly intended as a placeholder but made it into the initially published version (and now the version sold online, since Telltale never updated the online downloads and that's what's being sold digitally currently).

 

Also, in Easy mode of MI2, you can just go down the back left passageway in LeChuck's fortress and arrive straight at the office door. No bone pushing required.

 

The original CD release of MI2 dummied out both the copy protection and Lite mode, since the copy protection and the mode choice were both done on same screen. The SE reused this code and dummied out Lite mode, even though the lines for it were recorded and are in the voice files.

[MurraySchull]

18 hours ago, Zaxx said:

 

That would be an interesting find indeed.

 

Had to dig back into the archives of this forum but it turns out there is still an active link for a patch from LogicDeluxe to run the SE in easy mode. In their words:

Quote

 

If you want to try, I made a patch which forces the game to run always in easy mode: http://www.mediafire.com/?20wqej2wk2y

Put the patched monkey2.000 and monkey2.001 to classic\en\

To undo it, just removes the files from classic\en\
 

 

Edited April 30, 2022 by fentongames

[Laserschwert]

Does easy mode have any changed dialogue? It would be weird if they recorded dialogue that couldn't be heard in the game, with easy mode removed.

[Lagomorph01]

9 minutes ago, Laserschwert said:

Does easy mode have any changed dialogue? It would be weird if they recorded dialogue that couldn't be heard in the game, with easy mode removed.

Yeah, it does. And if I understand correctly it’s fully voiced.

[Laserschwert]

And they couldn't be bothered to voice the stump joke.

 

Guess they just extracted all dialogue lines from the data files to record. Stump joke was missing from the VGA data files, while Lite Mode was still in the data files.

[OzzieMonkey]

6 minutes ago, Laserschwert said:

And they couldn't be bothered to voice the stump joke.

 

Guess they just extracted all dialogue lines from the data files to record. Stump joke was missing from the VGA data files, while Lite Mode was still in the data files.

You messaged Dom about possibly recording the stump joke for the Ultimate Talkie right? Did he ever respond?

[Laserschwert]

Nope, no response. Maybe it sounded like a "Could you record an answering machines message for me?"-request to him.

[Toymafia1988]

The rational part me of me is thrilled about the monkey island game and grateful it comes out very soon. Thank you Ron Gilbert and team.

 

The irrational part of me is absolutely losing my mind waiting for more info on this game.

 

Show us Guybrush already!!! I'm so nervous about what he looks like.

 

What if Grumpygamer closing down due to backlash means they will delay the reveal... 😔😔😔

 

I just want to see the game in motion. Give us some gameplay please. 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬

Edited April 30, 2022 by Toymafia1988

[KestrelPi]

6 minutes ago, Toymafia1988 said:

I'm absolutely losing my mind waiting for more info on this game.

 

Show us Guybrush already!!! I'm so nervous about what he looks like.

 

What if Grumpygamer closing down due to backlash means they will delay the reveal... 😔😔😔

 

I just want to see the game in motion. Give us some gameplay already. 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬

 

Here's what'll happen. (Probably. I dunno, I'm predicting here) You'll see it, and you'll instinctively be weirded out by it because it's going to be in a different style to how Guybrush has ever looked, which is always odd (same with CMI, y'know).

Then you'll see more and more of it in motion and you'll realise that it's pretty well done for what it is, and in the end you'll probably either end up liking it or just making peace with it.

I think the big take away people will have when they see it all in motion is that this is it's own style, it's not going to be like the previous games, or like the special editions. Some people will vibe with it, others won't, but it'll be really clear they were GOING for something (my main criticism of SoMI SE is that I really wasn't sure WHAT it was going for with the style.)

[OzzieMonkey]

16 minutes ago, Toymafia1988 said:

I'm absolutely losing my mind waiting for more info on this game.

 

Show us Guybrush already!!! I'm so nervous about what he looks like.

 

What if Grumpygamer closing down due to backlash means they will delay the reveal... 😔😔😔

 

I just want to see the game in motion. Give us some gameplay already. 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬

Yeah, I've been refreshing Mojo and Twitter every day since the announcement to see if any new info is out. Idk a whole lot about marketing but I would think that the game must be close to coming out for them to announce it when they did, so I would

think they'd want to strike while the iron is hot to make sure people don't forget about the game by the time it comes out, though at the same time I guess they have to build people's expectations and hype. I'm with you though, I'm dying to see Guybrush and some gameplay, along with a release date so I can plan my Monkey marathon 😁

Edited April 30, 2022 by OzzieMonkey