thought about EMI

[karmo]

EMI has story with comedy mystery elements with all those things Guybrush has to investigate 

Spoiler

(who was eager to declare Elaine dead, what is connection between LeCharles and Mandrill and what their plan is etc. Even subplot is about uncovering who framed Guybrush in bank robbery).

Maybe it would have been better game if it had game play of mystery game also? I mean, maybe it should had individual locations open up during investigation instead of each chapter having locations to explore from start and maybe it should had dialog system with new topics constantly opening up when Guybrush uncovers new info? (Stemmle and Clark used those game play devices successfully in Hit the Road after all.)

Edited October 30, 2022 by karmo

[Gins]

Good point, I wonder if such a thing was never realized or even thought about due to some restrictions of what MI "should" be.

 

E.g. the Secret team just wanted sword fighting and ended up solving it mechanically by using insults, likewise finding 3 people to crew a ship just worked in Secret.

 

Revenge didn't have either, but did have fully realized spitting mechanics and a working library and the game of luck.

 

Curse and Escape for some reason ignored Revenge completely and established Secret mechanics as series staples, making it a universal truth that any ship needs a crew of three and, especially in Escape, that any sports competion has to be fought by insults.

 

Curse tried the ship battle but lacked trust in it enough to allow players to skip it entirely.

 

It might well be that too different mechanics might have been discouraged by management to capitalize on the ostensibly safe features that worked in Secret and then in Curse.

 

[karmo]

25 minutes ago, Gins said:

Curse tried the ship battle but lacked trust in it enough to allow players to skip it entirely.

 

 

 

I have not thought about it before, but maybe Curse team felt that lack ship battles was weakness of Ron's games. (It is interesting that ship battles are part of means to

Spoiler

get ready to fight Rottingham. In more serious games ship battles would be part of every day life of pirate protagonist.)

 

[BaronGrackle]

4 hours ago, Gins said:

Curse tried the ship battle but lacked trust in it enough to allow players to skip it entirely.

To be fair, the Ship Combat section of CMI is the most arcade-leaning sequence in the entire franchise. I'm pretty sure they were trying to fulfill the plans for ship combat in Mutiny on Monkey Island, but the result is a sequence that leans closer to the Indy 3 sections of fistfighting or flying the biplane. I'm sure they asked themselves if such sections had a place in adventure games by 1997.

[ThunderPeel2001]

FYI - I don't think you need to put things in spoiler tags in a thread specifically about EMI

[Gins]

7 hours ago, BaronGrackle said:

To be fair, the Ship Combat section of CMI is the most arcade-leaning sequence in the entire franchise.

Yup, thanks. I originally wanted to point out how this contrasts with the more point-and-clicky integration for sword fighting but I forgot. And of course they were right to make their action combat skippable: many choose an adventure game precisely because they do not want to play an action sequence to progress. I was taken aback by the fist fights in the Indy games for example.

 

I think it was mechanically fun to play, the lack of confidence was perhaps more along the lines of: maybe we could have found a more organic solution to integrate this like the dialog based sword fighting in Secret.

 

Maybe simply making it turn based instead of real time, to give action averse players a chance to take their time, would have been enough.

 

A game I love dearly comes to mind: In Skies of Arcadia, an RPG, there are amazing ship battles which play completely different to the regular battles. You plot out your moves on a time grid and see them executed.

 

And then the most point and clicky part of them: at certain time you as the captain get a little dialog tree to do a strategic maneuver, e.g., you get the hint that the enemy ship has a weakness on the stern so you can give the command to get behind them. In another situation you can issue a command via this dialog, to pressure the enemy into a ditch and defeat them that way without further combat.

Edited October 31, 2022 by Gins

[karmo]

Additional thought about EMI. When Curse didn't use

Spoiler

it all is theme park idea, anachronisms become nothing more than jokes.

Whole commerialization plot in EMI made anachronisms again relevant for world of Monkey Island.

Edited October 31, 2022 by karmo