Zeusthecat

One thing that's really been bothering me since playing Cart Life is how poorly games often handle the passage of time. It seems like the way it is commonly handled is that 1 second of real life time is equivalent to 1 minute of in game time, meaning that a full day/night cycle takes 24 minutes. I hate this system and I think it is garbage despite the fact that a lot of my favorite games (namely Harvest Moon) implement the passage of time in this fashion. It's not so much the length of time that is the real issue for me, but rather, how poorly all of the in game activities scale to this type of system. The problem is that a lot of trivial things that would only take a minute or two in real life end up taking like an hour or two of in game time, creating a situation where you can never get enough done before the day is over because every little thing eats up precious time. This is then exacerbated even further when NPCs or shops have some kind of set schedule and you have to make sure you consciously block out enough time to travel to them, talk/interact with them, and travel back while still leaving enough time to get your other mandatory shit done (like watering crops, feeding livestock, etc.). On the other end of things, I'm not really a big fan of games that use real-life time like Animal Crossing. I like to sit down and play for a few hours at a certain time of day usually and I feel like I am missing out on a lot by never being able to play at odd times. I'm not really sure what a good solution to this problem would be. Maybe dynamically slow down or speed up the passage of time based on the type of activities you are performing or allow the player to just freeze time when they want or automatically freeze time whenever they are standing still. I'm sure there would be pros and cons to all of those approaches. One game though that handled it in a pretty satisfying way for me was the original Harvest Moon for SNES. In that game, time flowed at a pretty brisk pace from 6AM to 6PM and then just stopped as soon as 6PM hit. Additionally, whenever you went inside a building, time stopped. This took away so much of the stress that I experienced in the later games. I could take my time feeding my livestock and perusing shops and was able to spend most of the day just gathering stuff in the forest and talking to townsfolk. Then, when night hit and time stopped, I could go through and water all my crops (even though this meant repeated trips to the hot springs to replenish my stamina), clear out any weeds, and visit the village bar to talk to drunk people. As much as subsequent Harvest Moon games improved on a lot of the mechanics, the way time worked in the first one is something I've always missed.

I finished Psychonauts. It had a really unique and charming story, a good soundtrack, great voice acting, and solid gameplay to back it up. Thanks to the awesome variety of areas and unique gameplay elements in each one, the gameplay stayed fresh from beginning to end and was pretty much always enjoyable. I liked all of the different areas a great deal but the three that stood out as my favorites were the bull charging area, the milkman conspiracy area, and the Napoleon area. Leading up to the end of the game, I was definitely dreading the Meat Circus that I had heard so much about. Thanks to whatever patch they issued to make this area less frustrating, I found it to be a pretty decent segment and got through it fairly quickly. I'm assuming the checkpointing must have been tweaked or something because unless they actually fundamentally changed how it played, the only major frustrating thing I could imagine about this area would have been having to repeat large segments of the level whenever you fall down or otherwise fuck up. That happened to me quite a bit but once I reached certain thresholds, I would hit a checkpoint making the whole thing pretty manageable.

Not in my case. Most of them are <5 hour games and I kind of want an excuse to play them again anyways. Arkham City is really the only longer one but it's been awhile and I always meant to play it again on PC.

Dead Thread Redemption! My 360 backlog is cleared. My PS3 backlog is cleared. My Wii backlog is cleared (pretty much). Not including some games on older generation systems, my Steam backlog is all that remains. I am within striking distance and if I can keep at it, I will finally be freed of all gaming guilt and will truly reach gaming nirvana. My criteria is a little OCD. I consider any Steam game that I have not played and completed through the Steam client to be a part of my backlog. So several of these games have been completed before whether it was separately in ScummVM or on another console. Any games I have already completed through Steam or external shortcuts I added have been crossed off. For games that don't really end, my goal is to at least log 5-10 hours of playtime.

Yeah, I also liked the Disco level. One thing I don't like so much though is how a bunch of shitty animals show up to catch me on fire at night time. I liked it better when I could just freely explore the whole camp area without having to worry about that stuff.

No but I think that might be the next area I do. One of the guys I work with has been encouraging me to play this game for awhile now and he mentioned that that is his favorite part too.

Just figured I'd pop back in here to say how great Psychonauts is. I'm about 12 hours in and it has just been wonderful. As I've come to expect from a Tim Schafer game, the voice acting, dialog, and music are all pretty stellar but I'm a little surprised to find that the gameplay also has a very satisfying feel to it (I wasn't sure what to expect control-wise after experiencing the tank controls in GF). I just finished the milk man segment and the Mexican themed charging bull segment and after doing those, I pretty much want to have babies with this game. The milk man area was a surprisingly difficult puzzle to solve and I found myself stumped a couple of times as I tried to find the right items to get into each of the restricted zones. But even being stuck, the layout of the world was so unique that I found it quite enjoyable to just run around and experiment with different items and abilities until I figured out what I needed to do. I ended up getting through it in the end by sheer accident when I tried to light a mailbox on fire and ended up catching a keypad on fire, causing a guy to come out who I then had to use my remote vision ability on to see the password he entered into the keypad. But I think my favorite area of the game so far has been the bull charging zone. The music, the neon, and the overall theme of that area came together in such an outstanding way and made for a beautiful experience. This game just oozes style and I love it.

I'd say for me it just feels like unnecessary tedium that sometimes kills my momentum. There have been a good number of occasions now where I get to a spot that requires eggs to get through and I have to do some backtracking to get back to where there are some enemies or an egg block to replenish my supply. I don't think there is anything about the egg collecting mechanic that adds to the experience and in every case I have come across, I would have preferred to just know that I can count on having what I need.

I played a lot of this with my daughter over the weekend and just hit world 6. World 5 definitely stood out as the most interesting to me so far. It was all snowy and cloudlike and had several levels that I thought were much more unique than anything I had seen in the previous areas. It is definitely a solid platformer and I am having a fair amount of fun with it but even so, there is a constant feeling of frustration just under the surface with some of the stuff I mentioned above. At this point, the two things that are continuing to bother me the most are the egg throwing/collecting mechanic and having to get baby Mario back whenever I get hit. With the eggs, it has just become such a tedious chore to have to constantly go find an egg block or a bunch of enemies to swallow to get the eggs I need. Combine that with the egg aiming mechanic and it makes for a lot of needlessly annoying sections in the game. I cringe every time I come across a piranha plant that shoots the fuzzy spike things because they take 3 eggs to kill and I almost always miss with a couple of them, even when I try to lock the crosshair where I want it. If I could just have infinite eggs it would make some parts of this game so much more enjoyable. And as far as baby Mario goes, seriously, fuck that. That is just the worst way to handle health in a platformer like this. In these later levels, I have ended up in so many situations where I get hit at a bad time and I just can't get to him and have to watch that stupid timer slowly go down. And with the baby crying sound, this might qualify as the most annoying mechanic I have ever encountered in a game.

Can't tell if this thread is a joke or not but most of my collection has come from second hand shops. I have picked up countless classics including Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasies 3 through 9, Punch Out, Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, all Zeldas from NES through SNES, all Donkey Kong Countries, shitloads of Mario games, and at least 100 other games from the Atari to the Dreamcast. So yes, I don't think you are alone in finding this type of stuff in second hand shops.

Yes. I'm not saying it is a bad game, I just think it is at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to Mario games. Here are some of my reasons for not liking it as much as the Mario games that preceded it: I much prefer the aesthetic of all of the other Mario games to Yoshi's Island. It is nice and colorful but the screen just feels so busy that it takes me a few extra split seconds to spot an enemy sometimes. I have died a good number of times because it takes me that little bit of extra time to recognize what is coming at me. Baby Mario sucks. It grates on my nerves every time I get hit and I get to hear him crying and floating off. And there is nothing worse than getting hit in a spot where it is impossible for me to get over to him before those bastards come and carry him off. The vehicle sections are not enjoyable. Some of them just don't control right and even when they do, I feel like these segments are kind of lame and I can't wait to just get back to controlling regular Yoshi. I don't like the egg throwing mechanic. It would have been nice if you didn't have to wait for the target to pan to the position you want. When there is a bunch of shit going on, it is frustrating to have to dance around and avoid shit until the target ends up where you want it. The platforming just isn't as satisfying to me as it is with all of the other Mario games. Coming off of Super Mario World, the levels just don't feel as fun to me. I actually do like this game in general, I just like the other Mario games better. I would actually be curious to hear what other people did like about this game because I was under the impression that a lot of other people also took issue with how it played.

Nope, definitely objectively one of the worst. I challenge anyone to name a Mario platformer that is worse than this game that also isn't a "New Super Mario Bros" game.

About a month and a half ago, I graduated my daughter to Super Mario World and we ended up playing through the whole game including all of the star road stuff and secret levels. Her skills have continued to improve and I was even able to teach her how to fly with the cape and do the little bouncy parachute maneuver to stay airborne. A lot of the levels are still too hard for her but she is at least able to consistently beat most of the levels through the Donut Plains and she seems to have a full grasp on all of the controls including running, spin jumping when appropriate, ducking to avoid things, and ejecting from Yoshi to save herself or get something that is out of reach. So I decided to throw in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (which I have owned forever and never played more than a few levels) next and she is freaking obsessed with it. She refuses to play it but every day for the last week or so she has begged me to play so she can just watch and deliver her little 5 year old commentary. Honestly, the game is probably the worst of any of the Mario games I've played but having my daughter watch and comment on everything I am doing has made it a much better experience than it otherwise would be.

For me, the worst offender was the courthouse. It took me forever to figure out that there was another screen if you walked all the way to the right-hand side of the Downtown district and that that was where the courthouse was. Most other areas seemed to just be one screen that took you back to the map if you walked past either edge of the screen. One thing I will give the game credit for though is how awesomely I got scolded when I neglected to pick my daughter up on the first day (again because of how stupidly fast time runs). I tried to just play it off to my sister like it was no big deal and her response made me feel like such a horrible parent. Man, if only the game went on long enough to give more experiences like that...

I started Psychonauts. I really like it so far and it's got such a unique style. I'm still a little confused by all the random stamps and items I keep picking up but I'm sure it'll become more obvious what they do as I get a little further. It's also cool to see that this game was doing some of the stuff Mario Galaxy did years before Galaxy came out.

I recently finished Cart Life. Going into it, there was so much about this game that I liked and I was almost sure I was going to love it. Unfortunately, it didn't quite pan out and in the end I didn't really enjoy it at all. The first issue I had was with overall stability. The game either crashed or froze on me multiple times and each time I had to restart from the beginning of whatever day I was on. In a weird way, this turned out to be a good thing in some cases because of the second issue I had with the game: time moved too goddamn fast. I actually had to restart about 4 times because of all the trial and error that went into finding out where I needed to go to get to whatever store/building/person I needed to get to. Even after multiple restarts I wasn't able to start actually selling anything until day 3 or 4 because of all the time it took to take my daughter to school, pick her up every day, and travel between all the places I needed to go to get the various things I needed (which was incredibly vague until I had played through enough times to pick up on everything I would need). The more I played it, the more frustrated I got with the shitty time scaling. If this is supposed to be a retail simulator it would be nice if time actually ran at a pace where it was actually only taking 30 minutes of in game time to do something that might take me 30 minutes in real life (instead of the 3 hours that pass while I do nothing more than ask a character a few questions and buy a couple of items). I seriously cannot stress enough how much this aspect of the game soured my experience. The most glaring issue, however, was the overall length of the game. Even with the other issues I mentioned, I felt like I was almost to a point where everything was going to start falling into place and I would really be able to start 'living' in this world. I finally got the ingredients I needed to have a good variety of items, I had had a couple days of successful sales and was really digging the mechanics behind getting to know the customers and getting their shit prepared in a timely manner, and I had more or less figured out what routine I needed to follow to pick my daughter up every day and make whatever other stops I needed. And then it just fucking ended on day 7. I never would have even gotten close to being able to upgrade my cart, I had barely talked to like 4 people because it ate up so much of my already limited time, and I barely made maybe $150 dollars. I am still utterly confused as to why this game was designed to give the impression that there would be all these great systems and people and different products and equipment to experiment with only to give me a giant middle finger in the end. I am honestly still wondering if I played the same game that got so much critical praise because I can't imagine anyone going through this and feeling like they had anything resembling a complete experience.

Thanks Jon. If I can muster up the motivation, I'll jump in there and post my list.

Props to you all for keeping a good discussion going. There is just so much unbearable shit going on and I can't bring myself to spend the energy necessary to get involved in this debate or whatever you might call it. The one thought I did have though is that it would be kind of nice to have some kind of message board out there where gg'ers can clearly identify themselves as such (so there is no ambiguity as to what banner they fall under), state what it is they take issue with, and provide 3 specific examples that demonstrate that what they take issue with is actually a thing that is happening. This sure would be a good start at bringing into focus exactly what the hell they are fighting for and why they are fighting for it. I think the fact that there doesn't seem to be anything like this out there says a lot about what their goals are. And I suspect if there was some kind of place to put their grievances out there, whatever examples they might come up with would probably be exactly what we would all expect. Zoe this, Anita that, blah blah blah... Okay, now back to hiding.

Since I completely cleared my backlog on all other systems I own (not counting some of the older systems from a few gens ago), I finally decided to start getting serious about my Steam backlog. I am fortunate that I stopped myself from buying anything else once I reached a certain point so with the two games below completed, I am down to 17 games left to complete. And I forget, do we have a thread related to backlog discussions on this forum? I can't seem to find one. First, I finally played through The Walking Dead Season One. It was a really good game with a really good story. This was my first time experiencing a game with a timer on dialog choices and I thought it was really effective in encouraging me to make more natural gut decisions. I found each episode thoroughly entertaining and I really think the fairly limited interaction made for a much more engaging experience. I'm kind of tempted to play through again and make different choices to see what happens but at the same time I feel like I had "my" experience and I might just want to keep it that way. We shall see. I also just finished Hotline Miami. Man, it takes a bit to really get the hang of it but once everything clicks, it feels really good to harness the chaos and effortlessly string together a bunch of kills. I remember a distinct point where in a matter of a few minutes, the game went from "fairly difficult and slightly frustrating" to "I know how all this shit works now and I know exactly what I need to do to wreck these dudes". After finishing the bonus missions and whatnot, I played through the first few levels again and was amazed at how much better I had gotten. I think originally it took me about 2 hours to get through the first five missions but going through them a second time, I probably knocked them all out in about 20-30 minutes and got a much better score on each one. Also, it probably helped that I switched to using a 360 controller at one point. Now on to Cart Life...

I beat a bunch of games over the last few months. Watch Dogs (PS4) - I enjoyed this game when I played it the right way. I initially tried going as non-lethal as possible and found it to be a fairly frustrating experience. Once I ditched my self imposed restrictions and started using all of the systems that the game gave me, it became much more enjoyable (having the silenced pistol at my disposable made infiltrating bases so much more fun). The whole hacking system was a cool new layer to the familiar gameplay and it kept things fairly interesting throughout the game. I'm excited to see how they end up expanding on that. And I really enjoyed the profiler and all the random conversations you can listen in on. Those things went a long way towards giving some life to the random NPCs wandering about and made them feel just a little more real. So, not a great game but I still had a good amount of fun with it. Tomb Raider Definitive Edition (PS4) - This game was awesome. The gameplay was very fluid and felt great and I really enjoyed all the combat and traversal. The story wasn't great but was interesting enough. The graphics, however, were amazing. This game looked so damn good. The only complaint I would level against this game is that they went a little overboard with beating the shit out of Lara and her constantly jumping from crumbling structures right as they give way beneath her. It got to a point where it was just kind of absurd. But that didn't really bother me much and I'm definitely excited to play the next one whenever it comes out. The Last of Us Remastered (PS4) - I absolutely loved this game. The story was one of the best I've seen in a video game in a long time and that ending was really good. And surprisingly, even though I've heard a lot of complaints leveled against it, I really enjoyed the combat in this game and felt like it fit really well with the tone of the game. Definitely gonna run through this again on New Game + to experience it again and get some sweet cheevos. I also need to check out the multiplayer which sounds pretty fun. Oh yeah, and the photo mode was a lot of fun and I hope to use it a lot more on my next playthrough. Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls (PS4) - Dude, this game is hard to stop playing. Everything is tuned to perfection from the sound design to the art style and lighting, to how effective each build plays based on what skills and runes are mapped. I just feel like I'm in a state of zen whenever I play and the steady stream of upgrades and skill levels makes me want to keep pushing on. I've been playing adventure mode for about a week now and I'm thinking about rolling another character or two to see how other classes play. I'll probably continue playing this for awhile, especially since a bunch of co-workers got it and we've been pretty successful in getting a group of us together most nights of the week. I would also love to play this with some fellow thumbs if anyone is playing this on PS4. But I think there would need to be a strict wizard-only rule (of course I'm the motherfucking wizard). Super Mario World - Played through this with my daughter and beat the game along with every level. Tubular still sucks and is the most annoying level in that game but everything else is awesome. This was the first game I ever beat back in 1992 and it's one I keep coming back to every now and then. Pokemon Leaf Green/Fire Red - I figured I'd start at the beginning and start the long journey of collecting all of these little bastards. So far I have everything I need from both of these versions and am doing the post elite four stuff. Eventually, when I have everything traded over I'll move on to HG/SS. Super Mario Galaxy - I've owned this game since 2008 and at some point I stopped at around 50 stars. It turns out my kids love watching me play this so I went ahead and finished the game and have about 95 stars now. This game was freaking awesome and I'm glad I finally started playing it again. My only complaint is that the camera can be a real pain in the ass. I'll probably be slowly churning through those last 25 stars for awhile and I might eventually pick up Galaxy 2. Escape From Monkey Island - This game was okay. Not shit but not great either. GTA V - Finally got the platinum trophy on this one. It says only 0.1% of people have this trophy so I feel special. Also, I'm a loser.

I don't think I'm ready for that jelly.

Thanks for the recommendations. I already started Walking Dead last night and will play through Psychonauts soon too since I already own it. I am definitely interested in playing Telltale's other games so after I clear a few things off my backlog that I've been meaning to play I'll probably start going through those. Maybe I will go ahead and post about that stuff here but probably not in the same detailed way. Do the Telltale games have any fairly difficult puzzles like what I've experienced with LucasArts or are they mostly all straightforward?

And The Big LucasArts Playthrough is officially concluded! This was a truly awesome experience getting to play through so many amazing games while sharing my experience with the excellent people on this forum. I know it dragged on for a few months longer than it probably should have at the end but I think taking the last game in shorter doses over a longer period of time helped me enjoy the game a bit more and keep a more level head while going through. And seriously thank you to everyone for encouraging me to do this and helping me along as I went through this experience. I have remained a little apprehensive about whether or not I've come across as arrogant for making this kind of thread detailing all of this, but you guys have been super positive about this whole thing and have made it probably the best video game adventure I've ever had. So thank you all a million times. Now that I've played through all 14 of the LucasArts graphic adventure games, one of the games stands out as my clear favorite. And that game is Secret of Monkey Island. Being my first adventure game (and my first Tim Schafer game for that matter), I was completely blown away by how clever the dialog was, how ingenious a lot of the puzzles and ideas were, and just how fucking hilarious the whole thing was. The comedic timing was just brilliant through and through and I laughed more than I had for any other video game up to that point. From the timing of the shopkeeper popping his head back into the store whenever you tried to take something, to the segment where Stan was talking up the boat he had just sold to you and had a nice long pause right as the mast broke off, to the situation with Guybrush's crew who refused to do anything but relax on the deck of the boat and take a nice caribbean vacation. But most of all, the most hilarious thing about this game was stuff like this: I don't know why I find it so funny but when I see such dweeby artwork for the character cutscenes accompanying a game that is just dripping with sarcasm and humor, I can't help but think that when they were making this game, they thought it would be hilarious to make the characters look as douchy as possible in the cutscenes. I could be totally wrong but I laughed every time I saw scenes like those. So from here on out, I hope others will take up the torch and use this thread to catalog their experiences with the LucasArts games. I'm sure there are plenty of other people who have never played these games and I would love to see others post about their progress and how they go about solving the puzzles in these games. I might continue to post in here from time to time and I intend to eventually play some of these games again so if I do I will probably post about it here. Specifically, I still need to play through the special editions of MI 1 and 2 and try one of the other paths in Fate of Atlantis. But for now, I am moving on to some other games(Walking Dead from Telltale is next on my list).

I finally completed Escape From Monkey Island! I ended up getting through rest of the game using only a couple hints along the way and quite enjoyed the last act of the game. When I resumed from where I had left off, I first continued exploring all of the areas available to me. From the rock tunnel area, I moved on to the church of LeChuck and talked to father Rasputin for a little while before testing out his matrimonial lava log ride. Once I was done there, I briefly checked out the lava fields and didn't see anything of significance that I could interact with. Finally, I checked out the canyon/mine shaft area and found Herman's banana picker by a cactus. There wasn't anything I could do in the mine shaft itself yet but I did make note of a big door at the end of the shaft with a closable vent and another open slot at the top of the door. Since I now had the banana picker, I decided to head back to the beach and grab some bananas. After using the banana picker multiple times, I was able to nab the whole bunch of bananas and found that when I fed one to Timmy, he followed me around to whatever area I walked to. So I walked around with him for a little while and we eventually made our way back over to the mine shaft area. Once we were both in the shaft, I thought that I might be able to get Timmy to go through that vent in the door and open it from the inside or something like that. So I tried using a banana with the open vent and was able to lure him inside where he just stood there doing nothing. When I saw that he was just sitting there, I tried closing the bottom door and then used another banana with the top opening. This caused Timmy to jump up to the banana which resulted in some kind of lever getting pulled and the door being opened. There was a giant pipe behind the door that I followed until I found myself in some kind of room with a bunch of gears. I picked up a weed whipper that was lying in the gears (I think I had to use the banana grabber for this), and poked around at the various gears and gauges before heading back out. At this point, it didn't seem like there was anything else I could do on this side of the island aside from messing around with the rocks and rock tunnels some more. So I went back over there and started tossing rocks down each of the tunnels. I did this for several minutes and noticed that despite there being three tunnels I could throw the rocks down, they always got launched out of either the farthest left or farthest right ramp. So I mixed it up a little bit and started trying to see if I could throw multiple rocks with the right timing to try to get them to knock into each other and change course towards the middle tunnel. As I kept attempting this, I eventually got two of them to hit but still didn't end up getting one of them to go down the middle ramp. However, I did happen to notice that when I got them to successfully hit, it just happened to coincide with me throwing the second rock right as the first rock was going past one of those twig things on the track. This ended up being the big hint I needed and it wasn't long before I was able to throw rocks in the correct sequence and with the correct timing to finally get one of them to go down the middle ramp. With this ramp, the rock ended up landing in the lava field and I immediately headed back to the church of LeChuck to take another log ride. After jumping in the log for another go and exiting into the lava fields, I tried steering my log towards where the boulder had landed. I ended up successfully making my way towards the boulder and bumping into it which got me to come to a stop in a small lava pool. I disembarked and immediately noticed some weeds growing by the pool. So I pulled out my weed whipper and got rid of them, causing the ground beneath the lava pool to give way and send lava pouring down the mine shaft and into the gear system where I had found the weed whipper. Once I had done that, I continued on to check out the new areas available to me. First, I went over to the monkey village and chatted with Jojo the talking monkey. After learning a number of things from him, he introduced me to Monkey Kombat. His instructions on how to go about beating other contestants at monkey kombat were quite confusing and I only really got a vague idea of what I needed to do but I at least learned that Jojo would give me his hat if I could defeat him. Once I was finished talking with Jojo, I checked out the rest of the monkey village and spent a little bit of time trying to figure out how to get the accordion from an accordion playing monkey in one of the huts. Since there wasn't anything I could do yet to get it, I continued on to check out the next area. Next, I went over to the area with the giant monkey head. I messed around a little bit and ended up discovering that I could use the banana picker with the nose to open its mouth. Then I went through a passage inside the mouth and ended up in a control room with all kinds of levers and gauges. Nothing seemed to be working so after some poking around, I left the area and decided to start fighting some monkeys. Also, at some point in this process, Guybrush made a comment indicating that I could use the giant monkey head to make another ultimate insult. Seeing as how I already had the monkey head and the gold banana picker (shaped like a man), it looked like I would be good to go once I got Jojo's bronze hat. After leaving the monkey head area, I approached a monkey and started my first session of monkey kombat. It didn't go so well and I didn't quite understand what was going on so I decided to look at a guide to get me through this session (plus I had seen it mentioned multiple times how irritating this part was). After reading through the guide, I had a solid understanding of how monkey kombat was supposed to work and grabbed a pen and paper to start recording what defeated what and what combinations were used to switch between the various stances. Surprisingly, I kind of enjoyed going through this process and I thought it was pretty neat if a little unnecessarily complicated (although if I hadn't looked at a guide I could see how it would have been frustrating trying to figure out how it worked based on Jojo's description). It took me a good chunk of time to battle each monkey and learn most of the moves but once I had done so, I made quick work of Jojo and his lesser monkeys. I even managed to take a sweet screenshot of my monkey kombat note sheet! Once I had emerged victorious, I was given Jojo's bronze hat which I immediately took over to the giant monkey head to complete the ultimate insult. Unfortunately, I couldn't get anything to happen after doing so, so I spent the next 15 minutes or so luring monkey after monkey over to the giant monkey head to see if that would cause the 'monkey meter' inside the giant monkey head to fill up. After I had lured about ten monkeys over and gotten no results I moved on to see if I could figure out what I was missing. After some wandering, I eventually ended up back at the church of LeChuck and noticed a couple tiny shields I had missed earlier. I couldn't reach them so I went back to grab the banana picker from the monkey head and was able to get the shields using that. Once they were in my inventory, I saw that they looked exactly like tiny symbols and immediately ran back to the monkey village to find that I could exchange them for the accordion. Unfortunately, this still left me stuck and I spent quite a bit of time searching around the island and throwing the accordion and other objects at Herman Toothrot's head before finally deciding to look at a guide again. After reading through the section I was on, I was surprised to see that I had missed a milk bottle in the lava field area that was supposed to be one of the objects I needed to throw at Herman to restore his memory. So I went back to the lava field and noticed a little unrecognizable blob on one of the rocks that I assumed was the bottle I needed. From there, I went back to the church, jumped back in the log and rode around until the lava logs had been knocked into the right spots, giving me a path to reach the milk bottle. As I floated by, I was able to grab it with the banana picker and finally had the last item I needed to restore Herman's memory and finish off this section of the game. With all the objects in hand, I went back over to Herman and started tossing the three necessary items at his head. Despite trying over a dozen times and trying to talk to him in between, I got no responses even though I verified that I was using the correct objects in the correct order. So I did a quick Google search and found that I had encountered a potentially game breaking bug. Most of what I read indicated that I would need to restore a save from before Herman got in that state (which I had overwritten at that point) but a couple people said that it could be fixed by just throwing the coconut at him multiple times until he started giving the correct responses. Luckily, that ended up working for me and I was able to restore his memory and learn that he was actually Elaine's grandfather and was responsible for Ozzie Mandrill's bullshit. He eventually gave me the gubernatorial seal which was the last item I needed and I ran straight back to the monkey head and inserted it into the control panel slot, kicking off the last section of the game. A bunch of cutscenes proceeded after wrapping up the Monkey Island segment followed by a brief part where I had to use a board with a short tower to be able to navigate to the top of a larger tower (the ultimate insult amplification device) and flip a switch to turn it off. Then I saw some more cutscenes and finally ended up in the last segment of the game where I had to battle a giant statue of LeChuck with my robot monkey. I started battling like normal but after several minutes, I realized I was getting nowhere and both of our health bars were pretty much where they started. So I looked back at the walkthrough again and saw that I needed to just copy whatever stance he went to three times in a row to win the fight. After doing that I finally defeated LeChuck and watched the closing cutscene and credits. My overall feelings on this game are mixed. I think the music and voice acting was generally pretty great but a lot of other things were really hit or miss. First, the humor was dry at best and downright pathetic at worst. I think this was the worst part of the game and actually made the overall experience worse by being so lame. On the puzzle side, I feel like there were more good puzzles than bad puzzles. Some of my favorite puzzles were the rock tunnel puzzle on Monkey Island, the diving competition puzzle on Jambalaya island (and most of the other puzzles on that island for that matter), and a few of the random lesser Melee island puzzles. Lucre Island, however, was a fucking abomination and had enough lame puzzles and humor going on to make it hard to focus entirely on the positive aspects. The story was decent enough but with it being so closely tied to the humor aspect of the game, I ended up feeling indifferent about it, if slightly negative. Finally, I kind of liked the polygonal graphics at first but ended up hating it by the end. These games just look and feel so much better with the 2d graphics from the first three games. Despite all of this, I think my opinion of this game is very slightly on the positive side. There was enough that I liked that I'm glad I stuck with it.