Chris

Yes, such analogous whines could be conjured, but the thing is the new game looks bad to me. The VGA game doesn't. I have other complaints that are much more holistic and related to the original game, but at the most fundamental level, one of the things I'm saying is that even if this were a brand new game that had nothing to do with Monkey Island, I would still think it looks bad. If this were a brand new game that wasn't a remake, would you seriously think the art is attractive? If the answer is genuinely "yes," then I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree. But if not, I don't understand why it gets a pass. The old game is obviously dated from a technical perspective, but that's not anybody's fault, it's just the nature of the passage of time in the video game industry. The new game has no such temporal setbacks hindering it. It is what it is.

Yeah, this is basically what I meant in my post as well. It would probably be the same for me.

I think nostalgia definitely has a huge impact on people's perceptions, but I played Syberia when it came out and when I was playing pretty much every major adventure game as it was coming out, because I wrote for an adventure game site, and I really just did find it very boring. It came off quite sterile and slow to me. I see where you're coming from, but it doesn't imply that newer games are also automatically good. Some are good, and some are bad, just like the old games. Similarly, old games are not automatically good either, but we don't talk very much about the bad old games, because they are both bad and old. At least the good old games are good. I also can't really address all your points, because you bring up a lot, but it seems like in some cases (for example, Half-Life 2) you're just picking something that one person mentioned for a couple words in the middle of one sentence in one post, and then nobody else actually discussed any further. But it's worth noting that the original poster is saying he now thinks he might just be tired of the genre and its gameplay entirely. I don't read his post as saying "The old ones are good and the new ones are bad," he's saying that when the old ones came out, he was willing to invest himself in that style of gameplay, but now he has grown tired of it. That's just bad luck for the new games. I don't think that's nostalgia, I think that's just changing taste. Certainly the declining fortunes of the adventure game genre would suggest he's not the only one.

Well, not really. The PS3 technically supports mouse and keyboard in games (neither of the other two consoles do) but I'm pretty sure the number of developers that have actually implemented that is pretty close to zero. I know Unreal Tournament III has it, I don't know what else does. Maybe a couple other things. And the Wii's pointer is sort of absolute positioning, but as somebody who was a big proponent of the system prior to and soon after its release, and now hardly ever uses it (but has still played a number of shooters on it), I am not one who thinks the pointer is an acceptable stand-in for the mouse. That's not to say it doesn't have other things it's good at, but as a straight-up pointer I think it's still too fiddly. The fact that the mouse actually rests still on a surface, and doesn't require effort or stabilization from the user to simply stay still, makes it massively better at that to me. When I try and keep the Wii pointer fixed on a point, I can feel myself developing RSI.

To me there's one important concern, as also mentioned by Jayel, that the PC is the only major gaming platform that is actually open. I don't have any problem with consoles, I own all of them and I'll play a game on any of them, but it would be extremely dangerous for the PC to not remain a viable gaming system. It is still the only meaningful place you can create and distribute a game without someone needing to approve it, to certify it, and to take a cut of the royalties. There are obviously people who will do those things for you on PC (that is, publishers), but there is no unified gatekeeper. You can self-publish a book. You can paint a painting and sell it. You can independently fund a film. You can rent out your own studio time and record an album. But without the PC, you cannot truly independently develop a game. At the end of the day, you have to ask for somebody's permission if you want to do it legally. There is nothing anybody can do to keep you from making a PC game. To me, that principle is tremendously important. There is a huge amount of interesting material published on the PC (much of it out of Europe--increasingly, Eastern Europe) that would have a very, very difficult time getting any kind of actual commercial release on a console while having to go through that 100% proprietary channel. Even if only a portion of that stuff personally interests me, I consider it extremely important that it exists. Again, I don't say these things out of an opposition to consoles. I understand their importance in terms of convenience and a unified experience and an accessible format and input method. Those things are great. But they are also limiting in a way the PC, by its nature, is not.

This in-stock version is the first search result: http://www.amazon.com/Foucaults-Pendulum-Umberto-Eco/dp/015603297X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248081880&sr=8-1

Good job to him!

IN THIS COUNTRY, it is stocked on Amazon, where it ranks #10 in translated Italian literature. Number 3 is The Name of the Rose, but #1 is The Divine Comedy. I expect that's mainly due to people reading up in preparation for VISCERAL GAMES' DANTE'S INFERNO: THE RECKONING.

Following my recent excitement over Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, as documented in this thread, I've been reading Foucault's Pendulum. It has a lot of similar qualities to the other, in that it's almost a blend of the novel and the essay, but it's interesting seeing how the drastically differing time periods (medieval versus modern day) affect not just the characters but the actual style and structure of Eco's writing. It's pretty impressive in that respect. Anyway this guy continues to rule.

That blew my mind when I learned it

Well, GDC is the audience they need to prove it to. Consumer hype is nice, but it's not as important as trade awareness until you're ready to actually start selling the thing. Edit: although this is probably straying slightly too far off topic

I've discussed this too much to go into it point-by-point again, but I do take exception to this. Are you saying people shouldn't review games, or call them bad, or badly made? That seems both impractical and impossible. You clearly disagree with me on the matter, but I have my opinion and you have yours.

I don't really doubt the team was trying to do something awesome that enhances the original, but I think they were probably given a fairly limited amount of time, and also quite simply didn't have very good taste when it came to art. I think in a lot of cases with games, the latter bit tends to be the real culprit more often than time or money or whatever else.

So you were totally right about us calling Natal. I didn't remember that at all.

What about hands?

It's less impressive than in MI2 for sure, but there are a couple factors to bear in mind. One, MI2's soundtrack required an incredible amount of time and money for a result that is awesome but also not likely to pay off significantly or, in all honestly, be noticed by your average person who isn't aware of it or paying close attention to the music. The irony is that the more effective it is, the more it should just blend into the overall texture of the scene. Two, game soundtracks were undeniably moving away from MIDI as CD-ROM drives and larger hard drives allowed for full recorded tracks, and by 1995 or 1998 I think the dated sound of that style for most gamers would outweigh the gains of interactivity. It is of course possible to simply use MIDI control to drive interactive music using individually-sampled recordings (and that's what a lot of later LucasArts games did, but not necessarily in a very granular way), but even that I think is often determined to be too much effort for the practical payoff.

I would still think The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition looks like garbage, whether or not it was a remake of an existing game. It's called taste. That particular opinion has nothing to do with outdated technology. Katie: thanks for stopping by and clarifying!

Oh hell yes. My favorite adventure game ever, and probably my favorite narrative ever in a video game. Full Throttle is so goddamn good. The writing, artwork, and music in that game are so completely top-notch. And it's short enough that you can play through it again pretty easily. Man, so great. Those later adventures didn't just use the "concepts behind iMuse," they used iMuse itself. You're just talking about the difference between MIDI and prerecorded tracks, not whether the audio engine was powered by iMuse. It supported both MIDI and recorded tracks. It was also used in X-Wing and TIE Fighter.

Unlike some PC enthusiasts I am willing to admit that PC gaming is a massive fucking pain in the ass to start getting into, and it's not going to be purely smooth sailing even after you start. But the great advantage it has is that it offers far more additional variety--both in game experiences as well as obviously input method and other technical areas--than any single added console. By that, I mean that if you already have a console, adding PC to the mix will create far broader options than adding another console to the mix, especially these days as the consoles have become increasingly similar to one another. I am quite jazzed on PC gaming at the moment, more than I have been in years. Steam really is one of the best things to happen to gamers in a long, long time. It really highlights the breadth of the platform in a centralized, accessible way that nobody has previously been able to achieve.

I did sort of address this in my post. Yes, they should be available. No, they should not be available like this. This game should be released either in its original form, or, to put it bluntly, in a revised form that's actually good rather than just acceptable or mediocre. To me, the main problem with this remake isn't for the people who have already played Monkey Island. The bigger problem is for the people who haven't, and will from now on have this crap as their mental image for the first game. That's the real shame. I'm not blaming newcomers for playing with the supposed "enhancements" -- as I said, the draw to use the new stuff is extremely strong, even if it's not actually good. That's exactly the problem. Newcomers WILL use the new stuff, and that new stuff really changes the game in a way that I think unfortunately detracts from it. I've seen plenty of posts from people who have played the Steam releases of Loom, Fate of Atlantis, and The Dig who never played those games when they were released, and that's great. I wish this game had been given that treatment instead. Those games still feature smoothing, and that filter is handled MUCH better than I've seen it done in some cases. They certainly look a lot better than the Monkey Island SE does. Granted, those games aren't on XBLA, and that's too bad, but I still think they're much better releases.

Screenshots of course convey the poor quality of the animation. Low-framecount animations like that work fine when you're dealing with low-res sprites; they go together and make sense to your brain. But it looks terrible with high-res sprites, especially when the sprites are already sort of awkward-looking.

I just loaded this up for a bit, and god what a misfire. It's very frustrating--the addition of more ambient sound and that kind of thing makes the modern gamer in me really want to use the special edition version, but then I have to look at some of the worst amateur-hour graphics I've seen in ages. Most of the backgrounds are pretty good, but then they'll spoil it with awful signs and background text that looks like it's been added with Microsoft Paint, and absolutely godawful sprites and animation. I genuinely wish they wouldn't have made this, and just released the game with the optional filters like they did with the other Steam games. Yes, this game still has the option, but the problem with offering the option is that most people are going to use the new one--after all, that's what the additional $5 for. I used it most of the time, and I don't even like it. It's hard to fight that instinct to go for voice acting and higher resolution, even if that higher resolution is used to display garbage. If the option simply weren't presented, it wouldn't be a problem. And Christ, those Guybrush and Elaine closeups. I know Ron Gilbert regretted the realistic portrait style they used in the original game, and I completely see where he's coming from, but this is NOT an improvement. Jesus. Some of the new portraits are better than others, but the two most important ones sure aren't among those. God I hope they don't do this to Monkey Island 2. That game doesn't need it even in a theoretical sense. The soundtrack is much fuller, the graphics are much better, and the whole thing just feels about a generation beyond Monkey 1 technically. Man I can't even believe how disappointing this release was for me.

I agree that the Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy demo represents a pretty encouraging direction for adventure games. I can't say the same for the rest of the game, though. Yeah, I played one of the Putt-Putt games, I think that's all I'm familiar with from that group though.

Wait, it has a cloth map? REDEEMED. BUTTS

I also found Syberia incredibly boring. I remember it being all the rage in the Adventure Game Community whenever it came out, so I became excited for it by some sort of osmosis, and then I ended up giving up after a few hours of extreme disinterest.