Udvarnoky

I'm most looking forward to the uncompressed cutscenes. Do we have any reason to believe that the original voice files were found as well and thus were given a little bit more breathing room? I honestly don't remember the original game sounding too hampered in that regard, whereas it was very much an issue with Escape from Monkey Island.

I'm guessing Double Fine will have access to any DOTT:SE assets that LucasArts (Singapore) had come up with in the event that they're worth poaching or looking at.

I doubt they'd be able to find the original voice recordings. Hopefully they just leave that alone in such a case. Double Fine has Peter Chan on speed dial. I'm hoping they just give him the correct combination of money and time and he emerges from his island with every frame of cel animation representing every scene of the game in 35mm. Double Fine will scan it and reproduce the game Dragon's Lair style.

The Shacknews write-up states that it's coming to PC, Mac and Linux.

Sierra definitely had LucasArts beat in terms of art and animation until Last Crusade. That was the game where they upped the ante with the character animations - some of Purcell's earliest work.

Yeah but that's only in theory. It's not like they came up with a funny line for trying to apply every inventory item to every background prop in those one-click-does-all adventures (The Dig, early Telltale stuff). Even just doing that would have resulted in some ungodly amount of written dialog and would have been exponentially more jokes along those lines than exists for any of the older, more verb-heavy adventures, which nine times out of ten just had a default line for trying something nonsensical. Maniac Mansion in particular is a terrible example to use in favor of the more verbs equals more jokes argument. I can count on one hand the number of unique lines that were written for when the player tried to do weird things. (One of those few examples is trying to pick up a gravy stain.) Incidentally, as the scripter on that game, I think David Fox is the guy responsible for those super-early examples of "rewarding" the player with special lines. You'll always get as many jokes as people are willing to write. No game has ever even attempted that sort of thing with a particularly crazy level of ambition that I'm familiar with, so discussing the potential seems pointless. I will say I've long had a dream of being involved in an adventure game and being responsible for plugging in dialog lines into a massive spreadsheet that had every possible permutation of an object sentence represented. To date, that mystical adventure game where you never hear some permutation of "I can't do that" remains unachieved.

If the "Fix" verb is not restored, I'm retracting my pledge (thus dooming the Kickstarter to be merely: a raging success). Once again, I feel bad for poor Bill Tiller, who barely squeaked by his modest $40k goal for his (albeit bite-sized) hand-painted adventure while this product soared into six figures within the first day. Ron and Tim have undeniable marquee value.

I'm excited for this. Maniac Mansion is still my favorite game, and I do think there's room for unabashed retro projects, especially when made by the same people. This is like the Mega Man 9 of graphic adventures. I take slight issue with Ron purporting that Maniac Mansion invented the verb interface for graphic adventures. It seems to me that the MacVenture games (Deja Vu, Shadowgate) did this first, even if they don't get the credit. Ron may well have come up with the idea independently of those guys as the next logical step from King's Quest, but he didn't do it first. Also, I demand they invite Ken Macklin to do the box art.

Eiji Aonuma is saying that they won't be making the game more merciful, but that they're apparently tweaking at least one boss fight where they felt the method of killing the boss was poorly communicated in the original (no idea which) and are adding some ponds to Termina to allow for fishing. There are also vague claims about making use of the touchscreen (was that in doubt?), and talk of some special stuff you can do exclusively on the New 3DS (fuck off). It comes across to me like they're doing little to mess with the original game, which is good news. One of the things I've always felt made the game so special was the fact that all these tertiary characters had these lives that they lived throughout the three day period that you could choose to follow and help/ruin. For example, at some point a Goron shows up to Clock Town, enters the hotel and claims his reservation with Anju. (Link can be an asshole and steal his reservation before he gets there, leaving him to tragically sleep outside that night.) If I was in charge of an enhanced Majora's Mask, I'd just go even further with that stuff. I would make it possible for you to see that Goron walking all the way from the mountains in Termina Field to the city.

I'm loving that Mike Nelson (MST3K, Rifftrax) is the voice of the lead.

What does this mean? Answer me.

Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Also, I remember those hellish, operatic Majora's Mask commercials from eighth grade as clear as (the last) day.

I forget how much the game itself had, but it wasn't a whole lot.

The sum total in the game might be more, but not much. The stuff I'm talking about includes a smidge of miscellaneous BS-ing by the guys.

I wish they would release everything they recorded. I'm sure only a small fraction was actually used. There's about fifteen minutes worth of video of the session on Youtube.

I remember Bill Tiller suggesting that Chan and Purcell's original marker drawings were simply too small to come out looking good in HD. I don't know though...I would have liked to see them try. It seems uncharitable to not acknowledge that this looks damn good though. What's funny is that the concept art gallery they include proudly displays the original, tall art for the cliff scene. And the real kicker: Gilbert innocently discusses the feature in the commentary!

Well, they ain't making nothin' no more, because they're dead now.

My beef was that they failed, somehow, to keep the vertical scrolling effect in classic mode (when Guybrush looks down at the map off the edge of the cliff, when Guybrush is floating down to the bottom of the sea). It was a minor innovation at the time, and it's gone. These productions were compromised, but they weren't hack jobs, either. I'm happy to have them. The music alone justifies both projects, in my opinion, and the voice acting is high quality even if inevitably weird in effect. Plus the background art in MI2:SE is legitimately good. Actually, the asking price of both games combined is worth the concept art that came with MI2:SE.

To be fair, the "outsourcing mentality" was more about the paucity of money LEC gave the humble remake project. I think we've discussed this before, but a member of the ill-conceived "indie" team at LucasArts (which I guess existed from around 2009-2011) took to Reddit several years back to offer the grunts' side of the story. I'm reprinting the whole shebang, bolding the relevant part. Looking forward, I wonder at what frequency GOG will roll out the games they've scored? I'm quite hopeful we'll see the games we want, even if it's over the long-term. The key news here is that GOG and, earlier, Double Fine (through Sony) have been able to communicate with the right foks at Disney. Anything is possible now.

The creators will never see a dime, but at least when someone in your life asks a perfectly reasonable question like, "Where can I buy this seminal adventure game?" you might have something less mortifying to point them to than eBay.

Just that somebody has licensed the catalogue is squee-worthy news, though the fact that four of those six games are already on Steam kinda blunts the impact. Still, Hit the Road and TIE Fighter being back in circulation is a big deal. Let's hope all 14 adventure games make the cut.

Correct. The final puzzle is based off an animation that happens when you draw three times with a monkey. I did an interview with Stemmle and he admitted that in retrospect they probably should have threw in a line of dialog that better explained it. Regarding the milk bottle you initially overlooked, there was supposed to have been a brief cutscene (I think when you first approach the church), where you come across a monkey who kicks the milk bottle to the lava maze. Really a shame you ran into a showstopping bug regarding the Toothrot amnesia bit. I think your assessment of EMI is fair. It's a solid adventure game, but as the final outing from LucasArts (though not by intention) it's hardly representative of what they were doing at their best. I was not too fond of the game when it first came out, but I've warmed to it over time. The way Tales returned the series to a more genuine pirate-y atmosphere made it "safer" for me to appreciate what Escape was doing with the commentary stuff as a one-off thing. I was always fond of the painterly 256-color close-ups for Monkey Island 1, although of course I grew up with the VGA version, so I'm biased. Ron Gilbert's point, which is completely valid, is that they kind of break from the more stylized artwork of the rest of the game, which Purcell's original versions obviously shake hands with better. I love both. I'm glad you did this, too, Zeus. I'd be hard pressed to think of a better saga to recommend to you than LEC's adventure catalog. If I were you, I would proceed with Psychonauts (but have a PC gamepad), and the Telltale Games titles that most interest you in the order they were released (with Sam & Max and Monkey Island 5 being highlights). I also recommend A Vampyre Story and Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, which are the two adventure games headed up by Bill Tiller (lead background artist on Monkey Island 3). I'm personally waiting for Part 2 of Broken Age to get released so I can embark on Schafer's first straight-up adventure game since Grim...which we're getting a remastering of next year, woo! Anyway, you have a lot of excellent games ahead of you that continue the spirit of the oldies. I don't see why you shouldn't keep using this thread as you go forward, but that's your call.

The game is certainly difficult, but to an extent that was true of all the early 3D platformers. Half of it is dealing with the camera and the rougher controls (the difference between a wall kick in this and later games is night and day), but there's definitely also just less hand-holding in the design than would be true later on. Yet at the time I didn't think of it in those terms, it was received unquestioned as just "how it was." I oddly found it way easier in 1996 than I find it now. There are certain expectations now, but at the time the game was setting the expectations. Plus my platformer muscles have atrophied immeasurably since adolescence. (I still find Psychonauts pretty slight in that regard, though, including the last level, so I was always nonplussed by that controversy. There's no comparison between that and Mario 64, and Mario 64 is not even close to the hardest of 3D platformers.) Incidentally, there are few things I want to recapture more than the feeling of running around a 3D Mushroom Kingdom for the first time. Definitely in my top five mindblowing moments as a gamer.

Cool that the Jambalaya Island material rang your chimes. Sadly, the Monkey Island stuff was probably my least favorite, but at least it doesn't have the overwhelming-ness of Lucre Island.

Best part was Jake quietly rescinding his claim that Lucasfilm Games' The Eidolon is a text adventure game.