Udvarnoky

Edie McClurg as Miss Rivers is spot-on casting.

Well, both games in question were massive sellers, but we'd need a Nintendo accountant circa 1997 to truly close this case. Attempting to extrapolate what this might have cost would be pretty interesting, in all seriousness. How many subscribers do you figure Nintendo Power had at that time?

Oh God, I have that Diddy Kong Racing promo VHS that was sent out via Nintendo Power. I assume that's one of the tapes that was talked about? Dutifully, the tape has been uploaded to Youtube by some anonymous Social Awesome Warrior. I completely forgot about the mugging ersatz Jim Carrey and fake commercials between the big commercial. I actually think I love this.

I will say that whatever clunkers he sometimes gets saddled with, Armato really owns the role in this game.

Zeus! I thought we'd lost you! I don't think you'll have too much trouble finishing up the second Melee Island segment. I'm quite eager to read your opinions on the remaining half of the game.

Elaine and LeChuck both say "Hell" at some point during the game, so that suggests they actually thought they were being funny, which is far more damning.

Oh em fucking gee, my brothers and sisters. EDIT: Well, fuck. Comment from the same site: I about had it with all these hollow rumors about this particular game's 3DS remake. This is how conspiracy theorists are forged.

"You've befouled my platypus!" Legendary. It's very instructive to read your reaction to this game as you play it. You had a lot of goodwill for it in that first Melee Island section before the game squandered it with Lucre Island. I think it takes a certain level of brilliance for an adventure game to open the world wide (in terms of locations) without frustrating the player. There's a reason why the second chapter of MI2 gets so much praise - even though there are some ridiculous puzzles, it's really, really ingeniously designed. There's a lot of great content on Lucre Island. If they would have just regulated the quantity of the mandatory dialog and the maliciousness of the puzzle design a tad, it would have been easier to appreciate. I think Thrik's onto something about the game being better with some distance - with the agony of actually having to push threw those puzzles gone, you can look back on what actually worked and forget about the bad puzzles and rambling monologues.

It was meant to be a console exclusive for Sony, surely. I'm (happily) surprised that the PC release is revealed to be simultaneous, which would further obviate the kneejerk outrage from the kneejerk outragers. Hope to see some screenshots of this soon. Also, what happened to those retail releases of Psychonauts, Costume Quest and Stacking (I think?) that were meant to have been put out by Nordic Games (aka the nineteenth parent company to have absorbed Dreamcatcher) some time ago?

I guess the card catalog is the kindred puzzle, but it's just plan not fun to have trial-and-error your way to the realization that the faces on the dials map to a sequence in the alphabet. Just labeling them with the sequence would have still left you with a substantial enough puzzle (since you're working with an alias and still have to figure out that you're spelling out initials) without all of the awful. What were they thinking?

Hee, the skin on the manhole. It is kind of amazing how regressive EMI can be at times with the puzzle design inanity. And yes, the File-O-Matic retrieval system is legendary in its WTF-ness.

I think it speaks volumes that the North American printing of the game came packaged with a quick-path walkthrough. The game. Came with. A walkthrough.

Trivia: The two chess players are loosely modeled on the likenesses of project leaders Sean Clark and Mike Stemmle. Sorry about all the grief you're experiencing with anything related to the House of Prostheses. I feel ya.

Isn't it the same concept as everyone on Woodtick complaining about Largo screwing their businesses over?

I'm leaning toward this being more of a compatibility upgrade with a few bells and whistles thrown in that are inspired by the various fan efforts over the years - anything lower level seems like it would be too massive an undertaking for Sony to cut the check for. I think a lot of what they'll be able to do will depend on if they can get access to the original assets. In theory, being able to get into those 3D environments in the source tools again will allow them to re-render their angles in widescreen, and hopefully uncompressed versions of all the cutscenes exists as well. I suspect an awful lot of resources would have to be preserved for them to be able to actually recreate those FMVs with any kind of ease and thereby make them properly widescreen, so I'm not going to be surprised if we end up with windowboxed cutscenes. I don't see an easy way to dramatically improve the game's resolution, either. Surely they can't get away with increasing it too much without having to repaint every single texture, which seems a task beyond reason, although I have no idea what all those environments actually look like "raw" and uncensored. Would simply re-genning those backgrounds in super-res look okay, or reveal that they only look any good at the target resolution? And is it as easy to re-render them as we're assuming at all? Did they touch them up after? What about the effects, like the water in Rubacava? I'd like to believe that the original audio assets still exist, too. Imagine uncompressed voicework and perfect fidelity McConnell? Yes please I'll take twelve.

Yeah, the Lucre Island stretch is a bit brutal in that respect.

And that would satisfy the hell out of me, honestly. The main thing to be addressed here is the fact that the game in any form has been out of print for...geeze, a long fucking time.

Incredible. As far as the remastering - I'd be happy just to get better-compressed cutscenes, everything else will be lagniappe. I agree that faithfulness would be good here. I think a lot of how they do this will come down to how much access Double Fine has to the original resources (should they have been preserved). This is mind-blowingly awesome news on the surface, but the most important aspect of this is that some kind of agreement was reached with Disney about the IP. This is an important precedent for other heavily needed re-releases of the LEC classics.

Those are the issues in a nutshell, but I agree with syntheticgerbil that the game is still pretty funny. Two notes about EMI's controls compared to Grim's. One is that you can double tap the arrow key to make Guybrush run as an alternative to holding shift. (Apparently Grim was supposed to have this feature too and even references it in the manual but apparently it didn't ship with it.) The other is that EMI lets you look at things with both the "l" (Look) key or the "e" (Examine) key. Ostensibly these do the same thing but I swear I've heard Guybrush make different comments on certain environment objects between the two keys! Regarding the backlash at the time of release, I think a lot of it had to do with the decision to go to 3D and direct control, which at the time I think was more sacrilegious conceptually to the fans. If anything, the game's visuals have only gotten worse, but now that we live in a context where there is more than one 3D Monkey Island game a lot of the outrage kind of becomes obsolete (even granting that, yes, the art direction is not what it should be). There's also the more legitimate issue of the game really pushing that parody/self-awareness boundary that the other games skate more tactfully, but I'd argue that's more an artifact of the particular story Stemmle and Clark chose to tell here. EMI holds up way better as "Monkey Island 4" than it does "The Final Monkey Island." My favorite bit of trivia about this game is that apparently both Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman have played some of it but quit, not for quality concerns, but because they got stuck. I wish I had the interviews/tweets/blog comments to back this up but I swear they exist.

I'd settle for Nintendo announcing Majora's Mask 3DS.

I would recommend following up the LEC catalog with choice releases from some of the companies that vets of the classic adventures went on to form. Check out Psychonauts and Broken Age from Double Fine, Sam & Max and Monkey Island from Telltale, and probably the two adventures that Autumn Moon has put out. The only one of those that isn't strictly a graphic adventure is Psychonauts - it's more like what would happen if you cross-pollinated a Tim Schafer graphic adventure with Mario and Zelda. It's fairly required playing, though, and we'd hate to have to kill you, etc. We're also qualified to recommend you the non-adventure highlights of the LEC back catalog, if you're ever interesting in delving into that.

I think the obnoxious load times (you know how often you leave a location?) and inability to overlap audio (which means little to no iMUSE and even ruined gags) are dealbreakers. Like you point out, the game is presented at such an unfortunate resolution regardless of platform that the reduced jaggies on the PS2 version is a pointlessly marginal benefit. I think ultimately the PC version looks (cutscenes aside) and plays better with any halfway modern anti-aliasing capacity applied. It certainly runs much, much smoother than the choppy console version with the full install. It's literally the difference between no wait between environment swaps and several seconds. It's not insignificant. The only real advantage of the PS2 version is the less severe compression on the audio and FMVs. The Monkey Combat chart is convenient but unnecessary, and there's a really good one online anyway. A gamepad unquestionably works great for the game (and you can still plug one in), but the keyboard controls are fine. Also, you never noticed iMUSE at work in The Curse of Monkey Island? The Barbary Coast and the Goodsoup Hotel are standout examples. You're right that once the soundtracks went digital, its use was dramatically lessened (although Julian Kwasneski, I think it was, pretty much asserted that there was nothing except nerve limiting the ability to do stuff as crazy as Monkey Island 2 with digital tracks). It's not like EMI packs all kinds of wonderful examples of nuanced iMUSE awesomeness (my go-to example is rowing to Knuttin Atoll on the Jambalaya Island overhead map), but at the very least the lack of music segues of any sort kind of blows. Point being, I think even presentation-wise the PC version defeats the PS2 handily despite its own faults. Both EMI and Grim deserve way more breathing room, that's for sure. I'm still waiting for somebody with access to the right resources to break us off decent versions of the Grim cutscenes. It's also too bad that the spigot for illicit EMI cutscene music got closed off after Bajakian gave us that one (and certainly best) piece from the game's giant cutscene toward the end.

The PC version of EMI is the way to go. It's better in every way to the PS2 version except for the controls (assuming you've got no gamepad) and cutscene compression, and if you were fine with Grim's controls, EMI's is exactly the same. Just drop a few bucks on a used copy. Once you've scored a copy, install it with this, and run it with this.

Capcom went bankrupt a day later.

The tumbler puzzle counts as a gear puzzle in my book, and the decision to include gear puzzles in your game legally entitles me to bisect your thorax with a trenching spade. The issue with a puzzle like that is that you can understand exactly what you're suppose to do (align the cylinders) but struggle to pull it off for reasons that have squadoosh to do with actual, you know, puzzle-solving. I like to think Tim would find it unacceptable to do today. Only kind of relevant and it's not an adventure game, but I remember when Resident Evil 4 came out, and I'm enjoying it and then at some point the game decided to present me with a sliding tile puzzle. I almost swallowed the DVD in my white-hit contempt and never finished the game.