Udvarnoky

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.

Has anyone tried installing and running Grim and EMI with Benny's (quick.mixnmojo.com) installers/launchers on modern versions of Windows? I've had good experiences with them in the past, and if you can get the games to run natively without resorting to emulators you only have to deal with the bugs the game shipped with. I used his CMI launcher to load up that game recently and it worked like a charm. I always avoided SCUMMVM for that game because (at the time, at least), they never got the iMUSE flowing music tracks stuff working, so the themes would just stop and start. A huge blow to the effect of the Barbery Cost and Goodsoup Hotel environments especially.

I could have sworn Grim has an option to expose all hotspots.

I agree with this problem however the game does have a highlight-all-objects function. I think it's Tab?

Just in case it helps, your "big dog friend" (your driver Glottis) and the "weird monster dude" are demons, who in the context of Grim's universe have been summoned to the Eighth Underworld to perform the more mundane jobs like car mechanic and maintenance repairman. While the humans are undergoing their four year journey of the soul with the goal of leaving the world, they hang around along with the souls who choose to make the eight underworld their permanent home.

That's not the only cutscene that got dropped from the game. A full-fledged dance number taking place upon the yard-arms of the Threepwood honeymoon ship would have been performed by Guybrush and Elaine for the end credits. Chuck Jordan's lyrics to "Plank of Love" are available http://miwiki.net/Plank_of_Love'>here.

Elaine had some fun stuff in Escape. One of the funniest parts was toward the end of the game when Guybrush says, "Somehow, I always knew it would end like this," and she just sincerely goes "...Really?"

Well, Curse's story condemned Elaine to be a gold statue for most of the game. And they cut out her big scene in the climax where she supposedly fights off an army of skeletons single-handedly, so.

There was some inane rationale for not having "Dead" in the name, is the story I'm familiar with.

It's a cool name, but it's so esoteric and weird, it's hard to imagine it helping units propel off the store shelves. "Deeds of the Dead" is pulpy enough to make someone pull out the box and see the cool skeleton characters and realize they get to play as the grim reaper. That's the selling point. It's like with Psychonauts - as bananas as the games are, there are good marketing hooks. They just weren't successfully exploited.

It's an invaluable peek under the hood. It's also still comical to think that the marketing department nixed "Deeds of the Dead" for the title only to sign off on Grim Fandango.

Blasphemy! Having done my own playthrough recently, I find it holds up marvelously. That's not to say it's flawless, but the problems I have with it are the same ones I've always had, and mostly come down to some evil puzzles. It was always every other element but the puzzle design (which is still extremely solid, just not up there with LEC's best) that took Grim to the next level. Even the visuals still hold their own, since the team was smart enough to marry the now dated technology with a logical art style (i.e. blocky 3D isn't jarring if the characters are supposed to look like paper mache dolls), plus the pre-rendered backgrounds are beautifully done. Visually, The Curse of Monkey Island holds up the best of the LEC games for obvious reasons.

Monkey Island 3 is indeed pretty close to faultless. I think the ending is a bit abrupt, but that was a budgetary issue. I was surprised to see the series fall into the sudden ending trap again with the fifth game though. Does ResidualVM run Grim Fandango without a hitch now? Potentially, installing with this could make the game work on modern Windows. Also, I haven't tried this point 'n click mod, but I suspect it's one of those ideas that sounds good on paper, but doesn't actually work well. I'm curious for anyone's impressions. The whole idea of the direct control was to allow the designers to pick the angles they wanted. Since that includes a number of angles where the ground is mostly obscured, I have to imagine there are areas that end up being at least as awkward as any of the native issues.

Oh, since we failed to inform you of the Full Throttle easter egg in time, here's one you can trigger on Blood Island: on the beach (the location with the Flying Welshman, not the crew), "Use" (the hand icon) the beach something like 30 times.

This is my favorite section of the game. I wanna take the atmosphere of Blood Island out behind the middle school and get it pregnant.

Monkey Island 3 and Grim Fandango definitely represent the production value zenith of LucasArts adventures. It's pretty telling that Blizzard was intimdated enough by Curse to cancel a game they felt was shaping up to be an inferior competitor. CMI has aged as well as any computer game I know from a technical standpoint. Literally, the resolution and sound compression are the only things that give away that it came out in the 90s.

I think both Monkey Island 2 and Monkey Island 3 are pretty clever about the way they simplify certain puzzle solutions. It wasn't as simple as just dropping puzzles out - they had to identify certain puzzles to pre-solve, and in ways that actually made sense and protected the design from dead-ends or other unexpected surprises. The effort involved is probably why there are no other examples of LEC implementing this feature - effectively you design the game twice. I think this what a lot of people don't realize when they cry out for difficulty modes in adventure games. The resources that are required to do so intelligently might not be vast but they are not negligible and should just as soon be used building game content that everyone will see. I know in Monkey Island 2, the Lite version actually has a unique inventory item (fresh laundry on Largo's bed) to replace the more involved puzzle to obtain the bra. In CMI, an interesting example that springs to mind is the

Yeah I think they would have designed Mega Monkey mode first, and simply cut out stuff (in a judicious, intelligent way) to make Regular mode.

Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island had this as well.

To a certain extent every installment after LeChuck's Revenge cannot help but be viewed in terms of how far it deviates from the aesthetics and perceived "characterization" of the first two games. There's a satisfying cohesion with the first two that cannot ever be touched, since they were of course back-to-back productions made by the same group of people. The whole question of CMI's authenticity was a big deal (at least among the online fan communities) at the time but got largely redirected at EMI when it came along and was seen as a far greater offender. By now the whole issue seems kind of moot. CMI is kind of jarring six years after Monkey2, but now that we can look at the series as a group of five games made over a period of twenty years with sometimes massive gaps in between, I think it comes across as a reasonably organic saga. We all have our preferences and peeves, but this series is way more consistent than it's sometimes given credit for, and the "Ron Gilbert Is God" contigent aside, the talent behind all of these games have been remarkably in-bred. There's never truly been an installment crafted by developers outside of a certain broad family of Bay Area folks. Personally, I remember being hit way harder (at the time) by how far Day of the Tentacle strayed from the characterizations of its predecessor. That particular "controversy" tends to be a whole lot quieter because academic considerations aside, Day of the Tentacle is the far more beloved game, and the love that Maniac Mansion does get is traditionally not rooted in the memorability of its characters or story, which LEC hadn't really start to push the potential of 'til Monkey 1. Plus I have a nostalgic relationship with Maniac Mansion that surpasses even The Secret of Monkey Island.

CMI requires no nostalgic rose-tinting. It holds up completely.

Oh that's right, you did play the original versions of MI1 and MI2 - good on ya. I don't know if the special editions bring the first two games that much more into the aesthetic continuity of the series as a whole, but I think things like the retroactively employed Bill Tiller-esque curly clouds and the voicework nudges it in that general direction. I was just kind of curious how the progression might have played for a newcomer who started with the SEs first. The interesting thing about The Dig despite the critical "meh" is that it's supposedly the most successful adventure LEC put out in terms of units sold, I think slightly behind the also record-breaking Full Throttle. That's probably to do with the "based on an idea by Steven Spielberg" marketing hook, although you have to wonder how profitable it could have really been considering the number of years it spent floundering in production. I think the only reason it ended up shipping despite increasing internal unpopularity was a stubborness on the part of people/person in high places who saw it as a pet project due to the Spielberg connection. This helped make the The Dig come off as game made three years earlier than its time - basically the reason Blizzard cancelled Warcraft Adventures, which I bet would have compared favorably to The Dig, just not its contemporary, which was Monkey3.

Wow, you jumped to the next game quick! The Curse of Monkey Island is wonderful. It's interesting that you find the visual/audio shift so jarring. This is of course similar to what most of us experienced, but I would have thought that coming from the special editions would have smoothed this transition somewhat for you, especially with the Curse actors being called back for those remakes. Or did you play the first two exclusively in classic mode? On The Dig: I agree that the story kind of fell apart toward the end. I'm certain a more intriguing incarnation of the plot was to be found in one of the earlier attempts at the game. Now that you're done, you can enjoy stories about some of those failed productions. We collected a few here.

The Dig starts well, for sure. As I recall the intro is pretty guided but the game opens up fairly dramatically not long after the arrival.

I'd put it on the lower end, yeah, but it's a relative thing because as everyone will keep qualifying, you are playing the best of the genre. "Lower end of the spectrum" for LEC adventure games is still probably the 95th percentile in the context of adventure games in general. THE DIG is legitimately good, but a lesser god in the LEC pantheon. The story of its long, troubled development is kind of amazing, though.