Marek

Monkey Island 1 special edition coming to XBLA

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This hasn't been posted yet so I guess I'll just pimp my website:

"LucasArts planning Secret of Monkey Island re-release"

http://www.adventuregamers.com/newsitem.php?id=1893

Bringing some of the old LucasArts adventures to modern platforms is a great idea (and long overdue). Hope they'll also go for the more obvious DS/Wii ports.

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I don't have a DS or a Wii, so for me this is fantastic news. :tup:

Thanks for running the legwork on confirming this, I saw it reported on joystiq yesterday strictly as a rumor, and I dismissed it as probably too unlikely to bother getting my hopes up. So you've now just made my day. The crowd goes wild for Marek Bronstring! :clap::clap::clap:

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This is awesome and great. I wonder how different it'll be from a straight-up port.

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Obviously very exciting news. I'd like to see this expand to PC and Wii releases, but it's nice to see LEC even acknowledging the existence of their classic adventure titles after literally five years. Between this and the Fate of Atlantis unlockable in the new Indiana Jones game, maybe LEC will treat their back catalog with a modicum of the respect that it deserves.

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And all it took was for Telltale Games to remain solvent for four years. :shifty:

I'm still bitter about Lucasarts canceling Sam & Max and their lengthy streak of cheap cash-ins and terrible storytelling. :(

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If it comes out, and if it hasn't been meddled with too much I'll be ecstatic, but until then I'll have a nagging worry that this will be a) a hoax or B) the Video game equivalent of the star wars special editions.

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Please please please please PLEASE have the style of animation from CoMI.

Also, playing this with a joystick may be incredibly weird. Colour me cautiously optimistic...

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This could be fabulous... or this could be awful. I want it to be great, but...

Are they really going to bring in voice actors, 3d artists (it'll be in 3d -- you know it will), record some new music and design a whole new game engine... just for a XBLA title? It just doesn't sound like something a big company would do..... Surely they'd this farm this out to a 3rd party? And if it's not big budget then surely it means: Crap music, crap voice acting and possibly the horror of "new puzzles" and sub-games?

Or will LucasArts just SuperEagle up the graphics and sell it for 800 MSP??

Unless something ground-breaking is on the horizon, I really can't see this being more than a "cheap 3rd party 3D port" (Prince of Persia, Speedball II, etc) or a "cheap 2d scale-up" (Pacman, Galaga, etc). I just can't see this being done with the due care and attention that people who even know what "The Secret of Monkey Island" is, would want. (What's with the awful title, anyway? "Special Edition"? Yeesh.)

Finally: Monkey Island achievements? Maybe I love the original game too much, but no, I don't want them. Adventures aren't made to have achievements! :oldman:

Bah. Colour me 90% extremely cautious and 10% hopeful that I'm wrong.

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All the backgrounds were paintings by Steve Purcell.

So, if they scanned in the originals at a high res. for this, that'd be nice.

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All the backgrounds were paintings by Steve Purcell.

So, if they scanned in the originals at a high res. for this, that'd be nice.

Wrong (unfortunately). The backgrounds for SOMI were drawn in Deluxe Paint and not based on any external artwork.

MI2, however, did use backgrounds scanned from paintings by Steve Purcell (and probably others, too). I agree that THAT would be awesome to have :tup: (In fact I'm drooling just thinking about it.)

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I have the impression they won't do anything more than make it run on XBLArgh. It would be, a) stupid to do more than that because it messes with the original experience of the game in ungood ways, B) too risky and therefore not really in the spirit of the risk-averse, shit-peddling bunch of yesmen (and women) that LEC has become.

The fact that it took this long for the SCUMM games to reappear makes me think getting them released was a sisyphean struggle of one dude in programming who had to persuade the entire hierarchy (probably all promoted from marketing*) that this old crap they were just sitting on could be worth a lot with only a few months time needed to get it to run on modern hardware.

*I am pulling this out of my ass. It is an educated guess somewhat; what with them not making ANYTHING worthwhile in YEARS. Doubt there are any cool creatives left in the company TO promote.

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With a... pad?

Just stick all the SCUMM games on a DS cart and I'm happy.

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Details! Details! :shifty:

But yeah I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they happen to forget that these are mouse games.

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This news makes me very nervous. I just can't see anything good coming out of it since LucasArts seems so incompetent these days. The Rogue Book only magnified what a mess of a company they have become. But I guess this depends on whatever third party they send this out to.

It's possible by making a special edition, they will just do what Revolution did to Broken Sword, which I hear was a very overall sloppy job. The game apparently even fell to no brainer incompetence like the team not bothering to master the new audio to fit with the old audio.

Besides, the first Monkey Island seems hard to actually "improve" on with any sort of special edition features. Like Thunderpeel said, the backgrounds were all done on computer. I doubt LucasArts would be putting up any money to record voices consistent with the cast from MI 3 and 4, although that would be worth my buy. They did after all pay to record all the voices to the canceled Sam and Max game with the original cast. Maybe what will happen is that puzzles will be added and talking character portraits will be put in a frame in the corner during dialogue, Sierra style, similar to what Broken Sword on Wii added? Any kind of complete overhaul seems unnecessary and expensive (for LucasArts). Last complaint is of course that none of the original team is at LucasArts is even there anymore, and as someone already said in the thread, who would be able to take charge and understand what the game would benefit from?

I suppose this is all nothing though and the special edition will probably have something like a redesign interface or smoothed out pixels.

Sinking your ship while on Monkey Island will be an achievement, by the way.

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Here's some more achievements:

Melt Otis' jail cell lock in 3 grogs or less.

Make Guybrush kill LeChuck's right hand man.

Do the recipe to get to Monkey Island without adding any extraneous ingredients.

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With so many companies publishing (mostly decent ? ) remakes and ports of their classic titles, it's extremely sad that I have almost zero faith in the company that once made so many of my all-time favourite games doing the right thing. Of course I hope that I'm completely wrong and that they come up with something amazing although I don't even have an Xbox.

Also, voice-chat enabled online insult sword fighting DLC. "En Garde! Douché!"

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Okay, so I just read that Telltale are working on a new game to be released this year that will make LucasArts fans excited. So, either:

  1. It's bullshit
  2. They're doing the Collector's Deluxe Special Edition
  3. TELLTALE IS MAKING A MONKEY ISLAND SEQUEL!!!!

I don't know.

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On the same site as the Beneath a Steel Sky 2 announcement.

:grin:

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Yes, so I assume a). Still, it would be awesome if LucasArts let someone who cared take their awesome licenses and run with them. Run like the wind!

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Okay, so I just read that Telltale are working on a new game to be released this year that will make LucasArts fans excited. So, either:

  1. It's bullshit
  2. They're doing the Collector's Deluxe Special Edition
  3. TELLTALE IS MAKING A MONKEY ISLAND SEQUEL!!!!

I don't know.

Where did you read that, man?! Tell me!!!

Beneath A Steel Sky 2?!? (*Leaps out of window in a fit of exuberance*)

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