New "old-school" LucasArts game announced tomorrow

[syntheticgerbil]

Oh I forgot. Don't buy Loom from Steam. If you do, download other versions and play with ScummVM instead. PC CD version of Loom is fucking stupid and never should've existed. It's a mystery why LEC people decided to sell this version on Steam. Fuck.

Ah, but it has the pretty voices!

Even though a lot of the dialogue is cut, it's missing almost all of the closeups, and there is no background music... grumble...

[toblix]

WTF Did I just buy a busted version of LOOM?

[syntheticgerbil]

No, it still works. You're just missing out.

But if you only played the FM-Towns or floppy disk 256 color version, you would also be missing out on the voices and scored cutscenes.

Loom is really just this lose/lose situation.

[toblix]

Fucking shit. Which one should I choose?

[Jayel]

Voices I can do without - it's not like they were performed remarkably well anyway. I prefer the EGA version. It has beautiful, stylized line-art quality to the background art that I feel is missing from the VGA version.

[LOPcagney]

Well, I bit the bullet and bought the Steam release of Loom. Finished it in under 4 hours (first time playing through). I have to say I was a little disappointed. I didn't play any of the Lucasarts adventures when they were first released (I was more into the Myst series) and the short length along with some minor puzzle frustration left a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, most of the game was fantastic, most of the puzzles were surprisingly logical, and the musical system was a brilliant idea. It just didn't feel as tight or complete as I thought it was going to be. That said, Grim Fandango is still one of my favorite games and these new releases have renewed my interest in the Lucasarts adventures, so I'm going to play through the others (for the first time) as well. I have The Dig, Atlantis, Sam and Max, Full Throttle, and Day of the Tentacle from a few years ago and I eventually want to play through the first 3 monkey islands in order (I only own the third one).

[baconian]

The Dig is fun, it was more or less the only Lucas adventure I never got around to back in the day, so I had to give it a go.

Atmospheric, reminds me of Beneath a Steel Sky, and I didn't know Orson Scott Card wrote the dialogue.

(btw what the hell happened to the thumbs smilies?)

[ThunderPeel2001]

I prefer 3x. This is maybe not the best scene to show (although you can see the scaling artifacts in the text of AdvMame3x, and the missing stars in HQ3x). During the intro you zoom in on a fence, and for the smoothing scalers this fence looks terrible.

I think it looks better below, but each to his own...

[Nevsky]

Ooh, the smoothness.

[ThunderPeel2001]

WTF Did I just buy a busted version of LOOM?

No, don't let the hype get you down, Loom is a bit weird, is all.

There's the EGA version with 16 colour graphics.

There's the Enhanced CD version with 256 colour graphics and voice over soundtrack (and CD quality music, IIRC).

The only problem is that the CD version was forced to cut out lines of dialogue and character close-ups, in order to fit the game onto a CD...

So it's either REALLY old skool 16 colour graphics or 256 colour graphics and a snazzy soundtrack with voice over... but less dialogue.

Some trivia from Wikipedia:

A rather persistent and common misconception about the game is that author Orson Scott Card helped make the original version, based on the fact that his name appears in the credits. Card says on his website that this is untrue, and that Moriarty put his name into the credits based on a brief conversation they had prior to the release.[6] Card did, however, help Sara Reeder shorten the game's dialogue for the 1992 CD-ROM re-release.

[syntheticgerbil]

The only problem is that the CD version was forced to cut out lines of dialogue and character close-ups, in order to fit the game onto a CD...

Well the latter was cut because apparently the CD version team wanted to get lip synching to work but either failed to do it correctly or had no time to finish, so the close-ups were completely scrapped altogether, which is unfortunate.

[toblix]

Well, I'm playing the VGA version, and although I don't feel completely old-school, it is very fun, looks nice and I'm really impressed with the voice work. I guess they just recorded all sequences in one go, rather than line by line or something, because everything flows really well. Maybe the best dialogue flow I've heard in a game.

[Chris]

Well, I'm playing the VGA version, and although I don't feel completely old-school, it is very fun, looks nice and I'm really impressed with the voice work. I guess they just recorded all sequences in one go, rather than line by line or something, because everything flows really well. Maybe the best dialogue flow I've heard in a game.

Yeah I'm really going by a weak memory here, but I seem to recall they did in fact record the audio as straight conversations in standard redbook CD audio format, rather than feeding it through a more traditional game sound engine, which meant among other things that they got rid of a lot of the conversational pauses that plague most games, including other LucasArts was. I could be misremembering that though.

[toblix]

Finished LOOM, pretty good. I guess I'm not devastated that I didn't play it before now.

So I've just started MI:SE, and holy fucking shit. The classic/new mode hotswap function is the coolest shit. I just keep hitting F10 all the time to see how everything matches up while still being totally different.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Finished LOOM, pretty good. I guess I'm not devastated that I didn't play it before now.

So I've just started MI:SE, and holy fucking shit. The classic/new mode hotswap function is the coolest shit. I just keep hitting F10 all the time to see how everything matches up while still being totally different.

Hmm... I've heard a lot of people saying that. Makes me wonder if that's the best thing about it...? (Mine's currently taking FOREVER to download.)

[DoctorKevs]

Bought and played through Monkey Island SE on 360 today. It's The Secret of Monkey Island, as predicted. Surprisingly fun to play with the 360 controller, didn't feel as clunky as I had initially feared. The hotswap from old to new is fantastic, but the real disappointment here is that the voices can't be enabled for the Classic version. Besides that I really don't have any complaints- sounds great, animations are... as good as they could be, considering (as far as I know) it's just painted over the original, and it's a ten dollar remake of Secret of Monkey Island.

Didn't LucasArts say, though, that they're using this ten dollar remake of The Secret of Monkey Island to test the water for more remakes? Fingers crossed.

[Horticulture Tycoon]

The Monkey Island remake has a few weird glithes though. I had a situation where the Voodoo Lady music wouldn't stop playing no matter what room I was in, it only stopped when I entered another area with music. Also I examined my 173 pieces of eight and Guybrush told be I had 371 pieces of eight. Though that glitch was somewhat overshadowed by the amazing revelation that they specifically recorded every number possible, all the way into the high three-hundreds. Jesus.

But yeah, remake is great. I especially love how in the insult swordfights, they recorded two voiceover versions of every retort: A snappy one when you get it right, and then a more uncertain line reading when you use the wrong one. Nice touch.

At this moment I'm actually

letting it run for 10 minutes to see if you get an achievement for drowning yourself.

[DoctorKevs]

At this moment I'm actually

letting it run for 10 minutes to see if you get an achievement for drowning yourself.

From what I've heard,

you do.

[toblix]

Also, besides the hair thing, I think a lot of the new graphics are pretty good. The close-ups in the bar, for example, are nice.

Of course, that's just my opinion, YOU DON'T HAVE TO LIKE IT.

[miffy495]

Holy shit, I forgot this came out today. Totally buying it right now.

[Erkki]

Also, besides the hair thing, I think a lot of the new graphics are pretty good. The close-ups in the bar, for example, are nice.

Of course, that's just my opinion, YOU DON'T HAVE TO LIKE IT.

Yeah, from what little I played yesterday, I like it. Except Guybrush's head.

[Simon]

So I was thinking of buying the Monkey Island Special Edition this evening but are those system requirements for real? The required processor speed kind of stands out as strange to me, but maybe this game has more new-fangled fancy-pants bells and whistles than I thought. Besides the processor, I'd easily run it okay. Has anyone else tried to run it on something below the Steam specs?

Sorry, super boring question.

I'm annoyed by some of the art ideas, and only especially interested in hearing the soundtrack, but I feel like I should support the new friendly LucasArts, and this is a game I don't already own...I mean, I already spent four months' pocket money on Full Throttle when it came out.

[Cigol]

The inventory and how you interact with the world itself is a bit of a downer. I started with the Curse of Monkey Island, so missed out on the joys of these classics; but boy am I glad. Even with the rejiggered modern version it's a pain in the ass.

So I was thinking of buying the Monkey Island Special Edition this evening but are those system requirements for real? The required processor speed kind of stands out as strange to me, but maybe this game has more new-fangled fancy-pants bells and whistles than I thought. Besides the processor, I'd easily run it okay. Has anyone else tried to run it on something below the Steam specs?

Those aren't dual-core processors remember. The game has some nice water effects and it scales to big resolutions, but surely nothing that would bring a PC to its knees. What is the speed of your processor?

[Simon]

Oh okay, maybe there is some hope. It's a 2GHz Core 2 Duo. The computer's handling Tales of Monkey Island fine...

[toblix]

I've played MI:SE some more, and the new graphics, which I liked at first (as I mentioned, the pirate close-ups were pretty good) are really starting to disappoint. As I followed the shopkeeper through the woods to find the sword master, I noticed that they've just upscaled the original art and drawn over it, not even bothering to cover everything, so there's huge chunks of pixels peeking out everywhere. I was really aiming to play through this with the new graphics, but I'm not so sure anymore. Also, if this is a success, I hope they'll start a new project and not just do the same shit with MI2 (which is what they will do)