New "old-school" LucasArts game announced tomorrow

[syntheticgerbil]

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)

You should upload screenshots of the shopkeeper with the huge pixel chunks sticking out. I kind of figured the art would be sloppy in some places based on what I've seen so far, but I'm getting the feeling the thing was rushed without much quality control.

But this is me complaining without having bought it. It's not at the top of my list to play anytime soon. I'm just not looking forward to amateur mistakes on Monkey Island 2. That game almost doesn't need to be improved at all if it's going to be the same team.

[Cheetohands]

I'm about to get on the nostalgia train and buy Fate of Atlantis. l loved this game back in the day. Has anyone purchased it on Steam? Does it run well? Any technical glitches?

[syntheticgerbil]

I'm about to get on the nostalgia train and buy Fate of Atlantis. l loved this game back in the day. Has anyone purchased it on Steam? Does it run well? Any technical glitches?

I was wondering that as well. I think you'll have to wait until Thunderpeel plays through it to know accurately whether or not there are any glitches. He would be able to tell you about any missing IQ points too.

[DanJW]

I finished The Dig, and enjoyed it thoroughly. It was shorter and less difficult than I remember (I never finished it back in the day).

I only needed to look up tips a couple of times (a pixel-hunt that I missed and... yes the bone puzzle, although I was pretty close with the bone puzzle).

It really does have a nice atmosphere and cinematic quality. I wish there were more things like it.

Might give LOOM a go next.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Argh... I know I'm going to sound like an ungrateful whiney uber fanboi... and maybe that's what I am, but I don't like it. I hope I'm in a massive minority and I suspect that it's only because I know the original so well. But...

1. The new artwork looks a little shoddy in places (why couldn't they line up the cliff face, for example, so that, when Guybrush follows the original walk path, it looks semi-decent?!). There's weird white lines around things that haven't been cut-out properly. Some of the artwork literally looks unfinished.

2. There's irritating pauses between dialogue... for no good reason! This is just unbelievably bad. There MUST be a way to fix it.

3. Some of the line-readings are sometimes incredibly off. Even the excellent Dominic Armato and the fantastic Earl Boen seen to have been given some bad direction on occasions. But other characters suffer much worse... Estvan's "You could wait for the cook to notice you, but that could take all day. Just find a mug and sneak into the kitchen. That's what we all do." Nooo.

4. The characterizations, for the most part, seem terrible. Like they've tried to inject "more humour" at every available opportunity and failed miserably... Random characters speak with the most outrageous voices for no good reason. Cobb, the rat guy ("I thought it was rats"). No other MI game does this, why did they do it here?

5. The music seems to suffer from the same problem as above: "Let's try and make EVERYTHING funny!" Even LeChuck's theme is played for laughs... it's supposed to be somewhat menacing, not sad trombone.

6. The control system is ABOMINABLE. I have to press a key to get the verbs up? I have to press a key to get the inventory up? I have to press TWO KEYS simultaneously to get them both up? It's horrendous! It's beyond horrendous. New players will miss out on mouse wandering and experimentation...

7. My mouse clicks were not always responded to... Click, click, click, CLICK - ah it worked.

8. Finally, you all know this one: The new Guybrush isn't loveable.

If anything, my overall complaint would be that they've tried to ram as much "comedy" into MI as they possibly could... But that ISN'T Monkey Island. LeChuck is supposed to be SCARY, not funny. The relationship between Guybrush and Elaine, while a little shallow, admittedly, is supposed to feel genuine.

Dave Grossman said it best, except I can't find the quote. It was something like "Monkey Island is a balance between silly dialogue and serious storyline". It's NOT a camp game!

And the control system... Oh man, it's terrible. TOMI's inventory system seems like a masterpiece in comparison.

I just CANNOT believe that the people who made the SE are thinking to themselves "THIS is how I always imagined Monkey Island!"... it's like they've tried to think what the fans would want instead of trusting what THEY would want.

Anyways, as I said at the beginning, I STRONGLY believe that most of my reaction comes from the fact that I know the game so incredibly well. A return to it will probably lessen my reaction But this was my first reaction... I'll probably change my mind next time I play it.

Apologies to the devs. Glad to see I'm in a minority on this one.

Fanboi mode: OFF

[syntheticgerbil]

Dave Grossman said it best, except I can't find the quote. It was something like "Monkey Island is a balance between silly dialogue and serious storyline". It's NOT a camp game!

Amen, brotha! Praise the lord!

[Jayel]

7. My mouse clicks were not always responded to... Click, click, click, CLICK - ah it worked.

Oh yeah, i noticed all the hotspots for the buttons and dialog choices are 10~20 pixels off, so I have to click slightly below what I want to click for it to register. Terrible.

[syntheticgerbil]

Oh yeah, i noticed all the hotspots for the buttons and dialog choices are 10~20 pixels off, so I have to click slightly below what I want to click for it to register. Terrible.

Does this constitute as lazy in your opinion? That sounds frustrating as if the game was released untested.

Edited July 16, 2009 by syntheticgerbil

[Horticulture Tycoon]

It's NOT a camp game!

I actually think the voicework is surprisingly well done considering the lines were written with the intention of being read and not heard. (Somehow the actor playing Otis manages to sell the "my least favorite kind of picary is CONSpiracy" joke, even though it only makes sense in text.) And I quite like the music, including the LeChuck theme. (He's really pretty scary in MI2 and even CMI to a degree, but in Secret I never thought he was all that menacing. The guy almost marries two monkeys stacked on top of each other, for Pete's sake)

Other than that, everything you've said is pretty much spot on, ThunderPeel. There's no question that the Special Edition is just littered all sorts of technical problems, and feels like it was rushed out the door.

[Jayel]

Does this constitute as lazy in your opinion? That sounds frustrating as if the game was released untested.

It seems like a huge bug to let past QA, so I assume it happens only on certain configurations.

Or maybe it was intentional.

edit: ah, seems like there's a workaround to this bug

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=919057

[syntheticgerbil]

edit: ah, seems like there's a workaround to this bug

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=919057

Ah that's good... so maybe it just went untested in Vista?

[miffy495]

Damn, as said in another thread, this game is in my muscle memory now. I just bought it, and was looking forward to a playthrough over the next couple of weeks. Whenever I have time, I guess I'll post my thoughts too. Don't know if I'll be able to top Thunderpeel though.

[Jayel]

2. There's irritating pauses between dialogue... for no good reason! This is just unbelievably bad. There MUST be a way to fix it.

Yay increasing the text speed (in classic mode) fixed this problem for me.

[Cigol]

In one of the menu screens you have to press the escape key on your keyboard to get out of it, there's no other way out. That was a nice touch I thought - special edition indeed

...but I agree with everything Thunderpeel has said, only I never noticed some things like the bad graphics or changes in tone (never having played the original). I certainly noticed the godawful control scheme though - but I mean I still enjoyed playing the game so I guess it depends on whether you're familiar with the original or not.

[Chris]

I just loaded this up for a bit, and god what a misfire. It's very frustrating--the addition of more ambient sound and that kind of thing makes the modern gamer in me really want to use the special edition version, but then I have to look at some of the worst amateur-hour graphics I've seen in ages. Most of the backgrounds are pretty good, but then they'll spoil it with awful signs and background text that looks like it's been added with Microsoft Paint, and absolutely godawful sprites and animation.

I genuinely wish they wouldn't have made this, and just released the game with the optional filters like they did with the other Steam games. Yes, this game still has the option, but the problem with offering the option is that most people are going to use the new one--after all, that's what the additional $5 for. I used it most of the time, and I don't even like it. It's hard to fight that instinct to go for voice acting and higher resolution, even if that higher resolution is used to display garbage. If the option simply weren't presented, it wouldn't be a problem.

And Christ, those Guybrush and Elaine closeups. I know Ron Gilbert regretted the realistic portrait style they used in the original game, and I completely see where he's coming from, but this is NOT an improvement. Jesus. Some of the new portraits are better than others, but the two most important ones sure aren't among those.

God I hope they don't do this to Monkey Island 2. That game doesn't need it even in a theoretical sense. The soundtrack is much fuller, the graphics are much better, and the whole thing just feels about a generation beyond Monkey 1 technically.

Man I can't even believe how disappointing this release was for me.

[thorn]

Can someone please post a screenshot of the graphics, so the conscientious objectors can see what you mean?

[Chris]

Screenshots of course convey the poor quality of the animation. Low-framecount animations like that work fine when you're dealing with low-res sprites; they go together and make sense to your brain. But it looks terrible with high-res sprites, especially when the sprites are already sort of awkward-looking.

[Noyb]

Yeah. They added no frames of animation whatsoever, and had trouble with the frames they did copy. Yet another example: the parrot on the map salesman's shoulder jitters terribly as if it were copy and pasted from a separate image file without bothering to check if it was in the same place as the previous frame.

I really wish there was an option to have the voice acting with the original graphics and UI.

When you interrupt a character who is talking while you're walking around, his new dialogue plays over the old ones. Especially annoying with

George Lucas

the Troll.

I also love how in the XBLA version, the menu screen tells me to press in the center of the D-Pad to select "Look."

[BigJKO]

I'm kind of liking it. Some of the graphics looks fine, some of it looks really, really amateur. But mostly I'm enjoying going through it again. But the motherfucker has started crashing constantly. And not even just back to desktop. It's restarting the god-damn computer! I can't get past the Fettuccini brothers section without it crashing my computer... Now I'm sad.

[thorn]

George Lucas

the Troll.

Oh my god. I always thought that that guy looked strangely familiar!

[Simon]

Oh no. For the time being, I'm going to skip this. I'm more sure now that I will not enjoy it so much.

I see the first two games as establishing one kind of idiom for Monkey Island, and then Curse created another one, quite wonderfully, and I think that has been picked up very successfully by Tales, so far. Less so by Escape before that.

The Special Edition seems to me to stand well outside of either way of presenting that world, but not in a neat new way that interests me. I think it is just throwing technology at the old game, in a hurry, but not paying much attention to what made it charming. Maybe I will play it some other rainy day and find out for sure.

I too hope they don't attempt a remake of Monkey Island 2, that game is an artistic leap ahead in terms of nailing a very particular style and feel. It would not be done justice by any well-meaning enhancements to any part of it. The same is true of the other SCUMM games that followed, though.

[Horticulture Tycoon]

I also love how in the XBLA version, the menu screen tells me to press in the center of the D-Pad to select "Look."

Oh God, yes. Both annoying and baffling. I got in the habit of using the D-Pad to select my verb because I didn't want to have to pull up that damn verb table every time. But whenever I encountered an object where "Look" was not the default action, I ended up spending about thirty seconds hitting every direction possible on the D-Pad going "Wait a second, which direction is "Look?" OH RIGHT, it's none of them."

I'm less down on the Special Edition than most of you guys though. No question it was rushed, and much of the artwork is subpar, and there's rough edges galore. But all the great new audio stuff mitigates the mediocre-to-terrible visual stuff in my opinion. Plus, the existence of the game on XBLA means non-PC-gamers are being exposed to Monkey Island, which is a positive thing in and of itself. They obviously wouldn't have released it on Live Arcade without the new bells and/or whistles.

That said, I agree that giving Monkey 2 the same treatment would be a bad idea. I'm hoping that success (does anyone know how well it's selling?) of the SoMI SE would mean a much higher budget and more care taken with a MI2 SE. But they would definitely need to seriously step up their game if they're thinking of tackling that next.

[miffy495]

Well, I got all the way to Mancomb before my sound card crapped out on me. My computer now puts out exactly 0 audio, so I need to get that taken care of before I try anything at all that needs sound, including this game. All I can say so far is that I kind of like the voice acting, but my GOD the animation is bad. When Guybrush is walking down the stairs to town after talking to the old man, it looks like somebody just used their mouse to drag a still image overlay of him across a painted background. Why in the name of all that is holy can't we play the game with old graphics and new sound? I pretty much only bought this so I could hear the voice actor's work, and I don't think there's any way I'll be happy playing this game in the new mode after seeing only 5 or so minutes of it.

[syntheticgerbil]

Low-framecount animations like that work fine when you're dealing with low-res sprites; they go together and make sense to your brain. But it looks terrible with high-res sprites, especially when the sprites are already sort of awkward-looking.

Even though I've gone into a long drawn out argument elsewhere about this, I just want to make a note here on general animation theory. I'm really not trying to rile you up or be an asshole, Chris... sorry ahead of time if I come off that way.

That said, I think the animation could have been done a lot better had they just drawn the characters really well within the frames they already had. A lot of the special animations in Monkey Island has a pretty high frame rate already, and if you get stiff characters acting this stuff out, then you have less chance of being successful. About any animation book will tell you stronger poses always trump the amount of frames you use in terms of movement. I mean outside of Disney or CG movies, most animated movies made for the bigscreen are not going at a full 24 or 30 frames per second. More often than not a classic Warner Brothers cartoon is moving at 12fps, and yet they still look smooth. Tekkon Kinkreet, parts of Paprika, and any Bill Plympton cartoon are probably better modern examples of low frame rates with strong poses showing high movement. High resolution should not come as a hindrance if the artist draws his poses efficiently and selectively.

All of that said, I think they should have increased the frame rate of Guybrush's walk since they decided to start scrolling the screen at a full 30fps along with the background water and clouds moving at that speed. This looks weird behind a sliding 6 frame walk. It just creates an unnecessary juxtaposition that the original game did not have.

One last thing is I've tried to find out what makes the art in this game so ugly and sloppy and who dropped the ball. From what I can tell, 3D models were used to pose the main characters somewhat similar to their lo-res counterparts and then drawn over by the artists, which I feel causes the ridiculous stick up their ass look.

I looked up one of the three artists that worked on the special edition and there is no reason he people should have been drawing over 3D models for reference. He doesn't work in 3D at all and is perfectly capable of drawing strong poses and figuring out anatomy without having to draw over a 3D model. Maybe the other two artists needed to? I don't know why this decision was made, since it seems like more effort than it's worth, as they already had reference in the first place with the original animations.

But looking through these this artist's website, his stuff is pretty amazing and makes me very envious, so why is the game so ugly? I don't understand. It doesn't make sense to me.

Links:

www.longfish.blogspot.com

Bad typography aside, there's also all of the cut-outs errors and white edges from people who don't export their graphics right. The pixels from the original game are apparently showing through on the hi-res art, because someone forgot to turn off their bottom layers in Photoshop. There's also a lot of laziness in the forest with the same group of 12 leaves being copied and pasted all over the place. I don't know how this sloppiness makes it in the final game or if anyone played through it and made notes before release, but I would imagine all of this stuff is either the product of bad art direction, low budget, rushed deadlines, or maybe a combination of the three. Also it's possible the team, although talented did not care about Monkey Island and to them it was just another job or project to get through.

Edited July 17, 2009 by syntheticgerbil

[Jayel]

oh well.

Not too thrilled with the quality of art myself, but the inevitable fan-made patches will no doubt clear up some of the sloppiness. (seems like they already managed to unpack all the data and run the game with modified assets)

I would like to participate in improving the background and character art - mold the game to fit my childhood vision - but I fear it will never be carried through the end and end up with better chunk of my life wasted with nothing to show for. Or worse, end up with even worse art than the SE's.

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