Zeusthecat

The Big LucasArts Playthrough

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Side note: In each of the first three Monkey Island games, I have had a laugh-out-loud moment so intense I had to stop playing for a bit.

 

MI1: The two men not throwing a knife off the dock.

MI2: Guybrush "dying" in a vat of acid.

MI3: The reveal of Skull Island.

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Sorry, for some reason I got my numbering mixed up and thought we were on MI2. Carry on.

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I played a bunch last night and finally made some substantial breakthroughs.

 

Upon resuming, I started going back through each area to try to figure out what I was missing. This went on for a little while until I ended up back at the hotel staring at all that congealed cheese. I decided to try using a few of my items to get the fork out of the cheese in the hopes that it would somehow be useful and in the process, I happened to look around and notice all the signs in the restaurant subtly telling me I should drink grog. Convinced that those signs were trying to hint at the solution I was looking for, I headed over to Goodsoup and asked him for a drink. He gave it to me and I quickly drank it and then repeated the process a few times thinking that maybe I just needed to get shit faced and pass out so they would think I was dead and bury me. Before long, I realized this probably wasn't going to work and decided I should try using some of my items on the cup of grog since I hadn't really tried much with it before. To my surprise, I found the solution when I tried using the hangover medicine with the grog which created a lethal mixture that I promptly drank, causing Guybrush to go into a crazy hallucinogenic freakout and collapse on the floor. Goodsoup wasn't convinced that Guybrush was dead but luckily the gravekeeper was an idiot and buried him alive just as I had hoped.

 

At this point the credits started rolling and there was a good 4th wall breaking moment about not dying in LucasArts adventure games. Shortly after that, Guybrush regained consciousness inside the crypt. After trying a few items, I was able to pry the lid off of the coffin by using my chisel. Once I was free to move around the crypt, I noticed some noises coming from one of the other coffins and pried the lid off to find Stan still trapped inside due to my shenanigans in Monkey Island 2. He appeared to have a severe case of restless arm syndrome and proceeded to give me his business card before telling me to come back a little later so he would have time to set up shop for his new business.

 

After coming out of the crypt, I saw that Guybrush had not actually been buried in the Goodsoup crypt and realized that I would likely need to do something else and then repeat the medicine + grog process to get in there. So I went back to the hotel and talked to Goodsoup. At this point, I was able to carry the conversation a little bit further than I previously could and Goodsoup hinted that if I could convince him of my Goodsoup heritage, I would be worthy of being buried in the crypt. I carried the conversation a little further and tried to convince him but had no luck so I just asked him for another drink so I could 'kill' myself again.

 

...I got quite a bit further than this but I'll have to continue this post later as it's gotten quite long already and I need to head home. 

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I really like the voice acting in the game, but I was rather disappointed by Stan.  He seemed so...sedate compared to what I was expecting from a fast-talking used-boat salesman.  I mean look at this

 

:stan:

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I have to agree. And his crazy waving arms looked kind of disturbing in their animated form.

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Okay, part 2:

 

This time, upon awakening in the crypt, I found that Stan had set up shop and was ready to do business. I expressed my interest in purchasing a life insurance policy but he needed me to give him some kind of payment before he would sell it to me. So I went through a couple items and ended up being able to give him my gold tooth in exchange for the life insurance policy. With my new policy in hand, I headed back to the hotel once again to try to figure out what I needed to do next.

 

Hoping that the life insurance policy would prove my Goodsoup heritage, I went straight over to show it to the bartender which ended up being pointless as he seemed to show no interest in it. So yet again, I figured I should poke around the hotel a bit and I happened to get super lucky when I went upstairs to see if the business card or insurance papers would somehow come into play with something up there. In one of my first attempts, I happened to try using Stan's business card with the locked door and was finally able to pick the lock and get into the room. Once inside, I investigated each item in the room and ended up finding a dead guy laying in the wall bed when I pulled it down. He had a big blue book resting on top of him which I tried to grab but wasn't able to because the bed flew back into it's upright position as soon as I let go of it. So I did the most obvious thing I could think of and used the coffin nails (I forget to mention in my last post that I had picked these up when I first freed myself from the coffin) and hammer to nail down the bed. Guybrush commented that I would need one more nail, so I finished the job with the nail I had picked up earlier from the painting. With the bed nailed in place I was finally able to grab the book and was thrilled to see that it had everything I needed to know about the Goodsoup family history. With the book in hand, I headed straight back downstairs to talk to Goodsoup again.

 

This time, I was finally able to convince Goodsoup that I was a member of his illustrious family and he seemed quite impressed with my 'knowledge' of Goodsoup family history despite the fact that I pulled the book out and literally read from it right in front of his dumb face. With him convinced, I 'killed' myself one more time and finally ended up in the Goodsoup family crypt.

 

Upon awakening, I escaped from my coffin and noticed a ghostly woman nearby (also, I peaked my head through a crack and got to experience another MI1 throwback segment). I listened to her story and learned that she had the band I would ultimately need for the ring that would save Elaine. I tried to convince her to part with it but she insisted that the only way that would happen would be if someone married her. Since necrophilia was pretty much the last thing I wanted in my life, I politely declined her advances and continued on to the end of the crypt hallway. At the end of the hallway I found an empty half-open coffin with a crowbar sitting inside. So I picked the crowbar up and after taking a few steps, my favorite dead dude, Murray, dropped down to bestow my presence with his awesomeness. After having a brief conversation with him, I picked him up and then went over to peak through a big crack in the back wall of the crypt. When I peered through the crack, I found the interior of the gravekeeper's house on the other side. I tried to convince him to let me out but he was convinced that I was just some hooligan playing tricks on him (now I know why I spent so much time torturing this dude with the voodoo doll earlier in the game, he's kind of a prick). So I took a minute to examine his room and after attempting a few things, I found that I could grab his lantern with my glued up skeleton arm. Once I had the lantern, I was able to use it with Murray to scare the shit out of the gravekeeper and finally convince him to unlock the crypt.

 

Based on some of the stuff the ghost lady said during our conversation earlier, I figured my next step should probably be to go back and see if there was anything else to do with the dead dude in the hotel. So I headed back over there and quickly found that my new crowbar was capable of removing the boards covering up the hole in the wall behind where the bed folded up. Then, it was just a matter of using the crowbar to remove the nails I had put in place and I was able to launch the dead dude right into the Goodsoup crypt. After doing this, I saw a short scene where the two ghost people fell in love and decided to get married, at which point they disappeared, leaving the ring band behind (question: Is it still considered necrophilia if both parties are dead?). After witnessing that sequence, I headed straight back to the crypt, picked up the wedding band, and continued on.

 

I tried a few things after this but have yet to make any further progress. So far I have tried giving the insurance policy to virtually every character available and I have tried using the ring band as my buy in for the poker game with no success. Right now I'm thinking the first thing I will do is to try to somehow convince Stan I am dead so I can collect the life insurance money. Maybe if I show him one of the Tarot cards he will believe me.

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I finished The Curse of Monkey Island. My total play time was about 26 hours and the jawbreaker/gold tooth puzzle was the only one I ended up using a hint on.

 

It ended up not taking me too much longer to figure out how to prove to Stan that I was dead. I toiled for a little bit at first but as soon as I ended up going into the room in the hotel with the big wheel of cheese I noticed the death certificate sitting in the file cabinet. So I picked that up, went straight back to Stan so I could get "a lot of money" and then headed back to Skull Island.

 

Now that I finally had my buy in, I was able to join the two pirates in a game of poker. As I suspected, I was able to switch out my weak hand with the Tarot cards and beat both of their hands with my five of a kind. They weren't about to let me off that easily and just as they were about to do horrible pirate things to me, LaFoot opened the door and let in a breeze that caused the lights to blow out. In the ensuing chaos, I grabbed the diamond and made my way back outside to escape back to Blood Island. And, in one of the funniest scenes I've witnessed in a video game, Guybrush ran back up to the top of the cliff and threw LaFoot over the edge before finally departing.

 

Back on Blood Island, I went straight over to Elaine to switch out the rings and found that I couldn't get the cursed ring off her finger. The slippery, greasy lotion seemed like the most obvious thing to use to get the ring off and after I applied some, I was able to pull the cursed ring off and replace it with the non-cursed one. With the curse finally lifted, Elaine returned to normal and punched me square in the face. However, the reunion was short lived as we were immediately captured by a bunch of LeChuck's minions.

 

After being captured, we were brought to Monkey Island and LeChuck told me all about his plans surrounding his theme park. Lots of story threads were explained and I gathered that his whole theme park scheme also somewhat explained the end of Monkey Island 2. After we talked for awhile, he took off with Elaine and transformed me into a kid, at which point I regained control and exited the roller coaster cart to head into the next area.

 

I entered the next area to find 3 different carnival booths: a pie cannon booth manned by a dude in a rat costume, a guessing game booth manned by Dinghy Dog, and a snow cone booth manned by a gross dude. The first part was pretty easy as I just had to get Dinghy Dog to incorrectly guess my age. After making his guess, I showed him some proof of my true age and was able to get an anchor as a prize (I wanted Murray but I guess Guybrush didn't). As soon as I got the anchor, I tried using it with each of my items and found that I could combine it with my shaving cream pie. Then I did the next most obvious thing and added it to the stack of pies at the pie cannon booth. After some goading, I convinced the rat dude to fire the pie out of the cannon which ended up killing, or at least severely injuring the poor clown who was sticking his head through the display. With him gone, I took his place and antagonized the rat guy a little bit more until he fired a lemon meringue pie at me which I was then able to add to my inventory. Next, I went over to the snow cone guy and ordered a plain snowcone. I quickly discovered that I could combine the snowcone with the meringue to make a meringue snowcone but nothing seemed to happen when I ate it and I was unable to walk more than a couple steps without it melting. So I looked around some more and after a few minutes I noticed a pepper grinder sitting on the snowcone cart that I was able to pick up. After repeating the snowcone sequence again I found that I was also able to add the pepper to the snowcone in addition to the meringue but still had the same results when I ate it. So I toiled again for a few minutes and after talking to the rat guy a little bit more and hearing him tell me I should hit Dinghy Dog, I decided I should probably try to beat the shit out of him to see if anything would happen. After about half a dozen punches (which he responded differently to each time, indicating to me that I should keep hitting him), he got fed up and "bit" me. I was able to grab some of his fur as he did this and right after doing so I realized what the whole purpose of the snowcone thing was. With this last item, I was finally able to make my "hangover cure" snowcone and transform Guybrush back into an adult.

 

Now that Guybrush was back to normal, I headed onto the roller coaster and the final segment of the game. This part ended up being pretty straightforward and I was able to grab a rope in one area and a barrel of rum in another area. Then, I struggled for a little bit on the lantern in one of the other areas but was finally able to get the flask of oil from it after I discovered that I needed to blow out the flame. Also, as I was going through this process and running from LeChuck, I discovered that I could use the pepper to make him sneeze which I figured would somehow come into play with the barrel of rum, rope, and oil flask. Once I had all of these pieces, I was able to coat the rope in oil and put it in the barrel as a fuse to make some kind of makeshift bomb. I tried to throw the bomb directly at LeChuck and when I saw that wasn't an option, I recalled a big frozen animatronic ape in one of the areas who had an interactable arm. So I went back over there, put the bomb under his arm, and used the pepper to make LeChuck sneeze fire onto the fuse. Thanks to my (Guybrush's) clever thinking, the place exploded, LeChuck was defeated, and Guybrush and Elaine lived happily ever after.

 

I can't really think of anything this game did wrong. It was nearly perfect in almost every way. The puzzles were hands down the best puzzles in any of the games I have played so far, the voice acting was impeccable, the story was incredibly clever, and the game was funny as hell. It's weird to think that I was slightly apprehensive at first because this game ended up hitting all the perfect notes for me. I'll stop short of saying it is my favorite LucasArts game so far just because Monkey Island 1 was such a revelatory moment for me (being my introduction to adventure games and having so many laugh out loud moments) but goddamn this game was a great experience.

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Man, I shudder to think of Zeus dealing with the tank controls... It's it's only drawback. :|

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I'm not too worried about the controls. I've played a ton of games with bad controls and have never really been too bothered by them after initially getting accustomed to them. Even Resident Evil worked just fine for me.

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It's not like you ever have to sprint away from any boulders or anything like that. Just gotta be patient with it. Also, if you struggle with any doors, try walking through them backwards.

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Just finished Grim Fandango myself, actually - I'm very curious to see how Zeus feels about it, because I've cooled on it significantly.

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Alright, I've got ResidualVM and the game all ready to go. It looks like there is also a patch available that fixes some bug so I'll make sure to grab that too. Does that about cover everything or is there anything else I need before I get started?

 

Also, not sure if there are difficulty modes or if I can/should tweak the default controls so if anyone has any advice it would be much appreciated!

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There aren't any difficulty modes. I think you can change the controls from character-sensitive to screen-sensitive, but with the constantly changing camera angles I wouldn't recommend it. Also, the tank controls aren't so bad if you resist the urge to run everywhere.

 

I think Residual say you need that patch or at least they heavily recommend it - they link to a file for it on their website, which is probably the best version to use in case you got it from elsewhere.

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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. 

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I briefly loaded it up in ResidualVM last night and it seemed to run just fine so hopefully that is an indicator that the rest of the game will run smoothly.

 

So back to Curse of Monkey Island for a minute. Can anyone confirm that the whole theme park thing and Guybrush being turned into a child explained what was meant by the ending to Monkey Island 2? I'm sure what to think since at the end of that game it shows him there with his parents and his brother and it seems to indicate that the whole Monkey Island 2 series of events was just them playing pretend. Whereas in this game Guybrush is fully aware that he was turned into a child and is still very much embroiled in his adventure. If I had to guess I would say that at the end of the second game, Guybrush is put under some weird spell that makes him think he is just a kid in a theme park with his family. Then, in Curse, LeChuck puts the same spell on him but Guybrush is able to retain enough sanity to know what is going on (hence needing to drink the hangover cure to clear his mind). Or maybe I just shouldn't read into it too much.

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If I had to guess I would say that at the end of the second game, Guybrush is put under some weird spell that makes him think he is just a kid in a theme park with his family. Then, in Curse, LeChuck puts the same spell on him but Guybrush is able to retain enough sanity to know what is going on (hence needing to drink the hangover cure to clear his mind). Or maybe I just shouldn't read into it too much.

 

Yes, that's definitely the interpretation of the Monkey Island 2 ending used by Curse of Monkey Island.

 

Though it's odd that MI3 starts with Guybrush alone.  At the end of MI2, Elaine hopes "LeChuck hasn't put some terrible evil curse on Guybrush."  But instead of looking for him in between games I guess she just leaves.

 

More evidence of Ron Gilbert's assertion that they wouldn't be a good married couple!

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Honestly I think they're more fun married; usually writers avoid it because all the fun goes out of the relationship, but Elaine got more interesting and now their arguments have some stakes to them.

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MI2:SE has the commentary tracks from Gilbert, Shafer and Grossman in which they discuss the ending. Turns out it wasn't even part of any grand, overarching plot; it was something Grossman suggested and Gilbert approved because he thought it was funny.

 

Given that there was going to be an MI3 and it was going to involve Guybrush as a pirate [citation: I asked Gilbert when he was here for PAX-OZ] , it's fair to say that the ending of MI2 was only a voodoo curse.

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