Zeusthecat

The Big LucasArts Playthrough

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And finally, I just started

 

Escape From Monkey Island

 

I'm playing in fullscreen mode with the default resolution and so far everything looks pretty good. 

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I have no knowledge of the quality of the games for better or worse, but I'd love to experience the Tex Murphy games through your eyes. After seeing the quick look of the new one on Giant Bomb, I'm half tempted to make one of these threads myself. They're all available on GoG I believe.

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I played through a few of the first puzzles in Escape from Monkey Island tonight.

 

I'm curious to hear what Zeus thinks of the plot and characters so far.  It's all slightly different from what I remember.

 

Also, my feeble emulation has left me without background music.  Every step that Tank Control Guybrush takes echoes on the cobblestones of Mêlée Island.

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I'll put together a post tomorrow on my first couple hours with the game. So far though I am really liking it and the characters have some pretty well written and funny dialog.

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I should really play Escape again. My opinions are all based on my memories of the game as an eleven year old, but I've always thought the game got a bad rap.

 

Not that the game doesn't have problems (it has many), but I think the biggest problem was simply that people were (consciously or not) bored of the adventure game format. I mean, admittedly, it ranks pretty low on any list of Lucasarts adventure games... but still relatively high on a list of adventure games in general. IMO of course.

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So I started the game Sunday evening and managed to make a couple hours of progress.

Upon starting, I found Guybrush tied to the mast of the "Honeymoon" ship from the end of Curse. The ship had been boarded by pirates and Elaine was fighting them off as Guybrush mused about recent events in his life. After gaining control, I found that I could shimmy around the mast that I was tied to and interact with a number of nearby items. Before long, I was able thwart the pirates by knocking over a brazier and kicking one of the hot coals towards the cannon on our ship which lit the fuse on the cannon, causing it to fire and sink the enemy ship. We then continued on our journey, and before long we arrived at Melee Island.

Immediately after landing and seeing that there was no fanfare for her return, Elaine became suspicious that something was amiss on Melee Island. This was further confirmed when we approached Elaine's mansion and found some douchebag using a catapult to hurl boulders at the mansion. After talking to the guy, we discovered that Elaine had been declared dead and he was just carrying out orders from the new (likely) governor-to-be to destroy the mansion. Elaine then took off to take care of some business or something and I was tasked with stopping the destruction of the mansion and then sailing to Lucre Island to talk to some lawyers about the situation. From here, I spent a good amount of time venturing around the various Melee Island locations and having a bunch of lengthy conversations with a number of characters.

As I went around shooting the shit with people, a few puzzles started to reveal themselves. First, after running into Carla and Otis (who were both quite hilariously traumatized from the shit I put them through in the first game), I learned that they would be willing to join my crew if I could land them a cushy government job. Then, while investigating the Scumm Bar and talking to the various patrons, I got into a conversation with the owner of the bar (I think his name was Ignacious Cheese or something like that) and was able to convince him to join my crew after beating him in a game of insult arm wrestling. Next, I tried to grab some pretzels from a passed out drunk guy but was thwarted by his sudden drunken movements each time I tried. However, after another brief conversation with some dudes who were playing darts at the front of the bar, I was able to convince one of them to throw a dart at the drunk guy's birthday balloon which caused it to pop and startled the drunk guy, somehow making him completely catatonic in the process. I was then able to steal his pretzels and continued on my way.

After I had conversed with everyone in the main town, I made my way down to the docks where I found a stern talking government lady who was adamant about not letting me leave with a boat until I could prove that I had authority to do so. While I was down there I picked up a deflated inner tube and based on my conversation with the catapult guy from earlier and some of the observations Guybrush had made while I was in the mansion area, I had a suspicion that I knew what I needed to do to stop him.

From there, I headed back to the mansion area and gave a pretzel to the catapult guy. He then walked away for a couple minutes to eat his pretzel, leaving me an opportunity to mess with his catapult. Once he saw what I was doing, he came back and shooed me away before re-calibrating the catapult to aim at the weird two-pronged cactus near the mansion. After I saw how this sequence played out, I ran over to the cactus, put the inner tube around it to turn it into a makeshift slingshot, and repeated the process with the pretzels. This time, after he re-calibrated, the boulder he launched landed right in the 'slingshot' and bounced back, knocking the catapult over the cliff. With the catapult guy finally gone, Elaine headed into the mansion and I followed suit.

There wasn't a whole lot for me to do inside the mansion but I did manage to obtain a government employment contract and a cushy government contract, both of which I gave to Elaine to have her sign. After I finished poking around there, I headed back to Otis and Carla and convinced them to join my crew by giving showing them the cushy government contract. And this is about as far as I was able to get.

At this point, it seems like I have all the crew members I need and I just need to obtain a boat. I've tried giving the other employment contract to most of the other characters I've ran across and so far I haven't had any luck. I haven't spent too much time on this yet though so I think my next course of action will be to run through each area again and see if there are any objects I missed or any characters I haven't tried giving the contract to yet.

My initial thoughts on this game are pretty positive. The music and voicework both seem as solid as ever and I've already gotten a few chuckles out of some of the dialog I've heard. The controls aren't bothering me much at all and actually seem somewhat improved over Grim Fandango. I guess my only minor gripes at this point are that some of the dialog is a little on the lengthy side and it is sometimes hard to get in the exact position and angle necessary to detect items in some of the areas. But overall, I like what I've experienced and I look forward to seeing where the story goes from here.

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Navigation-wise Guybrush doesn't bounce off invisible walls as badly as Manny did, but he has more verbs than Manny and I can't figure out the buttons.  I keep pressing "O" which immediately exits me from buildings or sends me to the Melee Island map!

 

Did you speak to the Voodoo Lady?  I bummed around her shop and couldn't figure out how to summon her.

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Navigation-wise Guybrush doesn't bounce off invisible walls as badly as Manny did, but he has more verbs than Manny and I can't figure out the buttons.  I keep pressing "O" which immediately exits me from buildings or sends me to the Melee Island map!

 

Did you speak to the Voodoo Lady?  I bummed around her shop and couldn't figure out how to summon her.

 

Yeah, I talked to her but it did take a bit for me to figure out the whole "pulling the middle finger" thing. And I guess the additional verb would be another thing that I'm still struggling to get used to. In Grim Fandango, I used the numpad and all of the verbs were right there within reach ("Ins" for inventory, "Enter" for use/talk, "+" for pick up, and "5" for look at). It looks like in this game they broke out "Use" onto the "U" key so now I keep my left hand on the keyboard and have to keep reminding myself to press "U" with various items since "Enter", "+", and "5" don't cover every possible interaction any more.

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I remember the thing it took me a while to get used to was using Page Up and Down to cycle through the current options.

 

I was heavily disappointed by this game. It looks awful, the jokes are mostly puns, aged references (Forrest Gump, anyone?) or Guybrush doing a Barry White voice while hitting on women, and it just doesn't feel like an MI game a lot of the time.

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I remember the thing it took me a while to get used to was using Page Up and Down to cycle through the current options.

 

I was heavily disappointed by this game. It looks awful, the jokes are mostly puns, aged references (Forrest Gump, anyone?) or Guybrush doing a Barry White voice while hitting on women, and it just doesn't feel like an MI game a lot of the time.

 

I don't recall running into any recognizable pop culture references yet (although I might have heard that Barry White one you mentioned) but I have enjoyed a lot of the opening dialog especially with all the references back to the previous games. I do tend to enjoy dumb humor though so I suspect the shitty jokes and aged references won't really bother me too much when I do run into them. We'll see.

 

Regarding the graphics, I actually kind of like the look of the game more than I expected to. It doesn't hold a candle to Curse's style and doesn't work as well as the polygonal models in GF but it works well enough for me and I especially like how vibrant and colorful everything is. 

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There's some bad lines and the Guybrush and Elaine TV sitcom dynamic is absolute shit, but Escape from Monkey Island is genuinely funny. It got more than a few laughs from me when I played a few years ago. There are some badly written not funny games out there but I wouldn't count EMI as one of them.

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The writing tries too hard—Guybrush has to have a response to everything Elaine says, funny or not.  They are also reverent to a fault to the earlier games.

 

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But Charity James is much better than I remember.  She was extremely chirpy taking over for Grace in Gabriel Knight 3, a quality that I thought was inappropriate for Elaine.  But she isn't all that chirpy and underplays a lot of the more desperate-sounding dialogue, making a decent straight-man to Guybrush's antics.  So far I think syntheticgerbil's summary will play out.

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. I guess my only minor gripes at this point are that some of the dialog is a little on the lengthy side

 

This was actually my biggest criticism of EMI the last time I played it. It's all reasonably well written, but it just goes on and onnnnnn.

 

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So I started the game Sunday evening and managed to make a couple hours of progress...

 

Reading this, I discover that I maybe played Escape from Monkey Island long ago, or at least watched a friend play through most of it? What a strange sensation... Keep going, Zeus! This thread is the best.

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The writing tries too hard—Guybrush has to have a response to everything Elaine says, funny or not.  They are also reverent to a fault to the earlier games.

 

Those are the issues in a nutshell, but I agree with syntheticgerbil that the game is still pretty funny.

 

Two notes about EMI's controls compared to Grim's.  One is that you can double tap the arrow key to make Guybrush run as an alternative to holding shift.  (Apparently Grim was supposed to have this feature too and even references it in the manual but apparently it didn't ship with it.)

 

The other is that EMI lets you look at things with both the "l" (Look) key or the "e" (Examine) key.  Ostensibly these do the same thing but I swear I've heard Guybrush make different comments on certain environment objects between the two keys!

 

Regarding the backlash at the time of release, I think a lot of it had to do with the decision to go to 3D and direct control, which at the time I think was more sacrilegious conceptually to the fans.  If anything, the game's visuals have only gotten worse, but now that we live in a context where there is more than one 3D Monkey Island game a lot of the outrage kind of becomes obsolete (even granting that, yes, the art direction is not what it should be).  There's also the more legitimate issue of the game really pushing that parody/self-awareness boundary that the other games skate more tactfully, but I'd argue that's more an artifact of the particular story Stemmle and Clark chose to tell here.  EMI holds up way better as "Monkey Island 4" than it does "The Final Monkey Island."

 

My favorite bit of trivia about this game is that apparently both Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman have played some of it but quit, not for quality concerns, but because they got stuck.  I wish I had the interviews/tweets/blog comments to back this up but I swear they exist.

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Here's Tim playing through an hour and a half of Grim Fandango. Pretty much my dream.

 

 

I believe the double fine youtube channel has Day Of The Tentacle and Full Throttle, too.

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I played a bit more over the last week and managed to make a decent amount of progress. There ended up being a lot of new characters introduced with a lot of dialog so my apologies if I misremember some of the details.

 

After wandering around for awhile, looking for a way to obtain a boat, I eventually stumbled onto the solution when I talked to Elaine. This time when I talked to her, I was able to bring up the fact that I needed a ship and she gave me the Governor's Seal as proof of my authority. From there, I left the mansion and went straight back down to the docks to show my new credentials to the government lady. Once I showed it to her, she took me to my beautiful new pink ship. My crew then joined me and we headed off for Lucre Island.

 

After arriving at Lucre Island, I eventually made my way towards the lawyer guys to talk to them about the situation. On the way there, I happened to sit on a random bench and witnessed the most cringe inducing Forrest Gump reference I have ever seen in my life (Ben X, you were totally right on this one; even with my juvenile sense of humor that was just painful to experience). Once I made it to the lawyers' office, I explained the situation and they responded in some incredibly fucking weird ways. Somehow I was able to convince them to help me and they ended up giving me Elaine's father's will (I think that was how it went down). The will mentioned some kind of deposit box at the bank so I headed over there to check it out. I should also mention that while I was going through the town, I picked up a bottle of grog, an empty spray bottle, and a bottle of cologne (and probably some other things).

 

Once I made it to the bank, I went into the vault and grabbed all the contents in the room. There was a lot of random crap including a bunch of sponges, a music box, a sword, a handkerchief, a duck (or maybe I picked this up outside somewhere) and I think a couple other items. I probably picked up a total of around a dozen different items between the bank vault and the town within a couple hour time span so I'm finding it hard to specifically remember where I got each one. After (or in the midst of) picking up all of the items, the vault door was slammed shut and I ended up getting trapped in there while someone pretending to be Guybrush Threepwood robbed the bank. With my options severely limited, I had no choice but to get to work trying to open the door. As I went through all of my items, I found that I was able to break off the lower door hinge with the sword (which I think broke the sword, or maybe it was already broken) and then stick the broken sword into the door crack to open it a bit. Unfortunately, I had no way to break off the top door hinge so I was forced to toil for a little while to figure out how to get the door open the rest of the way. Eventually, after I exhausted most of the item combination possibilities, I discovered that I could put all of the sponges along the door crack and then pour some grog down the door frame, causing the sponges to expand and blow the door open (I don't feel like this was a very good puzzle; kind of random and illogical). I was then mistakenly arrested for robbing the bank and got sent to jail. 

 

Luckily, Lucre Island apparently had some pretty lax policies because I was able to easily convince the jailer to let me wander around the island to try to prove my innocence. So I waltzed out of the jail house and proceeded to go into each building and area around town, picking up every item I could find and talking to all of the characters. There were quite a few areas with a lot of dialog and a lot of things to interact with so this is pretty much as far as I got.

 

At this point I think I have talked to everyone in the main town and picked up all of the items (and opened a manhole) so now I just need to explore the rest of the island and find a way to prove my innocence. Hopefully, as I spend more time on the island, all of this stuff will start making more sense. But as it stands right now I have a wealth of random ass items and I have talked to so many different characters that I'm a little overwhelmed with how much is going on. I suspect when some puzzles emerge, everything will start to fall into place and things won't feel quite as chaotic.

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I played some more last night and didn't really get anywhere. I hopped on a raft in a foggy swamp area but Guybrush indicated that I would need a map or compass to get anywhere. Then I went over to some creepy mansion where I found Ozzie Mandrill and challenged him to some insult sword fighting. Unfortunately, his Australian insults were impossible to counteract and I was forced to leave. I then went around and re-investigated various areas around the town to refresh my memory a bit on what the hell is going on. From what I can tell, getting through the swamp seems to be the thing I need to do right now so my focus will be on trying to get some kind of compass or map to help me through.

 

I'm not going to lie, I am not nearly as excited about booting up this game as I have been with the previous LucasArts games. It just feels so much more tedious and drawn out than what I've become accustomed to. There are definitely some bits of story and dialog that I like and I think are pretty clever but I just keep feeling a little overwhelmed with all of the seemingly random items I have and all of the information that has been thrown at me from various characters.

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Plus every single NPC tells you about this one plot point - about all the pirates leaving or the tourists taking over or something - so you end up hearing it twenty times, it's infuriating.

 

"Say, why's your shop so empty?"

"Oh, it's because Ozzie Mandrill bought all the property and etc etc"

 

"How's the perfume business?"

"Pretty bad since Ozzie Mandrill etc etc"

 

over and fucking over.

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Ozzie Mandrill. What a bastard.

Are we talking about Ozzie Mandrill? The place's never been the same with him around.

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his Australian insults were impossible to counteract

 

True to life!

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Oh man... I remember that swamp. That swamp was a pain in the butt.

I liked the swamp! It's the only part of the game I remember fondly.

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