The Big LucasArts Playthrough

[syntheticgerbil]

One time I went through every file combination just to see what Guybrush would say after realizing there were some original responses around. I also read every book description card in the Monkey Island 2 library, but there were no long animations to wait on so it wasn't as painful. Also it was much more clever. Fucking OCD

[Udvarnoky]

I guess the card catalog is the kindred puzzle, but it's just plan not fun to have trial-and-error your way to the realization that the faces on the dials map to a sequence in the alphabet.  Just labeling them with the sequence would have still left you with a substantial enough puzzle (since you're working with an alias and still have to figure out that you're spelling out initials) without all of the awful.  What were they thinking?

[Zeusthecat]

Sorry for my extremely slow progress on this. I keep meaning to get some more time in but to be honest, I'm having a hard time feeling enthusiastic about playing more of this game. I'm just not having very much fun when I play it and I keep dozing off as I go through countless lines of dialog.

 

Despite how I feel about this game, I will finish it and even managed to play for a couple hours the other night. At this point, I am using a walkthrough to help me get through this at a steady pace and I don't plan to spend more than a few minutes trying to solve any of these puzzles on my own. As a result, I'm also not going to bother going into as much detail as I have in the past.

 

Upon resuming the other night, I sprayed some perfume on a fucking platypus to make Ozzie Mandrill break his walking stick. Then, I went down to the walking stick shop and put termites on his stick so he would leave a trail of sawdust behind him wherever he went. After doing that, I met him back at the mansion, told him about how I saw him and Pegnose Pete conspiring, and then nonchalantly followed him to a secret hideout. Then I pressed a button on the table inside the hideout to reveal a window and was able to see that the bank loot was inside of an underwater cave on the other side of the window. From there, I headed back above ground, dove into the water, and used my scupperware with bait to lure a glowing fish thing so I could use it as a flashlight to see underwater. Then, I entered the cave, grabbed the loot and a screw for Pegnose Pete's nose, and headed back to the town. Once I was back in town, I went straight to the jail and cleared my name by showing all my cool new shit to the jailer. This finally convinced him that I was innocent and I was able to head back to Melee Island.

 

There was a fairly lengthy cutscene around this time with lots of talking and a revelation that Ozzie Mandrill was really LeChuck. After all that talking, I headed over to the Voodoo place to do more talking and fell asleep for about 15 minutes when I tried to talk to the Voodoo lady. Then I woke up, selected another dialog line, and fell asleep for another five minutes. Then I turned the game off and went to bed.

 

I was able to solve some of the stuff I mentioned above on my own and had some brief moments of fun while I was doing so but most of what I experienced struck me as pretty mediocre at best. And I'm still trying to figure out why I needed to spray perfume on a platypus to get a dude to break his walking stick.

[Trip Hazard]

perfume on a fucking platypus

 

That sounds like some unnecessary perfume

[Thrik]

Upon resuming the other night, I sprayed some perfume on a fucking platypus to make Ozzie Mandrill break his walking stick.

 

Hahahahahaaaaa. Such a great summary of what this game's all about.

[Ben X]

And I'm still trying to figure out why I needed to spray perfume on a platypus to get a dude to break his walking stick.

 

I think he says at some point that he hates the smell of pirates, so when you make his platypus smell like one, oooh he gets angry!

 

Actually, this reminds me of the skunk puzzle in DOTT, which was massively unfair as it relied on a throwaway, unrepeatable line of dialogue from the Dr Fred descendant.

[Udvarnoky]

"You've befouled my platypus!"  Legendary.

 

It's very instructive to read your reaction to this game as you play it.  You had a lot of goodwill for it in that first Melee Island section before the game squandered it with Lucre Island.  I think it takes a certain level of brilliance for an adventure game to open the world wide (in terms of locations) without frustrating the player.  There's a reason why the second chapter of MI2 gets so much praise - even though there are some ridiculous puzzles, it's really, really ingeniously designed.

 

There's a lot of great content on Lucre Island.  If they would have just regulated the quantity of the mandatory dialog and the maliciousness of the puzzle design a tad, it would have been easier to appreciate.  I think Thrik's onto something about the game being better with some distance - with the agony of actually having to push threw those puzzles gone, you can look back on what actually worked and forget about the bad puzzles and rambling monologues.

[Zeusthecat]

It's very instructive to read your reaction to this game as you play it.  You had a lot of goodwill for it in that first Melee Island section before the game squandered it with Lucre Island.  I think it takes a certain level of brilliance for an adventure game to open the world wide (in terms of locations) without frustrating the player.  There's a reason why the second chapter of MI2 gets so much praise - even though there are some ridiculous puzzles, it's really, really ingeniously designed.

 

I think it's fair to say that I've been spoiled by all of the excellently designed games that preceded this one.

 

I feel like I am being a bit unfair with some of my gripes about the puzzles. Based on some of the responses to the complaints I made in my last few posts, it seems pretty clear that a lot of these puzzles would have actually made more sense if I had paid closer attention to what various characters said and what observations Guybrush made. I just don't know how feasible that would have been because the quantity of the dialog is too high and the quality of the dialog is too low for anything but the most pertinent plot points to stand out. It would be really interesting to see how much this game could have been improved by simply having less dialog. 

[syntheticgerbil]

Well I think once you get past that part, it should pick up pretty well, besides when Elaine starts saying "darned" and "heck" instead of "damned" and "hell" sometimes. I guess they couldn't figure out their ESRB rating for a second there and didn't bother to fucking fix it.

[Udvarnoky]

Elaine and LeChuck both say "Hell" at some point during the game, so that suggests they actually thought they were being funny, which is far more damning.

[Zeusthecat]

After taking a few weeks off from playing this game, I booted it up again recently with renewed motivation to get through the next portion of the game without using a guide. We'll see how far I get with that but I think some time off was good because I actually had an enjoyable time coming back to it and racking my brain on the Melee Island puzzles.

 

Before doing anything, I spent some time re-conversing with the voodoo lady so I could remember what my current objective was. After finishing the conversation and examining what items I had, I went to work trying to figure out how to find the location of the ultimate insult. First, I headed to the Scumm bar and found that it had been turned into the Lua bar. I messed around in there for a little while, talking to the various characters and examining the various items and at one point, I picked up some chopsticks and managed to break them by sticking them in the sushi conveyor belt thing. There didn't seem to be anything else I could do in that area so I continued on and made my way towards Meathook's place.

 

This time, when I approached the door to Meathook's house, he let me inside and I talked to him for a bit about his latest endeavors. Apparently, he had taken up wax art and had a successful business selling his works. Also (and I may be misremembering this since I've been sitting on this post for awhile), he mentioned that he had painted over and sold the map showing the location of the ultimate insult. After I finished talking to him, I went around investigating all the shit in his house and picked up a paintbrush before heading back out. 

 

Next, I went back down to the docks. Once there, I was able to grab a quarter out of the grog machine and used it to get a can of grog. Then, I walked down to my ship and after fiddling around for a bit, I found that I could talk to the lady on the front of my ship and put the necklace, earrings, and pen that I had received earlier on her. After doing this, I poked around a little bit more before continuing on.

 

At this point, my options were pretty limited. There was nothing else of interest at the mansion and the only place on Melee Island that I hadn't exhausted all possibilities was the Lua bar. So I headed back to the Lua bar and quickly noticed the painting on the wall behind the sushi conveyor belt thing. I wasn't sure how to get to it yet so after messing around a bit more, I ended up sitting down on one of the stools and found that I could order some kind of flaming dish from the waitress. As soon as I saw the dish coming down the conveyor belt, I figured I was supposed to try to stop it right in front of the wax painting to get the wax to melt and reveal the map underneath the painting. Apparently there were no more chopsticks available to jam in the conveyor belt so I resorted to using the paintbrush. Upon stopping the conveyor belt, the chef came out of the kitchen to see what was going on and I was able to sneak into the kitchen while he was distracted. I haven't been able to figure out what I need to do next but I've repeated this process a few times with no success. I've examined the kitchen pretty thoroughly at this point and tried to stop the flaming dish in various spots around the painting but the results have been the same each time. To make matters worse, there was also a super lame brass monkey reference when I examined the two monkeys in the kitchen. I'm not sure whether to hate the brass monkey reference or the Forrest Gump reference more at this point in the game.

[Udvarnoky]

Zeus!  I thought we'd lost you!  I don't think you'll have too much trouble finishing up the second Melee Island segment.  I'm quite eager to read your opinions on the remaining half of the game.

[Zeusthecat]

Zeus!  I thought we'd lost you!

Never!! I will definitely see this through till the end. It's just been a bad combination of a lack of enthusiasm for this game and a bunch of shit going on in my personal life that has made these last couple months really tough.

[syntheticgerbil]

That brass monkey reference hurts so so bad. I hate that I can hear exactly how it is said right now in that screechy kid's game type voice.

[Zeusthecat]

That brass monkey reference hurts so so bad. I hate that I can hear exactly how it is said right now in that screechy kid's game type voice.

Glad I'm not the only one that feels that way. And also, the way Guybrush keeps using that stupid Billy Dee Williams 'sexy' voice when he talks to various female characters is really grating on my nerves. It wasn't funny the first time and it was downright infuriating the third time.

[Udvarnoky]

I will say that whatever clunkers he sometimes gets saddled with, Armato really owns the role in this game.

[Zeusthecat]

I will say that whatever clunkers he sometimes gets saddled with, Armato really owns the role in this game.

 

I agree. As much as I hate a lot of the writing, the voice acting itself is pretty solid.

 

I also got a little further the other night, but not much. After spinning my wheels for a little while longer, I finally discovered that I could pour my can of grog into the furnace thingy to make the brass monkeys stop the conveyor belt. As soon as I did that, the flaming dish that I had stopped in front of the wax painting melted off all of the wax revealing the map underneath. Since the painting/map was of no use to him any more, the chef handed it over to me and I headed back to the dock. After giving the map to the ship figurehead lady, we learned that the ultimate insult was located on Jambalaya Island and immediately set sail for our new destination.

 

Since arriving on Jambalaya Island, most of my time has been spent just going through each of the new locations, talking to the new characters, and picking up a few items here and there. So far I've checked out Planet Threepwood, a micro-groggery, and a Starbuccaneers coffee shop and gone through all the dialog options for each of the characters in those areas. I see that there are still a few more areas to visit on the island aside from the main village area I've explored so far so hopefully those don't drag on for too long so I can get back to solving the next series of puzzles.

[Zeusthecat]

I'm finally making some decent progress on Jambalaya Island and enjoying it quite a bit more than the last couple sections of the game.

 

When I resumed the other night, I continued going through each of the shops and areas on the island. Starting with the Starbuccaneer's coffee shop, I picked up some kind of nasty bagel snack and ate it, leaving a chewed up bagel thing in my inventory. I then got a hint on the ultimate insult from an old lady inside (and I think I got some kind of souvenir mug here as well but I may have picked that up somewhere else) and tried to order some coffee from the barista which I ended up not having enough money for. From there, I went back to Planet Threepwood, talked to all of the people inside, and got a caricature done by a caricature artist. I also tried to order a meal but didn't have any money so I was forced to move on. Next, I went back over to the micro-groggery and tried riding the mechanical manatee after talking to the bartender again (I think I had also previously gotten a glass of weak grog from this area). I ended up just getting thrown off a couple times and figured that I probably didn't have the means to defeat the manatee just yet and decided to leave the town and head for the next area on the island.

 

After leaving the town, I continued on and found myself in an area with a diving competition and a competition trophy which looked to be one of the pieces of the ultimate insult. I talked to the champion diver for a bit and challenged him to a dive-off, but was rejected because I didn't have the required diving certificate. So I went over to the judges and after they looked me over, they gave their approval and handed me the diving certificate I needed. Then I re-challenged the diver guy and lost horribly. After chatting with the judges some more and making a few more failed attempts, I started to get a good idea of what I needed to do to win. First, I needed to mimic the moves of the other diver to get a perfect score from the hippie judge. Then, I needed to produce the smallest splash possible to get a perfect score from the wise judge. Finally, I had to somehow bribe or otherwise convince the third judge to stop giving me such shitty scores. I was able to at least get a perfect score from the hippie judge at this point by meeting his criteria but couldn't get anywhere with the other two and had to move on.

 

Next, I made my way over to Stan's time share place. After picking up a bottle of glue and a time share pamphlet, I listened to Stan's pitch and fell asleep during his three hour rant. Apparently, if I made it through the whole thing he would give me a coupon for a free meal at Planet Threepwood so I made a mental note that I would probably need to find a way to get some coffee from Starbuccaneer's so I could stay awake for the whole pitch. Before leaving Stan's place, I examined the pamphlet and glue I had picked up and saw that one of the pictures in the pamphlet was of the shitty diving judge with some lady. So I went straight back to the diving place and was able to use the pamphlet as blackmail to get him to give me better scores.

 

At this point, I wasn't quite sure what to do so I meandered around for a little while and eventually made my way back to the town. I ended up going back inside the micro-groggery and quickly realized that I could apply glue to the mechanical manatee. After doing that, I gave it another go and managed to hang on all the way through the highest setting. That netted me a coupon for a free meal from Planet Threepwood which I immediately went to redeem.

 

After ordering my meal and receiving the monkey mug (one of the three pieces of the ultimate insult), I tried to take off with the mug but wasn't able to since it belonged to the establishment. I went through my limited options to try to figure out how to snatch the mug and ended up talking to the caricature artist again to get another picture done. This caricature ended up being a picture of me with the monkey mug so after receiving it, it didn't take long for me to figure out that I could use the glue with the picture to paste the monkey mug portion onto the mug I had received earlier. Then, I switched out my fake monkey mug with the real one and took off with my prize.

 

Next, I headed back over to Starbuccaneer's to see if I could figure out how to get some coffee. This time, as I approached I got lucky and noticed a mug sitting on the other side of the window that I hadn't seen before. So I went inside, grabbed the mug from behind a planter that had been obstructing it from the inside, and handed it to the barista to get my cup of coffee. Once I had that, I went back to Stan's, drank the coffee, and listened to his pitch. Thanks to the coffee, I made it through the whole thing and then realized it was pointless because I had already received the same coupon from the micro-groggery.

 

I had pretty much exhausted all my options on the main island at this point and after eventually making my way back down to the docks, I found that I could take a canoe over to Knuttin Atoll. On the way there, I ran into some asshole who was firing a cannon at me and learned that Knuttin Atoll was where all the pirates were being sent off to. After I finished talking to him, I continued on through and started exploring the island. The first thing I noticed was some guy doing a puppet show so I went right over to him and talked to him and his puppets for a bit. That ended up being pretty pointless so next, I went over to a school house and enrolled in a pirate rehabilitation program. On my first go through, I passed easily and got my certificate. However, I couldn't help but notice a dunce cap in the classroom and based on previous comments about my flat head, I figured that would be the perfect hat to wear during the diving competition to make my splash as small as possible. So I re-enrolled, gave the worst possible answers, and got the dunce cap as a "reward". After doing that, I went back outside and pulled the fire alarm on the building which caused the teacher lady to run out. As soon as I saw that happen, I ran inside and ended up running into a really annoying bug that's happened to me a few times throughout this game. Basically, I was standing in the doorway when the teacher tried to walk back in and the game got stuck with her in a walking animation and me blocking her way with no way for me to move or interact with anything. So I had to revert to an earlier save and lost a small chunk of progress.

 

And that's about where I stopped playing. It shouldn't take me too long to redo that last portion and get back to where I was and once I do, I'll finish exploring Knuttin Atoll and see if I can finish off the diving competition and get that trophy. 

[syntheticgerbil]

Man, and it bugged out on you on my favorite part of the game. That's obnoxious. Thanks George Lucas.

[Udvarnoky]

Edie McClurg as Miss Rivers is spot-on casting.

[Zeusthecat]

It's been awhile but I got a couple more hours in last weekend and had quite a good time. I'm definitely finding that this game can be pretty fun if I take it in smaller doses and spread out my play time a bit.

 

Since I previously lost a chunk of progress when the game got stuck, I first had to spend some time getting back to where I was. After redoing what I had done before and getting the dunce cap again, I made another attempt to pull the fire alarm and run into the classroom while the teacher was out. Once inside the room, I was able to grab an item out of the chest of random pirate shit, after which, the teacher came back in and booted me out. So I repeated the process a few times until I got all the items I could from the chest (I think I got a parrot whistle, a magazine, a toy boat, and some kind of collectors card) and then moved on.

 

Next, I headed down to the beach where two pirates were talking and as soon as I showed up, the cannon asshole fired a cannon ball at us causing one of the pirates to run off. Apparently, if more than two pirates are ever conversing at the same time, cannon fire will rain down upon them. I chatted to the remaining pirate for a bit and talked to his two parrots (one that always tells the truth and one that always lies) and learned that the bronze hat I needed for the ultimate insult was buried under a rock along the beach. I walked around for a little bit and couldn't seem to find the area he mentioned so instead I decided to head back to Jambalaya and try to finish off the diving competition.

 

Now that I had the dunce cap, I gave the diving competition another go and got perfect scores from all the judges. However, this still wasn't enough and on the tie breaker round, Marco Pollo somehow pulled off an 11 from one of the judges and beat me. But luckily, before the rematch, the game showed a brief segment where Marco Pollo went into the changing room and oiled himself up with the baby seal oil. After seeing that, I figured I would somehow have to sabotage the baby seal oil to get Marco Pollo to fuck up. So I went through my items and eventually found that I was able to distract Marco Pollo and put the chewed up bagel thing into the oil. Then I retried the diving competition and was finally able to defeat him when a bunch of seagulls attacked him as he was doing his dive. With the diving trophy in hand, I went back to Knuttin Atoll to try to get the last piece I needed.

 

When I got back to Knuttin Atoll, I headed straight back to the pirate with the two parrots and continued trying to find the area he was referring to where the bronze hat was buried. Before long, I found that it was just off the right edge of that screen. I saw that there were a ton of rocks along the beach and separate screens for each rock so I immediately used the parrot whistle to call the parrots over. Unfortunately, each time I talked to them they flew up and then landed again in a random spot so there was no way to tell which one was the truth telling parrot when I asked which direction I needed to go. So after some experimenting, I found that I was able to give the coffee I had to one of the parrots, causing him to get all tweaked out and fidgety. Now that I could distinguish between the two, I followed the truth telling parrot's directions until I got to the rock that had the hat under it. I immediately found that the rock was too big to lift and the only obvious solution was to somehow get the cannon bastard to fire a cannon ball at the rock. Knowing that he would only fire if three or more pirates were conversing, and knowing that the only thing left in that area that I hadn't really done anything with was the puppet show booth, I figured I had to somehow get those two puppets and bring them down to the rock so I could somehow trick him into fire at us. So I went back over to the puppets and after talking to them a few times and trying a bunch of items with the dude and each of his puppets, I was eventually able to scare him off by showing him my map to the ultimate insult. Then, I picked up the puppets, headed back to the rock, and put on a little puppet show which tricked the dude into firing at us and got me the hat I needed.

 

After doing all that, we headed back to Melee Island and some cutscenes ensued. Basically, LeChuck got elected governor, I got all my shit taken from me, and I ended up getting stranded on Monkey Island. I started exploring the beach area and gathered a few notes before making it into a clearing where Herman Toothrot had his camp set up. After talking to him for a little bit and picking up a coconut, I moved on to an area where I could drop rocks into a series of tunnels/tubes and saw that it launched the rock onto the beach. And this is about where I stopped playing.

 

For the record, I think the whole Jambalaya Island segment was really well done and was a step above anything else I've seen in the game. The puzzles all made a decent amount of sense and most of the characters were fairly interesting and not too stupid. The fact that I also didn't need or want to use a guide at any point in this section was also a testament to how well it all came together.

[Udvarnoky]

 Cool that the Jambalaya Island material rang your chimes.  Sadly, the Monkey Island stuff was probably my least favorite, but at least it doesn't have the overwhelming-ness of Lucre Island.

[Zeusthecat]

I finally completed Escape From Monkey Island! I ended up getting through rest of the game using only a couple hints along the way and quite enjoyed the last act of the game.

 

When I resumed from where I had left off, I first continued exploring all of the areas available to me. From the rock tunnel area, I moved on to the church of LeChuck and talked to father Rasputin for a little while before testing out his matrimonial lava log ride. Once I was done there, I briefly checked out the lava fields and didn't see anything of significance that I could interact with. Finally, I checked out the canyon/mine shaft area and found Herman's banana picker by a cactus. There wasn't anything I could do in the mine shaft itself yet but I did make note of a big door at the end of the shaft with a closable vent and another open slot at the top of the door.

 

Since I now had the banana picker, I decided to head back to the beach and grab some bananas. After using the banana picker multiple times, I was able to nab the whole bunch of bananas and found that when I fed one to Timmy, he followed me around to whatever area I walked to. So I walked around with him for a little while and we eventually made our way back over to the mine shaft area. Once we were both in the shaft, I thought that I might be able to get Timmy to go through that vent in the door and open it from the inside or something like that. So I tried using a banana with the open vent and was able to lure him inside where he just stood there doing nothing. When I saw that he was just sitting there, I tried closing the bottom door and then used another banana with the top opening. This caused Timmy to jump up to the banana which resulted in some kind of lever getting pulled and the door being opened. There was a giant pipe behind the door that I followed until I found myself in some kind of room with a bunch of gears. I picked up a weed whipper that was lying in the gears (I think I had to use the banana grabber for this), and poked around at the various gears and gauges before heading back out.

 

At this point, it didn't seem like there was anything else I could do on this side of the island aside from messing around with the rocks and rock tunnels some more. So I went back over there and started tossing rocks down each of the tunnels. I did this for several minutes and noticed that despite there being three tunnels I could throw the rocks down, they always got launched out of either the farthest left or farthest right ramp. So I mixed it up a little bit and started trying to see if I could throw multiple rocks with the right timing to try to get them to knock into each other and change course towards the middle tunnel. As I kept attempting this, I eventually got two of them to hit but still didn't end up getting one of them to go down the middle ramp. However, I did happen to notice that when I got them to successfully hit, it just happened to coincide with me throwing the second rock right as the first rock was going past one of those twig things on the track. This ended up being the big hint I needed and it wasn't long before I was able to throw rocks in the correct sequence and with the correct timing to finally get one of them to go down the middle ramp. With this ramp, the rock ended up landing in the lava field and I immediately headed back to the church of LeChuck to take another log ride.

 

After jumping in the log for another go and exiting into the lava fields, I tried steering my log towards where the boulder had landed. I ended up successfully making my way towards the boulder and bumping into it which got me to come to a stop in a small lava pool. I disembarked and immediately noticed some weeds growing by the pool. So I pulled out my weed whipper and got rid of them, causing the ground beneath the lava pool to give way and send lava pouring down the mine shaft and into the gear system where I had found the weed whipper. Once I had done that, I continued on to check out the new areas available to me.

 

First, I went over to the monkey village and chatted with Jojo the talking monkey. After learning a number of things from him, he introduced me to Monkey Kombat. His instructions on how to go about beating other contestants at monkey kombat were quite confusing and I only really got a vague idea of what I needed to do but I at least learned that Jojo would give me his hat if I could defeat him. Once I was finished talking with Jojo, I checked out the rest of the monkey village and spent a little bit of time trying to figure out how to get the accordion from an accordion playing monkey in one of the huts. Since there wasn't anything I could do yet to get it, I continued on to check out the next area.

 

Next, I went over to the area with the giant monkey head. I messed around a little bit and ended up discovering that I could use the banana picker with the nose to open its mouth. Then I went through a passage inside the mouth and ended up in a control room with all kinds of levers and gauges. Nothing seemed to be working so after some poking around, I left the area and decided to start fighting some monkeys. Also, at some point in this process, Guybrush made a comment indicating that I could use the giant monkey head to make another ultimate insult. Seeing as how I already had the monkey head and the gold banana picker (shaped like a man), it looked like I would be good to go once I got Jojo's bronze hat.

 

After leaving the monkey head area, I approached a monkey and started my first session of monkey kombat. It didn't go so well and I didn't quite understand what was going on so I decided to look at a guide to get me through this session (plus I had seen it mentioned multiple times how irritating this part was). After reading through the guide, I had a solid understanding of how monkey kombat was supposed to work and grabbed a pen and paper to start recording what defeated what and what combinations were used to switch between the various stances. Surprisingly, I kind of enjoyed going through this process and I thought it was pretty neat if a little unnecessarily complicated (although if I hadn't looked at a guide I could see how it would have been frustrating trying to figure out how it worked based on Jojo's description). It took me a good chunk of time to battle each monkey and learn most of the moves but once I had done so, I made quick work of Jojo and his lesser monkeys. I even managed to take a sweet screenshot of my monkey kombat note sheet!

 

Once I had emerged victorious, I was given Jojo's bronze hat which I immediately took over to the giant monkey head to complete the ultimate insult. Unfortunately, I couldn't get anything to happen after doing so, so I spent the next 15 minutes or so luring monkey after monkey over to the giant monkey head to see if that would cause the 'monkey meter' inside the giant monkey head to fill up. After I had lured about ten monkeys over and gotten no results I moved on to see if I could figure out what I was missing.

 

After some wandering, I eventually ended up back at the church of LeChuck and noticed a couple tiny shields I had missed earlier. I couldn't reach them so I went back to grab the banana picker from the monkey head and was able to get the shields using that. Once they were in my inventory, I saw that they looked exactly like tiny symbols and immediately ran back to the monkey village to find that I could exchange them for the accordion. Unfortunately, this still left me stuck and I spent quite a bit of time searching around the island and throwing the accordion and other objects at Herman Toothrot's head before finally deciding to look at a guide again. After reading through the section I was on, I was surprised to see that I had missed a milk bottle in the lava field area that was supposed to be one of the objects I needed to throw at Herman to restore his memory. So I went back to the lava field and noticed a little unrecognizable blob on one of the rocks that I assumed was the bottle I needed. From there, I went back to the church, jumped back in the log and rode around until the lava logs had been knocked into the right spots, giving me a path to reach the milk bottle. As I floated by, I was able to grab it with the banana picker and finally had the last item I needed to restore Herman's memory and finish off this section of the game.

 

With all the objects in hand, I went back over to Herman and started tossing the three necessary items at his head. Despite trying over a dozen times and trying to talk to him in between, I got no responses even though I verified that I was using the correct objects in the correct order. So I did a quick Google search and found that I had encountered a potentially game breaking bug. Most of what I read indicated that I would need to restore a save from before Herman got in that state (which I had overwritten at that point) but a couple people said that it could be fixed by just throwing the coconut at him multiple times until he started giving the correct responses. Luckily, that ended up working for me and I was able to restore his memory and learn that he was actually Elaine's grandfather and was responsible for Ozzie Mandrill's bullshit. He eventually gave me the gubernatorial seal which was the last item I needed and I ran straight back to the monkey head and inserted it into the control panel slot, kicking off the last section of the game.

 

A bunch of cutscenes proceeded after wrapping up the Monkey Island segment followed by a brief part where I had to use a board with a short tower to be able to navigate to the top of a larger tower (the ultimate insult amplification device) and flip a switch to turn it off. Then I saw some more cutscenes and finally ended up in the last segment of the game where I had to battle a giant statue of LeChuck with my robot monkey. I started battling like normal but after several minutes, I realized I was getting nowhere and both of our health bars were pretty much where they started. So I looked back at the walkthrough again and saw that I needed to just copy whatever stance he went to three times in a row to win the fight. After doing that I finally defeated LeChuck and watched the closing cutscene and credits.

 

My overall feelings on this game are mixed. I think the music and voice acting was generally pretty great but a lot of other things were really hit or miss. First, the humor was dry at best and downright pathetic at worst. I think this was the worst part of the game and actually made the overall experience worse by being so lame. On the puzzle side, I feel like there were more good puzzles than bad puzzles. Some of my favorite puzzles were the rock tunnel puzzle on Monkey Island, the diving competition puzzle on Jambalaya island (and most of the other puzzles on that island for that matter), and a few of the random lesser Melee island puzzles. Lucre Island, however, was a fucking abomination and had enough lame puzzles and humor going on to make it hard to focus entirely on the positive aspects. The story was decent enough but with it being so closely tied to the humor aspect of the game, I ended up feeling indifferent about it, if slightly negative. Finally, I kind of liked the polygonal graphics at first but ended up hating it by the end. These games just look and feel so much better with the 2d graphics from the first three games. Despite all of this, I think my opinion of this game is very slightly on the positive side. There was enough that I liked that I'm glad I stuck with it.

[Zeusthecat]

And The Big LucasArts Playthrough is officially concluded! This was a truly awesome experience getting to play through so many amazing games while sharing my experience with the excellent people on this forum. I know it dragged on for a few months longer than it probably should have at the end but I think taking the last game in shorter doses over a longer period of time helped me enjoy the game a bit more and keep a more level head while going through. And seriously thank you to everyone for encouraging me to do this and helping me along as I went through this experience. I have remained a little apprehensive about whether or not I've come across as arrogant for making this kind of thread detailing all of this, but you guys have been super positive about this whole thing and have made it probably the best video game adventure I've ever had. So thank you all a million times.

 

Now that I've played through all 14 of the LucasArts graphic adventure games, one of the games stands out as my clear favorite. And that game is Secret of Monkey Island. Being my first adventure game (and my first Tim Schafer game for that matter), I was completely blown away by how clever the dialog was, how ingenious a lot of the puzzles and ideas were, and just how fucking hilarious the whole thing was. The comedic timing was just brilliant through and through and I laughed more than I had for any other video game up to that point. From the timing of the shopkeeper popping his head back into the store whenever you tried to take something, to the segment where Stan was talking up the boat he had just sold to you and had a nice long pause right as the mast broke off, to the situation with Guybrush's crew who refused to do anything but relax on the deck of the boat and take a nice caribbean vacation. But most of all, the most hilarious thing about this game was stuff like this:

 

I don't know why I find it so funny but when I see such dweeby artwork for the character cutscenes accompanying a game that is just dripping with sarcasm and humor, I can't help but think that when they were making this game, they thought it would be hilarious to make the characters look as douchy as possible in the cutscenes. I could be totally wrong but I laughed every time I saw scenes like those.

 

So from here on out, I hope others will take up the torch and use this thread to catalog their experiences with the LucasArts games. I'm sure there are plenty of other people who have never played these games and I would love to see others post about their progress and how they go about solving the puzzles in these games. I might continue to post in here from time to time and I intend to eventually play some of these games again so if I do I will probably post about it here. Specifically, I still need to play through the special editions of MI 1 and 2 and try one of the other paths in Fate of Atlantis. But for now, I am moving on to some other games(Walking Dead from Telltale is next on my list).

[syntheticgerbil]

That's not exactly the original art though, it was kind of given the Princess Bride treatment by the 256 color team. I don't think Ron Gilbert was too satisfied with it, going by something he said on his blog a few years ago. However I find them pretty similar even though Steve P.'s original EGA artwork is somewhat less realistic. Not anywhere as drastic as the switch between that and the Special Edition.

 

Also funny you wrote Monkey Kombat like that, that's how I did it first playthrough I remember. Later I used this:

The PS2 version pretty much does half of that for you, and it's probably for the better. The last puzzle still makes no god damn sense to me. Why does LeChuck crush Ozzie because of a draw? What?

I'd personally say maybe move on to Season 1 of Sam and Max or Tales of Monkey before you bother with those special editions.