Day of the Tentacle Special Edition

[Udvarnoky]

The fact that Double Fine is referring to this as a "Special Edition" as opposed to the "Remastered" moniker they attached to Grim is pointed, so I'm going to speculate that they're at least planning a Monkey Island style overhaul.  Which is what's going to make the F5 key so important.

 

I will previse that whatever Double Fine does to the art that we're all going to judge as a failed experiment is bound to be more interesting than Monkey Island, though I really thought that what the Temple of Doom slave kids out in Singapore came up with for LeChuck's Revenge wasn't bad.  Fans will live longer if they start treating these new versions as alternatives rather than replacements, and if Double Fine is offering the classic mode toggle for a facelift as unobtrusive as Grim's, you have to think they'll preserve DOTT in the same way.

[Ben X]

Incidentally, when I said I'd like to see Peter Chan painted backgrounds, I wasn't referring to using his concept art. It could be any of the talented artists at DF doing new backgrounds, but I just threw PC into the wishlist as it'd be interesting to have him revisit this stuff.

 

What I imagine when I think of a special edition is faith to the original intent, not to the lines of the existing art. So I'd like a DOTT:SE to look like an interactive Chuck Jones cartoon, Full Throttle to look like a Mike Mignola strip (while retaining the flavours of Peter Chan et al of the original). A blando paint-over is a huge waste of an opportunity and shows a certain lack of appreciation for the original art, imo. For example, compare the fake puke in the original and then that HD paint-over -in the former, you can see all the little chunks, it's tangible; in the latter, it looks like a flat pancake or maybe even a light fixture. 

[sclpls]

You could probably honestly solve any perceived lack of noise or texture by literally introducing some noise or a subtle texture on top. A light grain goes a long way.

I don't think Peter Chan does final production art anymore - he's just a concept and idea guy, by choice, as far as I can tell - so I wouldn't get my hopes up for him painting backgrounds for the game.

Assuming they're going down the "redo assets in HD" route at all, I hope this game looks exactly like DOTT with some "filling in the details," but hopefully beyond that it's left alone. In motion it won't need more than that. Especially once camera scrolling is smooth, ambience and music are pumped up, etc.

PS: if this project means we get a live, McConnell-directed, old cartoon style symphonic performance of the DOTT theme, then it's worth it regardless of anything else.

 

I agree with this. I think the game holds up pretty favorably compared to other adventure games from that era, and I'm hoping they use a light touch with whatever updates they do.

[syntheticgerbil]

As long as they include the original version (which hopefully they will), I'd rather they did something more interesting even if it's not wholly successful. I felt like the MI:SE's had the same (and many more!) problems as this paintover...

In my head there's no reason to include the original version if the new assets are true to the original like an upres type version. Would be easier to do with Day of the Tentacle because it was already so detailed with large sprites and all, compared to the Monkey Island games.

 

I think scanning the Peter Chan backgrounds might produce some odd results and may be more work than touching up the older backgrounds to be higher res. Just lookin ga little bit harder at the one posted you can see where he purposefully fudged a lot of the drawing since it's ultimately scanned for 320x240. Like, along with the nicer looking natural brush texture, you can also see uneven brush or marker strokes in the darks and a lot of the painting is very chunky and it would look pretty amateurish scanned in the game as is.

 

Anyway, that HD paintover from earlier is a fan made thing right? I'd assume the talented folks at Double Fine would have an easier time breathing life into doing the same things but using a softer or slightly more textured brush to separate the floor tiles and things instead of just a vector hard straight line.

[Udvarnoky]

If the rumors that Disney had begun work on a DOTT remake of their own a few years back are true, I'm assuming Double Fine's team would have access to the assets they had come up with.  I have a morbid curiosity about what it was going to look like.

[Ben X]

In my head there's no reason to include the original version if the new assets are true to the original like an upres type version. Would be easier to do with Day of the Tentacle because it was already so detailed with large sprites and all, compared to the Monkey Island games.

 

I think it would be nice for the original to be made available at the same time regardless, but yeah there would be less reason to do so if they're just going to "add a pixel here and there", which is what Tim told Polygon recently (although he frames this as the opposite of going 3D, so it's still unclear exactly how close to the original they're hewing)...

[Vainamoinen]

The Polygon article also calls the game "Remastered", not "Special Edition", and communicates extremely lowered expectations as to the effort they will put in the update. So it seems rather certain that we'll see something like the Grim Fandango Remastered edition regardless of the name. Now, don't get me wrong, I'd be first in line at bandcamp to purchase an orchestral DoTT soundtrack, but I don't really need a DoTT Criterion Edition. Double Fine had better put a good deal of effort in a real remake or just push out a re-release.

 

That also answers the question whether 'faithful remake' or 'reboot' would be favorable to me. I still have a working DoTT CD version thanks to ScummVM, so switching to the old version via F5 wouldn't make sense to me. I'm playing for the nostalgia, sure, but I can have full nostalgia whenever I like, so I'm primarily playing for the things which changed. High res graphics, smooth animation, wide screen – heck, I'd even accept a proper verb coin in an instant.

[Tanukitsune]

If I can't "pick up" people, I'll be very upset. 

[Udvarnoky]

The Polygon article also calls the game "Remastered", not "Special Edition", and communicates extremely lowered expectations as to the effort they will put in the update.

 

All it communicated to me was that things are so early that Double Fine doesn't know what it's going to be yet.

[Ben X]

Their official images have called it Special Edition - it seems that the "Remastered" confusion is wholly down to Polygon. But it's still all very ambiguous as to what the extent of it will be. 

 

I hope they include the original version (though I already own it), but also that they don't compromise the new version in order to incorporate a MI:SE style F5-to-switch function.

[Udvarnoky]

Was it really the fact that it was built on top of SCUMM that was responsible for the Monkey Island compromises?  I think the animations that were light on frames and the leftover pixels were more the product of a time/effort deficiency than a tech one.

[Ben X]

Yeah, I mean, I guess it should be possible to have animations with more frames running in one version and still be able to swap over, for example. I'm not saying they would have to compromise in order to include the swap function, just that I hope they don't!

[Udvarnoky]

Perhaps the best approach is to make this a special edition in terms of absurd amounts of bonus content and do little to the game itself.

 

How likely is it that the original voice files even exist anymore?  You think they would have bothered preserving the stuff from the MONSTER.SOU days?  Sound might be the best aspect to focus on.

[syntheticgerbil]

I think the Lucas SEs ran at 30fps or at least 24, and that it just depending on how much whoever was animating in the original game wanted to draw. But I think things like screen scrolling were moving at around 15 fps, at least that's what it seemed to me. The Special Editions definitely moved many animations up to the full 30 with the screen scrolling, lighting and water effects they added on top as well as the double framed walk cycles in MI2, but they also tended to sometimes skip over some of the frames originally made or they just looked weird and stiff because they used 3D model Guybrush. I guess it was all down to time and budget. Don't know if you could push 60 fps in Scumm for screen scrolling or whatever else, but I'd rather Day of the Tentacle just keep the same frame count for all of the animations since the game looks fine the way it is I think. I don't know, maybe if it's in the hands of Double Fine animators, it might be cool to see what they come up with.

[Vainamoinen]

All it communicated to me was that things are so early that Double Fine doesn't know what it's going to be yet.

 

That may be true, but that still would be exactly what was communicated after the announcement of the Grim Fandango Remastered edition.

[BigJKO]

Sure, except the Grim Fandango announcement had a big splash with the word "Remastered" on it and Day of the Tentacle's announcement had a big splash with the words "Special Edition" on it..

[Vainamoinen]

They called it a "remaster" back then, but there was no visible "remastered" splash until much later than E3. Journalists favored the word "remake", but possibly out of mere wishful thinking.

 

Still, I see that the terminology is decidedly different and the suggestion of "Special Edition" is absolutely_clear. But I still doubt that they'll rise to anything above the Grim Fandango level.

[brkl]

Dvd special editions are not that different from the original movies...

[Dewar]

I would expect a Special Edition to contain largely the same work, with some added scenes, visual clean-up, and (in a Video game's case) modernized controls.

 

With a Remaster, I would expect very little of the original art to be there (or CG in a movie's case) but the underlying game to still be close to identical (modernizing things like controls and save files aside.)

 

With a Remake, I would expect the engine to be mostly rebuilt from scratch, basically making a brand new game using the original as a template.

[BigJKO]

I would expect a Special Edition to contain largely the same work, with some added scenes, visual clean-up, and (in a video game's case) modernized controls.

 

With a Remaster, I would expect very little of the original art to be there (or CG in a movie's case) but the underlying game to still be close to identical (modernizing things like controls and save files aside.)

 

So, you'd expect the opposite of what we've already had with Monkey Island Special Edition and have seen of Grim Fandango Remastered? 

 

[Dewar]

I never played Monkey Island, so I can't answer to that. Didn't they say they were completely redoing the art for Grim Fandango?

[BigJKO]

No. They're displaying it in HD resolution, and they up-res'ed the character textures and changed the lighting engine so the lighting looks better (this is probably the biggest actual change they've done, IMO). Apart from just making sure it looks as crisp as it can in HD, there aren't any fundamental changes happening in the art.

 

At least not compared to Monkey Island: Special Edition where they actually re-painted every background, created 3d models of every character, animating them all again, recording voice acting for all the dialogue. They changed a LOT of what Monkey Island feels like art-wise and tone-wise, whether you liked it or not.

[syntheticgerbil]

It's a weird choice, but I think they should have just called it Grim HD, since that's usually what is understood these days with other HD versions. Just an up res and new textures. Sometimes maybe some normal maps or something added, but it's very rare the original models are ever readjusted.

 

But then there's like Another World Remastered Edition which had redrawn backgrounds but the original vector work was just upresed. But then there's a new rerelease I think with the glitches from the upressed vectors fixed. I suppose there was that boring Leisure Suit Larry remake which was "reloaded."

 

So really we are going on the definition of what the Monkey Island games set for Special Edition which generally doesn't apply to games to be redrawn things, but more like a nice package and maybe some bonus DVD or extra levels included.

[Jake]

It's probably appropriate in the case of Monkey Island, as it is a Lucas product and follows the Lucas definition of Special Edition - add a bunch of CG over a surprisingly analog original work, and trample the subtle original intent and tone of most scenes in the process.

[Ben X]

Really, the industry needs to just pick a single term for an old game getting re-done in any sense, then each redo can be understood per its individual choices on release.