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Happy Birthday Monkey Island

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51–60 of 123 posts

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the Indiana Jones games. Fate of Atlantis was a great game. There is also Beneath a Steel Sky which is fantastic and now free. http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Beneath_a_Steel_Sky

Did you ever play "Martian Memorandum", one of the Tex Murphy series?

Hadn't come across them. Will take a look. Thanks.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#52
post #2

"I don’t know if I will ever get to make another Monkey Island. I always envisioned the game as a trilogy and I really hope I do, but I don’t know if it will ever happen. Monkey Island is now owned by Disney and they haven't shown any desire to sell me the IP. I don’t know if I could make Monkey Island 3a without complete control over what I was making and the only way to do that is to own it. Disney: Call me." I won…

His current Kickstarter project, Thimbleweed Park, looks very similar in tone, humour and gameplay. I really have high hopes for it. Maybe if it's successful it will prove that there is still a market for "retro" adventure games and help give Disney a prod in the right direction. That was certainly my hope when I backed it, anyway...

I hope you're right. However, I think Broken Age that even in the best possible conditions, there's just no real market for classic adventure games beyond the fanatics willing to kickstart it out of nostalgia (like me). At least, there's no market large enough that would make Disney reconsider its position.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#53
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MI 1 & 2 support several lectures of the story. Due to Guybrush inability to explain his real age and various weird occurrences, it can be read as a little kid snooping around a theme park. It explains why he has to think that hard before giving his age, why a tshirt would be a treasure given after vanquishing a sword-master, why some areas are closed off with modern looking out of order signs, etc. It can also be re…

The thing is that whatever Gilbert thinks about it, the ending of MI2 sucked. MI2 was genuinely scary in places ( http://monkeyisland.wikia.com/wiki/Screaming_Chair ), and the revelation that it was all a daydream just made everything you've done up to that point feel completely pointless. This put the writers of Curse in a difficult position, and although their solution was a bit awkward, I can't really see that the…

I agree, while I wouldn't say it outright sucked, it was a bit disappointing. In fact, when I played it as a child I literally had no idea what was going on. I guess it was doubly confusing for me because Curse was the first Monkey Island game I played! Perhaps that's why I don't think too hard about it, I love all of the games and readily overlook the inconsistencies in the story.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#54
Has anyone played Broken Age? It's nowhere near as difficult as the adventure games of old, it feels more of a casual adventure game, but the story, characters, art and voice acting are superb. My favourite game genre by far, happy birthday Monkey Island!

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#55

Ah... Monkey Island. I have such fond memories of not just MI, but also other Lucasarts/Sierra adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, Sam&Max, Full Throttle, Willy Beamish, King's Quest, Space Quest, etc. I owe a large part (if not most!) of my English skills to these games. Recently, I bought my daughter an old '99 ibook Clamshell on a yard sale. I upgraded the RAM and substituted the hard drive for a CompactFlas…

I realise my comment won't add much to the discussion, but Day of the Tentacle was a masterpiece.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#56

Ah... Monkey Island. I have such fond memories of not just MI, but also other Lucasarts/Sierra adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, Sam&Max, Full Throttle, Willy Beamish, King's Quest, Space Quest, etc. I owe a large part (if not most!) of my English skills to these games. Recently, I bought my daughter an old '99 ibook Clamshell on a yard sale. I upgraded the RAM and substituted the hard drive for a CompactFlas…

> Most of these games are free downloads these days

Not legally, just conveniently.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#57

If anyone is unaware, they've got some pretty good versions of MI 1 and 2 on the Apple App store. I played it on my iPad a couple of years ago, and it was great. The adventure format works really well on a tablet. You can even play with updated graphics or in classic mode. Easily worth the 10 bucks or however much it costed.

Unfortunately Disney pulled the iOS versions from the App Store in April.

https://help.disney.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/About-The-Secret-...

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#58
post #49

Ah... Monkey Island. I have such fond memories of not just MI, but also other Lucasarts/Sierra adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, Sam&Max, Full Throttle, Willy Beamish, King's Quest, Space Quest, etc. I owe a large part (if not most!) of my English skills to these games. Recently, I bought my daughter an old '99 ibook Clamshell on a yard sale. I upgraded the RAM and substituted the hard drive for a CompactFlas…

Me too. I learned english "by force" by playing basically Monkey Island and Indiana Jones series. Funny thing is that I played them a lot in pair. I would go to a friend's house and we would play together, even if is essentially a one player game. One that infuriated me was King's Quest, the one that you could type anything you want the character to do. Such a powerful potential, but I took days just to discover the…

I think "take" worked. Sierra games had extremely limited vocabularies, of course. The Infocom games and later those by Magnetic Scrolls were much more advanced at natural language parsing; you could type "put key in bottle", and if you had several bottles it would ask you "Which bottle?" and you could simply answer "the green bottle". Wish I could think of more examples, but it's been a long time.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought these were all DOS-based (Intel CPU) games... How are you running these on a PowerPC/G3?

They are mostly pre-intel based games, as Apple switched to Intel in 2002. They are free for download through sites like macintoshgarden.org. Otherwise I use an emulator (Basilisk/SheepShaver) on my own PC/Mac.

Nitpick: The Intel switch was in 2006.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#60
post #10
post #2

"I don’t know if I will ever get to make another Monkey Island. I always envisioned the game as a trilogy and I really hope I do, but I don’t know if it will ever happen. Monkey Island is now owned by Disney and they haven't shown any desire to sell me the IP. I don’t know if I could make Monkey Island 3a without complete control over what I was making and the only way to do that is to own it. Disney: Call me." I won…

There is no other way. MI is too close to the Pirates of the Caribbeans franchise to let anyone run wild with it. Disney will keep it as buried as possible, and strictly under control. Ron is publicly begging for it (and not even for the first time) because all other avenues have failed. It's easy to predict nothing will change as long as Johnny Depp is alive and working.

Related bit of trivia: MI was heavily inspired by Tim Powers' novel "On Stranger Tides" (which is a classic piece of secret history, involving Blackbeard, the Fountain of Youth, and of course zombie pirates). For the newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, they bought the rights to the novel -- but pretty much the only thing they kept from the book was the title and the Blackbeard character. Everything else has been changed, for the worse. (So much worse.) So Disney's two pirate franchises are related, in a weird way.
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