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Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

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Re: Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

#111

Post by unixhero »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #25
esperent wrote: post #3

I've been playing Thimbleweed Park on Android recently. In general I do love point and click puzzle games but my feelings on this one are very mixed. * The writing is hit or miss * The story is just serviceable * Only about 20% of the jokes land for me * The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad And then there's the puzzles. Maybe I made a mistake in selecting hard mode at the start but it's got the worst of the gen…

> there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters Are multiple/simultaneous playable characters a common feature of adventure game design from LucasArts alum? I played Broken Age and thought the idea was novel, but recently played through Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated. So many people say that a…

Yes it is a thing. Maniac Mansion, Day Of The Tentacle, Zak McKraken and The Alien Mindbenders, The Dig

Re: Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

#112

Post by RobM71 »

madamelic wrote: post #43

Not enmeshed in game development and have only done it very lightly: what takes a game like this 1.5 - 2 years to finish? Like at a minimum, it's art, sound, graphics, and programming. If they are re-using assets, that's one of them ~done. So what's taking them 2 years? My background is in SaaS type stuff and if I went to who hired me and said it would take 2 years to build out a non-cutting edge product I am pretty…

It's just like when during development the client/the users realize the system can do more and better, so the specs are changed because it makes a lot of sense to do that. Game dev is always like that: you won't realize what works and what doesn't until you can actually playtest the game... then you'll think of fixes and you'll have to go back implementing them.

Re: Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

#113

Post by bsder »

esperent wrote: post #3

I've been playing Thimbleweed Park on Android recently. In general I do love point and click puzzle games but my feelings on this one are very mixed. * The writing is hit or miss * The story is just serviceable * Only about 20% of the jokes land for me * The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad And then there's the puzzles. Maybe I made a mistake in selecting hard mode at the start but it's got the worst of the gen…

I feel like people give Ron Gilbert way too much credit. His writing seems just mediocre at best. One big problem is that Ron Gilbert can't write an ending for crap. A meta-ending is interesting or surprising maybe once. After that, you're a hack writer.

And, honestly, I liked the art of the last Monkey Island. I thought the "ugly" art fit the pirate theme really well. The writing and puzzles--not so much.

My guess is that the stuff I like best about Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island is probably the result of Tim Schafer rather than Ron Gilbert.

I won't buy into another Ron Gilbert thing unless I've got people I trust raving about it first.

Re: Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

#114

Post by vanderZwan »

esperent wrote: post #3

I've been playing Thimbleweed Park on Android recently. In general I do love point and click puzzle games but my feelings on this one are very mixed. * The writing is hit or miss * The story is just serviceable * Only about 20% of the jokes land for me * The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad And then there's the puzzles. Maybe I made a mistake in selecting hard mode at the start but it's got the worst of the gen…

> The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad

IMO Ron Gilbert's biggest weakness as a writer is mainly that he has a tendency to use fourth wall breaking for everything, including the final plot twist in most of his games. It was there in his originally planned ending for The Secret of Monkey Island. That ending sort of came back as the actual ending of Monkey Island 2. Then Monkey Island 3, which didn't involve Gilbert, soft-retconned the previous game's ending, then three games later Ron Gilbert came back for Return to Monkey Island and basically retconned everything to use the original ending he planned for the first game!

And I think the main problem with it is that it tends to make the writing feel like the author doesn't dare to admit that they love the world that they created. It's kind of like how some teenagers discover sarcasm and use it everywhere because it makes them feel more "mature" than younger kids who don't understand it yet, without realizing it actually makes it very obvious to everyone else that they are masking their insecurities by acting "edgy".

To me, Gilbert's tendency for 4th wall breaking often ends up feeling similar, like the story is trying to be self-deprecating to mask insecurities about its own writing (and also, it just feels like a total cop-out to avoid writing a ending that ties all the absurd plot threads together into a satisfying pay-off).

Thimbleweed Park had that problem for me, and it kind of soured me on the ending.

Now, I don't want to suggest that the meta stuff is inherently bad. In fact, the ending of Return to Monkey Island actually was pretty satisfying to me. Mainly because of Elaine. At some point there is a very blatantly fourth-wall breaking dialogue you have with her, but unlike other times it feels more like an honest reflection on nostalgia for old adventure series, its stale tropes, how that represents growing older and having to accept that things change or be stunted forever. And it comes back at the ending in a way that makes it very clear that the implied message is "yeah it's all make-belief nonsense, it has flaws, and it's also fine to admit that you love it anyway". You're Guybrush Threepwood with a loving wife who keeps you grounded despite yourself, and the fourth wall breaking doesn't take that away. It's meta but it's sincere meta.

So I guess Gilbert's a fine writer as long as he manages to keep the fourth wall breaking grounded in sincerity. Return to Monkey Island came out five years after Thimbleweed Park, so maybe Thimbleweed Park 2 will have a similar nuance to it. I hope it does.

Re: Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

#115

Post by account42 »

Razengan wrote: post #39
dark-star wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though Monkey Island now has a real (i.e. canonical) ending, it sucks. I prefer the original continuation of MI3 to the 25-years-late official, canonical sequel

It's not just the ending, but the flat humor, the lazy puzzles (like clicking multiple times on multiple objects to open the porthole) and the meagre number of interactions on each of the islands after the first one.. It's like his heart just wasn't in it anymore It felt like a "ehh let's get this over with" at best or a medium-effort nostalgia-pandering money grab at worst.

It's not even decent nostalgia-pandering, more like an expression of disdain towards the fanbase complete with "art" that can only have been designed to offend.

Re: Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

#116

Post by anonreplier »

pezezin wrote: post #110
Teever wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, the genre died because of the rise of 3D graphics and Microsoft’s push into the console market with Xbox and Halo. The whole industry changed when the Xbox came to town. Microsoft really fostered that bro gamer culture to sell Xboxes to normies and fast paced violent games took over to the detriment of other genres and styles of play. I’m really pleased to see a bit of a revival of adventure games because I thin…

Graphical adventure games were already dead before the Xbox even arrived, and besides that the first Xbox was not that popular outside North America so it could not have affected other regions.

They may have been dead by the original xbox, but they definitely had a pulse at the time of the original ps1

Re: Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

#117

Post by agos »

tarkin2 wrote: post #103
agos wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's clearly in that direction (and that's fine), but I would debate the "effort" part

The link given elsewhere here about the multi-layered aspect of the stories from 1, 2 and RMI gives it a bit more depth. Obviously if you take it on the surface level only it's low effort.

that's a nice fan theory which does involve some very real elements from the game (the meta narrative, the genre awareness, the nearly constant fourth wall breaking, the multiple layers, the ambiguity) but speculates a lot and veers towards some wild hypothesis ("Stan is LeChuck" makes no sense however you put it).

I do appreciate the multi layered aspect, and it's the number one element which keeps me coming back to MI games, and I especially appreciated the way in which RMI felt like a fading dream, with stuff being ever more "slightly off" than before.

But if this is indeed the intended "meaning" of the whole thing, the authors didn't do a great job at it. We get only bits and pieces of this purported hidden "reality", and on the other side we have a couple of very easy to read narrative levels where The Secret is clearly a MacGuffin (a trope the authors love: see the rewards for the three trials, and the treasure being literally called "Big whoop"), the absurdity and the anachronisms are the point, and once it's over the only thing they can say is... the game is over, now turn this off and go do something more interesting, which is a nice joke and sufficiently meta. The issue is that it's ok the first time, but after the third time it's an overused trope

Re: Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

#118

Post by agos »

wisdomseaker wrote: post #9

Hmm I don't remember completing the first and other than finding the phone amusing I don't remember much else about it. Will await reviews once done but if anyone hasn't played The drifter yet that is worth checking out

why didn't I know about this! thanks for the rec, it looks great

Re: Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

#119

Post by agos »

vanderZwan wrote: post #114
esperent wrote: post #3

I've been playing Thimbleweed Park on Android recently. In general I do love point and click puzzle games but my feelings on this one are very mixed. * The writing is hit or miss * The story is just serviceable * Only about 20% of the jokes land for me * The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad And then there's the puzzles. Maybe I made a mistake in selecting hard mode at the start but it's got the worst of the gen…

> The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad IMO Ron Gilbert's biggest weakness as a writer is mainly that he has a tendency to use fourth wall breaking for everything, including the final plot twist in most of his games. It was there in his originally planned ending for The Secret of Monkey Island. That ending sort of came back as the actual ending of Monkey Island 2. Then Monkey Island 3, which didn't involve Gilbe…

thanks for putting this in words much better than I could. I truly appreciated the bittersweet finale of RMI which told us all "hey you've grown up you have a family now, we all know this is fake, but you still love it and it's endearing that you care about this, even knowing if there's no big payoff or grand reveal of the secret"

Re: Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

#120

Post by hnal943 »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #102
hnal943 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man if your example of weak video game writing is Monkey Island I think you're going to be disappointed a lot.

Was my favorite game for a long period as a kid and I loved it then, I'm saying if it looked at the same thing today without that nostalgia without what felt magic about it.

I definitely agree that so much of the magic of gaming during that era was moving from the command prompt to seeing the computer explode with color and sound. That said, the thing my friends and I enjoyed the most about Monkey Island was reading the dialog out loud to each other, like a play. The dialog might be childish (we were children) but I think it was pretty funny.
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