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When I made another Monkey Island

grumpygamer.com

51–60 of 215 posts

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#51

old 2d scumm is my favorite engine. with all its weird stuff going on, the amount of imagination it has unleashed is next to magical. its like the amiga500 or c64. there is something about being limited as a creative person which sparks imagination. certain "things" do it better or worse. scumm should be seen as an instrument, not a tool.

An old art teacher of mine once said "art is creativity expressed under constraints".

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#52
post #20

lucasarts had a string of hits that are timeless, dig, day of the tentacle, sam and max[had own tv show], and full throttle. great single player games that didn't require fast user clicks. you can go at your own pace. it was like the studio Ghibli of the 90s

> sam and max[had own tv show]

Sam and Max was a 80s-90s comic by Steve Purcell[0], who was also a LucasArts employee at the time. You will recognize his art style in several Monkey Island scenes.

Anyway the point is that the tv show was not based on the videogame which you seem to be implying, but on the comic instead.

The comic series is artistically amazing. Purcell is a master of setting an atmosphere. It's also meant to be comedic but the humor is mainly cartoon violent slapstick mixed with pop culture references (of the time). It's dated by now.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Purcell

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#54
post #49

The Curse of Monkey Island is my favorite game, I am honored to read this post and blog. Thanks HN! I still remember the part of the game where Guybrush was stuck in a quicksand, I remember it took me days to figure the solution out.

It's my favorite game too, this game takes me back to wonderful childhood memories. Ironically that puzzle was the one of the easiest for me to solve

Awesome then! I could not remember that single thing I forgot to collect for that puzzle, maybe it was the gum? I dunno but I enjoyed it a lot. Fun memories.

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#55

When you read posts like this, and also the previous, linked one [1], you can clearly see that Ron is a smart and humble guy. I really dislike the fan mob that it's starting the hate because RTMI is not going to be a throwback and retro-game. > Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of- the-art tech and art. This is SO true, and as much as I loved those games, as much as I stopped…

Ron Gilbert making a modern MI is like Metallica cutting their hair for these fans.

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#56
post #28

When you read posts like this, and also the previous, linked one [1], you can clearly see that Ron is a smart and humble guy. I really dislike the fan mob that it's starting the hate because RTMI is not going to be a throwback and retro-game. > Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of- the-art tech and art. This is SO true, and as much as I loved those games, as much as I stopped…

What was special about the first two Monkey Island games (at least for me) was the atmosphere . I mean, just look at this screenshot: https://www.adventurecorner.de//uploads/images/games/monkey1... Parts 1 and 2 had this effect on me, with part 3 the magic was mostly gone unfortunately. If Return to Monkey Island manages to recapture some of that, I don't care if it's pixel art or whatever else...

Oh! I am glad to see the atmosphere aspect of MI emphasized! I played these games as a preteen, and much of the humor went above my head (non-native speaker). It was the atmosphere, the setting and the characters that made me love the games, especially the first one. I spent so much time on Melee Island; the eerie forest, the voodoo lady, the jail, the docks... these places and people made a tremendous impression on young me.

EDIT: Oh, and how can I forget the music!

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it was still clearly low-res. CRTs and smaller screen sized helped, but you could still see the pixels.

Indeed, you could see the pixels, but that was all it was. Advanced games used antialiasing to lessen the blocky effect. You only could dream of a future where graphics are "paper like" without pixels. At that moment, it didn't fill like low-res, at all. 320x200 256 colors was the bleeding edge of computer graphics. Later on, some games started appearing with 640x480.

That's also why I can't stand some of the modern pixel-games. They are too blocky and doesn't work well on modern screens. Using blocky graphics is not "retro" at all. It's more an artistic impression of how they think old games looked like.

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#58
post #26

This reminded me of the amusing way the leas character (Guybrush) was named. Obligatory wiki linkage [1] but basically due to a Deluxe Paint filename convention. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guybrush_Threepwood

Read it from the man himself - and also common myths around the filename: https://grumpygamer.com/guybrush_fact_fiction

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#59

When you read posts like this, and also the previous, linked one [1], you can clearly see that Ron is a smart and humble guy. I really dislike the fan mob that it's starting the hate because RTMI is not going to be a throwback and retro-game. > Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of- the-art tech and art. This is SO true, and as much as I loved those games, as much as I stopped…

Fan culture in the age of twitter is so polluted with loud minorities.

Re: When I made another Monkey Island

#60

When you read posts like this, and also the previous, linked one [1], you can clearly see that Ron is a smart and humble guy. I really dislike the fan mob that it's starting the hate because RTMI is not going to be a throwback and retro-game. > Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of- the-art tech and art. This is SO true, and as much as I loved those games, as much as I stopped…

> I really dislike the fan mob that it's starting the hate because RTMI is not going to be a throwback and retro-game.

That is the same blow-back that George Lucas caught when he made the Star Wars prequels. When George Lucas made the original Star Wars he set out to make a state-of-art sci-fi movie, and in fact he pushed the state-of-art ahead by a huge leap in that movie. A decade or two later, with the evolution of cinema effects, the original trilogy stopped being seen as state-of-art, but kept its cultural influence now under a new lens, it started being seen as a type of retro-futurism. So when George Lucas set out to make the prequels, he again intended to make state-of-art sci-fi movies*, as is his right, and as he should, but many of the fans instead wanted the new trilogy to match the retro-futurism feel they now assigned to the original ones, hence the many complaints at the time.

Interestingly enough, later when Disney made the sequels they went the other way completely, and bet heavily on the retro-futurism feel (down even to the story arcs), so they got blow-back from the fans that instead wanted a state-of-art sci-fi.

* If he achieved that state-of-art goal is debatable, my personal opinion he did, but just barely, failing to leap forward like the original did on its time, so they do feel a bit like "generic late 90s/early 00s sci-fi".*

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