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Happy Birthday Monkey Island

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61–70 of 123 posts

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#61

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…

Good memories!

The Dig deserves a place on that list as well.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#62
post #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!

Broken Age looks and sounds great, but I really hated how the whole game runs on rails pretty much from the beginning. You can't wander around much, so it feels less like a world and more like a movie where you occasionally help the plot along by clicking on things.

The original LucasArts games were only occasionally like this. They invited a lot of trial and error (some of it extremely unintuitive; Zak McKracken had some of those), exploring areas you couldn't access yet, and so on. They were difficult, and they never held your hand.

Unfortunately, this dumbed-down form seems like a fairly new trend in games. (Double Fine's The Cave, which looked fantastic, failed partly because it was just too simplistic.) I suppose they are afraid of losing audiences if they are too hard.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#64
post #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!

Broken Age looks and sounds great, but I really hated how the whole game runs on rails pretty much from the beginning. You can't wander around much, so it feels less like a world and more like a movie where you occasionally help the plot along by clicking on things. The original LucasArts games were only occasionally like this. They invited a lot of trial and error (some of it extremely unintuitive; Zak McKracken had…

You're right, this isn't quite the same genre anymore, it's more of an interactive story. The trend towards simplicity has definitely crept in. I really enjoyed Broken Age, but not for quite the same reasons as the Monkey Island series.

Monkey Island 2 was incredibly frustrating at points and for whatever reason (shorter attention spans probably) there is less of a market for that type of game; people are more likely to stop playing after the first bit of difficulty.

I'd still play that old style of game because the more time it takes you to figure the puzzles out the more immersed you get in the game world, but for a lot of people that's not fun.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#65
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…

What was that like? I've never tried playing a game in a different language before. How much English did you already know before starting those games?

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#66
post #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.

Beneath a Steel Sky is completely free

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#67

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.

IMO the updated graphics are an unmitigated disaster that ignore what made the original great. Since there is a classic mode, it is still a great way to play these games.

The updated graphics work better for MI2 than MI1. That's because the MI2 graphics were scanned. (They even admit to that in the audio commentary.)

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#68
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Pirates of the Caribbean movies heavily borrowed from "On Stranger Tides" from the very first movie, so it was only fair that they eventually actually licensed the book, even if only to mostly just use the (fantastic) title, because they'd already picked so much of the book apart.

Also, further mutual inspiration trivia between the two franchises: Ron's never made it a secret that Monkey Island was also directly inspired by the original Disney Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. (The influence of which can be felt strongly throughout, but which most directly manifests itself in the complicated and controversial MI2 ending.)

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#69
post #8
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…

I find it interesting that Ron doesn't consider "The Curse of Monkey Island" part of the trilogy. Anyone know the back-story there?

Ron left LucasArts before Curse of Monkey Island and it was made without his consent or original design plans by essentially and entirely new and different design team. To be fair to the Curse design team, it sounds like Ron's vision for his Monkey Island 3 has never really existed outside of his head and he didn't leave them any/many notes to even be able to attempt to end the trilogy with whatever story Ron may have envisioned. Ron also had mostly made it clear that he doesn't like that LucasArts continued the IP without his consent, as it was his baby, but that's the wonderful world of work for hire for you.

Re: Happy Birthday Monkey Island

#70

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…

although it came later, don't forget Outlaws! Maybe the most underrated and unknown top-10 game of all time.
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