Monkey Island sequel+remake announced

thefonz on 7/7/2009 at 19:07

Has anyone played the new one yet?

For the record I'm a huge fan of ALL the previous games and when the redone first game is out next week i'll be snapping it up and playing through all four once again.

mothra on 8/7/2009 at 09:40

i just got the link in the mail. i will report back when I played it this evening. can't imagine it being a hard and long game :)

samIamsad on 16/7/2009 at 23:27

Mapped Tales to my pad, mousepointer and all. Took me about 5-6 hours, but I took my time. To finish the GAME that is. It's entertaining, and it looks much better in motion than in still shots. There's more effects and trickery going on than you'd imagine: depth of field effects, filtering, and so on. Plus the animations are real good. Looking forward to the next episode for sure. Glad I payed the money, that pre-order deal was a steal anyway.

I'd compare this to MI2's first chapter in terms of length and complexity, without on or two of the harder puzzles perhaps, such as getting your hands on Largo's shirt or getting some money to pay Capt. Dread. The puzzle design itself is pretty much classic Monkey Island though. Some of it is quite original too. For the record, I've yet to play any other Telltale game from start to finish. Whilst it seemed alright, I wasn't overlyimpressed when I tried the free download of "Abe Lincoln Must Die!", but compared to this rather limited experience with their games it seems that Telltale have come a bit of a way since then.

Quote Posted by Thirith

*Everyone* complained about Grim Fandango's controls at the time. It's the one blemish people bring up when talking about the game. And even though the point&click interface might have had its weaknesses too (although I thought that they'd ironed most of those out by the time Monkey Island 2 and Indy 4 came around), the Grim Fandango/Curse controls were worse in every way.

As it's being done so often: How anyone can compare direct controls of a character with point&click is beyond me anyways. It's not just a different kind of controlling a game for the heck of it. Both p&c and direct controls make for a totally different look and feel. There's something inherently different about exploring an environment by directly being in control of a character and pointing and clicking to get him to move there himself.

mothra on 17/7/2009 at 10:40

tales of mi is ok. it's the typical short game we now expect of telltale, the puzzles are ok and easy (one gets reused too often imo). voiceover is ok. What I don't like is the art. it's done good but it's uninspired and has no "character" compared to the original MI games. the supporting characters are rather uninteresting and they are not given much backstory. I'm a little disappointed (and I had NO high expectations)

gunsmoke on 17/7/2009 at 13:56

Quote Posted by mothra

This?

Thirith on 17/7/2009 at 16:37

Having seen the Tales of Monkey Island art in motion, I have to say that I prefer it to Escape from Monkey Island (although my favourite is still the dark, painterly background art of LeChuck's Revenge) and I can get used to the Tales Guybrush. Not sure I could say the same for the Special Edition version of him.

samIamsad on 17/7/2009 at 18:13

Quote Posted by mothra

tales of mi is ok. it's the typical short game we now expect of telltale, the puzzles are ok and easy

They're about onpar with pretty much anything The Largo Embargo, really. If you flew trough the game it likely has more to do with experience rather than anything. It's not like Telltale are doing anything genuinely new except for: the lab puzzle, which is a very original one. It might not be particularly hard, but it's up there with pretty much anything in the previous games. Balancing adventure game puzzles at their most typical at least is a bit of a tricky thing by their very nature - you're demanded to find this one solution to a problem the designer deems to be the right one. (http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/runaway/781347p1.html) it's very easy to just fuck it all up and never bother with any kind of clever design upfront. Or direction. Or wit. Or inventiveness. Or anything whatsoever. It is however (http://www.gamespy.com/reviews/january04/blackmirrorpc/) much easier to make the game as obscure and "puzzling" as can be.

I'd take the lab and some of the map puzzling over the kind of contrived stream of neverending McGuyver conundrums you get served in your average adventure games these days easily. Yet now with that hint system in place it should be easier than ever to balance this one out. Still, in terms of overall design this is as classic LucasArts as it gets.

And about everything else, yeah, you know, that's like your opinion, man. :angel: I agree about the supporting cast so far - even with the villain, the pacing is a little off, particularly in the beginning of the game.

Thirith on 17/7/2009 at 18:25

Quote Posted by samIamsad

This would only be true for me if the controls weren't as clearly inferior. They don't make me feel more involved; they make me curse and swear because it's so much more difficult to find the right position so you'll see the right thing and are able to use it. If you were talking about true 3D, then you might have a point; but at least in the case of Grim Fandango there was simply no positive effect whatsoever to being able to control Manny as if he was an unwieldy tank.

samIamsad on 17/7/2009 at 18:30

Quote Posted by Thirith

Mind, this wasn't directed at Grim Fandango in particular. I saw a bit of a general "point&click vs direct controls" debate coming up. Maybe I was wrong.

Personally I never had any kind of REAL issues playing Grim on my pad, at least not to the extent half the internet appeared to have when I got my first modem and googled up "Grim Fandango". But then I'm old enough to remember Alone In The Dark. :cheeky: I'd argue another reason this was being done in Grim were the wonderfully cinematic Noir-style shots. The thing about point&click is that you're only able to click what's onscreen. (http://www.brainygamer.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/07/25/games_as_art_grimfandango.jpg) And Grim has a healthy share of camera work that has Manny not only moving towards the camera until he takes up a great deal of the screen, but has him moving beyond and out of the shot. Just guessing, though.

Man, now you've made me want to fire up Grim Fandango again. Too bad I lost two copies of this already. Don't ask. This is the kind of game I'd buy a third time without getting grumpy over it. :D

Paz on 17/7/2009 at 18:45

I just finished a play-through of the Special Edition MI this morning. On the whole, pretty great.

The music and (especially) the voice acting are splendid. Getting the Curse cast in adds some extra layers to the whole thing - you can hear hesitancy in Guybrush's voice when he chooses an unwise insult retort during the swordfighting, and there are added jokes like a random pirate slipping in and out of plummy RADA tones as he explains that Guybrush should just play along with the lingo. Plus you have Yakko from animaniacs as a cowardly ghost pirate.

There are one or two problems.

On the technical side, there are some silly bugs like the inventory images for the directions to monkey island and PTA meeting notes being swapped around. I also had a weird thing where my cursor didn't always seem to be properly alligned to things (so when clicking the 'up' and 'down' arrows in the inventory, I had to aim a little bit off - same with a few dialogue tree responses.) That's easy to get used to - it's not like MI is a quick-fire action game - but it's annoying at first and probably should've been fixed.

Along similar lines, it's nice to have the verb choices and inventory off-screen, but to be honest it makes the interface worse. Either you rely on hotkeys, or you have to keep bringing up the verb-choices and inventory. It's especially bad for having to combine inventory objects.

Oh, I also had a weird bug where I chucked the hunk of meat to the vicious poodles and managed to drug them, even though I hadn't drugged the meat yet (only remembered I had to do that after the fact .. but it had already got them snoozing without it.)

Some of the artwork is a bit ropey. I'm not sold on Guybrush's new look - and I'm not totally sure if the comic sans font for Stan's Used Ships is a joke or not. Elsewhere, some of it is absolutely wonderful (the skies tend to be especially nice.) Because they're using the same animation as the old game, it can look a bit weird to see all-new HD Guybrush with 4 frames of walking animation at first ... but I actually found that kind of cool.

Being able to switch between new and oldie graphics on the fly is rather addictive too, I think I did it in almost every location to compare and contrast the differences. It's just a really neat effect. A bit sad, though, that you can't totally mix-and-match and do (say) oldie graphics with the voice acting.

It might seem like I've been a bit down and nit-picky there, so I should say that overall I had a tremendous time and enjoyed playing through a game I've completed several times before far more than I was expecting to. I really hope MI2 gets a similar treatment (with no bugs this time!)

For those who might be interested, I interviewed Dom Armato (the voice of Guybrush) about his VO stuff and MI in general: (http://www.incgamers.com/Features/224/Guybrush-Threepwood-The-Memoirs)