[technovader]

Ron you really should not be bashing your oldest most hard core fans.

Monkey Island 2 is a masterpiece. The 2D hand drawn style and animation are a huge part of it.

I'll take any Monkey Island sequel, but if you take a closer look at say the Tales of Monkey Island sequels, you'll see what people are worried about.

Monkey Island 4 was TERRIBLE. Fully 3D and tank controls. Tales of Monkey Island was great but completely ruined by terrible tank controls.

A proper Monkey Island games needs to be 1. Point and Click 2. Have excellent puzzle design and structure 3. Ideally 2D hand drawn art and animation 4. Least important, Pixelated style like MI2 or Loom

People who are critizing the trailer are worried we're getting another Tales of Monkey Island or Monkey Island 4.

As long as you nail #1 (proper point and click controls) I think you will still make a better Monkey Island sequel since Curse of Monkey Island

[the_af]

> Ron you really should not be bashing your oldest most hard core fans.

I don't read anything Ron said as "bashing". He explains why he is not interested in making pixel art games. He is also promising you this is the best possible Monkey Island game he can make, one he is proud of.

[technovader]

He's playing the victim and calling them haters.

It's a legitimate criticism about the art style. No one is "hating"

Unless we're at a point where saying anything negative is "hating"

[the_af]

CTRL+F of "hate" and "hating" gives zero results in that page. This is what Ron actually says about some fans:

> "It's ironic that the people who don't want me to make the game I want to make are some of the hard core Monkey Island fans. And that is what makes me sad about all the comments."

And that's it. He's not "bashing" all fans, not even some fans. He's just explaining his vision and what his goal is for this Monkey Island game, and also expressing disappointment that some fans don't want him to make the game he wants.

I think his points are solid. Monkey Island I & II weren't retrogames, and so it makes sense he won't try to turn this Monkey Island into a retrogame either.

That's it. No "hate". No "hating". No "bashing".

[Andrew_nenakhov]

> Monkey Island 2 is a masterpiece.

My mileage certainly differs. I loved how it looked, but to me it is by far the weakest of the lucasarts games I played (and I played all but the first Maniac Mansion and Zac McKraken). It is far too difficult! Far too many locations and items, you just get overwhelmed in the middle part of the game.

MI1 was a much better game in this regard.

[seba_dos1]

What do 3D games have to do with this though? The new game is very clearly not 3D.

Also, while Escape was absolutely atrocious, Tales wasn't so bad. It wasn't point'n'click, but unlike Escape it actually had reasonable controls.

[technovader]

The new game isn't 3D, you're right. At least from the trailer I can assume so. But I wouldn't rule it out completely. Let's see when we actually get some gameplay.

But it still feels like a major downgrade to Curse of Monkey Island or the originals.

It looks like every other game, very generic style. It's lost the charm of the original games IMO.

I think Ron has an opportunity to differentiate his game from all the bad sequels we got before it.

[seba_dos1]

"All the bad sequels"? From all Monkey Island games, I'd say only Escape could be considered somewhat bad. It felt rather uninspired compared to others, control scheme was awful and it aged the worst way of all MI games. All the rest are really great.

Monkey Island series has been drastically changing the art style in its every single installment. When it comes to this new style, I find it hard to judge from still unpopulated screenshots, as they feel way too static to me. The trailer looks nice though.

[WorldMaker]

If you ignore the awful controls and equally awful minigames, I think Escape is still a fun pirate tale with a lot of things to love about it. I think the plot's overall is pretty inspired about the gentrification of the pirate islands, and it's the natural progression from Curse's exploration of the same themes (which in turn those themes going all the back to things like Secret's used boat sales lot). A lot of Escape is extremely funny, too. It just has that huge grind in the middle made worse by awful controls and environments that were both too big and too densely packed with sight gags and too empty all at once.

"Somewhat bad", sure, given those qualifications of pretend the controls and their grind don't exist. But also, more inspired than many give it credit for and still "worst Monkey Island" is a relatively high bar compared to other franchises we could mention.

[seba_dos1]

To me, Escape felt a lot like a fan fiction story. A pretty good one, sure, but it still hatched onto the themes that you mention (which used to be more or less background gags in previous installments without much relevance to the actual story) the way fans usually do when writing their own stories. So you got bombarded with callbacks to previous games, characters you already knew, jokes you already heard, and stories that didn't really feel like natural progression of the lore but more like "what if?" scenarios. Ozzie, Herman, your old crew, LeChuck's role in the whole conspiracy, Giant Monkey Head, Planet Threepwood... compare that to Curse, which genuinely moved the series forward into a new and fresh adventure. It also called back to previous games - it even started with Wally right in the first scene who didn't really need to be there - but it always felt like an addition to the game's story, or a glue that makes a Monkey Island game a Monkey Island game, rather than something it relies on to be funny or interesting (after all, we meet Murray right after meeting Wally in Curse, and I don't think any character introduced in Escape is even close to how strong Murray is as a character).

Escape would be a great spin-off - it's still a genuinely fun and engaging adventure game if you can look past its shortcomings. However, as an entry in the main series, it feels a bit wrong, and definitely the weakest. It's not "a pirate tale with good share of silliness" anymore, but rather "a silly tale with good share of pirates". I bet that most of the stuff in the new game that will end up contradicting older games' canon will be stuff that goes at odds with Escape in particular, mostly thanks to its plot twists for the sake of plot twists and taking previous games' gags way too seriously :P

[technovader]

I don't disagree.

I actually played through and finished EMI. I think its tonnes of fun and arguable better than CMI.

But I won't say the tank controls didn't ruin an otherwise great game

[WorldMaker]

I know Schafer wasn't involved in EMI and so had no direct interest in doing it but with the huge underlying similarities in the engine it would have been nice to get an EMI remaster side-by-side the Grim Fandango remaster with similar controls improvements.

One of these days maybe SCUMMVM will finally get around to gifting us the right controls for EMI to make it truly fun to experience.

[technovader]

I don't know how anyone can see a Monkey Island 2/3 screenshot, and compare it with this abomination, and say "it looks fine"

Monkey Island 2 was a gorgeous work of art. Every scene was worthy of being a wallpaper.

This trailer looks like something out of Teletoon / Cartoon Network. It's a style that is clearly lazy / easy / cheap.

[agency]

Thank goodness Ron Gilbert has you to tell him what a proper Monkey Island game needs to be.

[technovader]

You're being sarcastic but it seriously sounds like he needs a refresher course.

We didn't wait 20 years for this.

[melcor]

> We didn't wait 20 years for this.

Yes we did. MI1 and 2 was great because they were pushing the technological limitations, trying to be the best puzzle games they could, and were made by a great, talented, and enthusiastic team. Not because it was catering to entitled fans with rose tinted glasses.