Udvarnoky

Ye of little faith! You needed only to wait fifteen years.

So Double Fine has been acquired by Microsoft Studios, we have some new previews, and there's a spiffy new trailer. A pretty active E3 for this game.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/327085/Telltale_Games_initiates_majority_studio_closure.php Most people will remember this studio for The Walking Dead, I guess, but my enduring memories will be of cow races, freelance police, Strong Bad, puzzle agents and a satisfying fifth Monkey Island installment I never thought I'd get. I still have and cherish my Sam & Max case file, my Jared Emerson-Johnson soundtrack CDs and my collector's edition big boxes. I still treasure my copy of the Surfin' the Highway re-release which was manifestly a labor of love. I still remember those early launch day rituals, where Emily and Jake and Tabacco would politely field anguished questions about what time the new Sam & Max episode would drop while they (I imagined) kept humming servers from melting down with a cartoon-sized bellows at half-past midnight. Those early days were a blast to follow. As with LucasArts, the actual shuttering of Telltale comes years after they stopped making games that interested me, but I will always remember the studio for its best work and will always be grateful to the individuals responsible for it. There's a hell of a lot of quality in that library, and I'm furiously re-downloading all my old purchases while I still can. To anyone reading this who helped generate those good times, thank you. They meant a lot to me.

For those who missed the memo, Escape from Monkey Island was released on GOG this week. All fourteen LucasArts adventure games are now officially available for what must be the first time in fifteen years. Now if only they'd offer the EGA version of LOOM and the non-SE versions of Monkey Island 1-2.

Escape is underrated, but there's no denying that it had an impossible standard to live up to where atmosphere was concerned once the decision was made to try to realize a lush cartoon world with the Grim Fandango engine. Also, I think pushing the plotline so far into satire, while funny, had the unintended side effect of making the world less engrossingly piratey, which is one of the fundamental come-ons of the series. It's an above average adventure game by any objective metric, though.

Not true! GOG has it, although for some reason not Steam.

Well, the GOG/Steam version just comes bundled with SCUMMVM, which you could have indeed been using to run the game since XP. But hey, there's a legal way for people to get those game files again, without having to resort to the second-hand marketplace.

As I'm sure a lot of you are aware, The Curse of Monkey Island made its way to GOG and Steam this week. With the exception of Escape from Monkey Island, that makes all of the LucasArts adventures officially available* through digital distribution, and that's an awesome milestone. Especially considering that for the longest time these games were not legally available at all. *Yes, the version of Loom that's being sold is not the EGA version, and there's some controversy about the fidelity of the Monkey Island special editions, even in Classic Mode, to the original releases, but let's keep this positive for at least post #1.

I'm very happy with the remaster. My main objection was the harsh way audio transitions at the end of cutscenes, as gerbil points out.

I respect Tim's policy that the remasters should be headed up by the original team leads, but it's kind of devastating to think that this will be the last one after Double Fine has built this pipeline and forged this valuable relationship with Disney. I hope serious consideration has been given to reaching out to Hal Barwood, Brian Moriarty, etc. and inviting them to take advantage of these hard-earned resources for their own restorations. If Double Fine currently has the ability to scour the Lucas vaults, we should not assume that access is indefinite.

Apparently the remaster includes a recreation of a magazine demo for the game because it features unique dialog and Tim wanted all of Roy Conrad's voicework preserved in high quality. Awesome.

From the sounds of it those SMUSH action scenes powered by Rebel Assault technology were pretty hacky under the hood. I bet it was a nightmare to update that stuff.

If the figures originally given were different then I understand the pique, but honestly the numbers you quoted don't sound unrealistic to me. It's why I didn't understand why everyone was so excited about the investment option when it was announced, aside from maybe the principle of the thing. But what return on investment were people expecting? We're talking about a sequel to a cult game that managed 1.7 million sales over ten years - the majority of those certainly being at far less than the original retail price. Psychonauts wasn't profitable for its original publisher, and they had way more stake in the game than any individual fan can realistically chip in. If anyone was anticipating a non-trivial profit off this, I'd love to see their math.

That this game is still in pre-production is arguably the most ¬¬ thing that ever did ¬¬.

Yeah, it seems like the game's major failing from Blizzard's perspective is that it came off as a solid adventure game for 1994, when they were going to put it out in 1998. But with this much distance it is much easier to judge it for it is, especially for people* characterized by an unnatural obsession with 90s era adventure games. *us