Tales of Monkey Island

[Roderick]

That's such a tricky quest. I tried to forget Grim Fandango after finishing it in 1998 (it was made by this company called Lucasarts), and only played it again in 2007 or something. I had forgotten a lot, but not everything, but it was nevertheless a wonderful experience. But mightn't it have been better just to play the damn thing every two years? You don't really forget stuff so easily, and the chances are you'll die or something, and then go to the afterlife of your choice being all stumped you never replayed an awesome game.

[Shakesbeard]

Chiming in to say that I'm a hopeless plebe that wasn't even aware PC gaming existed for much of my young life (all my friends were too busy arguing about consoles) which resulted in me never having played any Monkey Island games. It's hard to admit but totally true and I feel as though I am on my way to redemption as a trip to the flea market yesterday yielded the Curse of Monkey Island, in box, with instruction booklet and everything for $5CDN.

I want to play the first two before I play the third, what would my fellow thumbs recommend as the best venue for obtaining them these days?

[MrHoatzin]

Email Ron Gilbert and ask him for a torrent link.

[Noyb]

Besides the remake of SOMI coming out next month to XBLA, you'll probably have to get them used. Lucasarts has been terrible at making them available, hence our general surprise at the one-two punch of the remake and sequel.

[toblix]

How much of an effort is one supposed to make before just caving in and downloading it for free? I totally get wanting to buy the games and getting the box and maybe also awesome goodies too, as well. I also get wanting to do the right thing by not not paying for it, but seeing as the original makers won't get any money from a used game purchase, and also the original makers not making an effort to make the game available, I wouldn't have any qualms about just downloading the thing. Not having downloaded ROMS, old Amiga games or old "abandonware" PC games in a while, I assume there are still loads of sites with direct HTTP links. Also, there should be torrents for more populare stuff like MI. Even alsoer, newsgroups are sure to have these.

[Nappi]

Indeed. I just went ahead and downloaded many of the old Lucasarts classics back in the day since I couldn't find them anywhere. I have come across most of the games now and bought them.

[syntheticgerbil]

  Shakesbeard said:

It's hard to admit but totally true and I feel as though I am on my way to redemption as a trip to the flea market yesterday yielded the Curse of Monkey Island, in box, with instruction booklet and everything for $5CDN.

Did you get the flimsy box version with the heavy Prima strategy guide stuffed in there?

[ThunderPeel2001]

  toblix said:

How much of an effort is one supposed to make before just caving in and downloading it for free? I totally get wanting to buy the games and getting the box and maybe also awesome goodies too, as well. I also get wanting to do the right thing by not not paying for it, but seeing as the original makers won't get any money from a used game purchase, and also the original makers not making an effort to make the game available, I wouldn't have any qualms about just downloading the thing. Not having downloaded ROMS, old Amiga games or old "abandonware" PC games in a while, I assume there are still loads of sites with direct HTTP links. Also, there should be torrents for more populare stuff like MI. Even alsoer, newsgroups are sure to have these.

Totally, and with the availability of digital distribution these days, there isn't much of an excuse not to make them available for some money.

I REALLY wanted to play the EGA version of Monkey Island... now, where the hell am I going to get that?! (I guess I could just *not* play it.)

[thorn]

  Shakesbeard said:

I want to play the first two before I play the third, what would my fellow thumbs recommend as the best venue for obtaining them these days?

There are tons of copies on Ebay. That's how I got CoMI years ago.

Also, for some reason, there is an auction that claims that this is a MI branded playset:

[Horticulture Tycoon]

Actually out of curiosity, I just looked up some old LucasArts games on Amazon, which apparently still has many of them in stock. But holy shit... $75 for Curse of Monkey Island? $162 for for Day of the Tentacle? They can't possibly be that rare, can they?

[thorn]

I imagine that new copies must be pretty rare. Lucasarts probably hasn't printed/pressed their adventure games for years, excluding the wierd blip in which they were available in Australia in 2007 for about two weeks.

Second hand copies seem to be at around the $10-$20 mark.

[miffy495]

I have about half of the original LA adventures, the others I downloaded in high school and played back then. I have the Monkey Island Madness CDROM myself, which has MI1, MI2, and a demo for COMI on it. It's currently going for about $70 on Ebay Canada, so I'd say fuck it, just download.

[Thyroid]

I found them all for like $15, brand new, a couple of years ago in a megastore. They weren't boxed with manuals, etc, but yeah, brand new copies.

[Shakesbeard]

Thanks for the tips guys, gonna do what must be done and throw LA my precious monies when they re-release, I've waited this long, I can wait a couple months...

[syntheticgerbil]

  Horticulture Tycoon said:

Actually out of curiosity, I just looked up some old LucasArts games on Amazon, which apparently still has many of them in stock. But holy shit... $75 for Curse of Monkey Island? $162 for for Day of the Tentacle? They can't possibly be that rare, can they?

Amazon is the worst to use to price a game. People notoriously inflate everything there or wait to jump on anything they have that may be out of print. The high priced stuff isn't exactly selling.

Best way to get vintage games is Ebay on bid only type deals, because then you sort of end up paying around whatever the game's market value is at the moment. GameTZ used to be really good, but it got overrun by 10 year old kids who apparently sent a lot of broken stuff as well as probably the same people that extort on Amazon, who collect complete vintage games (in shrink wrap!) but never actually play them.

  miffy495 said:

I have the Monkey Island Madness CDROM myself, which has MI1, MI2, and a demo for COMI on it. It's currently going for about $70 on Ebay Canada, so I'd say fuck it, just download.

Hahah, I can't believe that budget CD-ROM is worth anything to anyone now. It came in like a plain jewelcase where the cover had instructions on how to install! If I'm not mistaken it came free with CMI? At least that's where I had gotten mine long ago, but I had owned the disk versions previously.

Lowest price I could find on Monkey Island Madness was a $40 CD in sleeve on Ebay. It's so not worth it.

Edited June 30, 2009 by syntheticgerbil

[miffy495]

  syntheticgerbil said:

Hahah, I can't believe that budget CD-ROM is worth anything to anyone now. It came in like a plain jewelcase case where the cover was instructions on how to install! If I'm not mistaken it came free with CMI? At least that's where I had got mine long ago, but I had owned the disk versions previously.

I got mine in some Adventure Collection thingy from LA's website around 2000. Big pack with MI Madness, The Dig, Full Throttle, and for some reason Dark Forces. I think that whole bundle cost me $20 back then.

[Nappi]

So anyway, yey:

jP5uDNhOiPg

[Thrik]

I only watched like 30 seconds but I was very impressed by LeChuck's voice. It's clearly not Earl, but it's close enough that I don't really care.

The music is naturally amazing, too.

[syntheticgerbil]

I guess I've never noticed this before, but why is LeChuck a short little man now?

And they should *really* get around to fixing that rope.

To end on a positive note, I love the work done on modeling and animating the face. Looks great! It almost completely makes up for the failure in that category on EMI.

[Thrik]

Is he not the same height as Guybrush? That's how he was in the first three games, although he's definitely lost a lot of the bulk he gained in CMI. Presumably that ties in well with his new form for ToMI, though — I don't know if that's shown later in the video as I haven't watched it all.

[lobotomy42]

Oh look! Elaine's British again!

[syntheticgerbil]

  Thrik said:

Is he not the same height as Guybrush? That's how he was in the first three games, although he's definitely lost a lot of the bulk he gained in CMI. Presumably that ties in well with his new form for ToMI, though — I don't know if that's shown later in the video as I haven't watched it all.

He's always been a little bit taller than Guybrush by maybe a few inches (convert that to pixels) but it could just be the hat.

They don't actually stand next to eachother in the gameplay video for me to be able to really tell. If the new LeChuck isn't really that short or tiny, then I think I'm just getting the impression that he's an undead Danny Devito since almost all of the cameras pointed at LeChuck in the posted video are angled looking down upon him.

Edited July 1, 2009 by syntheticgerbil

[Jake]

LeChuck's actually noticeably taller* once they actually get near each other (which doesn't happen that often for obvious reasons).

* a few inches of actual height, plus a lot of hat.

  lobotomy42 said:

Oh look! Elaine's British again!

It's the same actress (Alexandra Boyd) from Curse of Monkey Island. I personally never heard Elaine as British in my head when playing the games, but whatever! She does a great job in Tales. It's the first time since Elaine had a voice that she seems like a three dimensional character, for me. It seems like the voice direction given in 3 and 4 was often "you're mad at, or at least exasperated with Guybrush," which was funny but tired me out after a while.

[syntheticgerbil]

  Jake said:

She does a great job in Tales. It's the first time since Elaine had a voice that she seems like a three dimensional character, for me. It seems like the voice direction given in 3 and 4 was often "you're mad at, or at least exasperated with Guybrush," which was funny but tired me out after a while.

Yeah I agree! I really hated that. It's such a tired US sitcom cliche with the smarmy married women getting constantly upset with her bumbling manchild husband. I found it less obvious in 3 because she isn't in most of the game, but in EMI it became so unbearable sometimes that I felt like I was watching an episode of Home Improvement.

Really happy that in one of the recent interviews with Dave Grossman that Ron Gilbert is said to have come in and given some direction on the Elaine character.

[Sleepdance]

I know this is offtopic, wouldn't be great if taletale would make Monty Python game?