Monkey Island special edition (360, PC) is upon us!

only mere few hours away, one of the most beloved franchises is coming back, redone with HD graphics(you can toggle between classic and new style in real time), voiced this time(Dominic Armato is back as Guybrush!), ~ all this for mere 800 points, I was sure they would charge at least $15 or maybe even $20), it's a steal at $10.
if you remotely like adventure games, you owe it to yourself - get it :thumbsup:

 

That sounds freakin' awesome.

 

They seriously need to support mouse peripherals on the 360. You just can't have Monkey Island played by a pad, it just isnt the same.

 

This is pretty damn awesome, even though the HD graphics look like a fangame made by a Bulgarian animation studio. And it has probably the easiest achievements in 360 history for me considering how many times I've completed the original :lol:

 

Monkey Island special edition is probably the last game I would get my hands on. Damn the new graphics are fucking ugly. And as Barc0de said, the game isn't the same without a mouse. And the music is even worse than the Amiga music. Damn, why didn't they not just take the music from the CD version of the game ? So Monkey Island Special Edition = not my cup of tea. And I LOVED the original game.

 

What a bunch of big crybabies some of you are :110:

Been playing it for the past couple of hours. Not touched the original Monkey Island 1 since... I dunno... sometime in the mid-90s, probably.

Controls works pretty well with the gamepad, really.
Most stuff has a contextual setup, so while A does the normal walk/look, B triggers the most obvious interaction.

Both analogs acts as mouse input, d-pad (8 directions) can be used to access the verbs (alternatively press LT to bring up the full menu on-screen)

Voice acting, although a bit wonky at times (mostly 'cause it builds itself around the limitations of non-voiced design of the original) works perfectly fine.

And, seriously, to be honest, nothing is wrong with the art direction when running in "Special Edition" mode (tapping the back button switches between original/enhanced, on the fly, enhanced mode features voice acting, enhanced graphics and the re-recorded soundtrack)

If the game would've been re-released like this back in the 90s, not nearly as many would've complained.


As for the achievements... to be honest, I have no clue what they are. They're all listed as secret, but I've managed to get two so far (and neither of them was directly linked to progression, but rather some minor experimenting and some major failure)

Of course, it wouldn't have hurt to have mouse support in this, but it's seriously not as much of a game breaking problem as people try to make it out to be. People play shooters, strategy games and various clickety clicky puzzle games on consoles, and those are all game types that most people associate with PCs and mouse input, even though they probably all had console iterations long before mouse and keyboard even became the proper standard on PC for those genres. Adventure games just were late to the party and are now making a return. Soon enough people will find some other genre to bitch about being played with a gamepad or some other input device. (Also, as a random sidenote: Sam & Max - Season 1 on the 360 worked perfectly fine with gamepad too. If anything, the use of shortcut keys and such saved me a good few KM/Miles worth of mouse travel)

 

Man... Too many good arcade titles coming out this summer!

 

Yup. So much that I even started to accept Microsoft Points as a valid currency for some of the stuff I'm getting rid of

 

don't we all?
:lol:

probably I've spent $1,000 on downloadable tracks for Rock Band alone(every single DLC) - but it's so awesome, it's justified :thumbsup:

back on the track, got the game the very morning and I'm absolutely loving it.
graphics is gorgeous, just toggle between retro and new style to see how everything is recreated with the littlest details, animation is sometimes a little stiff but I suppose, that has been done on purpose to keep that old Monkey Island feel at the same time(when you toggle between styles), everything runs smoothly at 60 frames, love the arranged music and of course hilarious dialogue(now finally spoken), adds another layer of greatness.
control layout works perfectly, intuitive and super easy to grasp.
enough chit chat, going back on Monkey Island :dance:

 

Battlefield 1943 is actually really fun, too. It looks great for an 'Aracade' title.

 

As you wish:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/32360/
http://www.direct2drive.com/7/8241/product/



Been playing it on PC today. Quite frankly, the art direction in the updated mode is completely and utterly hideous. It like some sort of Saturday morning cartoon reject. Guybrush looks like some sort of sad, terribly drug-addled young German man. His facial expression in the sprite, frankly, makes him look somewhat undead. The background art lacks depth, and the overly bland cartooniness (it doesn't even aspire to the beautifully detailed cartooniness of Curse) just pales in comparison to the gorgeous painterliness of original.

I mean, it's as simple as this. Which is better: this, or this? His expression on the remake cover reveals a lot. Gone is the subtle look of fearful awe, replaced with smug smirk. Ugh. And I just won't even start on the hair.

I understand that none of the original artists from LucasArt's hayday are still there, and their accomplishments are a difficult thing to emulate, but still, I find the art quite disappointing.

So, with all this negativity, it might come across as strange that I am still quite pleased with this package. The $10 price tag is right on the money (less than I was expecting, for sure), low enough for an impulse buy if you ask me, and the on-the-fly transitioning from classic to remake modes is quite impressive. On a technical level, this thing is great. And I do think this is absolutely worth a playthrough, to finally hear the characters voiced, after all these years.

I do think this is worth a purchase, because while it is not perfect, it's the closest thing to a step in the right direction that LucasArts has taken in years, and I hope they get the message that people want them to do more with their heritage, than just churn out shoddy Star Wars games. Despite my dislike of the new art, I still find this game to be a welcome arrival.

Anyways...perhaps I've gone on long enough about all this.

Of special note is that, apparently, it's all still running on SCUMM engine (updated to handle HD assets and whatnot). If this is accurate info, that would mean that this engine has been used over a 22 year span (constantly updated throughout it's life, of course, but always evolutionary; it was never rebuilt from scratch). That's pretty astounding, I think.

 

I think I will dig out the very original this weekend.

Yay, Monkey Island (I + II) is one of the most awesomst games I ever played.... time to become a pirate all over again and to do some nice swearing fights.... "You fight like a cow!" *LAWL*

/me undusts retro corner

 

on a relevant note, I completed the first episode of the episodic Monkey Island.

 

Funny. When he looks straight into the "camera", he for some reason reminds me of a guy from Finland that I know. He's not terribly drug-addled, but he sure loves his bottle and often has eyes that speak tales of long evenings and lack of sleep :lol:

And, oddly enough, the young lad with fearful awe in his eyes does not very accurately represent the protagonist's constant need to blurt out witty comments and strange remarks

One of the things that always has annoyed me about the original version is the horrible stylebreaking use of horribly pixelated portraits for the close up dialog scenes. They just don't flow very well with the otherwise mildly cartoony pixelated look of the game. At least now everything looks like it belongs to the same game.

Besides, ignoring the disastrous design failure that is the transition from typical low-res pixelation to low-res pixelated photoshops of the past; which one's the most awesome: this or this?

I know what made me laugh when it popped up on my screen, at least. So no judging this book by its cover! Monkey Island: Special Edition is full of sweet new art (Governor Marley's probably my favorite so far. Though, the first time you meet her, her eyes looked kinda... weird, or maybe it was just me :|)

Yeah, it seems like it's basically a full scumm interpreter with a lot of odd detections going on or something to synchronize the new content and stuff. It's as if it runs the original game in the background and do overlays for everything else, or basically runs two games at the same time or something with synchronized input. It's a rather interesting thing, really.

(Though, I wish they'd been totally awesome and animated the new portraits to go with the voiced dialog.)

 

presentation of a remake is fantastic(new style is recreated very well with new touches here and there), Lucasarts did great job(many original Lucasarts employees worked on remake).
I'm so glad because if the game sells well, we might see remake of LeChuck's Revenge and perhaps Curse/Escape/Grim Fandango ports coming to XBLA too(that would be amazing!).

graphically speaking, I don't think any adventure game will ever come close to sheer beauty of Curse of Monkey Island(that was a 2-D masterpiece).

 

ditto, curse rocked. best graphics in the series

 

Curse of Monkey Island is way underrated, even if the plot is not all perfect or anything (we contradicted the absurd ending of the last game, which was obviously not written with a sequel in mind? Better have a lot of stupid exposition at the end to explain it!). Unfortunately, the fourth game was like the fourth Indiana Jones movie of Monkey Island games.

 

i didn't find playing is on a Genesis pad to be that bad. so i don't think a 360 pad will be a chore

and i gotta start keeping track of things related to my 360 more often. i didn't even know about this. and i used to play the original ALL the time

 

To me, the old one, by far. I can't stand how sharp and angular the faces are in the new close-ups.

I suppose that I can see where you're coming from, but I never really felt the same disconnect between the regular view and portrait close-ups that you seem to have had with the original version. We'll have to agree to disagree. ;-)

Indeed. I've been poking around in the game's assets files. Lots of interesting stuff. Gonna experiment with replacing some graphics, perhaps, just to see if it works.

Hmm...I just checked the credits for the remake, and I can't see that any of the of the old LucasArts artists, composers, writers, or programmers were directly involved in the remake. It was made by all new people.

I think that you might be thinking of the new episodic sequel, Tales of Monkey Island, which is being made by Telltale Games. Those games, indeed, have many of the old LucasArts artists, composers, and writers working on them. :thumbsup: