Oh common, now you're just being childish. Besides, TTG has acknowledged the issue dozens of times, I think the last time in the previous thread. It's understandable that at some point they say "enough, let us get back to work".
Oh common, now you're just being childish. Besides, TTG has acknowledged the issue dozens of times, I think the last time in the previous thread. It's understandable that at some point they say "enough, let us get back to work".
Show me where they've seriously addressed the issue. I'm not being rhetorical here. If they have really addressed it, we all clearly missed it. As far as I know, the last word was three days ago where Will said the following:
Unless there was just some mistake, the review code got the same audio as the release code. As for powering through vs waiting for a patch, that one scene is the only part that particularly stands out so I would definitely suggest powering on. Something about Elaine's voice just doesn't compress well at all I'm afraid, particularly with all of the S's she has in that one dialog.
This is certainly no solution. In fact, it's an admission that it is a problem and we should just "power through" the parts where it's a BIG problem. Nowhere have they said "we're working on it" or even "deal with it folks". Either answer would be more appreciated than being ignored. All's I'm saying...
They may have acknowledged it, however they haven't fixed it yet. Twenty two episodes released to date and they're yet to fix a problem reported since the very first one. It's poor form, especially considering "I have to wait a whole four seconds when I want to try combining inventory items" gets a "we'll look into it" within the hour.
Complaining about it won't help though. They realise there is a problem, and you moaning about it every couple of minutes if anything will annoy them, and make them even less likely to get a fix. If anything you're lucky to even get a game, TT didn't have to make ToMI. There may be a few problems, but a game is a game.
Complaining about it won't help though. They realise there is a problem, and you moaning about it every couple of minutes if anything will annoy them, and make them even less likely to get a fix. If anything you're lucky to even get a game, TT didn't have to make ToMI. There may be a few problems, but a game is a game.
Really? So they'll refuse to fix a known issue in order to spite their paying customers who have annoyed them by posting in the support forum about said issue?
This seems like an unrealistic scenario to me. Call me crazy.
Your probably right, but it still doesn't negate the fact you are being annoying. They can hardly work on a patch to fix it if they've gotta read your complaints about it every minute.
I am a professional sound editor, and I have worked on downloadable titles for XBOX Live Arcade, PSN, and PC/Steam of similar size and scope to TOMI.
In general, the voice quality on TT games (by this I mean Sam and Max and TOMI, which is what I've played) is very low. TOMI2 crosses the line between very low and unprofessional.
There are a number of possible reasons for the poor voice quality:
1. DATA COMPRESSION
Put simply, data compression decreases file size by degrading audio quality. It reduces the dynamic range and/or frequency range of the audio. The human voice is a complex waveform, and it does not respond well to large amounts of compression. If you took the pc_voice.ttarch file's 15MB and filled it with uncompressed audio, you'd have roughly SIX MINUTES of voice. Obviously, TT needs to compress the voice to make downloadable distribution feasible, but trying to cram hours(?) of voice into six minutes worth of space seems unnecessary.
For comparison:
SOMI:SE is a 2GB download. After installation, 800MB (40% of download) is voice.
TOMI2 is a 225MB download. After installation, 15MB (7% of download) is voice.
2. SIBILANCE
Even without changing the amount of compression, using a de-esser or notch filter on the voice tracks BEFORE compressing them could help alleviate some of the problems. A low-pass filter IS NOT the right tool for this job, as you might need to roll off as low as 6-8kHZ, which would damage the voices even further. This should have been done by the dialogue editor, but it's possible that he/she was not given the time or resources to make it happen.
3. MIX
I'm not sure how the TT engine is handling the mix in-game, but it is contributing significantly to the problem. Guybrush can say the same line in two different places with VASTLY different results. In one place, the line sounds "fine" (compressed, but no distortion or popping), then in another place he sounds like "I'm GuyPOPbrushSNAP POPThreeCLICKpwood." Somewhere in the game engine, the "music", "voice", and "sounds" stems are being crammed together, and can't all fit through what seems like should be acceptable total sound levels.
4. PEOPLE
This is possibly the most difficult hurdle to overcome. Like it is in the film and television industry, sound is overlooked in the game industry. Somebody has to care about it enough to fight for it, on almost every project. Obviously TT knows the sound quality is a problem; people have been complaining about it for three years. It's entirely possible that TT hasn't fixed any of the sound issues because whoever makes the final decisions just doesn't care, or isn't willing to allocate time or money to fix them. It's also possible that sounds takes a backseat to anything else to make the monthly release deadlines.
Whatever the case may be, if I were the sound editor/designer for TOMI, I'd be really mad and/or really depressed after the release of TOMI2.
If anything you're lucky to even get a game, TT didn't have to make ToMI.
"Telltale, thanks for letting me give you $35!"
Telltale didn't have to make Tales of Monkey Island, no. And they wouldn't have made it if they didn't think it was financially viable. They're a company, not a glorious fountain of generosity.
I don't hold this against them, I completely accept that's just the way things work. If I were running Telltale, I would act in exactly the same way. What I wouldn't do, however, is completely ignore the most replied thread on the customer support forum.
Really? So they'll refuse to fix a known issue in order to spite their paying customers who have annoyed them by posting in the support forum about said issue?
This seems like an unrealistic scenario to me. Call me crazy.
Your probably right, but it still doesn't negate the fact you are being annoying. They can hardly work on a patch to fix it if they've gotta read your complaints about it every minute.
Please be nice to each other.
Posting and discussing problems on the Forum is not annoying Telltale.
There's also no reason why it should prevent Telltale from fixing them.
Yeah Nice post. Although I admit, in all honesty I never experienced any problems with any previous games. Despite me having a good set of speakers. Mind you I'm pretty tolerant of things, so unless someone points something out to me I wouldn't notice the problem unless it made the game completely unplayable.
After playing through half of this chapter, Spinner Cay was the only place with unacceptable sound. Anemone had the worst issues with whole words cutting out and Elaine had problems with her S's.
I powered through this part and the rest of what I have played so far has been enjoyable. I am happy that the rest of the chapter didn't have such severe problems.
As Mr Party Hat said, posts like this add nothing to the discussion. You don't hear the problem, so just be happy with that and move on. Some of us genuinely hear it (because like it or not, it's there), and it's terribly distracting and noticeable regardless of the type of speakers used.
Well, in my instance, the type of speakers made a huge difference (probably it was my old crappy Dell speakers that hid the crappiness of the sound).
So you suggest to use crappy speakers as "workaround" for the bad sound quality? Sorry, but that's the stupidest thing i've read in this thread so far.
It worked for me.
Agreed! Like said before: Posts like this don't add nothing to this thread, so please don't post.
And like said before: ears are VERY personal. I get this a LOT in my field of work. Some people have (magnificent) hearing, others poor. Every individual interpreters sound differently, and the fact how you hear sound plays a big role. Yes, with headphones or 200 $ / € speakers you enjoy sound quality more, but also notice bad quailty than tiny cheap speakers.
Pardon my lack of humility, but I think I have better hearing than most. My dad was an audiophile, and I do have a high-end stereo system. I see audio as something important, but I do realize that a company such as Telltale has to majorly sacrifice audio quality for the sake of file size. I guess I find that acceptable, which a lot of people here don't.
As for the so called "whining" part: if you buy a product (ie. game in this case), than the buyer expects to have a certain quality, and to enjoy the quality. For the ones who think we are whiners: you don't buy a new car that runs badly either, do you?
I think HansSchmucker said it best: You're expecting ferrari quality out of a Mini Cooper.
If this was a FPS shooter, then it wouldn't be such a big issue, but in Monkey Island games, dialogue plays a huge part in the game experience, and that part is flawed.
Dialogue plays a huge role. Audio representation of said dialogue does not, as many non-talkie Adventure games in the past, like both Monkey Island 1 and LeChuck's Revenge have shown.
Edit: I do want to apologize for being a jerk. It's just that for every praise this games gets you get a thousand complainers willing to never buy a telltale game again, and that annoys me.
I had heard the whining and complaining about sound quality before, and I had noticed it to some extent in previous TT episodes. But I have to agree with the folks in this thread--in ToMI Ep2 it did cross the line for me in places, going from "acceptable compromise for download time" to "very disappointing for a commercial product circa 2009". Besides the terrible S's, I also had a few places where Guybrush's dialogue clipped. I'm not sure if this is a separate or related issue, but it was irritating nonetheless.
I wasn't so offended that I had to stop playing because of the sound quality, though. And I think in general, the consistency of the dialogue sounds in terms of volume, balance with the music, etc. is much improved from, say, Sam & Max Season 1. But this episode really did have more than its fair share of painfully obvious over-compression and glitchiness.
Wow! His problem is seriously a minor issue, and he got a "we'll look into it" response in less than an hour!
Minor issues are much easier to "look into" than major/core issues, which the audio compression seems to be. TTG's Will made a specific comment about why the compression sounded particularly bad in this episode, but beyond that, this thread is basically about the same problem that all TTG games have, so one would assume that they have "looked into it" many times, and haven't come up with a good solution, for some reason.
A low-pass filter IS NOT the right tool for this job, as you might need to roll off as low as 6-8kHZ, which would damage the voices even further. This should have been done by the dialogue editor, but it's possible that he/she was not given the time or resources to make it happen.
Interesting. Never used a notch for de-essing or controlling sibilance, I should look more into that. I always felt sibilance varied dramatically from word to word and character to character, so much so it didn't become feasible within time constraints to hand-edit or automate filtering on a per-line basis. I've traditionally used a sharp lowpass (8x butterworth for instance) and gently gained the upper mids, or, yeah, just a de-esser plug.
Then again i've never had to deal with a game in which voice is such a front-and-center feature.
I never had an issue with any popping in the voice track on my studio monitors or headset, only the sibilance stood out.
I will say that my opinion of the issue is that i can deal with some shitty 22khz sampling as long as that is the constant, but screwed up sibilance on an otherwise high quality track drags the whole thing down. It's like someone behind you poking you in the back of the head every time it pops in.
nWeCinematics, thanks for your post, really informative.
Spacecat - I've stopped playing thanks to the poor quality. It is an expectation that a game is put together to a reasonable degree of quality. This clearly qualifies as faulty audio. They have sold us a faulty product, and I am considering asking for a refund.
nWeCinematics, thanks for your post, really informative.
Spacecat - I've stopped playing thanks to the poor quality. It is an expectation that a game is put together to a reasonable degree of quality. This clearly qualifies as faulty audio. They have sold us a faulty product, and I am considering asking for a refund.
Same here. I don't feel motivated at all considering that i am stuck and to figure out where to go next i need to hear a lot of crappy dialog. I honestly have a lot of other games that I would rather play right now. Fortunately it's not like Telltale is the only supplier of games. Although i really would like to see the end of this ridiculously funny and epic saga.
I see audio as something important, but I do realize that a company such as Telltale has to majorly sacrifice audio quality for the sake of file size. I guess I find that acceptable, which a lot of people here don't.
1. The bandwidth problem has been talked about million times but I just don't buy it, if TT was so concerned about bw costs, they wouldn't allow anyone to download their games from the website without some limits.
2. They could allways use a free p2p solution for distributing their games if that was really the problem.
3. And if you are talking about those people that have poor internet connection, just make two voice files available for download.
4. We really aren't talking about huge download increases, 16x3=48mb for example? Don't really know without having those voice files on my own computer, but TOMI doesn't have that much dialogue to fit in a reasonable space.
I have that problem too and I demand a patch. Playing an adventure game with bad sound quality is disgusting. Also its a insult to Guybrush and the crew.
Only after we PAY FOR the game and play it do we realize the audio is lousy.
It kind of reminds me of when 256-color VGA graphics started to become popular, and I was stuck with a PC that had a 16-color Tandy graphics adapter. All of the screen shots on the back of game boxes were from the VGA version of the game, and when I got the game home, I'd have to settle for second-rate graphics. In those cases, at least the screen shots were properly labeled, and no one was being misled.
Only after we PAY FOR the game and play it do we realize the audio is lousy.
Yeah, I think that's what's annoying me the most about all of this. After purchasing Sam & Max, I had had enough of the poor sound quality. I told myself I would wait for preview videos or play the first episode's demo to see if the sound was poor. If it was, I wasn't going to buy ToMI.
The first episode's video snippets came out, and sounded fine (as did the first episode, on the whole) so I paid my money. Then they switch back to horrible quality!
Asking for a refund for poor voice compression? Seriously? That would set a real interesting precedent.
This is an occational nasty itch, not a steaming turd flung in your face.
Actually, if you do want a refund, you may be in luck. Back when this exact problem was reported nearly three years ago, Emily told people to e-mail support@telltalegames.com if they wanted a refund:
She also mentions that they're kicking around the idea of offering the option of a higher-quality download... a brilliant solution that we're still begging for.
Seriously, though. Would begging help, Telltale Games? We're only passionate about this because we love your games and don't want to abandon them. I love the idea of a scrappy lil' company keeping these old-school franchises and game-style alive. And I want to keep supporting you!
So... pretty please make with the higher-quality download options? We'll be your best friends!
We're only passionate about this because we love your games and don't want to abandon
Yes youre right. I think Telltale's idea is only making a game with cheap quality because the title "Monkey Island" is enough to buy the game. They only think that the appereance of Guybrush will be enough and lots of money will go to their pocket...
If you want to play, but feel you "can't" because of the terrible sound on the Spinner Cay Island, just power through that bit (takes about 5 min). The rest of the chapter has passable sound.
Having this terrible sound near the beginning of the chapter makes people assume the rest is equally as terrible when it isn't.
Well, I'am on the first Island (think name was Jackibit or something) and the pirate and Elaine's talk on the background, also the sound of the mer-thing is unbearable. Especially when all of them speaks together.
Yes youre right. I think Telltale's idea is only making a game with cheap quality because the title "Monkey Island" is enough to buy the game. They only think that the appereance of Guybrush will be enough and lots of money will go to their pocket...
No way. Geeze, I strongly disagree with this assessment. To me it looks like an awful lot of work goes into these games, which makes their allowance of this sloppy (for lack of a better term) aspect to continually pass muster so darn perplexing.
They have to write funny scripts and dialog which can't be easy. They have to hire actors and engineers to record the dialog which can't be cheap. Then once the game has been programmed, playtested, and debugged, they compress the dialog within an inch of its life and then release it, apparently saying "meh, it's good enough."
Imagine the curator at the Louvre decided to take a Polaroid of the Mona Lisa, blow it up to poster size, and then hang it in place of the original. Sure, you'd get the gist of the original painting. And maybe most people wouldn't even notice the difference. But the people who did notice... well, I think they'd be pretty vocal in their protest.
And yes, for anyone from TTG who is reading this, I did just compare Tales of Monkey Island to the Mona Lisa. Feel free to use this in a promotional blurb.*
Imagine the curator at the Louvre decided to take a Polaroid of the Mona Lisa, blow it up to poster size, and then hang it in place of the original. Sure, you'd get the gist of the original painting. And maybe most people wouldn't even notice the difference. But the people who did notice... well, I think they'd be pretty vocal in their protest.
And yes, for anyone from TTG who is reading this, I did just compare Tales of Monkey Island to the Mona Lisa. Feel free to use this in a promotional blurb.*
(*if you first address our concerns, that is)
...or if they quote your comparison in full context: a polaroid of the Mona Lisa, blown up to poster size, and hung in place of the original.
Comments
Show me where they've seriously addressed the issue. I'm not being rhetorical here. If they have really addressed it, we all clearly missed it. As far as I know, the last word was three days ago where Will said the following:
This is certainly no solution. In fact, it's an admission that it is a problem and we should just "power through" the parts where it's a BIG problem. Nowhere have they said "we're working on it" or even "deal with it folks". Either answer would be more appreciated than being ignored. All's I'm saying...
Come on guys. Give the man some credit for helping us out on a sunday evening..
I'm sure they're having meetings about this subject over the next few days.
Really? So they'll refuse to fix a known issue in order to spite their paying customers who have annoyed them by posting in the support forum about said issue?
This seems like an unrealistic scenario to me. Call me crazy.
In general, the voice quality on TT games (by this I mean Sam and Max and TOMI, which is what I've played) is very low. TOMI2 crosses the line between very low and unprofessional.
There are a number of possible reasons for the poor voice quality:
1. DATA COMPRESSION
Put simply, data compression decreases file size by degrading audio quality. It reduces the dynamic range and/or frequency range of the audio. The human voice is a complex waveform, and it does not respond well to large amounts of compression. If you took the pc_voice.ttarch file's 15MB and filled it with uncompressed audio, you'd have roughly SIX MINUTES of voice. Obviously, TT needs to compress the voice to make downloadable distribution feasible, but trying to cram hours(?) of voice into six minutes worth of space seems unnecessary.
For comparison:
SOMI:SE is a 2GB download. After installation, 800MB (40% of download) is voice.
TOMI2 is a 225MB download. After installation, 15MB (7% of download) is voice.
2. SIBILANCE
Even without changing the amount of compression, using a de-esser or notch filter on the voice tracks BEFORE compressing them could help alleviate some of the problems. A low-pass filter IS NOT the right tool for this job, as you might need to roll off as low as 6-8kHZ, which would damage the voices even further. This should have been done by the dialogue editor, but it's possible that he/she was not given the time or resources to make it happen.
3. MIX
I'm not sure how the TT engine is handling the mix in-game, but it is contributing significantly to the problem. Guybrush can say the same line in two different places with VASTLY different results. In one place, the line sounds "fine" (compressed, but no distortion or popping), then in another place he sounds like "I'm GuyPOPbrushSNAP POPThreeCLICKpwood." Somewhere in the game engine, the "music", "voice", and "sounds" stems are being crammed together, and can't all fit through what seems like should be acceptable total sound levels.
4. PEOPLE
This is possibly the most difficult hurdle to overcome. Like it is in the film and television industry, sound is overlooked in the game industry. Somebody has to care about it enough to fight for it, on almost every project. Obviously TT knows the sound quality is a problem; people have been complaining about it for three years. It's entirely possible that TT hasn't fixed any of the sound issues because whoever makes the final decisions just doesn't care, or isn't willing to allocate time or money to fix them. It's also possible that sounds takes a backseat to anything else to make the monthly release deadlines.
Whatever the case may be, if I were the sound editor/designer for TOMI, I'd be really mad and/or really depressed after the release of TOMI2.
"Telltale, thanks for letting me give you $35!"
Telltale didn't have to make Tales of Monkey Island, no. And they wouldn't have made it if they didn't think it was financially viable. They're a company, not a glorious fountain of generosity.
I don't hold this against them, I completely accept that's just the way things work. If I were running Telltale, I would act in exactly the same way. What I wouldn't do, however, is completely ignore the most replied thread on the customer support forum.
Please be nice to each other.
Posting and discussing problems on the Forum is not annoying Telltale.
There's also no reason why it should prevent Telltale from fixing them.
I second that. Thank you, nWeCinematics.
By the way, to be fair to whomever is the sound editor for TOMI, we don't know that they are necessarily to blame for the problem.
Erm sorry for defending TT.. >.<
Exactly. The sound editor is likely responsible for none of the problems, and is possibly powerless to correct them.
I powered through this part and the rest of what I have played so far has been enjoyable. I am happy that the rest of the chapter didn't have such severe problems.
Well, in my instance, the type of speakers made a huge difference (probably it was my old crappy Dell speakers that hid the crappiness of the sound).
It worked for me.
Pardon my lack of humility, but I think I have better hearing than most. My dad was an audiophile, and I do have a high-end stereo system. I see audio as something important, but I do realize that a company such as Telltale has to majorly sacrifice audio quality for the sake of file size. I guess I find that acceptable, which a lot of people here don't.
I think HansSchmucker said it best: You're expecting ferrari quality out of a Mini Cooper.
Dialogue plays a huge role. Audio representation of said dialogue does not, as many non-talkie Adventure games in the past, like both Monkey Island 1 and LeChuck's Revenge have shown.
Edit: I do want to apologize for being a jerk. It's just that for every praise this games gets you get a thousand complainers willing to never buy a telltale game again, and that annoys me.
I wasn't so offended that I had to stop playing because of the sound quality, though. And I think in general, the consistency of the dialogue sounds in terms of volume, balance with the music, etc. is much improved from, say, Sam & Max Season 1. But this episode really did have more than its fair share of painfully obvious over-compression and glitchiness.
Minor issues are much easier to "look into" than major/core issues, which the audio compression seems to be. TTG's Will made a specific comment about why the compression sounded particularly bad in this episode, but beyond that, this thread is basically about the same problem that all TTG games have, so one would assume that they have "looked into it" many times, and haven't come up with a good solution, for some reason.
Interesting. Never used a notch for de-essing or controlling sibilance, I should look more into that. I always felt sibilance varied dramatically from word to word and character to character, so much so it didn't become feasible within time constraints to hand-edit or automate filtering on a per-line basis. I've traditionally used a sharp lowpass (8x butterworth for instance) and gently gained the upper mids, or, yeah, just a de-esser plug.
Then again i've never had to deal with a game in which voice is such a front-and-center feature.
I never had an issue with any popping in the voice track on my studio monitors or headset, only the sibilance stood out.
I will say that my opinion of the issue is that i can deal with some shitty 22khz sampling as long as that is the constant, but screwed up sibilance on an otherwise high quality track drags the whole thing down. It's like someone behind you poking you in the back of the head every time it pops in.
This is an occational nasty itch, not a steaming turd flung in your face.
Spacecat - I've stopped playing thanks to the poor quality. It is an expectation that a game is put together to a reasonable degree of quality. This clearly qualifies as faulty audio. They have sold us a faulty product, and I am considering asking for a refund.
Same here. I don't feel motivated at all considering that i am stuck and to figure out where to go next i need to hear a lot of crappy dialog. I honestly have a lot of other games that I would rather play right now. Fortunately it's not like Telltale is the only supplier of games. Although i really would like to see the end of this ridiculously funny and epic saga.
1. The bandwidth problem has been talked about million times but I just don't buy it, if TT was so concerned about bw costs, they wouldn't allow anyone to download their games from the website without some limits.
2. They could allways use a free p2p solution for distributing their games if that was really the problem.
3. And if you are talking about those people that have poor internet connection, just make two voice files available for download.
4. We really aren't talking about huge download increases, 16x3=48mb for example? Don't really know without having those voice files on my own computer, but TOMI doesn't have that much dialogue to fit in a reasonable space.
..or can they?
(I did recall an episode of Sam & Max season 1, which sounded like it was recorded in a small bathroom)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmkC9ULnbVE
Only after we PAY FOR the game and play it do we realize the audio is lousy.
It kind of reminds me of when 256-color VGA graphics started to become popular, and I was stuck with a PC that had a 16-color Tandy graphics adapter. All of the screen shots on the back of game boxes were from the VGA version of the game, and when I got the game home, I'd have to settle for second-rate graphics. In those cases, at least the screen shots were properly labeled, and no one was being misled.
lol!!
Yeah, I think that's what's annoying me the most about all of this. After purchasing Sam & Max, I had had enough of the poor sound quality. I told myself I would wait for preview videos or play the first episode's demo to see if the sound was poor. If it was, I wasn't going to buy ToMI.
The first episode's video snippets came out, and sounded fine (as did the first episode, on the whole) so I paid my money. Then they switch back to horrible quality!
Actually, if you do want a refund, you may be in luck. Back when this exact problem was reported nearly three years ago, Emily told people to e-mail support@telltalegames.com if they wanted a refund:
http://www.telltalegames.com/forums/showpost.php?p=15002&postcount=7
She also mentions that they're kicking around the idea of offering the option of a higher-quality download... a brilliant solution that we're still begging for.
Seriously, though. Would begging help, Telltale Games? We're only passionate about this because we love your games and don't want to abandon them. I love the idea of a scrappy lil' company keeping these old-school franchises and game-style alive. And I want to keep supporting you!
So... pretty please make with the higher-quality download options? We'll be your best friends!
That's how I feel as well. I want to LOVE these games, not just kind of enjoy them while I try to ignore the sound.
Yes TT! We'll make it worth your while!!! (Sorry, had to say that..)
Yes youre right. I think Telltale's idea is only making a game with cheap quality because the title "Monkey Island" is enough to buy the game. They only think that the appereance of Guybrush will be enough and lots of money will go to their pocket...
Having this terrible sound near the beginning of the chapter makes people assume the rest is equally as terrible when it isn't.
No way. Geeze, I strongly disagree with this assessment. To me it looks like an awful lot of work goes into these games, which makes their allowance of this sloppy (for lack of a better term) aspect to continually pass muster so darn perplexing.
They have to write funny scripts and dialog which can't be easy. They have to hire actors and engineers to record the dialog which can't be cheap. Then once the game has been programmed, playtested, and debugged, they compress the dialog within an inch of its life and then release it, apparently saying "meh, it's good enough."
Imagine the curator at the Louvre decided to take a Polaroid of the Mona Lisa, blow it up to poster size, and then hang it in place of the original. Sure, you'd get the gist of the original painting. And maybe most people wouldn't even notice the difference. But the people who did notice... well, I think they'd be pretty vocal in their protest.
And yes, for anyone from TTG who is reading this, I did just compare Tales of Monkey Island to the Mona Lisa. Feel free to use this in a promotional blurb.*
(*if you first address our concerns, that is)
...or if they quote your comparison in full context: a polaroid of the Mona Lisa, blown up to poster size, and hung in place of the original.