Personal Vindication for Mike Stemmle?
After receiving endless (and excessive) amounts of indirect hate over Escape and its flaws, he and Mark Darin came up with an intriguing and excellent Monkey Island story. I will admit my initial fear was "...uh oh, Mike Stemmle wrote this story - will it make the same mistakes as Escape?"
I didn't have to worry. The reinvention of LeChuck was brilliant and saved the character. Morgan Le Flay became really interesting as a love interest for Guybrush. They used Murray in a non-forced way. There's not a whole lot of bad things to say about the series.
I think the third episode is where things really hit its stride. If the latter two episodes end up in a satisfactory way this may be my favorite Monkey Island game. And in a way it's kind of cool to see the whole human subplot level of it all, to see the creator of the fourth game get his very improbable and unlikely chance to make a beloved sequel ten years later.
(Obviously with lots of help from a talented staff and everything, but yeah.)
I didn't have to worry. The reinvention of LeChuck was brilliant and saved the character. Morgan Le Flay became really interesting as a love interest for Guybrush. They used Murray in a non-forced way. There's not a whole lot of bad things to say about the series.
I think the third episode is where things really hit its stride. If the latter two episodes end up in a satisfactory way this may be my favorite Monkey Island game. And in a way it's kind of cool to see the whole human subplot level of it all, to see the creator of the fourth game get his very improbable and unlikely chance to make a beloved sequel ten years later.
(Obviously with lots of help from a talented staff and everything, but yeah.)
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Comments
the problem with these episodes is that youre stuck in one island at a time
and these islands are big big like melee island or something
and that keeps the game from being hard
Apropos of this, as a big fan of Escape, can you give me a wee bit of a hint? Having now acquired all the previous Monkey Island games through the offices of those fine people at Ebay, I'm playing through Escape, but no matter what I chuck at Herman, he doesn't remember anything. I can't even skip ahead using saved games downloaded from the web because I don't know the Monkey Kombat codes that cropped up when that player went through those sequences. HELP!
The plot & the puzzles the designers make, go somewhat hand in hand.
Kevin
The problem is just that the controls are really bad and its an inconvenience to run it on a modern PC.
1 to 3 are taken care of by ScummVM but there is no flawless way to run 4 on my Vista+Ubuntu rig. Other early Win9x games have the same problem.
What LA should do is;
Schedule a remake of 4 after they are done with 2SE, OR
Release a proper modern game binary so the original at least runs well, OR
Give some assistance to the ScummVM/Residual project so at least THEY can support the game in the near future.
It's unlikely that any of this will happen though. Shame..
That puzzle is a nightmare, I think it's littered with bugs that stop it from working. Try using the
I thought that was quite clever but yes, frustrating
I had absolutely no problem running it on Vista
Yeah definitely. Mind you, as much as I hope that they do release a MI2:SE, I doubt they'll go further. I guess MI3:SE would be a possibility but I think there are a lot of people out there for whom "Monkey Island" just means 1 and 2. I doubt they'd do a remake of 4 though because it would require a whole new 3D game engine (unless they licensed Telltale's engine) and its not nearly as popular amongst fans as the other games. At the least I would hope that they could at least recompile it and rerelease it via Steam. If they could add support for far higher resolutions and maybe use the game data from the PS2 version with higher polygon counts and less pre-rendered stuff then that would be just fine.
Personally I just want the ability to play through all of the games with voice acting and I want to be able to do that easily from any modern version of Windows (since OS X is too much to hope for).
I purchased it, but I never could get into it. I spent too much time getting frustrated by poorly executed controls that any humor was quickly de-railed by frustration.
EDIT: And yes, I have played, finished and enjoyed every other MI game to date.
Back when MI4 was out, my pc at the time was little more than a paper weight with internet access. So I kindaq forgot about it. Now I could play it but I can't buy it without going through eBay and I'm just too impatient to wait. Fortunately youtube had a whole playthrough of about 45 videos of the game, from start to finish with all most (if not all) the dialogue featured, but without the running back and forth (the player just grabbed whatever items were needed before coming up to a puzzle to avoid needless "Hmm, where can I get a duck?").
That was the only time I used a walkthrough for that game, and it only confirmed what I suspected. It was a bug. I threw the right items on him, but nothing worked. So after checking the walkthrough and confirming the bug, I reloaded an earlier save (thankfully I had saved only an hour earlier or so), it worked.
Hope you have an earlier save, FitzoliverJ.
Don't understand the complaints about the controls. They were more or less the same as Grim Fandango, only smoother, imo. Ironically though, these are the only two games LucasArts made with that engine, and one is considered one of LucasArts' greatest, and the other is considered one of LucasArts' worst.
Wow, I've heard about this bug before and I find it really strange that it never happened to me. Maybe its because I have the Aussie copy of the game, idk.
Use this installer to play Monkey Island 4 on a Vista or other machine that isn't letting you play.
There's a similar installer for Grim, but I don't know where to find it on the tubes. (Oh wait, its on the same page... just scroll down.)
Kevin
The main problem was they ditched a control scheme that worked perfectly in favour of one that wasn't quite ready.
so funny how people think the games have bugs when they just can't solve a puzzle lol...
It is a bug and to check it I replayed it following a walkthrough and still it didn't work - I had to revert to a previous save game and after that it was absolutely fine.
Previous save, sure, I'll try that.
(Walks out of earshot)
DAMN DAMN DAMN!!!:mad:
It's way better than Escape from Monkey Island, without a doubt, but unfortunately the same writing/conceptual problems exist.
All you have to really do is set up a controller and set the controls to camera relative instead of character relative and it controls pretty well... Then all you have to do is get over the fact that the character models are aged (sure sort of ugly) but the backgrounds are really nice (I think) and the writing and jokes are perfectly fine...
I will challenge anyone to a tickle fight who disagrees with me.
As for angry Monkey Island fans, there was nothing he could have done to satisfy all of them. If he had made a game similar to Curse of Monkey Island, then he would have alienated the diehard fans of the first two monkey island games. If he had made a game similar to the first two, then the fans of the third game would have revolted.
So he chose the best possible outcome: he tried to make a game that would make money.
I think the only thing I didn't like about it was that I would have preferred they stay with 2D until something more beautiful could be done with 3D but then I think that about pretty much all the games of the age. Tales is really beautiful and could probably have been done on 3d hardware from about 2003. Back in 2000, however, 3D graphics just weren't good enough to compete with the lush hand drawn 2D graphics of the time.
Had Escape been done with a similar engine to the current SOMI:SE then it would likely have drawn a completely different reaction. However, at the time 2D was sooooo old fashioned and lame and if a game wasn't 3D then it was obviously crap. Nine years later and things are completely different. 3D graphics are now as good as any 2D graphics could be at a similar resolution and the need for all games to be 3D is starting to wane. 2D is becoming acceptable again for the right type of game - i.e. side scrolling platformers, the rumored new sidescrolling Sonic game as an example.