arijigoku
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No matter how many times I play this it never gets old, Ron Gilbert is an absolute genius and one the greatest designers of all time. Doesn't hurt he's got Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman co-writing and designing this one with him too.
This was my first time playing through the original 16-colour floppy version all the way, probably my preferred version now, though the added ambience in the CD version is welcome due to the lack of music through much of the floppy versions. The EGA graphics still look great, while the 256-colour version can look a bit bland at times and the special edition too far removed from the original art, though I can't really complain about the sound in any of the PC versions.
This was my first time playing through the original 16-colour floppy version all the way, probably my preferred version now, though the added ambience in the CD version is welcome due to the lack of music through much of the floppy versions. The EGA graphics still look great, while the 256-colour version can look a bit bland at times and the special edition too far removed from the original art, though I can't really complain about the sound in any of the PC versions.
God Stemmle, when supervised by Grossman (and given a little advice from Gilbert) can actually redeem himself for Escape and direct the only good Monkey Island not by Gilbert.
The critical reception of this game was absolutely criminal and one of the first times I realised how disgustingly immature games "journalism" was.
Apparently, according to people who are seemingly so passionate about games they make their living writing/talking about them, games are simply a product of which value is determined based on consumer cost and length of what they arbitrarily define to be the core experience - even if the entire point of the game is not rushing through it once to see a fucking cutscene and move on with your life like disposable entertainment.
This shit hit Hitman (2016) really bad as well.
Apparently, according to people who are seemingly so passionate about games they make their living writing/talking about them, games are simply a product of which value is determined based on consumer cost and length of what they arbitrarily define to be the core experience - even if the entire point of the game is not rushing through it once to see a fucking cutscene and move on with your life like disposable entertainment.
This shit hit Hitman (2016) really bad as well.
This is not how you follow up the greatest game of all time. An incredibly poor attempt at recreating the first game through the 2nd act, and then going out of its way to explain away all of thematic depth of Monkey 2 with a meaningless narrative. This game looks absolutely beautiful though.
Windows version via DREAMM emulator with "simulated CRT" scaling (copying save data back and forth with a native windows install to get around crashes on DREAMM)
I was excited for this one, looking forward to Stemmle & Clark's follow up to Sam & Max: Hit the Road... I didn't really like it. It's interpretation of the world is weirder than Curse's, but it's wholly built on that. It's biggest crime is that, much like Curse, it devolves into rehashing the first game over and over.
It also ruins the GrimE engine - visually they developed a style for Grim Fandango that perfectly adheres to the low poly models - here? They just tried to directly convert Curse's style in late '90s CG... and it doesn't work. I did set up the latest version of the DREAMM emulator for this, and I gotta say, their new CRT filter is the best I've ever seen and it makes this game look pretty damn good, but it's a huge step down from Grim. The other thing is the controls, Grim was designed to be incredibly cinematic with no hud, apparently people found this confusing so they just chuck a menu on the screen with same keyboard controls assigned to less intuitive buttons. Ech.
Oh and the retcons at the end are even worse than the last game's, completely contradicting Monkey 1 & 2.
I kind of liked the insane Stemmle twists, but eh, it's not really Monkey Island. Which it shouldn't be anyway - but it is, so...
I was excited for this one, looking forward to Stemmle & Clark's follow up to Sam & Max: Hit the Road... I didn't really like it. It's interpretation of the world is weirder than Curse's, but it's wholly built on that. It's biggest crime is that, much like Curse, it devolves into rehashing the first game over and over.
It also ruins the GrimE engine - visually they developed a style for Grim Fandango that perfectly adheres to the low poly models - here? They just tried to directly convert Curse's style in late '90s CG... and it doesn't work. I did set up the latest version of the DREAMM emulator for this, and I gotta say, their new CRT filter is the best I've ever seen and it makes this game look pretty damn good, but it's a huge step down from Grim. The other thing is the controls, Grim was designed to be incredibly cinematic with no hud, apparently people found this confusing so they just chuck a menu on the screen with same keyboard controls assigned to less intuitive buttons. Ech.
Oh and the retcons at the end are even worse than the last game's, completely contradicting Monkey 1 & 2.
I kind of liked the insane Stemmle twists, but eh, it's not really Monkey Island. Which it shouldn't be anyway - but it is, so...