Q&A With the Team

[SurplusGamer]

MI2 is my favourite ending. It messed with my 10 year old mind in pleasant ways.

[trapplerton]

Originally Posted by Ravn

Long time fan, first time caller.

I am litteraly aching to play more Monkey Island, but get this game out on the Xbox 360 as well. I mean... Wii Ware... who cares? There are not many old school adventure gamers there. Albeit, they mostly tend to play PC, but if they have a console - it's a 360.

Please, I want to enjoy Monkey Island in the comfort of my livingroom in 5.1 surround.

Thx, team

please... who wants a 360? Playstation 3 ftw ^^ ... i know more old school gamer who prefer the PS3... but i wouldn't mind a release for both XBL and PSN... that would be awesome ^^ ... although, i already preordered them for the PC ... and i assume you've done the very same. so what's the point? ^^

[freewheel]

*cries*
i keep refreshing the page to no avail...
this is worse than the pain of solving a MI2 killer puzzle.

[Alucard]

xbox 360 is for blockhead jocks and frat boys.
While I'm not entirely impressed with what I've seen on the Wii and PS3 so far, my two favourite game systems of this "generation" are the DS and PSP

[Vandalis]

Hehe me too. And ill stay up all night if i have to!

Taste cold mouse curser feable internet explorar refresh button!

[Eilien]

Nice to know that I'm not the only one sitting in a "refreshbutton frenzy" waiting for the download button to show itself

[Vandalis]

I was just wondering somthing..you got Sam and Max in all new 3d goodness. And now Monkey Island. Whats Next? I think you should make a sequal to Day of the Tenticle or Loom or maybe even Zak Mckrakken! Now that would be awsome!

[Soup]

Forget those other franchises. Full Throttle! When is it happening?!?!

[EvilNod Threepwood]

Does anyone know if "Stian the Siv-lover" has this game by now??

[Slanzinger]

Originally Posted by Vandalis

I was just wondering somthing..you got Sam and Max in all new 3d goodness. And now Monkey Island. Whats Next? I think you should make a sequal to Day of the Tenticle or Loom or maybe even Zak Mckrakken! Now that would be awsome!

Speaking of Loom...
http://store.steampowered.com/news/2644/
I'm quite likely to buy it when it comes out on there.

[parabolee]

Originally Posted by Fury

Monkey Island 2 had a horrible ending. Seriously, it made MI2 the weakest in the series (until Mi4 came out).

I think 3 did it's best to salvage a plot from that ending, and most people will agree 3 was the best.

I think you will find you are in minority in this opinion. In all polls on Monkey Island fan boards that I have seen had LeChucks Revenge in the well deserved first position with Secret trailing by about 20%.

And I think the ending was pure genius. Monkey Island 2 is a masterpiece in my opinion and one of the greatest games of all time.

And it wasn't the first I played (Secret was).

Oh my, I'm off-topic aren't I? Well I'm just killing time until Tales comes out!

[Thriftweed Fancy Pants]

I suppose this might be "Classified," but out of curiosity...

How much $$$ did it cost to get the license for Monkey Island?

[Duate]

Originally Posted by parabolee

I think you will find you are in minority in this opinion. In all polls on Monkey Island fan boards that I have seen had LeChucks Revenge in the well deserved first position with Secret trailing by about 20%.

And I think the ending was pure genius. Monkey Island 2 is a masterpiece in my opinion and one of the greatest games of all time.

And it wasn't the first I played (Secret was).

Oh my, I'm off-topic aren't I? Well I'm just killing time until Tales comes out!

yeah the ending to mi2 blew my mind. twice. once with the carnival then once again with elaine standing by the hole wondering where guybrush went . it left so much to the imagination and created this wonderful mystery. it was a brilliant ending. best out of all 4 games, in fact. (monkey robot? urgh. cover lechuck in ice and sail away roll credits? uGHH. rootbeer lechuck to death and watch him explode in the sky? ok that was pretty damn cool. but still, MI2 had the best ending, in a lot of people's opinions).

[Dave Grossman]

Always controversial, isn't it? Some hate it, others love it, not too many opinions in the middle. Having a cliffhanger like that would have been a much better idea had Ron or any of us actually worked on the next game. Which, of course, we didn't, and poor Jonathan and Larry had to figure out what to do with it on their own. I thought their game was rather good.

I'm not going to say anything about what was or was not originally intended to follow that cliffhanger. I would caution you not to put too much faith into any particular rumor you might hear about it. Those who know don't tell, and those who tell don't know. Make up your own mind about what it means - that's what poetry is for (and, um, also the bizarre endings of funny computer games).

[zenshark]

7th where i am!

[Will]

Originally Posted by djchallis

Thanks for the reply again! That sounds good.
I guess my thoughts were from a design point-of-view. I wonder if you guys might design some bits in a certain way just because that's the way it's always done in your games and with your system. Or are you guys too creative for that?

Well it's always a good idea to design within your core competency. We do this one thing very well, therefore it's a good and safe idea to do that some more. Stuff outside of the norm can be new and exciting, but is often a lot harder to implement. As such, it runs a greater risk of falling flat and just not being that interesting. That said, I think we try to keep a good balance between the two things. I think in the initial design phase we end up throwing around a ton of ideas regardless of how hard it would be to actually do, and then we end up weeding down ideas until we have a produceable game.

Originally Posted by djchallis

If that is your job, you could answer another question for me: How much creativity do you get within your particular job? I always imagine the designer making all the creative decisions. Is that true and does it frustrate you, or are there loads of things you get to be creative with?

Actually, I'm just Lead Tester. In short, I play the games. So you would probably assume I have absolutely zero creative input. The way we are set up though, we have a pretty free flow of ideas. The designers are very open to ideas, and I'm constantly walking over to the designers and programmers to hash out ideas and fixes. I've got my hands in a bit of everything.

[Shauntron]

Originally Posted by Will

Actually, I'm just Lead Tester. In short, I play the games. So you would probably assume I have absolutely zero creative input. The way we are set up though, we have a pretty free flow of ideas. The designers are very open to ideas, and I'm constantly walking over to the designers and programmers to hash out ideas and fixes. I've got my hands in a bit of everything.

To elaborate on this, the kinds of creative input from a tester most likely to be addressed involves devising situations well off the regular path of the game in which the way the characters act make no sense. Like if you solve a puzzle that ends up torching a characters home, should he still be cheerful when you meet him next time? We also try to think about the weird things a player might try to solve a puzzle, because even if it's wrong, it might be a really good idea, and that's a good opportunity to steer the player in the right direction.

We're also in a good position to help designers recycle existing content creatively in crunch times (when generating new animations and voices will be a strain), like at the end of the Homestar audition in SBCG4AP 103. If you wait too long to solve the final leg of that puzzle, the timing will be thrown off (since it's a music puzzle) and you won't succeed even if you had the right answer, so Mike was trying to figure out the best way to let people know they needed to be quicker, and I remembered the line "Too late!" when burning Strong Sad's paper work in 102. Now the puzzle works just fine!

[Fefe]

Hi all!

I just can't sleep so I decided to write my first post here just before the release
I think I am the true Monkey Generation, being 28 now, I was about 11 when I first got my hands on MI2. It was the ultimately cool game then, and for me, it still is. LOTS of awesome graphics, funny characters, great atmosphere. It also gave me inspiration to learn English
I loved it so much that at first I was too critical towards new episodes. I've always loved 320x200x256col pixel graphics (I still do), I am quite conservative in general. But after a few hours of play time I started appreciating the cartoon-style of CMI and the 3D graphics of EMI too. Now I really like ALL MI games. The five episode TMI also sounded a bit strange for me at first and I was a little bit afraid that its style had changed too much... but having all these great names behind it, I am confident that I'm going to love this game too...

If I have to make a preference order of MI games, it would be MI2, CMI, MI1, EMI. But I love all of them, for different reasons. All of them had their different charming style.

Oops, almost forgot: my all time favourite visual joke is Stan's suit. In MI1 and MI2 its pattern was stationary on the screen while Stan moved. I suppose it was mainly because it was hard enough to make ANY pattern in 320x200 resolution. But in high resolution cartoon-style CMI the pattern of the suit still didn't follow Stan's movements even thought is would have been easy to do so. Even in EMI, where it was actually HARDER to put a stationary pattern on the 3D suit, they did it I laughed a lot when I first met Stan in EMI. It was both funny and giving some respects towards the original MI1&2 games.
I'm really curious if I'll meet Stan again and if I do, how his suit will look like

[Vandalis]

I wonder how long we have left? If it wasn't released unitl say 5pm or somthing i would get some sleep. I suppose it doesnt really matter when i get it. I guess im just too excited.

I think i started playin Monkey island when we got our first amiga when i was about 6 or so, we got the Lucas Arts Games collection, which had Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, Loom, Indiana Jones, and Zak Mckrakken. I used to play it for hours but got stuck when i couldn't figure out where to find a helmet. I didnt find out it was a pot under the stove in teh bar until after the amiga broke. So i didn't actually get very far until i was about 14-15 i think when i was able to play it agian. After that i played 2 and eventualy 3. BOth of whish were great. I bout 4 when i seen it in a shop for the ps2 but it wasnt really the same as the others.

The years past by, im 21 now and i have been patiently waiting for the news that a new Monkey island would be coming. But you were very sneaky and managed to keep it a secret.

Now that we know its here in only a matter of hours or so. Im just as excited now as i was back when i first played the Monkey Island.

Im not sure what to do now. Wait up? or just sleep and get it when i wake up.
It would be nice if you could come up with a time scale of maybe how long we got left till the release.

[MightyWally]

Hello everyone!

To the developers, how much would you rate your own game on a scale of 1-10?

just curious ^^

personally, as long as Dominic plays guybrush, i cant possibly give it anything less than 10, but i'll have to wait and see