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Secret of Monkey Island Thoughts

MRY

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Just finished playing it with the kids. Gotta say, I was underwhelmed. I still think Monkey Island 2 is the greatest of all time -- we'll see if I still feel that way after we play it -- but Secret had some real flaws.

(1) The last portion of the game is much weaker than the first. Monkey Island's puzzles are more or less linear and are mostly worse than Melee Island's puzzles. There are a couple that aren't so bad (like the catapult puzzle), but the overwhelming majority are A-on-B and lack the cleverness or lateral thinking of following the shopkeeper, understanding the treasure map, using the grog, beating the sword master, or getting into the safe.

(2) LeChuck is a neat character, but he's not an adversary. Other than snatching Elaine (which happens off screen) and is totally irrelevant to Guybrush's stated goal at the outset of the game (to become a pirate), he doesn't interact with Guybrush's quest until the very end. While the cannibals have various grievances to air about LeChuck, nothing he does there actually interferes with the player's goals (e.g., LeChuck has stolen the voodoo root, but you only learn of the voodoo root in the same conversation when you learn LeChuck has it).

(3) There is lots of tedious backtracking, particularly late in the game, and while thankfully they finally lampshade it and avert it with the fifth time you have to schlep to the cannibal tribe, that "joke" doesn't really merit the tedium leading up to it.

(4) Insult sword fighting was kind of good when I was a kid and not good at all now. Humor is hard, but the problem isn't actually the humor. It's that you have to grind for so damn long doing the same thing over and over again, such that any joke would wear out its welcome. The way the insults switch at the end is great, but the rest is pretty much classic bad puzzle design where the time it takes the player to figure out what to do is trivial compared to the time it takes him to mechanically do the thing. There are many other examples of puzzles that go on too long, in particular the two mazes, which each could be half as long and no less difficult or prone to luck. A few puzzles are just dumb (like the magnetic compass on the key), while others are stupidly easy and feel like padding (essentially everything on the ghost ship) -- you know exactly what to use an item one once you get it, and you get the item without even knowing it's there (the grease is a good example of this).

(5) There were several times in the game where I got way ahead of the logic. For example, the monkey was following me before I had any idea that I needed his help, I hit the tree with the boulder without knowing I needed bananas, most of the items I took I had no reason for taking. I went through many steps to get the oars, but I didn't really know what I was getting the oars for -- to row the boat, obviously, but to where? Lots of this "because it's there" stuff. (Indeed, the ghost ship is again a good example.)

(6) A big part of the game's "humor" is the idea that Guybrush goes through a huge undertaking and it's totally worthless. He completes the trials but nothing comes of it; he gathers the crew and the crew does nothing; Toothrot had a ship all along; he "rescues" Elaine and she didn't need rescuing; he gets the voodoo rootbeer and it's promptly lost. The thing is, whatever the merits of this from the standpoint of humor, it undercuts the player's sense of accomplishment and when it connects with #4, it makes the whole game feel kind of unengaging -- the things you try to do come to nothing, while the things you do unknowingly yield some result. Grim Fandango has basically the same structure except that Manny isn't a failure at everything he does, and IMO it works much better.

(7) In several instances, important hotspots are inexplicably hard to find, even when they aren't meant to be hidden. The most obvious of these is the hatch on the ship in the second part of the game. (That section also had the annoying fact that the rope ladder had to be interacted with using "walk to" not "use." Oh well.) I am not opposed to hiding hotspots. For one thing, they can encourage the player to more closely study the scene (which can itself reveal fun visual details). For another, where you're trying to convey that an item is hidden among others, small hotposts achieve mimesis. But that really didn't seem to be how the hard-to-find hotspots worked in MI. (The one "justifiable" hidden hotspot might be Herman's fort.)

A few other observations:

(1) I'd forgotten that the end of MI1 was so similar to the end of MI2.

(2) The sequence inside the wall in Elaine's manor is really funny and clever. There were a couple other similarly clever parts. A few of the puzzles are really great (most of them mentioned above).

(3) I was shocked to see that Sam & Max were among the idols at the monkey head. Apparently the Lucas guys were fans of the comic strip long before Hit the Road was made.

I mean, the game is still a bajillion times better than almost every other adventure game (certainly including Primordia), in part because it does have a good number of very clever puzzles, but it feels more like a proof of concept of the greatness that MI2 achieved.
 

Unkillable Cat

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I agree with many of your thoughts: The first Monkey Island game has some rough spots that make it inferior to its sequel.

The grind for the swordfight insults and the safe combination puzzle actually put me off wanting to play the game again. It's not that large a game when all is said and done, and I've played it enough times to know of some truly obscure jokes in (and related) to it.

For example: Once you have escaped from the cannibals, return straight back to them. Repeat this 3 more times. ("THAT should do it.")

Another one is to get it all over with in a hurry and use the CTRL+W shortcut.

A big part of the game's "humor" is the idea that Guybrush goes through a huge undertaking and it's totally worthless. He completes the trials but nothing comes of it; he gathers the crew and the crew does nothing; Toothrot had a ship all along; he "rescues" Elaine and she didn't need rescuing; he gets the voodoo rootbeer and it's promptly lost. The thing is, whatever the merits of this from the standpoint of humor, it undercuts the player's sense of accomplishment and when it connects with #4, it makes the whole game feel kind of unengaging -- the things you try to do come to nothing, while the things you do unknowingly yield some result. Grim Fandango has basically the same structure except that Manny isn't a failure at everything he does, and IMO it works much better.

In hindsight I understand this sentiment, but one thing that needs to considered is the target demographic of 1990. Back in the day every adventure game filled the player with a sense of accomplishment and self-confidence, to the point that I can relate to adventure gamers that may have felt things were getting a bit stale and someone saw a need to shake things up a bit. That said, the previous statement comes with three exceptions: Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and Monkey Island. Roger Wilco is a nobody that accidentally discovers he has an uncanny knack for survival, Larry Laffer is a loser for whom every accomplishment is a Win, and Threepwood is himself worthless, just a kid constantly trying to prove himself to others. And while all three rarely end up with what they were seeking, they still end up better off than they were in the first place. In many ways it's the matter of the journey and not the destination... and this seemed to have rang true with people, because the aforementioned three characters are the top three icons of adventure gaming, and influenced the creation of almost every adventure game released after the first Monkey Island game.

I was shocked to see that Sam & Max were among the idols at the monkey head. Apparently the Lucas guys were fans of the comic strip long before Hit the Road was made.

Steve Purcell started working at LucasArts in 1988. As a result his creations found their way into almost every LucasArts release, including the LucasArts newsletter where they got a page to themselves.

I mean, the game is still a bajillion times better than almost every other adventure game (certainly including Primordia), in part because it does have a good number of very clever puzzles, but it feels more like a proof of concept of the greatness that MI2 achieved.

The first Monkey Island isn't up there at the top, but it's still up there. So is Primordia. I recommend Primordia to everyone I know that enjoyed LucasArts and Sierra games from back in the day, and I've yet to hear anyone say they were disappointed by it.
 

Don Peste

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So do you think someone could take The Secret of Monkey Island, remove all the weak parts, improve the humour and everything, and make it a better game?
 
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One thing about the first MI game, is that it has a more "serious" tone than it's sequels. MI 2 fully embraced the cartoonish comedy that MI 1 was kind of shy from. Humor in MI 1 is more veiled, and it's more present in it's dialogue. The cartoonish style is present, but hidden and to find them you had to play the game and try everything so you get to see it. Like the puzzle mentioned by unkillable cat, the one about escaping from the cannibals and return. Or the appearance of the three headed monkey. Le chuck at the end with his boxing glove punch was very cartoonish, but it happens really at the end of the game.

My 1st experience with the first monkey island is also something I take into account, because I knew very little of the english by that time. As a result, I missed most of the jokes, and since the most similar game I played before that was indiana jones and the last crusade, which was a lot easier to get the plot since I had watched the movie, and it had the same level of Lucas Arts humor in it, after all it was based on the most comedic indiana jones.

About the Sam & Max appearance, they even appeared in indiana jones and the last crusade adventure game. In addition to what Unkillable cat said, Steve Purcell was one of the background artists in lucasarts adventure games, so I guess those appearances were made by purcell himself.
 

Gord

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(6) A big part of the game's "humor" is the idea that Guybrush goes through a huge undertaking and it's totally worthless. He completes the trials but nothing comes of it; he gathers the crew and the crew does nothing; Toothrot had a ship all along; he "rescues" Elaine and she didn't need rescuing; he gets the voodoo rootbeer and it's promptly lost. The thing is, whatever the merits of this from the standpoint of humor, it undercuts the player's sense of accomplishment and when it connects with #4, it makes the whole game feel kind of unengaging -- the things you try to do come to nothing, while the things you do unknowingly yield some result. Grim Fandango has basically the same structure except that Manny isn't a failure at everything he does, and IMO it works much better.

Dunno, but that does sound overly formulaic to me: You should do so and so, you shouldn't do this or that...
Neither back in the day nor nowadays did I consider that to be much of a problem, probably because MI was always clearly very self-ironic and not taking itself (and especially Guybrush) very seriously.
 

MRY

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Gord To be sure, I'm not talking about an absolute rule. And a classic trope is you think you've almost gotten something, then it's yanked farther away, and so on. The problem I have with MI is that there's so little pay off for the things you do. To give another example, the first part of the game consists of three trials of being a pirate, but none of the skills you learn (treasure hunting, breaking and entering, and sword fighting) turn out relevant in the end. I mean, you could really stretch it and say that you break and enter the cannibal village, treasure hunt the root, and sword fight LeChuck (? or something?) but I dunno -- at a minimum it seems pretty easy to connect those things.

To me, Monkey Island 2 provides a pretty good example of how there's a similar tone but ultimately better pay off (though I guess the whole "it was all imagination" is a bit deflating, and Big Whoop winds up being nothing). I dunno. Obviously I'm not saying that every game has to be player fan-service, but I do think -- based in part on the experience of making and reading reviews of Primordia -- that you need to be cognizant of the fact that when you ask players to work really hard to achieve something, it's kind of annoying when you then deprive them of what they thought they were getting.

Darth Slaughter Ah, that is not my impression at all. If anything, MI1 is more ridiculous than I remember MI2 being. There's the sequence inside Elaine's wall, the circus cannon, Stan, Meathook doing his tattoo thing, piranha poodles, Grog Cola, etc. I can't remember anything remotely serious?

Don Peste Of course, it's called LeChuck's Revenge.

Unkillable Cat Maaaaaybe. I never played LSL, and it's been a while since I played Space Quest, but my recollection of Space Quest is that it did a better job of mixing "self"-effacing humor with a real sense of accomplishment. For example, I remember in Space Quest I there's a sequence where you get yourself a used spaceship, and I remember it feeling more satisfying than the comparable segment in Monkey Island. I also seem to recall that the ultimate victory was less deflating, but it's been years.

Also, I don't remember the main tone of adventure games back then as being, "You're awesome!" so much as, "You're a dork, the joke's on you, but you still managed to pull something cool off, though you might still be underappreciated." Zack McKracken feels that way, Maniac Mansion, Space Quest, even to some degree King's Quest.

Anyway, it's hard for me to judge MI1 "in the moment." To me, adventure games* basically had a narrow period of being well designed (maybe 1986 to 1996?), and there are really probably fewer than 25 well designed adventures in existence, and MI1 is one of them, so I think the best use of it is to use its mistakes in contrast to MI2 as a way of learning what works.

(* No doubt to Crooked Bee's eternal exasperation, I'm talking about third-person adventures exclusively.)
 
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Darth Slaughter Ah, that is not my impression at all. If anything, MI1 is more ridiculous than I remember MI2 being. There's the sequence inside Elaine's wall, the circus cannon, Stan, Meathook doing his tattoo thing, piranha poodles, Grog Cola, etc. I can't remember anything remotely serious?

I didn't mean the game was serious, but less comedic and cartoonish compared to its sequels. It was more like and "adventure" (not the computer game genre), but like an indiana jones movie and goonies. Monkey 2 had things like guybrush drinking grog and his jaw falling to his feet, poping eyes, his hair jumping from his head as if it was a wig, things like that, or the low moral fiber pirates: the one with the peg leg. Look at his reaction when you saw his leg. MI2 is much more ridiculous in that regard. It's like a looney tunes.

The wall scene in the mansion is just an automatic sequence in which we see nothing, so there's not to many cartoon comedy on that one. The cannon is not something you woudn't see in a movie and the hero escapes unscratched. Piranha poodles? They're just angry dogs. Meathook and his tatoo I always saw as a ventriloquism and him moving his pecs, which actually is how he justifies it. Everything followed movie logic. The coke/grog machine is of course the most blatant anachronistic thing in MI 1 that is not hidden. Even Stan and herman are played as comic reliefs, which is very common in light hearted adventures (again, not the computer game genre).

Guybrush in monkey 2 is actually not naive anymore and much more of a jerk and prankster, and makes fun of every situation.
 

MRY

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Hmmm. I'm not sure I agree, but maybe we're just using different terms.

For example, the human cannonball thing is a classic Looney Tune shtick. Here's one iteration of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx90-LFWZRk

Attack poodles, a pirate with two hook hands who's scared of a parrot, a used boat salesman in a novelty cowboy hat with neon lights all around, grog so strong it melts through cups, a troll guarding a bridge who's really a guy in a troll suit, a "rubber tree" that bounces you back up when you fall down, the machine the Captain Smirk uses to train you, buried treasure that's actually a T-shirt that says "All I got was this stupid t-shirt," root-beer spray to kill a ghost... it seems like cartoony stuff throughout.

To the extent you mean the specific way they depict stuff with the graphics isn't as cartoonish, I dunno, so far in MI2 it doesn't seem any more cartoony, but I might just not be sensitive to it.
 
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HoboForEternity

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memory's a bit fuzzy but i have fonder memory of money island than waht you said. that is, i agree with alot of points and MI 2 is alot of improvement than 1. the only part that i have bad memory is the monkey wrench puzzle (ooooh i LOATHE that puzzle to the point of having it seared in my brain. i will never forget it ever in my life) and the ending. i dislike that kind of plot twist and i am glad monkey island 3 retconned that. other than that yeah, the whole series (except 4. i fucking hate 4. fuck 4) is pretty good even for tales of monkey island before telltale went full retardo.

hell, telltale made decent adventure game. their sam and max are really nice too, even BTTF is decent.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
a troll guarding a bridge who's really George Lucas in a troll suit

Fixed!

I think MI1 is a more "spartan" game and that can make it feel more serious. You're this kid wandering around alone in forests and jungles. It's perpetually night on Melee Island. Technology plays a part here as well, the graphics and music are simpler.
 

MRY

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Yeah, the monkey wrench annoyed me too. Had to look up a clue on Prodigy (!). We just cleared Scabb Island and the game has been basically perfect so far. The only slight annoyance was the very specific way you had to get Largo's spit.

EDIT

I'll give a little example of one of the places where the puzzle design is visibly better. To catch the rat you need cheese. To get the cheese, you need to cut the rope holding the pet alligator. To cut the rope, you need the knife. To get the knife, you need to go into the kitchen.* Once in the kitchen, you see the soup. That means that there's no way to get the rat before you already have a reason for wanting the rat (i.e., to plop it in the soup to get the chef fired). But this is all done without having neon lights on the soup. It's just a matter of arranging the puzzles' interlocking logic to make sure that you've seen the lock before you take the key.

(* The window into the kitchen thwarted me when I was a kid, and thwarted me again as a grown man. So I guess I can grouse about that, though the funny thing is that it's pretty visible, not sure why I have a blindspot for it. Still, might've been nice to have something like smoke or steam or dialogue coming out of it, maybe. As I stands, I wasn't sure it was the kitchen until I was already into it.)

EDIT2

Some further thought of this puzzle makes me appreciate its cleverness even more. The player enters Woodtick from the right. It is a fair assumption that he will enter each location in town in order.

Before the player enters the bar, he sees the help wanted sign; in the bar he learns he can't get a job because there's already a chef who hasn't messed up yet. Since he needs money, and wants the job, he has a motive to make the chef mess up.

The player will hit the laundry area before the inn, and thus will see the rat after wanting to spoil the chef; he may not have seen the soup yet (it's easy, at least for me, to miss the window into the kitchen) but the rat's use can be projected. So he has a reason to catch the rat before an opportunity to catch the rat. But he can't catch the rat yet: he can't hold up the box and he doesn't have bait. Now he knows to look for both. He can infer that cheese is the bait, and he can also learn it directly from one of the pirates.

Next, the player will hit the inn and see the gator. You can see the bait possibility in its bowl. Now you have a reason to loose the gator (aside from distracting the innkeeper), but no means of doing it. As noted, you can't get the means of doing it until you go into the kitchen and get the knife, at which point you see the soup, cementing the need for the rat.

Once you try to trap the rat with the bait and box, you realize you need a stick to hold it up. The stick is gotten at the beachside, which is the closest location to Woodtick and thus the most likely next place the player will go. If he goes back and attempts it, though, he'll realize he needs a string to pull the stick.

That string is found in the voodoo lady's hut. There's no reason to expect to find string there, but the player already has two independent motives for going to the hut: (1) everyone in town has told you that they need to make a voodoo doll to drive off Largo; and (2) it's the next nearest location to Woodtick. So when you pick up the string, you have a motivation for doing so (to pull the stick).

Then you go back, pull the stick, catch the rat, spoil the soup, get the job.

Every item functions exactly as you'd expect; you see have a reason for taking every item before you can take it; but there's no explicit coaching to go to such and such a place to get such and such a thing.

Obviously players can go in a different order, and thus grab items before a motivation exists, but none of those items is ludicrous to grab (and you sort of have independent reason for catching the rat, namely that the pirates (falsely) hint they're not coming down because of it).

Anyway, this kind of flow and structure is exactly what bad adventure designers (like me!) can't get right. And I don't think it's quite right in MI1, either, hence my underwhelmed reaciton to replaying it.
 
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MRY

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Well, I finished MI2.

The indisputably GOAT aspects of the game:

- The first part of the game (Scabb island until Largo is defeated).
- The spit puzzle.
- The finale battle with LeChuck, although it is not quite as good as I remembered.

Indisputably lame aspects of the game:

- The skeleton dance maze. Even knowing exactly how to solve it, it took me forever because (1) the stanzas contain four items, not three; (2) the art on the skeletons is so murky and bad that they also appear to have four parts, not three.
- The monkey wrench.

Beyond that, I would say the game is good, but not as good as I remembered. There's a huge amount of forced backtracking (which the develop commentary states was explicitly done to pad the game's length), but that's actually not my biggest criticism, as some of the backtracking works fairly well. My bigger complaint is that the very same logical aspects I praised above are largely absent. You do all sorts of stuff all the time without having any reason for foreseeing their outcome -- getting Capsize Kate arrested to get grog, using the telescope on the grotesque statue to shine a light on the mirror to make it so that the trap door works differently, competing in the spitting contest to get a trophy to sell to the antique store to get money to hire Kate to take a glass bottom boat to a spot that you find without looking through the glass bottom, the match you need being in a love potion bag, etc., etc. I still think the world and its characters are really engaging, the visuals, music, etc. are all great, but I'm now not sure I'd put it as my #1 adventure game. Probably would put QFG there.
 

JarlFrank

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What drugs are you on MI2 is the best adventure game ever made

I replayed it like 3 years ago and still fucking loved it, it was my 10th replay or so.
 

MRY

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Well, I didn't say it wasn't the best adventure of all time, only that I'm no longer as confident about it. As I play through the other 90s classics, I might revise my opinion of them down as well. Right now, QFG is the only game I can think of as a plausible contender against MI2.

That said, I basically think that the overall structure of middle half of the game is not particularly good, though I think there are a few strong individual puzzles and one amazing one (the spitting contest). The start of the game is much stronger in how the puzzles are fitted together.

I gather people are not interested in debating the subject, which is totally fine, but the thesis I'm offering is that puzzles should operate where you have a motivation for doing an action before you do it -- I wish this could go without saying, but to be clear, "take every item and do every viable action because it's an adventure game" doesn't count. The first part of the game executes that almost flawlessly, better than any other adventure game does by a country mile. But the rest of the game doesn't.

For example, one of your goals is to get the map piece of a crew member who died brewing bathtub "contest grog" on Phatt Island. Here are the actual steps to getting that:

Get to the Islet off the Coast of Phatt Island
(1) Get a banana.
(2) Distract a piano-playing monkey with the banana.
(3) Bring the monkey to a pipe sticking out of the ground above a waterfall. Use the monkey to turn the pipe to stop the waterfall.
(4) Go through the cave thus revealed to an islet off the coast of Phatt. (AFAIK, nothing has indicated that either (1) the map piece or the moonshiner is on the islet or (2) the presumptive cave behind the waterfall is a tunnel leading to the islet.)

Win a Drinking Contest
(5) Meet a random guy who challenges you to a drinking contest. (Note that only now, after you've met him, is a connection made between between this spot and the "contest grog.")
(6) Figure out that you can dump the grog in the plant, but then realize you need something else to go in the cup.
(7) Remember the near grog mentioned at the bar on Scabb Island.
(8) Find out that Kate Capsize has all the grog, ask her for it, get refused, get a pamphlet from her.
(9) Put the pamphlet over the wanted ad on Phatt Island, causing her to appear on Phatt Island and get arrested. Find the near grog in an envelope containing the items confiscated from her. (Did any player think, "If I put Kate's picture over my picture, it will lead to my getting the near grog in an envelope"? Or did every player who undertook this action simply think, "It might be useful to cover up my picture with Kate's" without having any concrete idea why it would be useful?)
(10) Go back, and win the drinking contest.

Find and Successfully Use the Secret Passage
(11) Explore the hut and interact with the loose brick, causing you to fall down a hole, the wrong way, past the map piece.
(12) Notice there is a missing mirror from the mirror frame. Go to an antique shop and buy a new mirror. Put the new mirror in the frame.
(13) For some reason, decide that what you need to do is shine a light on the mirror. Open the window. Get told you need to focus the light.
(14) Steal an oar from Elaine, go to the big tree, use the oar to climb the tree, break the oar, go to the woodcutter to fix the oar, return to the big tree, climb the tree, and find a telescope. [N.B. I don't think any player would follow these steps intentionally, so we might better say, "Coincidentally come into possession of a telescope."]
(15) Put the telescope in the grotesque statue's hand.
(16) Go inside, see the brick that is illuminated by the sun going through the telescope and bouncing off the mirror.
(17) Push that brick, get the map piece.

Almost none of those steps has any motivation for it other than "it's a adventure game, let's make progress" and very few of them seem to be tied to "this is the way to get to the map." There are plenty of odd omissions, too, where you could have tried to form some logical connections -- like if you saw the fat guy use the trap door to get to the grog supply, if the antique dealer telegraphed that the mirror had come from that house, etc.

That said, it is possible that there were such clues and I somehow missed them all due to a combination of playing the game with kids and knowing where to go, so maybe I'm too hard on it. But whereas the first part of the game seemed logical, coherent, and yet challenging, the latter part was perhaps a bit less challenging but also less coherent.

(Oh, I should add that the "winning Elaine back" "puzzle" is another very good one, one of the few good dialogue puzzles in an adventure.)


a
 

RuySan

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I tried to replay the game recently with my wife, and it shattered the great memories I had of it. And I'm going to say something shocking that I hope it will make you feel well: Primordia is much better.

It wasn't as funny as I remember it, and the puzzles are very mediocre for the most part. At the time it felt like the most epic adventure ever, but time wasn't kind to it. I was hoping to impress my wife, and she ended up sleeping and me being the one impressed by how non-good the game is.
 

MRY

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You are very kind, but very wrong. Primordia is not better than Monkey Island 2. Primordia's puzzles are overwhelmingly rudimentary compared to MI2 (and way too often in the form of locked doors or locked boxes), and the game is too cramped and linear by comparison. Whatever merits Primordia's story and art might have, the design is hugely inferior to that of both MI1 and MI2. Its only upsides are various user conveniences like fast travel.
 

V_K

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linear by comparison
But isn't that precisely the concequence of "puzzles should operate where you have a motivation for doing an action before you do it" philosophy?
Personally, I'm of the opposite opinion. I like my adventure games to be like sandboxes where the possible interactions aren't restricted by narrative. I just love that eureka feeling where after some time spent fooling around aimlessly, everything suddenly clicks and a puzzle chain folds like dominoes. It also helps with the pacing: you get stuck on a particular puzzle, you go fool around somewhere else, while your lateral thinking works out the solution. There's nothing that I hate more in an adventure game than choke points, when the game doesn't allow you to go anywhere before you solve a particular puzzle because muh narrative (Book of Unwritten Tales 2 is particularly guilty of that. Maybe the first one too, but I don't remember it as well).
 

Taluntain

Most Frabjous
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CMI is where it's at. Best game of the series by far. Try that on your kids, they'll love it. Characters and scenes so memorable that they stick in your head practically forever. Not to mention great music, art, etc.
 

HoboForEternity

sunset tequila
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
my fondest memory of MI3:

-El Pollo Diablo
this:


but yeah, 2 and 3 is definitely the highlight of the series for me. 4 is an utter utter decline. at least telltale's MI was decent enough
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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linear by comparison
But isn't that precisely the concequence of "puzzles should operate where you have a motivation for doing an action before you do it" philosophy?
No, because you can be presented with multiple interwoven objectives that you can move among independently. That's what a lot of adventure games (including Monkey Island) do. The question isn't whether you limit the player's options but whether you give him reasons for exercising those options.

For example, in the Mister Roger's map piece run:

(1) Allow the player to ask the old man at the cannon whether he knows anything about Mr. Rogers. Old man says something like, "Oh, I remember that old drunk. Used to come in here on his dingy to bring his mail back to that island of his." Or whatever. Some clue that provides the player a motive to try to get to the island.

(2) Make turning off the waterfall less dumb.

(3) When the fat guy goes to get the grog, pan the camera after him, show him walk up to the wall, turn to you, say, "Now, no looking!" and he presses a brick, falls, and returns through the entry door with the grog. The player can follow him, but he falls the wrong way. Now the player knows he has to find a brick, but needs to figure out the right one.

(4) When you examine the mirror at the shop, perhaps have the shopkeeper mention that the fat guy said he "didn't need it any more."

(5) Come up with some reason for the connection between the statue, the mirror, the brick, etc. to justify why the hell it's all there. Like maybe you can ask the fat guy about the statue and he says something like, "Mister Rogers built it so that he'd always know the way to his moonshining tub" or whatever.

Before everyone hoots and hollers about this being hand-holding and dumbing down, it isn't. The only reason why here you need all these signposts is because there is no logic connecting the steps of the puzzle. When you don't have logic, you need signposts or its just guesswork. Woodtick has logic, which is why you don't need someone to say, "I hope there's no rat in my soup, or I'd have to fire the chef!" or "That rope looks weak enough to cut with a knife." But on the Rogers questline, nothing is used as you'd expect -- a waterfall is actually a tunnel to a house; a telescope causes a trapdoor slide to operate differently; to turn a knob you need a pianist monkey; etc.

I think we basically agree as to what the goal is, since what you say fits with what I wrote in this article. But we differ on how to achieve it.

Incidentally, the other quest lines aren't much better. For example:

(1) "Young Lindy drifted aimlessly down on his luck until he mysteriously came into money while panhandling on Booty Island. He used the cash to bankroll an advertising firm which failed after its gross mishandling of the Gangrene n' Honey account."
(2) Find the map piece at the antique shop for a bazillion dollars. Learn you can trade it for a figurehead from a sunken ship. Learn the location of the sunk ship at the library.
(3) Learn about a glass bottom boat ride that costs 6,000 pieces o' eight. Be unable to affect this price by rescuing Kate from prison. (?!)
(4) Participate in a spitting contest.
(5) Win a trophy that is just your spit on a plaque.
(6) Sell the trophy for 6,000 bucks to the antique shop.
(7) Commission the glass bottom boat.
(8) Take the boat to a shipwreck and recover the figurehead. This sunken ship is not the sunken ship that the game suggests you'll need to find. ("Captain Marley vanished while sailing in the Americas cup race. His boat was leading at the time.")
(9) Go back and get the map.

None of the clues leads to another. Nothing about Young Lindy's death would suggest that you'd find his map piece in the antique shop; there's no good reason why you should need Kate rather than Dread to take you to the map's location; and there's no good reason to connect the contest, the plaque, and the antique shop to getting the money for Kate's ship.

After Woodtick, much of the game consists of just doing things because (1) they can be done; and (2) in an adventure game with death/fail states, anything that can be done must be done, or at least can't hurt.

Taluntain They've loved both MIs -- they're less critical than I am. I'm sure they'll like CMI too. Amazingly, you can't buy CMI on Steam on GOG, so I'm trying to figure out where I can find it for less than $70, its going rate on Amazon last I checked.
 

RuySan

Augur
Joined
Jul 11, 2005
Messages
777
Location
Portugal
You are very kind, but very wrong. Primordia is not better than Monkey Island 2. Primordia's puzzles are overwhelmingly rudimentary compared to MI2 (and way too often in the form of locked doors or locked boxes), and the game is too cramped and linear by comparison. Whatever merits Primordia's story and art might have, the design is hugely inferior to that of both MI1 and MI2. Its only upsides are various user conveniences like fast travel.

And you are way too humble. I wasn't referring to MI2, because I haven't played it recently, and because of my experience with MI1, I might not even do it, and let good rose tinted memories lie when they should.

And Primordia has puzzles with multiple solutions and optional puzzles! These should be obligatory by now, and yet most adventure game designers still follow the Lucasarts template. Primordia is my absolute favourite of Wadjet Eye games, and while it doesn't stack up to the Dream Machine or The Whispered World when it comes to modern adventures, it's still amazing.

Next time people are telling me that MI1 is better than The Dream Machine..
 

V_K

Arcane
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Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
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at a Nowhere near you
Before everyone hoots and hollers about this being hand-holding and dumbing down, it isn't. The only reason why here you need all these signposts is because there is no logic connecting the steps of the puzzle. When you don't have logic, you need signposts or its just guesswork. Woodtick has logic, which is why you don't need someone to say, "I hope there's no rat in my soup, or I'd have to fire the chef!" or "That rope looks weak enough to cut with a knife." But on the Rogers questline, nothing is used as you'd expect -- a waterfall is actually a tunnel to a house; a telescope causes a trapdoor slide to operate differently; to turn a knob you need a pianist monkey; etc.
But how would these prevent you from getting ahead of logic and doing things just because they can be done? And why this possibility to do things out of order a bad thing?
For me, always having a narrative reason to do stuff takes away from the agency. It makes me feel like I'm following a plot instead of exploring the gameworld on my own (I know that I'm following the plot anyway, but an illusion of agency is still better than no agency at all). It's actually one thing I hate about modern (from late 1990s onward) games - that everything has to be a quest with a clear objective, that you can't just stumble on stuff and then 20 hours later stumble on a use for it.
 

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