Return To Monkey Island - MI2 sequel from Ron Gilbert

[MRY]

because words mean nothing

(Obviously, your every post in this thread is an effort to stir up anger against Gilbert and to belittle his prior work, so I'm not engaging further.)

 

[JarlFrank]

pixels like you guys want

Refer to the selection of fan art I posted above. Find the pixel art. Protip: you can't.

It's not about pixel art or not pixel art. The new style just sucks.

 

[Darkozric]

People here seem stupid to have these opinions, but they don't matter at all so it's ok

Why are you here then.

because words mean nothing

Who let this Ron-bot in?

 

[Keshik]

Was expecting a lot more, I don't know, bitterness in his post from the way I saw people talking about it and reported elsewhere.

 

[negator2vc]

I have made one pixel art game in my entire career and that was Thimbleweed Park. Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of-the-art tech and art. Monkey Island 1 was 16 color EGA and we jumped at the chance to upgrade it to 256 colors. Monkey Island 2 featured the magical wizardry of scanned art by Peter Chan and Steve Purcell and we lusted to keep pushing everything forward.

If I had stayed and done Monkey Island 3 it wouldn't have looked like Monkey Island 2. We would have kept pushing forward, and Day of the Tentacle is a good example of that.

And that's precisely what separates the old art from the new: Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3 had beautifully hand-painted backgrounds and characters. The new artstyle looks cheap and overyl abstract in comparison.

Back then they used the technology of the time to make the visuals as detailed as possible, now they're simplifying the visuals to the point that it looks like cubist art.

Imagine picking up a picture book expecting beautiful watercolor illustrations by Warwick Goble or Edmund Dulac, but instead you get Pablo Picasso style cubism.

Try posting this on social media for ex. FB.
They will eat you alive for being an "entitled fan" who dare say to the "GrandMaster" how to do his job
;-) ;-)

 

[JarlFrank]

I have made one pixel art game in my entire career and that was Thimbleweed Park. Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of-the-art tech and art. Monkey Island 1 was 16 color EGA and we jumped at the chance to upgrade it to 256 colors. Monkey Island 2 featured the magical wizardry of scanned art by Peter Chan and Steve Purcell and we lusted to keep pushing everything forward.

If I had stayed and done Monkey Island 3 it wouldn't have looked like Monkey Island 2. We would have kept pushing forward, and Day of the Tentacle is a good example of that.

And that's precisely what separates the old art from the new: Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3 had beautifully hand-painted backgrounds and characters. The new artstyle looks cheap and overyl abstract in comparison.

Back then they used the technology of the time to make the visuals as detailed as possible, now they're simplifying the visuals to the point that it looks like cubist art.

Imagine picking up a picture book expecting beautiful watercolor illustrations by Warwick Goble or Edmund Dulac, but instead you get Pablo Picasso style cubism.

Try posting this on social media for ex. FB.
They will eat you alive for being an "entitled fan" who dare say to the "GrandMaster" how to do his job
;-) ;-)

People on social media probably don't even know what the art of Warwick Goble and Edmund Dulac looks like, and therefore their opinions can be safely discarded.

 

[negator2vc]

We need a poll between RoMI and Summer Daze art
which one is worst!

LucasArts vs Sierra, One last battle ;-)

 

[Nifft Batuff]

The new graphics style doesn't feel modern. It looks like the low-poly cartoonish angular style from the 2000-2010 decade games. Like Escape from MI.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

I will wait the game. I don't like the art, but I must confess that I hated Curse of Monkey Island art back in 1997. I was thrilled the series got a sequel, but it looked too different. I got used to it. I expect I can get into it nowadays, but my interest in adventure games these days is not like it was back in Sierra/lucasarts times.

 

[Alan]

Refer to the selection of fan art I posted above. Find the pixel art. Protip: you can't.

So what? I wasn't talking to you.

Most people wanted pixel graphics for this game, and MRY implied that Gilbert was hypocritical to drop them, since the thumbleweed game looked older than anything. Or something along those lines, I already forgot his stupid arguments. I do think that MRY wishes to diminish the figure of Ron Gilbert, so that a small-time idiot like him may look a bit gooder

I didn't pay attention to your posts. You kept explaining why the graphics of MI1 worked, since the game looked realistic and stupid at the same time. But those reasons don't even apply to any of the sequels. Graphics don't seem to be a fixed staple of the series. I look at them now; don't seem so exciting anymore. They are not sophisticated and cerebral like you think. The developers clearly tried to do what was fashionable at any given time. I guess that's now a wrong thing to do, since the bad graphics are fashionable? I don't know.

Guess that Gilbert should have picked a more obscure art for this popular series. Simply because he did that in a less popular series. A less popular series which was exclusively known for that style

Why are you here then.

Are you supposed to agree with everybody?

 

[Alan]

because words mean nothing

(Obviously, your every post in this thread is an effort to stir up anger against Gilbert and to belittle his prior work, so I'm not engaging further.)

It's Ok, you don't care what I say. But your sarcasm's the lamest thing in this forum. Passive little bitch

 

[Strig]

Most people wanted pixel graphics for this game

Prove it. Because you've been beating on that poor strawman for quite some time now and most of your "argumentation" hinges on it being true. And it isn't. People were presented with something that looks like it was scraped out of Picasso's bedpan and bucked. Many indeed said that pixel art would be a preferable alternative, but I don't think I've seen even one person say that nuMI HAS TO BE pixelated.

 

[WallaceChambers]

The pixel thing is 100% a strawman I've seen countless comments on facebook groups, twitter threads, various forums, etc and most people who dislike the art don't say it's pixel-art or bust. They just want something that evokes the feeling of a pirate adventure, not an Eric Carle children's book. Painting all the detractors as stubbornly stuck in the past is just an easy way to dismiss their criticisms as irrational or childish.

Are there some people expressing a desire for pixel art? Yes, but it's not all or even most of the people who dislike the new style. If the Return screenshots dropped and they had the fidelity of a Vanillaware game with the art direction of a Steve Purcell pinup, does anyone truly believe this backlash would've happened? Of course not, because it's not about pixel art, it's about a style that many fans don't think is a good fit for Monkey Island.

 

[Alpan]

That blog post by Gilbert is very poorly thought through, but I didn't expect any better when he decided to shut down the site. It was easy for me to keep an open mind about what the totality of a trailer and four screenshots implied about the game, but this screed just made it significantly harder.

I do think he's a smart guy, but his takes here are wildly off-base. I would agree with Boleskine in particular and many other comments made by the skeptics ITT.

 

[Darkozric]

Are you supposed to agree with everybody?

It's not that you must agree with everybody, you just made a codex account and the first thing you do is to come here and defend Ron's shit with passion from a bunch of stupid people whose opinion doesn't matter.
And I ask again, why are you here and not with the other twitter fags? Don't answer, it was a rhetorical question. I know the answer already. You're just one of Ron's braindead little bitches, a pathetic bitch who will eat whatever penis Ron throws at you.

Hey look behind you, a three headed penis. Go lick it you fucking Ron-bot.

Most people wanted pixel graphics for this game, and MRY implied that Gilbert was hypocritical to drop them

He is a hypocritical 60yo baby butthurt. You keep spamming the same retarded twitter comments like a true Ron-bot. No, we can live without pixel art when the art is good. "Most" doesn't exists idiot, you're just trying to justify this shitty hipster art.

It's Ok, you don't care what I say. But your sarcasm's the lamest thing in this forum. Passive little bitch

MRY is pretentious but at least he's here, he can take some harsh codexian criticism. Your Pimp Ron wouldn't stand even 2 days here. He couldn't even stand his own fucking pathetic grumpy blog and disabled it.
We'll have a good laugh when his dream abomination will be disabled.

 

[JarlFrank]

Refer to the selection of fan art I posted above. Find the pixel art. Protip: you can't.

So what? I wasn't talking to you.

But I'm talking to you: you are retarded and a faggot.

Thanks for listening, gay retard.

 

[OndrejSc]

You can see a touch of cartoonish absurdism in Stan's grog machine and the way his plaid suit animates, but it's still set against the backdrop of a pirate adventure story played straight. You even go an ancient viking ship among the vessels for sale! It's funny because it all plays with the genre conventions and expectations of pirate adventure stories. There's no post-modern desconstructive post-irony here, it's a humor that completely embraces its genre and makes fun of it by exaggerating and turning some of its elements towards the absurd.

MI2 art looks like shit compared to MI1 art. Decline started already then and there.

 

[Rincewind]

MI2 art looks like shit compared to MI1 art. Decline started already then and there.

I wouldn't call it shit and I still enjoyed it, but it's in fact not pixel art. They created traditional paintings for the backgrounds and then scanned them, then probably did some minor retouching here and there. The widespread adoption of VGA allowed such practices because they could use 256 colours for the scans. This has become kind of the norm for later DOS adventure games.

On the other hand, all EGA LucasArts games were drawn pixel by pixel in Deluxe Paint by Steve Purcell and Mark Ferrari on the Amiga. The 256-colour VGA paintovers from the post you replied to are quite good and very competent, but they were done by different artists and don't quite reach the sheer ingenuity and creative use of the very limited EGA palette displayed in the originals.

There' an interesting comparison of the EGA original vs the later VGA paintovers here for Indy3 and Loom:
https://www.superrune.com/tutorials/lucasfilm_ega.php

I have to say, I much prefer original EGA artwork; the VGA graphics is a little bit by-the-numbers and doesn't have the same charm and lovely dither patterns.

Just like how I really, really love the art of Sir Edmund Blair Leighton for how sincerely it depicts the chivalric vibe of the high middle ages, even though I wasn't alive in the early 1900s to see the paintings when they were new. I only discovered this artist's work in my mid-20s, so there's no nostalgia attached to it - merely a genuine appreciation of the artistic style. There is an objective beauty to it that comes from its sincere treatment of the subject matter.

Those paintings are beautiful, thanks for posting.

 

[MRY]

IMO, late EGA is beautiful from hindsight because of what they were achieving within the limitations of the technology, and early VGA is less beautiful because the absurd new resources led to a kind of profligacy that is less visually striking. This was totally invisible to me at the time; across the board I always thought VGA looked better than EGA.

One example is the use of blue and black in Loom and Indie -- a very striking, stylized approach to how to depict dark spaces:

vs.

As a kid I would've liked the VGA one more, but sitting here today, it has about a quarter the impact, if that.

 

[ghostdog]

IMO, late EGA is beautiful from hindsight because of what they were achieving within the limitations of the technology, and early VGA is less beautiful because the absurd new resources led to a kind of profligacy that is less visually striking. This was totally invisible to me at the time; across the board I always thought VGA looked better than EGA.

One example is the use of blue and black in Loom and Indie -- a very striking, stylized approach to how to depict dark spaces:

vs.

As a kid I would've liked the VGA one more, but sitting here today, it has about a quarter the impact, if that.

Yeah, but this is more of a poor art choice. For instance MI1 was full of beautiful blue shaded night scenes:

 

[MRY]

Yes, MI I think it is harder to make an argument in favor of EGA. I think the EGA dithering doesn't work as well (it just feels kind of "noisy") and the VGA work is much stronger than in Loom or Indie.

vs.

EGA is still more technically amazing, but doesn't really have much aesthetic upside.

 

[Rincewind]

As a kid I would've liked the VGA one more, but sitting here today, it has about a quarter the impact, if that.

I almost wrote something very similar, but then I didn't. Funny how time changes the perception of things; it seems a certain amount of time needs to pass so you can appreciate the true value of something in retrospect, in comparison to what came after.

Yeah, but this is more of a poor art choice. For instance MI1 was full of beautiful blue shaded night scenes:

Yeah, MI1 VGA is much better done than Loom, no disagreements there. I find MI1 VGA quite enjoyable and I'm oscillating between that and the EGA original. I think I appreciate Mark Ferrari's original art a bit more these days because that's where it all started, the VGA version merely adds more colours but doesn't change the graphics fundamentally. The EGA graphics shows just the pure essence and I love the dithering, the invention of which was a big deal back then and made a huge difference (note how Indy3 and Zak dont' use dithering, that's because they haven't figured it out yet how to compress dithered graphics efficiently, but Mark persisted pestering the devs about it, such as Ron Gilbert who first claimed it was impossible to compress such graphics).

Another interesting version is the MI1 Amiga port which is an extremely well done 32-colour conversion of the 256-colour VGA remake. It sits somewhere between the PC EGA and VGA versions, it uses the original EGA sprites, and it's less "gradienty". The music conversion is also top-notch, done by the legendary C64 and Amiga composer Chris Hülsbeck using his own music system, TFMX, and I'm very fond of both the AdLib and MT-32 soundtracks too. I simply can't decide between them, I love all three versions of the soundtrack equally!

I've made some quick screenies:

 

[Rincewind]

Btw, I know you guys are only reposting screenshots from other sites, but it pains me to see 320x200 art displayed with square pixel aspect ratio with no aspect-ratio correction (1.2x vertical stretch), like a barbarian.

Mobygames is one of the worst offenders; I know a guy who kept pestering them about it for a while, and their reply basically was that they just don't give a fuck... Same deal with the Hall of Light, which is a stellar site otherwise and those guys should know better. For what it's worth, their reasoning has some merit; they're Europeans and all American made NTSC games were butchered the same way on PAL machines (displayed with 1:1 aspect ratio).

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

As a kid I would've liked the VGA one more, but sitting here today, it has about a quarter the impact, if that.

I almost wrote something very similar, but then I didn't. Funny how time changes the perception of things; it seems a certain amount of time needs to pass so you can appreciate the true value of something in retrospect, in comparison to what came after.

Usually when these graphical chips were heading towards the end of their lifespan, be it EGA, VGA, or the ones in a C64 or CPC*, people had usually ironed out all the problems in getting the best possible image they could out of it, in contrast to the new hotness where they might very well be using entirely different tools to work on their games. As you both point out, nobody appreciates that at the time, they just want the new hotness. Now that new hotness doesn't really apply to adventure games much anymore, we've all taken some time to appreciate the older styles of artwork, the craftsmanship of it.
*exceptions for the CGA chipset, because I don't think any period commercial game not using trickery, the color composite mode, or the B&W mode looked decent, and the B&W Macintoshes, which great straight out of the gate.
(although this said, Loom is kind of cheating since in its EGA mode its basically the best looking 2D adventure game ever made)

 

[Rincewind]

(although this said, Loom is kind of cheating since in its EGA mode its basically the best looking 2D adventure game ever made)

That is true, although I prefer the EGA versions of all Sierra games to their later VGA remakes. Dunno, something is just lost in those VGA remakes, probably it's the scanned paintings vs hand-placed pixels difference again. And, of course, I vastly prefer the parser to the clicky-clicky of later games. Overall, I've found a new appreciation of those old SCI Sierra games, they really did a good job of getting the most out a lot of those ugly non-artist-friendly 16 colours.

Another thing, and I might be a bit of a cork-sniffer in this regard, I like to play EGA games with subtle scanlines. Scanlines were visible on original EGA hardware and on the Amiga that the artists at LucasArts used. Of course, an argument can be made that most people played these on VGA which was double-scanned, hence no scanlines. Still, I prefer the subtle scanline look, I think it adds a bit of a texture to the relatively primitive graphics.

And we are in 100% agreement that CGA is an abomination. I also quite enjoy the minimalist high-res monochrome graphics of many Macintosh games.

EGA emulation

VGA emulation