So I just finished Escape for the 2nd time, and for the first time in 10 years
Spoiler warning for the game's story btw, in case you haven't played it before:
Yeah I haven't finished it since my first playthrough back in 2000. Upon finishing I've discovered that it gets a lot of hate where I don't think it's really warranted. The only bad thing I have to say is that the story gets a bit stupid towards the very end of when you're on Monkey Island with the inconsistency regarding Herman's ID and Giant Monkey Robots.
Other than that it's a good game, Lucre and Jambalaya are nice big levels filled with great locations and music, as well as some challenging puzzles, to me that is always the most important thing for an adventure game to have. Monkey Kombat is actually fairly straightforward and not that hard to understand, the only thing is you will have to write down the combinations unless you have an amazing memory.
So to summarise, Escape is better than what a lot of people say, only the story at the very end of the game is an issue, and I don't think that's enough for me perosonally to ruin the game, much like the removed intro in MI2:SE doesn't ruin that at all. Story is nice, but it usually takes backseat to the locations, music and puzzle difficulty for me.
Escape is still bottom tier when compared to the first 3 games, but it's not an awful game by any means. I've been doing a playthrough of all the games in a row and am moving on to my 2nd playthrough of Tales soon.
Yeah I haven't finished it since my first playthrough back in 2000. Upon finishing I've discovered that it gets a lot of hate where I don't think it's really warranted. The only bad thing I have to say is that the story gets a bit stupid towards the very end of when you're on Monkey Island with the inconsistency regarding Herman's ID and Giant Monkey Robots.
Other than that it's a good game, Lucre and Jambalaya are nice big levels filled with great locations and music, as well as some challenging puzzles, to me that is always the most important thing for an adventure game to have. Monkey Kombat is actually fairly straightforward and not that hard to understand, the only thing is you will have to write down the combinations unless you have an amazing memory.
So to summarise, Escape is better than what a lot of people say, only the story at the very end of the game is an issue, and I don't think that's enough for me perosonally to ruin the game, much like the removed intro in MI2:SE doesn't ruin that at all. Story is nice, but it usually takes backseat to the locations, music and puzzle difficulty for me.
Escape is still bottom tier when compared to the first 3 games, but it's not an awful game by any means. I've been doing a playthrough of all the games in a row and am moving on to my 2nd playthrough of Tales soon.
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Comments
Why else would someone ignore the illogical puzzles, terrible graphics, bad characterisation & poor controls; unless they were some sort of EMI fanboy?
And yeah it was only the 2nd time I've finished it. Explain how I'm an EMI fanboy when I've just said it's bottom tier. The controls aren't an issue at all, the point of this topic was just to say how Escape isn't as bad as it's made out to be. It isn't a crap game at all. But it's still bottom tier in regards to Monkey Island games.
People who haven't played it in ages, I suggest to give it another playthrough.
I still don't get how they could alter the looks and history of that island so recklessly.
-Skin on manhole and entering bank
-Termites on the stick and following Ozzie
-Navigating swamp
-Recruiting Carla and Otis
I didn't remember:
-Duck and grease trick
-Getting him to break the cane
-Most of the prosthetics shop stuff
Some of them made no sense at all:
-Names on the manhole to the story???
-Spraying cologne on the platypus???
-Making a completely random perfume???
CMI and EMI endings are, IMO, not good both gameplay-wise and story-wise. A little gripe I have with CMI, by the way, that it's essentialy a remake of SMI. General plotline, that is. However, it does give us nice and atmospheric islands and characters. The ending is still not good in my opinion.
And, after the conversation about Elaine's logic of her actions in the end of MI2 (in the thread about MI2:SE) I've started thinking about MI2's plot, and it actually has quite a number of plot holes in itself (I've never noticed that before). But maybe, if we assume it's all fantasy of a child, everything goes. The thing is, Ron/Dave/Tim said in the commentary that they on the move added some twists there and there and there, add this and this... I have a feeling that EMI developers just wanted to add some twists to the ending too, but.... it didn't work out, obviously.
And each MI game has it's fair share of illogical or annoying puzzles. And there's not that many in any game. It's just the ones EMI has are far too annoying.
Huh? What would be the point of lying about what he thinks of the game? You think he's intentionally trying to mislead people to get them to try the game, or what? Why would anyone do that?
Try changing the controls in the settings to camera-based (so left moves him left relative to the screen, rather than rotates him). It makes it alot easier (although it can be a pain with smaller objects, and if the camera angle changes between scenes).
As for the art, i loved the 2D backgrounds. And the character models weren't horrendously bad either.
I think they were good for it's time. And, though the models are not very much detailed, the animation is great, IMO. Characters had a lot of... character.
I guess liking the character models comes down to personal preference, I hated them though. They looked especially ugly during the cutscenes where you see them close up, and Guybrush's constant Ctrl-Alt-Del grin annoyed me.
For the time, which I played video games way before then, they used the absolute best poly count possible. the textures aren't stretched, the backgrounds are clean and not blurred...
I don't get a head ache from playing the game like most 3D games before it...(Mostly 2D)
The shapes are distinct and the best for the time...unlike this...
Unlike this the textures are fitted properly, things aren't blurry...
The 2D is gracefully mixed with your 3D...Dynamic lighting...(Simon 3D is a classic example of low grade 3D for the time and now
Any one who comes at this game for its graphics is not only a newb to gaming, but knows absolutely nothing about video game evolution, and has an extremely closed mind and shouldn't speak of standards and quality because they know nothing of it and nothing of what it was....
1999 Prince of Persia 3D, character models were great. Still games like EMI have superior backgrounds, environments for their time. Absolutely superior...Let alone that EMI looks mostly smooth and isn't horribly angler.
Woopie it wasn't 2D. It wasn't bad either....
The games I started off on are so old you can't even find screen captures of them because I don't think there even was a print screen or computers now able to run them because they're so old and you can't get screens of them on new computers...
3D has never been that great, it still looks like shit in movies...even Doom 3 had heads that weren't rounded in it...
Waaa
Waaaah...
....
The game looks fine and has aged well enough.
Thus is why TOMI really worked out well following Escape. TOMI kept it episodic, but by the time you finished the game, you realized that Guybrush did stuff that was pretty big.
As for Herman's story, well, I might have solved that too. You see, Marley, his crew and Herman were all on the Sea Monkey and... because the whirlpool... timetravel... dressed as a cannibal... but the three-headed monkey was Nor Treblig... bla bla... Australia Cup and the Four Map Pieces. And thats probably how it happened.
Probably the games that looked the best at the time and have aged the best are the more stylized ones. I think Grim Fandango is a good example of this -- the models look like they were designed to be simple, rather than looking like a poor approximation of something else. EMI doesn't have that going for it, so the look of it doesn't hold up as well, in my opinion.
In terms of poor characterization, Curse ruined that already, so it's hard to start faulting it with Escape.
Ahh, seeing that picture reminds of that brilliant Melee Town Docks theme from the game, which oddly enough only appeared for like 10 seconds in the actual game but was used as background music for the Bonus Concepts on the PS2 version.
..looks better than this.
I understand that it looked fine compared to other 3D games at the time, but I tend to compare it to the previous game in the series. I may be biased because I'm a huge fan of traditional animation, but it bugs me when I play Curse with its beautiful hand-drawn art and then move on to Escape with its mostly expressionless wooden marionette-looking character models. It's similar to when our favorite childhood videogame series moved to 3D for the first time on the playstation or n64 and they looked all awkward, blocky and weird. It felt unnatural and wrong.
That said, graphics aren't everything and don't make or break a game for me. In this case, the graphics are only one of several reasons I dislike EMI.
...
That doesn't solve the other non-Monkey-Head related problems with the game, but yes.
What other non-Monkey-Head related problems?
Sounds way better than a robot, and wouldn't contradict the skeleton.
Yea I know, would be great for an escape:se
Oh yea, sorry when i read "other non-Monkey-Head related problems" I stupidly thought you meant problems of it not being a monkey head.
EMI had pre-rendered backgrounds, Simon 3D had backgrounds rendered in real-time. Comparing a pre-rendered background to a real-time one is kind of pointless, as the pre-rendered will obviously look better, but you can only look at it from one angle.
The biggest problem I have with EMI's graphics are the low poly character models (which are somewhat better on the PS2 port) and the fact that the pre-rendered backgrounds just look so fake and lifeless, and everything is overly round.
Sure, the Herman/Grandpa Marley thing was a bit of a stretch, but it's alright. Sure LeChuck taking the side-kick villain role wasn't the greatest. Yeah, the character models weren't the greatest, and there were a lot of design choices I didn't like (insult arm wrestling, monkey kombat was okay...).
All this aside, I thought EMI was a beautiful looking game, it's fun, and funny. It's here, and it's not going anywhere. Deal with it, haters.
The thing is, the monkey head USED to be a real monkey head and had a central signification on Monkey Island. You can easily forget about the merpeople by just not letting them return in future episodes, it's different with the monkey head - that's how I see it.
Sure, it's a fictional game so nothing must make sense, but some story turns in EMI just were unwise.
As for complaining about any supernatural beings in Monkey Island: to me, those weren't in EMI but in TOMI: the legendary sea creatures. I was truly embarrassed at how much Disney suddenly emerged from that sea.
Without internal logic, it isn't even a coherent story. It's just stuff happening on a screen or on a page.
Where in there do you see enough room for a giant monkey robot body that doesn't get in the way of this skeleton which is itself attached to the bottom of the Monkey Head? Given what we know of primate anatomy, the spinal column is usually located at the back of the skull, meaning the neckbones which are the ladder into "Hell" would then be positioned near the back of the inside of the Monkey Head, leaving no room for the neck (or lack thereof) of the robot.
Also keep in mind that when GB climbed inside the robot's body from the back of the mine, he was standing straight up in a room that, if it were turned on it's side, would burn alive every living thing as a result of the lava at the bottom sloshing around. This would mean that if the robot's body were near horizontal when GB entered it or lava flowed into it, then when it uprighted itself the lava would pour out of the bottom and kill the monkeys operating it. If the robot body is vertical when the body is buried in the ground, the skeleton is in the way.
Being smooth and round is a good thing to me.
Of course some people prefer ugly dated CGI like this...
Or yeah, like Simon 3D, which was a true disappointment.
I wasn't necessary giving a direct comparison to Simon. I was just showing people show range. Obviously it's a credit to the creators to suggest that they took the better looking route at the time they made the project though...
I almost beat Simon 3D actually, I got past the horrible graphics. I haven't beat it yet though, and don't know if I'll get back to it. LOL the backgrounds in the other cartoon games don't exactly look real, this isn't FarCry...
I still disagree with anyone who bashes these graphics, I guess you can argue that it's an opinion but this game is by far not entirely mundane and ugly, uninspired. It has it's own charm and I think they did a rather good job with 3D games and simply left the gap for TOMI.
It's not a ugly game, and some of the backgrounds are very enjoyable or at least effective in my opinion.
Which is another way of saying that though you can't think of any logical reason which would make any sense and therefore can't develop a proper argument, you wish we would stop complaining about it.
Well, at least you didn't say "It's just a game, get over it." I hate that response.