I really love the series, and I enjoyed EFMI. Sure the controls were a little awkward (they did have the option for camera relative controls, but then it became hard to target items, so character relative was sort of nessicary) and some of the puzzles were a bit tricky/frustating but the only thing I can't forgive, is it completely messed up the story.
It's really odd, with all the references to the previous games, how often it directly contradicts them. It says that Herman washed up on Monkey Island where it's clear in the first game he sailed there on board the Sea Monkey. It claims that Ozzie pushed HT Marley into a whirl pool 20 years ago, but LeChuck claimed credit for the same dead in MI3. If both were true (LeChuck summons whirl pool and Ozzie does the shoving) this would place LeChucks entering of big woop as happening over 20 years ago, which comes after Elaine telling him to drop dead, which leads us to the conclusion that Elaine is over 20 years older than Guybrush. Is that right?
LeChuck also had his ego destroyed... which made me sad. I was wondering how would I continue the series after MI4 and I'm sorry to say that perhaps the best way is to pretend it didn't happen just so I wouldn't have to explain all the plot holes it introduced. I know it's not a very serious series but it should at least be true to itself.
All that aside, I really enjoyed MI4. It had some cool ideas, funny jokes and interesting themes. I also like that it introduced a villian besides LeChuck. I think it's a bit like the Zelda series. Always Link, Zelda and Gannondorf. It gets stale and I like it when I see something different. But right now I am overjoyed to see anything Monkey Island at all.
If both were true (LeChuck summons whirl pool and Ozzie does the shoving) this would place LeChucks entering of big woop as happening over 20 years ago, which comes after Elaine telling him to drop dead, which leads us to the conclusion that Elaine is over 20 years older than Guybrush. Is that right?
Elaine is depicted as a young woman and not as middle aged woman, so there's another alternative which would mean that LeChuck is really much more evil than I ever imagined, but it's an alternative which I don't want to think too much or discuss about it in detail.
Or someone was simply lying when they explained the history of H. T. Marley.
Having just got properly back into it - its a great game? The background art is great, its just the low poly models that are an issue but I soon forgot about them as I got more into the story again.
I tried to play it through to the end again after failing the first time round and just couldn't, it was obnoxious and stupid. The controls, the grindy sections with no puzzle payoff it just all felt wrong.
But people inhabiting LucasArts adventure games cannot die!
Unless they're called Indy, Malcolm, Maggie, Ludger, Sushi, Dave, Syd, Michael, Wendy, Bernard, Razor, Jeff, Annie, Zak, Melissa, Leslie, Guybrush or Hamster™. If you happen to carry any of these names and think about sending in an application, we urge you to reconsider. Ted's fine, but only if you're dead yet.
It is a very good game. I am a fan of the series since The Secret of Monkey Island and I can't undertand all the hatred for EFMI.
It reminds me of Grim Fandango which was a really epic game in terms of controls and graphics, so it can't really be that bad. Obviously point and click is better, but at least the inventory manipulation is better.
I think one reason because people dislike this game is because sometimes it feels like a self parody of the series. But after four games in a classic franchise which is know for its humour, can't the series laugh a bit about itself? And we get to visit classic places and classic characters in a new fashion.
In terms of gameplay there are some real good puzzles, like the one with the time paradox in the swamp.
I think this was the ideal game for people (especially kids) who never played to game to get some idea of the franchise without playing all previous games, because it has the humour, Melee and Monkey island and it has cutie, clean graphics which may appeal to kids. Maybe characters don't look that good, but the animation is good.
Now the negative stuff, which undoubtly the game has a few. Murray is under utilized here. Monkey Kombat is not terrible, but it is too long. The mentioned continuity errors.
This is a game which is far, far away from the quality of the first two and I find it rates slightly under Curse of Monkey Island and doesn't have its amazing art, but it is a fun game, with good puzzles, with the characters we love and much better than most adventures that aren't from Lucasarts.
If you haven't played give it a chance. You may enjoy it. But please, play the first three too.
It was okay, not the best but okay in parts but I think they jumped to conclusions when they saw how well the engine worked for Grim fandango they thought it would work with Monkey Island but I don't really think it did.
I think this was the ideal game for people (especially kids) who never played to game to get some idea of the franchise
probably, but still Escape has some of the hardest puzzles from all games of the series. if i would to rate difficulty i think it goes on top with Monkey 2. It does not have many great and at the same time hard puzzles like Monkey 2, but from time to time you stumble on a puzzle that is really hard to solve, like fire boat puzzle.
probably, but still Escape has some of the hardest puzzles from all games of the series. if i would to rate difficulty i think it goes on top with Monkey 2. It does not have many great and at the same time hard puzzles like Monkey 2, but from time to time you stumble on a puzzle that is really hard to solve, like fire boat puzzle.
I always forget how hard the game is, tell myself that it can't be that hard, that it's easy . Then I play it game, some of the reasons the game is hard though is timing things out, like burning the wax paining in the lulu bar with the paint brush in the contorl mechanism .
my opinion:
A) Controls are bad. Ugly Graphics.
(don't mind OLD graphics if they LOOK GOOD, in this game they mostly DON'T)
C) The humour kind of work though.
Not really a worthy sequel, but ok i guess..
Being in need of a MI fix and i you can survive A) and it will SORT OF work as one.
PS. you should note down the MK to get it over with quickly.
First time i decided on doing it round 3, knowing it would quickly get old, and it ended quickly enough.
I loved it..it wasn't as good as the first three but I still found it very enjoyable.. The graphics style didn't bother me at all and neither did the controls. I don't know why so many people hate it.... I didn't see any problems with it but being the monkey island fan I am.. I guess I overlooked any problems and just enjoyed the game for what it was.
Yes, I'd have to agree with CONTROLS as being the biggest problem with the game. It's just too damn hard to achieve anything, and I've said in the new Controls thread that I think it was the direct cause of poor sales and therefore indirectly the abandonment of the adventure genre. Yes they are that bad.
The graphics were a huge, huge step backward from the excellent art style of Curse. Guybrush had amazing expressiveness in that game - unfortunately the character doesn't scale too well when in the background of a scene. The advantage of 3D is much better scaling, but that only comes about because the character is necessarily vector-based - a vector 2D game could have been very interesting. The limited power of hardware at the time meant some pretty crude character models, so the game wasn't even that visually appealing. The backgrounds were good but that made the crudeness of the characters even more obvious!
Monkey Kombat: as soon as you work out that certain stances beat other stances and that an incantation works to go both from stance A to stance B and from B back to A, drawing up a table isn't too bad, but there are too many stances. My memory has it as eight but actually I see there are only five. Still, that means 10 different moves to learn and you can't learn all the combos of what beats what until you know what the moves are. Inevitably you get stuck in a situation where the game won't tell you what one of the possibilities is, so you have to keep battling the lesser monkeys over and over just to find it out. Then the 'boss' battle isn't rewarding because it's just the same as the grind.
The other puzzle I remember being annoying is the one with the two parrots and which rock is the hat under. One time the game sent me about eight rocks down the beach, having to ask the damned parrots which way every time was extremely tiresome - not helped by sometimes Guybrush looking at a different parrot from the one I thought he was looking at, leading you to have to start over (stupid controls again).
regarding the visual style I feel that the main problem is that 3D models age worse than 2D art. Look at any 3D game from the late 90s/early 2000s to what's being made now. And as I said (or at least as I've tried to say) in that control thread my main problem with the control was the fixed camera angles.
As for Monkey Kombat, it wasn't as bad as I remembered when I went replayed Escape last week - completed it all in about 20 minutes at most and I could have probably done it faster if I wanted to.
If it wasn't for escape from monkey island, I would have never even gotten into the series. I bought it on a frign Playstation 2. So I didn't have the history of the series many of you did. And I loved it. Now I have played them all, and while it isn't the best in the series, it might just be my favorite.
regarding the visual style I feel that the main problem is that 3D models age worse than 2D art. Look at any 3D game from the late 90s/early 2000s to what's being made now.
People always kind of get that wrong. It's not so much a case of 3D art being more prone to aging. It is that 3D real-time visuals need quite a bit of computing power to pull it all off. In the advent of all things video games, artists had to battle against the constraints of hardware in 2D as well. The gap between say Sid Meier's Pirates! and Curse Of Monkey Island isn't merely some ten odd years. There's a huge pletora of advances in technology in between.
Obviously when this whole real-time 3d thing got started, technology was rather limited. 3D chips could barely render more than a fistful of polygons, and the lack of dedicated video memory meant textures came in half the size of your pockets. So obviously what an artist could do without making sacrifices was rather limited. Yet there are games that look decent to this day. See Grim Fandango's models, for instance. The art in this game was tailor-made for this early era 3D hardware, what with its character design being based on Mexican folklore. Obviously designers trying to render realistic-looking planets inhabited by aliens, humans and animals alike had to face a tougher challenge, and it showed just as much as in that Pirates! shot from ninety-eighty something.
So, yeah, 3D art doesn't age inherently faster than 2D. It's that even modern 3D hardware has its limits, as advanced as it may be - the more complex a designer's vision, the more sacrifices need be made still. Interestingly I've yet to see a 2D game that could compete with old Disney films too.
I liked Escape, although it had a HUGE name to live up to, and I don't think it quite made it.
The puzzles were excellent though, and the dialogue very monkey island-ish.
Also, that damned Monkey Kombat. Grr.
The controls never bothered me, but then I am a big Grim Fandango fan so I was used to it by the time EMI came out.
What bothered me about the game was the pointless fan service moments that seemed to be trying too hard (like the overused 'that's the second biggest...' joke and the almost completely pointless appearance of Murray), the soulless visuals and the dialogue that was simply less funny than any of the previous games, which still make me laugh more than EMI ever did, even the first time. Oh, and that stupid skin-trampoline puzzle. And some of the weird story stuff.
It's not that it's a bad game, as such. It's a servicable adventure game. I just expect more from my Monkey Island, and this game seemed to forget what it was that made the first 3 great.
Comments
It's really odd, with all the references to the previous games, how often it directly contradicts them. It says that Herman washed up on Monkey Island where it's clear in the first game he sailed there on board the Sea Monkey. It claims that Ozzie pushed HT Marley into a whirl pool 20 years ago, but LeChuck claimed credit for the same dead in MI3. If both were true (LeChuck summons whirl pool and Ozzie does the shoving) this would place LeChucks entering of big woop as happening over 20 years ago, which comes after Elaine telling him to drop dead, which leads us to the conclusion that Elaine is over 20 years older than Guybrush. Is that right?
LeChuck also had his ego destroyed... which made me sad. I was wondering how would I continue the series after MI4 and I'm sorry to say that perhaps the best way is to pretend it didn't happen just so I wouldn't have to explain all the plot holes it introduced. I know it's not a very serious series but it should at least be true to itself.
All that aside, I really enjoyed MI4. It had some cool ideas, funny jokes and interesting themes. I also like that it introduced a villian besides LeChuck. I think it's a bit like the Zelda series. Always Link, Zelda and Gannondorf. It gets stale and I like it when I see something different. But right now I am overjoyed to see anything Monkey Island at all.
Elaine is depicted as a young woman and not as middle aged woman, so there's another alternative which would mean that LeChuck is really much more evil than I ever imagined, but it's an alternative which I don't want to think too much or discuss about it in detail.
Or someone was simply lying when they explained the history of H. T. Marley.
It reminds me of Grim Fandango which was a really epic game in terms of controls and graphics, so it can't really be that bad. Obviously point and click is better, but at least the inventory manipulation is better.
I think one reason because people dislike this game is because sometimes it feels like a self parody of the series. But after four games in a classic franchise which is know for its humour, can't the series laugh a bit about itself? And we get to visit classic places and classic characters in a new fashion.
In terms of gameplay there are some real good puzzles, like the one with the time paradox in the swamp.
I think this was the ideal game for people (especially kids) who never played to game to get some idea of the franchise without playing all previous games, because it has the humour, Melee and Monkey island and it has cutie, clean graphics which may appeal to kids. Maybe characters don't look that good, but the animation is good.
Now the negative stuff, which undoubtly the game has a few. Murray is under utilized here. Monkey Kombat is not terrible, but it is too long. The mentioned continuity errors.
This is a game which is far, far away from the quality of the first two and I find it rates slightly under Curse of Monkey Island and doesn't have its amazing art, but it is a fun game, with good puzzles, with the characters we love and much better than most adventures that aren't from Lucasarts.
If you haven't played give it a chance. You may enjoy it. But please, play the first three too.
probably, but still Escape has some of the hardest puzzles from all games of the series. if i would to rate difficulty i think it goes on top with Monkey 2. It does not have many great and at the same time hard puzzles like Monkey 2, but from time to time you stumble on a puzzle that is really hard to solve, like fire boat puzzle.
I always forget how hard the game is, tell myself that it can't be that hard, that it's easy . Then I play it game, some of the reasons the game is hard though is timing things out, like burning the wax paining in the lulu bar with the paint brush in the contorl mechanism .
A) Controls are bad.
(don't mind OLD graphics if they LOOK GOOD, in this game they mostly DON'T)
C) The humour kind of work though.
Not really a worthy sequel, but ok i guess..
Being in need of a MI fix and i you can survive A) and
PS. you should note down the MK to get it over with quickly.
First time i decided on doing it round 3, knowing it would quickly get old, and it ended quickly enough.
The graphics were a huge, huge step backward from the excellent art style of Curse. Guybrush had amazing expressiveness in that game - unfortunately the character doesn't scale too well when in the background of a scene. The advantage of 3D is much better scaling, but that only comes about because the character is necessarily vector-based - a vector 2D game could have been very interesting. The limited power of hardware at the time meant some pretty crude character models, so the game wasn't even that visually appealing. The backgrounds were good but that made the crudeness of the characters even more obvious!
Monkey Kombat: as soon as you work out that certain stances beat other stances and that an incantation works to go both from stance A to stance B and from B back to A, drawing up a table isn't too bad, but there are too many stances. My memory has it as eight but actually I see there are only five. Still, that means 10 different moves to learn and you can't learn all the combos of what beats what until you know what the moves are. Inevitably you get stuck in a situation where the game won't tell you what one of the possibilities is, so you have to keep battling the lesser monkeys over and over just to find it out. Then the 'boss' battle isn't rewarding because it's just the same as the grind.
The other puzzle I remember being annoying is the one with the two parrots and which rock is the hat under. One time the game sent me about eight rocks down the beach, having to ask the damned parrots which way every time was extremely tiresome - not helped by sometimes Guybrush looking at a different parrot from the one I thought he was looking at, leading you to have to start over (stupid controls again).
As for Monkey Kombat, it wasn't as bad as I remembered when I went replayed Escape last week - completed it all in about 20 minutes at most and I could have probably done it faster if I wanted to.
People always kind of get that wrong. It's not so much a case of 3D art being more prone to aging. It is that 3D real-time visuals need quite a bit of computing power to pull it all off. In the advent of all things video games, artists had to battle against the constraints of hardware in 2D as well. The gap between say Sid Meier's Pirates! and Curse Of Monkey Island isn't merely some ten odd years. There's a huge pletora of advances in technology in between.
Obviously when this whole real-time 3d thing got started, technology was rather limited. 3D chips could barely render more than a fistful of polygons, and the lack of dedicated video memory meant textures came in half the size of your pockets. So obviously what an artist could do without making sacrifices was rather limited. Yet there are games that look decent to this day. See Grim Fandango's models, for instance. The art in this game was tailor-made for this early era 3D hardware, what with its character design being based on Mexican folklore. Obviously designers trying to render realistic-looking planets inhabited by aliens, humans and animals alike had to face a tougher challenge, and it showed just as much as in that Pirates! shot from ninety-eighty something.
So, yeah, 3D art doesn't age inherently faster than 2D. It's that even modern 3D hardware has its limits, as advanced as it may be - the more complex a designer's vision, the more sacrifices need be made still. Interestingly I've yet to see a 2D game that could compete with old Disney films too.
The puzzles were excellent though, and the dialogue very monkey island-ish.
Also, that damned Monkey Kombat. Grr.
Wasn't the version of Monkey Kombat slightly improved, made less frustrating for Playstation? I seem to remember it was.
What bothered me about the game was the pointless fan service moments that seemed to be trying too hard (like the overused 'that's the second biggest...' joke and the almost completely pointless appearance of Murray), the soulless visuals and the dialogue that was simply less funny than any of the previous games, which still make me laugh more than EMI ever did, even the first time. Oh, and that stupid skin-trampoline puzzle. And some of the weird story stuff.
It's not that it's a bad game, as such. It's a servicable adventure game. I just expect more from my Monkey Island, and this game seemed to forget what it was that made the first 3 great.
i hated the interface, but i could never hate an mi-game...
I think they added a movement chart, and removed the randomness of what beats what and the key sequences.