A small problem

I have always had a bit of trouble playing ol?der game?s.

This might not come as a surprise to some discerning Destructoid readers, who have, in the past, derided me for the recency bias seemingly on display in a handful of my ranked lists. It's true ??�I do tend to play more new releases than older ones, and I tend to enjoy them more, as well. Call it an o??ccupational hazard (it's easier to write about new games when you're playing them on release), chalk it up to my age (I am, as you might imagine, younger than many readers), but the fact stands: I prefer more modern titles.

Of course, this isn't a moral failing, but it is a bit of a problem. See, I am the kind of person who takes a great interest in figuring out why?? things are the way they are. Anthropologically, I'm fascinated by older games. I like to see the seeds of a great franchise, and I like to chart design trends from their earliest inception. To that end, I really should like playing older games.

So what do I do about that?

Put a bow on 2022 �it's done. The new year is upon us, and it's time for resolutions. So here's mine: I will play a lot of games that I've passed over. Titles that I was too young for on release, titles that arrived before I was around to play them, tit?les that sim??ply don't seem appealing. I will learn design languages that games have outpaced. I will find the fun, come hell or high water.

In some areas, this will be easy. Every year, I make a point of going through an older franchise with a new entry on the way. While the cynic in me wants to deride studios for coasting on successful ideas and propert?ies instead of coming up with original concepts, this year, that particular strategy exposed me to a mess of games that I otherwise wouldn't have played.

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2022 was, for example, the year that I finally played the Souls games (I'm aware that I'm stretching the definition of "old" a bit, but Demon's Souls was 13 years ago). That's a truly excellent series, even better if you're willing to include a handful of structurally similar FromSoftware games under the umbrella. I also played the phenomenally funny The Secret of Monkey Island for the first time, and I gave the original Advance Wars a shot (whoops).

Where you come in

2023 will bring plenty of franchise entries. I imagine I'll spend a lot of time digging into the annals of Armored Core history, just to understand why my mecha-enthusiast friends are so damn pumped. Maybe I'll finally check out Diablo and Street Fighter. But I want to play the games I'm not thinking of.

And, ob??viously, it's tough to think of things that I'm not thinking of.

That's where you, dear readers, come in. I want to play your favorite older games. Do you have fond memories of a game played in decades past? Please, tell me about them. Did you try any ancient titles for the first time in 2022? I'd love to play them. Are there any that you've been meaning to get to for ages? I want to jo??in you on that adventure. So please, let me know! Tell me the games tha?t you view as foundational to the medium, or just the ones you really love. I'm looking forward to it.

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Avast ye, the first trailer for Return to Monkey Island is finally here!

The Monkey Island games are heralded as some of the best point-and-click games ever made, so fans are pretty thrilled to be getting another mainline game twelve years after the series' last release, which was a special edition of the first two games. Another sequel is long overdue, and thankfully the developers behind the project, Terrible Toybox, just released a new trailer to satiate us as we wait for the game to drop later this year. The trailer was also posted by Monkey Island's beloved designer and creator Ron Gilbert, who shared the news with the exact type of humor we'd expec??t from him.

The new trailer shows off Return to Monkey Island's revamped art style, which captures the quirkiness of the characters and world perfectly. Although we didn't get to see all that much of it, the gameplay itself looks like the classic Monkey Island experience we know and love. Story-wise, our plucky protagonist Guybrush Threepwood promises we're in for an adventure with "ships, fights, love, treasure, betrayal, and root beer." As an avid lover of all things pirate-related myself, I do??n't ??think there's much more I could really ask for.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3mxq44HhnU

I can be pretty hesitant about sequels this far out from the originals, especially when a series' legacy is on the line, but I have to say that I've been blown away by everything I've seen of Return to Monkey Island so far. It also says a lot that they have some of the original creators involved. At this point, I'm optimistic tha??t the game will bring a thrilling adventure from a classic series to a brand new audience.

Return to Monkey Island takes to the high seas sometime ??in 2022 for PC and Nintendo Switch.

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The beloved series makes a triumphant return

Of all the games in the point-and-click genre, the Monkey Island series is up there as being one of the most classic. The first four games in the series were created by George Lucas' video game studio LucasArts (now known as Lucasfilm Games), and are known for their witty dialogue and challenging puzzles. Now, thirteen years after the last release in the series, Monkey Island's original director Ron Gilbert and publisher Devolver Digital have announced that they have a new title, Return to Monkey Island, releasing in 2022.

In addition to Gilbert's return, other developers attached to the project include original co-writer Dave Grossman, and composers from LucasArts Michael Land, Michael McConnell, and Clint Bajakian. Tim Schafer, another Monkey Island co-founder now known for creating the Psychonauts series with his studio Double Fi??ne, will not be rejoinin?g the team.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=sahskKAxSCY

Devolver Digital released a teaser trailer on their YouTube channel, which basically serves as a cute way to drop the news by way of a little animated scene, as opposed to showing us anything substantial about what the game will be like. If it's any indication of what the art of Return to Monkey Island is going to look like, though, I think we?? have a lot to look forward to.

While Return to Monkey Island will technically be the sixth game released in the series, it will serve as a direct sequel to the second game, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, which was originally released in 1991. After taking to Twitter, Gilbert shared that he and his team at Terrible Toybox have been working on the game "in complete secrecy," and while he may want Disney to sell him the Monkey Island IP, this is certainly the next best thing.

_{[Featured Image Source: NME]}

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More likely to leave in the future

[Update: It seems that Jurassic Park: The Game and all previous seasons of The Walking Dead have been removed from Steam. You wi??ll still retain access if y?ou've already purchased them.]

According to a report from GameDaily, Telltale Games is now entering the liquidation phase of its closing process. This is coming after September's shock announcement that the studio had laid off a majority of its staff?? and kept around 25 employees to finish off contractual obligations to other companies. It st??ill seems like yesterday that we were first hearing about this.

While most people don't really care to hear all the business mumbo-jumbo behind this process, the immediate effect for customers is that some games have been delisted from Steam. Currently, you will no longer be able to buy Back to the Future: The Game or Tales of Monkey Island from Valve's digital storefront. As of the time of writing, both games are still available on GOG.com.

This is likely more to do with licensing issues for both tit??les instead of the liquidation process, but the titles are likely to disappear from other storefronts in the near future. If you ha?ve been eying picking up either game on PS3 or PC, make sure to do it now before they completely disappear.

If you are more interested in learning about the business behind these decisions, GameDaily's report goes into pretty extreme detail about who is handling the liquidation and what it will mean for the current employees of the company. Since I'm ?not so up to speed on business jargon, it loses? me in the middle, but it seems that Telltale will be closing a lot sooner than expected.

Telltale Games is closing, liquidation underway and games ??being removed from St?eam [GameDaily]

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Goofy Pixel Noir

Thimbleweed Park was Kickstarted back in 2014 and promised a brand new game in an old genre, a return to the classic point-and-click adventure titles produced by LucasArts in the late '80s and early '90s. The title has an impeccable pedigree since both Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick made their names working on one of the first adventure titles ever made, Maniac Mansion. In fact, Gilbert is credited with introducing the concept of cutsce??nes to video games as a way of?? transitioning between two action sequences. 

Thirty years have passed since Maniac Mansion's release, and the genre it exemplified has died, been reborn, and relapsed into a coma. You don't see too many point and click adventure titles these days, as story-driven games don't need to rely on the old adventure formulas to get their message across anymore. It's been nearly two and a half years since the Kickstarter closed, and the game is finally releasing today. It's already been a great month for games, so how does Thimbleweed Park stack up?

Thimbleweed Park (Xbox One, iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, PC [reviewed])
Developer: Terrible Toybox
Publisher: Terrible Toybox
Released: March 30, 2017 (Xbox One, PC, Mac, Linux), TBA (iOS, Android)
MSRP: $19.99

Thimbleweed Park lets you take control of five very different characters, each with their own skills and specialties. You'll move them around the town, picking up anything that isn't glued down to try and figure out the mysteries that surround you. It's set in 1987, though there're some anachronisms to be found if you want to get pedantic. The story begins as a murder mystery, and borrows some of its trappings from several early '90s favorites like Twin Peaks and The X-Files. Later on, there's even some stuff in there that calls back to The Matrix. It does a great job of setting the mood and maintaining tension, even though you can play at your own pace and?? there's only one (easily avoidable) way to get yourself into a failure state.

While each character is mostly self-sufficient, there are a few puzzles that will require two or more of them to work together. Fortunately, they can share almost anything they find with the other characters as long as they occupy the same physical space. The game teaches you this early on, as you must use the GIVE command to make sure the same character ?has both the film and the camera required to take a picture. Once this is taken care of, you can switch between the contro?llable characters at any time by selecting the person you want to play as using a drop-down menu in the upper right. 

The nine verbs in the lower left of the screen are how you interact with everything in the world, and you can also use them on your inventory, to OPEN a package or combine two items with USE. While you can click a command every time for a dose of early '90s nostalgia, you can also use the keyboard shortcuts on the left side of the keyboard. Thimbleweed Park does suppo?rt?? a controller on PC, but I elected to play it with a mouse and keyboard for the authentic experience.

 Thimbleweed Park sold itself on nostalgia, and for fans of the adventure genre, it more than delivers on that promise. There are many, many references to past games, more than I could count. For example, it seems as though Dave and Sandy from Maniac Mansion settled down here to run the town's diner. The Edmund Mansion mansion bears a striking resemblance to the Edison's abode. There's even some puzzle callbacks, action sequences that'll give you a bit of déjà vu if you've memorized the puzzles in The Secret of Monkey Island or Maniac Mansion. ?Stuff like this doesn't detract from the story and would probably sail over the head of anyone who hasn't played those previous titles, but it's a great bit of fanservice for people who grew up with them or discovered the remakes later in l??ife.

While Gilbert and Winnick have every right to rest on their laurels, Thimbleweed Park surpasses their earlier work by a considerable margin. Adventure games are more about establishing characters and setting a mood than about action, and the town and residents of Thimbleweed Park have personality to spare. From the abandoned carnival to the vacuum tube store to the defunct pillow factory, every setting and character is distinct and memorable. This is helped by both the spectacular pixel art and the full voice acting, something that wasn't possible when the duo first teamed up on Maniac Mansion. The art has some modern touches, with dynamic lighting and other special effects added where appropriate. The precise, handcrafted pixel artwork fits the quirky story well, and there's even animation that ma?tches the characters' mouth movements to the Engli?sh dialogue.

Speaking of dialogue, the voice work is excellent, even though the actors all seem to be new to the genre. Each of the main characters has a distinct personality that comes through in their dialogue. Ray is world-weary, Reyes is upbeat and a little naive, Delores is optimistic even though her family is falling apart, deceased pillow salesman Franklin is convincing as a total doormat. Cursed clown Ransome is annoying, and the gravel-voiced Simpsons character Krusty the Clown is a pretty clear influence, but he's meant to be unpleasant. It's probably not a coincidence that he's the character who absorbs the most physical ab?use throughout the course of the game.

Each of the characters has their own arc and tasks to accomplish, and you can check their agenda ?by looking at their personal to-do list at any time. While most inventory items can be shared, some are tied to a specific person, which helps differentiate the cast. Aspiring game developer Delores is the only one who can solve comp?uter and programming related puzzles, and she's usually in charge of repairing the town's vacuum tube-based technology. Additionally, some characters can go where others can't. Ghostly Franklin is stuck haunting the site where he met his demise, jerkass clown Ransome won't let anyone else inside his trailer, and the federal agents Ray and Reyes are the only ones who can access specific crime scenes.

While the actions you have to take can be skewed at times, there's a consistent internal logic that makes the puzzles solvable if you pay attention to your surroundings. I only got really stuck once, and that was because I never bothered to LOOK at the corpse I was supposed to be? investigating at the beginning of the game. If you get stuck working with one character, it's easy to switch to a different one and focus on one of their tasks for a while instead, and doing so might trigger a brainwave about what to do on that first character. Once you have no further use for an item, you can use one of the town's many trash receptacles to toss your excess inventory, and you can be confident you won't need it because your character won't discard anything that's still useful. It's a nice touch, and helps keep the puzzles from feeling overwhelming.  

I particularly liked how Kickstarter backers were credited. Instead of a lengthy list of sponsors in the game's credits, backers above a certain funding tier were given the opportunity to add their name to the Thimbleweed county phone directory, or to write a short passage that can be found in one of the town's libraries. This is a callback to the funny book titles that were often found in L??ucasArts titles, and lets backers find their contribution as sort of a personal easter egg. It also makes sorting through the irrelevant names or titles to find something you need part of the puzzle. Fortunately, the people you need to contact to complete tasks are highlighted so they stand out on the page, and it's easy to find the correct titles in t??he library by using the provided index.

I admit it's a petty gripe, but I was slightly annoyed to see that misspelled words and mistakes made by backers weren't corrected before being imported into the game. I understand that this would have been a lot of extra work for the developers, but feel that it makes things look a lot less professional. Fortunately, the backer books are easily ignored if you're not interested, and you'll be able to go to the correct titles without pixel-hunting for hours. If for some?? reason you DO want to pixel-hunt, there's an optional side quest that involves fin??ding a single piece of dust on every screen.

As much as I enjoyed Thimbleweed Park, it's n?ot perfect. There's a lot of backtracking, which, although endemic to the genre, can become frustrating. This is mitigated somewhat once each character has a map of the county, wh??ich allows you to travel between destinations much more swiftly. You're still going to run back and forth a lot though, and you'll probably spend a good chunk of time waiting for the damn elevator in the hotel. Only one character can use it at a time and there's no fast travel between floors, so if you want to take your whole crew to the penthouse, they'll have to take turns and wait. A "group up" or "meet here" command would have been a godsend for juggling items between the various inventories. There's not really a story reason for the five characters to start working together, other than the fact that you're telling them to. And while I understand the decision to have different verbs instead of a more generic USE input, there are two or three commands there that frankly aren't necessary.

When the Kickstarter for Thimbleweed Park was launched, the stated goal was to create a game that plays like a lost LucasArts adventure title. In my opinion the developers succeeded brilliantly, creating a game that feels like a forgotten relic of LucasArts' heyday, but with enough touches to make it a little more relevant to a modern audience. It's fair to say no one makes them like this anymore, particularly since Telltale discovered a more lucrative formula based on popular franchises and keeping track of player actions. It was a rare pleasure to get to play a game like this again. I had a blast exploring Thimbleweed Park, and if you've ever enjoyed telling Bernard Bern??oulli o??r Guybrush Threepwood what to do, you will too.

_{[This review was based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Clever and resourceful... for a wall of meat

Allow me to introduce you to Duke Grabowski, mighty pirate. He's a lunkheaded, musclebound mouth-breather who used Int as his dump stat, and prefers punching to talking his way out of problems. He's also the protagonist in his own game, a throwback tribute to the Monkey Island series that's available on ??Steam right now.&n?bsp;

So, who here likes Monkey Island games? I know I do. I have a framed, signed print of Steve Purcell's artwork from Tales of Monkey Island displayed prominently in my home. I've played through every game in the series multiple times, and I often find myself quoting ??memorable lines (That's the second-biggest Q-tip I've ever seen!). I've always loved the implication that the hero, Guybrush Threepwood didn't seem to be really good at what he was doing, but prevailed through persistence and a willingness to try anything to get closer to his goal.

I wasn't really aware of Lucasarts games until the third installment, The Curse of Monkey Island. That was a great game to start with, though, containing full voice acting, gorgeous hand-drawn animation, and a long, involved quest with scalable difficulty (basically, adding extra steps to some of the puzzles). There's no doubt in my mind that Curse was one of the finest adventure games ever made, and should be held up along with other Lucasarts games like Sam and Max hit the Road and Day of the Tentacle ??;when talking about the a??dventure genre's glory days.

After playing through Curse, I tracked down copies of the earlier games in the series, and happily bought them when they were remastered. I also bought and enjoyed playing through the later games in the series, though I thought Escape From Monkey Island was hurt somewhat by its transition to 3D. Eventually, Telltale got the rights to do an episodic Monkey Island series, but that's the last we've heard from the franchise since it wrapped up in 2009.

A little while ago, I got a private message here on the site from somebody affiliated with Venture Moon Industries, the team behind Duke Grabowski, Mighty Swashbuckler. They'd seen my writeup on Thimbleweed Park, an upcoming game based on Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle from The Secret of Monkey Island's director, Ron Gilbert. They invited me to try out their game, since it seemed like I was a fan of Lucasarts-style adventures. Duke is heavily inspired by the Monkey Island series, and even has Bill Tiller on staff, who helped make Curse of Monkey Island when he worked at Lucasarts.

Duke Grabowski is a loving tribute to the latter Monkey Island games, and wears its influence on its sleeve. It may sound a little unfair to compare Duke Grabowski to the Monkey Island series, but as you can probably tell from my earlier statements, I mean it as a compliment. Duke's visuals are lush and colorful, and the Caribbean-flavored music is spot-on. What's more, every interaction Duke has with his environment triggers a unique voice l?ine, and the acting is well above average. One thing I appreciate is that it's not possible to get yourself into a failure state, something I particularly enjoyed about Lucasarts' offerings. It's easy to imagine Duke having a parallel adventure somewhere close to Guybrush, neither crossing the other's path.

Duke's story sees him vying to become the captain of his ship after his former captain has expired. His fellow pirates don't really respect him, but he tends to get violent when he doesn't get his way. So one of the other crewmen, a pirate called Slew Face, tells him that to become their leader, he should demonstrate his ability to woo some ladies, as their former captain had something of a reputation as ?a Don Juan. Really, all he's doing is getting Duke to leave the others alone for a while, but Duke's not especially gifted in the brains department, so he takes Slew Fac??????????????????????????e at his word. 

Duke can move around his environment and interact with anything he sees. The three possible interactions with every object are context sensitive, and Duke can use his? eyes, mouth, or hands when he wants to do something. Usually he'll just look, ta??lk to, or interact with an object, but occasionally the mouth icon can mean he tries to eat or lick an object, or the hands icon will indicate you want to punch something. It's a clever way of presenting interactions, and sets up some funny scenes.

While Guybrush is punier than your average pirate, he's usually the smartest guy in whatever room he enters. As I mentioned above, Duke is quite the opposite, so he has a different approach to the pirate themed puzzles he encounters. As an example, in one puzzle Duke needs to get past a group of zombie pirates who are well stocked with ca??nnons and cannonballs. While Guybrush might disguise himself as a woodland creature or find an alternate path, Duke's solution is to rip a tree out of the ground and use it as a bat to knock the cannonba??????????????????????????lls back at the enemy's position.

Not all of the puzzles can be solved with brawn, however, and for those that require a more subtle touch, Duke can ask for help from one of his companion characters. When they join him, their special skill will be added to Duke's inventory, and he can "use" them to help with puzzles, sort of like how Sam used Max as an item in Hit the Road. 

The game does have a few issues. The text shadows sometimes don't line up with the text, so a strange ghosting effect shows up under some of the dialogue lines. There isn't support for cloud saves, so if you move from one computer to another, you'll have to start the game over. There's a little less polish than you might expect if you've played Monkey Island games, but that's forgivable considering the ambition of the project and the size of the team th??at's made it. Adjust your expectations go?ing in, and you should be fine.

I enjoyed my time with Duke Grabowski, even though he's initially sort of hard to like as a character. I found that the more I played, the more he grew on me. I think I might know where his last name came from, and that was a nice touch. The team said that they'd like to make more games in the series, provided the first does well. It's available on Steam right now, so if you're interested in a new Monkey Island game, this is as cl??ose as you can ??get for the time being.

_{[This preview was based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Xbox One...not so much

Microsoft has been killing it in terms of game selection for its Games with Gold service. Last month may have been a bit of a drag, but November has two stellar Xbox 360 titles on offer. Subscribers to Live Gold will be getting The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (the latter which runs better on the Xbox One).

On the Xbox One side of things, gamers can look forward to Murdered: Soul Suspect and Super Dungeon Bros. That last title is brand new, so that could be pretty cool. Murdered I'd give a hard pass t?o, but I suppose free is free.

Super Dungeon Bros. and Monkey Island will be available from November 1st to the 15th. Murdered and Blood Dragon will become available on the 16th, though it seems Murdered will be offered until December 15th. I'm not sure wh?y, but extra time is never a bad thing?.

If you somehow have never played Monkey Island, do yourself a favor and change that. The game is an ex??cellent example of LucasArts??' domination of the adventure genre in the early '90s. The remake is also quite amazing, featuring fully recorded dialogue, incredibly lush artwork and a very generous hint system.

Fr?ee Xbox One/360 Games With Gold for Nov?ember 2016 Revealed [GameSpot]

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Clearly taking influence from X-Files

_{[Editor's note: This story ran in our community blogs a week ago. Backing is now closed, so I've made tiny adjustments to the headline and calls to action for fundraising. As backing the project isn't necessarily a pre-order I thought I'd put this on some of your radars anyway as it's due for a 2017 release. Why Louisa didn't mention her Monkey Island cosplay obsession is criminal, you look great! -Niero]}

You only realize you’re getting old when you start to reminisce a little too much.  One of my personal go to complaints is the lack of point-and-click adventure games nowadays. I grew up playing games like Monkey Island, Zork and Grim Fandango and I miss them.

Sure, we had some remasters and ??some more to come, but nothing quite beats delving in??to a new adventure IMO.  In amongst all the AAA titles and VR, I just wanted to give some recognition to a game in the works which could be just what I was looking for.

Thimbleweed Park is a Kickstarter project coming to us from the creator of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert. He works alongside Gary Winnick (Maniac Mansion) and David Fox (Zak McKracken and the Alien Mind Benders) as well as a whole host of ridiculously talented people. Described as ‘opening a dusty old desk drawer and finding an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you’ve never played before’, TP revisits the classic point-and-click method of head scratching puzzles, witty dialogue, and pixelat??ed goodness.

Clearly taking influence from X-Files, Thimbleweed Park follows two detectives who are investigating a dead body and encounter strange inhabitants in the town of Thimbleweed on the way. Much like Day of the Tentacle, you can switch between characters (five in total) and you use your good old verbs (walk, pick up, look) in order to get around. Despite the obvious appeal to retro gamers, there are modern twists that allow Thimbleweed Park to move with the times. The release on multiple platforms allows you to use an analog stick instead of clicking around, the graphics are more colourful and less glitchy and you won’t find yourself stuck at a dead end. These changes are welcomed, I was always worried that I was looking back on these games with rose-tinted glasses and my fears were realised when I played Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade recently. I expected the graphics to be a bit crude, but the main problem was the impossibly hard puzzles and dead ends. Thimbleweed Park is a bit more forgiving, highlighting areas that can be interacted with and allowing ?you to get hints from fellow characters.

The Kickstarter reached its pledge amount back in December, but further pledges contributed to improving the game as much as can be before its anticipated release. Gilbert and the team have been great in updating their backers via the blog, and the excitement (for me anyway) is real. Thimbleweed Park is said to launch no later than January 2017, and will be available on PC/Mac, Xbox One and Linux?? with mobile versions launching later.

_{Disclaimer: I feel it has to be stressed that I have no affiliation or am receiving any pay for this article, in fact they don't even know I'm writing it. I just REALLY love the idea of this game so felt it deserved some attention, and hope you will too!}

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He won't pay your phone bill, though

Ron Gilbert, the writer and director of Secret on Monkey Island, is teaming up with Gary Winnick, the art director of the LucasArts games of yore, to create Thimbleweed Park. The Kickstarter began last year, and one of the backer rewards w?as your name being found in the in-game phone book.

Gilbert says that "During the Kickstarter, someone in the comments?? suggested that it would be neat if they could also record a voicemail message. Not being above stealing a good idea, we quickly added that and pretended we thought of it all along."

But now that they have to actually go about collecting the voicemails, they have their work cut out for them. If you go on the Thimbleweed Park blog page, there's a link you can follow to help test the voicemail system. You don't have to be a backer t??o help them out, either. Are you a Good Samaritan with a microphone and a few minutes? Don't say anything too dirty.

Voicemail Testing [Thimbleweed Park]

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Threepwood shall rise once more... maybe

Monkey Island is a pretty major series in the history of adventure games. Fa??med for its humour, story, and setting, the series later received an absolutely gorgeous set of remakes. I know countless people who’ve been inspired by and adore the series, and references to it still pop up in gam??es released today.

Monkey Island is fantast??ic, and now it looks like creator Ron Gilbert wants to have another crack at it.

In a very interesting blog post celebrating the series’ 25^th birthday, Gilbert explains what bug-fixing?? in 1990 looked like. Seriously, it’s fascinating to read what '90s game development was like. He also lets slip he really wants to make a new game:

I don’t know if I will ever get to make another Monkey Island. I always envisioned the game as a trilogy and I really hope I do, but I don’t know if it will ever happen. Monkey Island is now owned by Disney and they haven't shown any desire to sell me the IP. I don’t know if I could make Monkey Island 3a without co??mplete control ove?r what I was making and the only way to do that is to own it. Disney: Call me.

Maybe someday. Please don’t suggest I do a Ki?ckstarter to get the money, that’s not possible without Disney first agreeing to sell it and they haven’t done that.

Disney, come on. Do it, sell him the IP so we can all get the Monkey Island 3 we’ve wanted, and see if you can give him the people who made the remakes while you&??rsquo;re at it. Those games are way prettier than th?ey have any right to be.

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The gas and the chainsaw: Together again for the first time

We were lucky enough to have Ron Gilbert (Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island) on Sup Holmes a few weeks back. Looking back, it looks like Ron may have been utilizing the show for a little pre-kickstarter promotion. Explains why he did the whole show in ?pixel-face. Fine by me. I'd have his pixel-faced puss on the show every week if?? I could. 

Ron hinted that he may be working with original Maniac Mansion artist Gary Winnick again soon, but I didn't think it would be this soon. But here we are, looking at a new SCUMM-style game from the creators of the term "cut scene" and the fathers of an entire genre. As a longtime fan of Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, and the first two Monkey Island games, I'm feeling like this all over again. 

It's a murder mystery that contain hundreds of locations and puzzles, all centered around Thumbleweed Park, a town that "...once boasted an opulent hotel, a vibrant business district and the state’s largest pillow factory, but now teeters on the edge of oblivion and continues to exist for no real reason." Sounds like a cross between Twin Peaks and Waiting for Guffman. Outside of Ron getting the rights to make a new Monkey Island game, this is about as close to perfect as it gets for fans of cl??assic Lucasfilm Ga?mes.

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Get to know the people who make great videogames

_{[Sup Holmes is a weekly talk show for people that make great videogames. I??t airs live every Sunday at 4pm EST on Youtube, and can be found in Podcast form on Libsyn and iTunes.]}

Last week on Sup Holmes we met Ron Gilbert, creator of Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, The Cave and so many other amazing games. I have wanted to talk to this person for over 20 years. When I finally got my chance, I found myself desperate to tell him everything I've ever thought ever, which?? left me at a loss. It's hard to pick just a few?? words when you want to say all of them at the same time. 

C'mon guys, this is the man who helped coin the term "cut scene". This is the person who who co-created the modern point and click adventure genre. This is the? guy who made some of the only games that have made me laugh out loud for the entirety of my adult life. I still laugh when I say "How appropriate, you fight like a cow," in game or out.  It literally never gets old.

Even typing this is stressing me out because I know the Ron Gilbert might read it later. His games have given me so much joy and inspiration over the ye??ars. I can't help but want to return the gesture.

Despite my fanboy freak out, we still had an amazing conversation. We talked about working with George Lucas, how frustrations with other games can inspire innovations in his own designs, the influence of Blazing Saddles on the ending of Monkey Island 2, his thoughts on modern adventure games like Lone Survivor, Kentucky Route Zero, and The Stanley Parable, the actual secret of Monkey Island,  how 90% of your ideas suck, why that's OK, his dream to return to Monkey Island, the game he's planning now, and so m?uch more.&nbs?p;

I also couldn't help but squeeze out some resentment I'd been holding in. Those Pirates of the Caribbean movies? They should have been Monkey Island movies. To me, that's what they were -- poor man's Monkey Island movies. Ron seemed to know exactl??y what I meant, though he was a little more composed and respectful than I was. He certainly looked calm. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen someone look so consistently rela?xed. Maybe it's because his face is made entirely of squares. I bet that helps. 

Thanks again to Ron for being on the show, and if you want to meet the creators of Adventures of Pip and maybe win a code for Devil's Dare, tune in for the live show here at 4pm EST. We'd love talk to you and give you things.

The post Did Pi??????????????????????????rates of the Caribbean rip off Monkey?? Island? appeared first on Destructoid.

IF.... he did. IF

With The Cave released and Ron Gilbert departing Double Fine for pastures new, he's had some time to reflect on maybe his most cherished legacy, Monkey Island. In a blog post, Ron speculates how he'd design a new Monkey Island game if  it were to happen. I'll let that sink in for a second; Ron has no plans to make another Monkey Island game. Okay?

In his post, Ron describes this theoretical game as real old-school point-'n-click, for hardcore adventure fans. "No tutorials or ?hint systems or pansy-assed puzzles... You're going to get stuck. You're going to be frustrated," writes Ron.?? "It would be an adventure game for the hardcore."

Ron also mentions how he would make the game with a small team, use pixel graphics but with some modern visual effects thrown in, and make the game fully voiced. He also mentions the sticky situation of the rights to the IP: "The only way I would or could make another Monkey Island is if I owned the IP. I've spent too much of my life creating and making things other people own.??"

With the dissolution of LucasArts, maybe the time is right for Ron to reclaim Monkey Island and add a new chapter to the series. Wouldn't it be cool if Ron signed off his PAX Australia keynote with an announcement?

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Please don't Cease and Desist this, Disney!

I want a new Monkey Island. So does some guy on the Adventure Game Studio forum, who announced Carnival of Monkey Island, which is a fanmade entry that will take place inbetween the second and third MI games (is that a midquel? a post-prequel?). Even better, it is being made in the style of Curse of Monkey Island with gorgeous hand-drawn visuals.

With MI creator Ron Gilbert struggling to convince Disney to let him get his grubby mits on his baby, I have my doubts t??hat Disney will let this project pass. It doesn't help that these indi?e developers are under the belief that Telltale owns the license. Also, protip: Don't call a developer's games "crap" when you are trying to get the license from them.

I hope Disney does turn a blind eye and these developers follow through, as a new MI in the style of my favorite entr??y sounds like a warm can of peaches to me (i.e. I enjoy warm peaches).

The Carnival of Monk??ey Island is looking for staff [Adventure Game Studio, via IndieGames]

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'Death makes sad stories of us all.'

With the Stars Wars license and money behind LucasArts, the studio only needed to follow. Instead, they in?novated for 31 years.

Not only did the studio have a hand in adventure, first-person shooter, real-time strategy, and flight sim games, it changed how developers that followed would approach these genres. Innovation aside, the studio and its many teams turned out original worlds with characters, quotable quips, and locations we would love as much as those of Star Wars and Disney.

It may be some time since LucasArts put out a title of great importance (Lucidity and Fracture look onward, angrily), but it seems not so long ago that LucasArts defined our younger years and the media we spent so m??uch time with.

After Disney laid off staff and cancelled all ongoing projects at LucasArts this week, now seems like a good time for the staff at Destructoid t?o reflect on the studio's history and how it ties into our own.

I sometimes wonder why more games don't feature extensive use of time travel, and then I
remember that Day of the Tentacle exists, so they don't need to. Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer's first game as lead designers is adventure game perfection. It's set in one location yet covers three distinct time periods. It won't melt your brain with time travelling quandaries like Primer, instead it focuses? on humor and puzzles that,? while steeped in loony adventure game logic, never threaten to become unintuitive.

My original copy of Day of the Tentacle was the floppy version, but there was a second CD-ROM version that came with the wonderful voice acting I no longer know how I could have lived without. When my folks finally upgraded to a computer not stuck in the past, the first purchase I made was the “better” Day of the Tentacle, and what a delight that second playthrough was.

This was LucasArts at its peak, and it's how I always want to remember the company. Not as a bully of a publisher, not as a company that milked Star Wars dry, and certainly not dissolved, but as a studio that churned out some of the most hilarious and clever games I've ever had the pleasure to play. - Fraser Brown

Our family didn't have a decent PC until the mid-90s, so the majority of my gaming had been done on the NES and SNES. Once my dad dropped the cash for a blazing fast Pentium 75, I knew one of the first games I absolutely needed was X-Wing.

The X-Wing series (followed by TIE Fighter, the multiplayer X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, and finally X-Wing Alliance) were space combat sims that put you in the cockpit of a Rebel (or Imperial) starfighter. While I'd loved the vector based Star Wars arcade game when I was younger, the X-Wing games' free flight, varying missions, and realistic (for the time) graphics blew it out of the wa?ter. There was nothing more exhilarating than deciding "screw the mission objectives" and dodging banks of turbolasers to single-handedly take down a Star Destroyer. This series was also responsible for my undying hatred of escort missions.

The catalog included with X-Wing introduced me to some of LucasArt's non-Star Wars stuff, including my personal favorite: the adventure title Sam & Max Hit the Road. Based on Steve Purcell's comic about a fedora-wearing dog and his psychotic lagomorph partner, you control the duo on a road trip across the country searching for a stolen bigfoot. It made me realize that games could not only be funny, but downright hilarious. Although the follow-up Sam & Max: Freelance Police was sadly cancelled in 2004, thankfully Telltale Games (made up mostly of former LucasArts employees including Purcell) picked up the ball the next year and gave us two great episodic sequels. - Aaron Yost

I have a fond place in my heart for a lot of LucasArts games, but if I had to pick one favorite, it'd be Indiana Jones and the Fate Of Atlantis. I ordered it out of a Scholastic Book Fair catal??og from my school, in spite of the fact that it wasn't remotely a book.

At the time, I was having a miserable beginning to junior high school, and had moved from living next door to my best friend in a fun neighborhood, to an old house miles from anything in the middle of the woods. 1996 was a rough year for me, especially the cold and dark Connecticut winter spent in that lonely house, and some of my fondest memories from that time are exploring Crete, The Azores, and Monte Carlo with Indiana Jones. Even when stumped by some intensely frustrating (no, seriously, they still piss me off) puzzles, I still managed to entertain myself by trying to make Indy jam a broken ship rib into Sophia Hapgo??od's Atlantean necklace. "I do?n't think that will work."

We all have a game or two that makes us get all sentimental, for reasons that transcend your run-of-the-mill nostalgia, and Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis is one of mine, and that's enough to make me pour one out for LucasArts. If nothing else, it's an Indiana Jones sequel that didn't involve Shia LaBouef swinging around with CGI monkeys. - Max Scoville

Maniac Mansion completely changed the way I looked at games. Just utterly destroyed it. Up until that fateful day in the late 1980's when I brought the game home for my recently acquired Commodore 64 computer, the concept of different playable characters requiring their own approach to problem solving had never really crossed my mind before. I had probably had the experience by this point without really thinking about it (the North American release of Super Mario Bros. 2 was already out by this time and I'm sure I had played it somewhere), but seeing the various combinations of kids that were possible and the ??realization that every group would require me to find other ways to rescue Sandy from the clutches of the mad Dr. Edison blew my young mind. It was so effective that I never even noticed how startlingly inappropriate the game's content was for a nine year-old. No child should be exposed to the tragedy that was the Ford Edsel.

It became something of an obsession, ultimately, and I still have a batch of 5/14" floppy discs with save files for every possible combination of kids. I wonder if I ever finished with Jeff and Michael... - Conrad Zimmerman

Maniac Mansion changed my idea of what videogames could be, and in doing so, changing the trajectory of my life in a permanent way, but it was Zak McKracken the really blew the lid off for me. The game worked to parody aspects of American culture that had already seemed ridiculous to my 12 year old mind, while effectively giving me a believably "realistic" adult world to safely explore. These two ?aspects worked together in perfect sync. The more believable the world, the more effective (and hilarious) the parody, the more drive to explore the world, and so forth. The power in that formula is unquestionable. This is a videogame that made me believe, even if for only the briefest of moments, that aliens might be using telephones to make me stupider, and that someday, little plastic cards may replace paper money.

What am I saying "had"? I still believe those things to this day, and for arguably goo?d reason.

More than anything though, Zak Mckracken amazed me with how unique, original, and personable it was. Unlike Maniac Mansion before it, and Monkey Island after, Zak Mckracken didn't rely on film genre gags and tropes to get by. It was a wholly original madcap adventure, released for Commodore 64, in the year 1988. That in itself is amazing. This was a time before the internet, before Adult Swim, before any non-Monty Python Frankenstein-ing of ludicrous surrealism sewn together with cultural satire was known to be potentially pala??table for the mass market in any form, let alone in the largely untested medium of videogames. And here was a game about a tabloid reporter who meets a two-headed squire, digs a into solid rock with french bread, travels the world, in?filtrates a secret alien headquarters, trades brains with a dolphin, and goes to mars, all of which with nearly no death or violence to be found. I couldn't believe it was real. To be so consistently surprised, amused, and enlightened by a game was a first for me, and it's a feeling I've been chasing ever since.

I can only hope that the original creators of Zak McKracken will reacquire the license for the property, so that Zak's adventures may outlive the flawed, trailblazing, and now sadly departed studio that birthed it. - Jonathan Holmes

The first time I played through The Dig I did so huddled in front of my parents' 486, my two brothers and neighbor at my side. We didn't care that it was voiced by the dude who played T-1000, produced by Steven Spielberg, or written by that guy who wrote Ender's Game; we were there for one reason and one reason only -- the thrill of discovery. And boy did The Dig thrill.

The producti?o?n values were astounding, the world was exciting, and goddamn if some of these puzzles weren't downright hard. In fact, to this day I still have the original game manual filled with our notes and solutions to the puzzles, and when it was finally released on Steam not too long ago, I was able to fly through the entire adventure in a matter of minutes -- a far cry from the days upon days we spent on that original outing.

The Dig was the first adventure game I ever remember really investing myself in, and the first game I played through from start to finish with my brothers and friend (who would later become my gaming compatriots), and for that I will always hold it dear to my heart. - Andy Dixon

If there was ever a game that was eligible for the "most improved sequel" award, it would be Dark Forces II. Although the original Dark Forces is a serviceable first-person-shooter, Jedi Knight really took the genre by the throat, turned it on its head, for?ce-gripped it, and threw it off the ledge.

What was the simple innovation you ask? Lightsabers. By adding a third person lightsaber mechanic into the game, Lucasarts wowed PC fans everywhere and let them give into their darkest Jedi fantasies right in their own living rooms.

But it wasn't just melee combat that made you feel like a badass -- the power to wield the Force -- either dark, light or neutral (a rarity for any Star Wars game) -- allowed you to customize the experience to suit your playstyle. With my group of f?riends through LAN play, all of us were able to craft our own unique way of experiencing the game -- ages before "perks" were a widespread first-person-shooter mainstay.

To this day, no one really does lightsaber combat quite like the Jedi Knight franchise, and it will be sorely missed. - Chris Carter

George Lucas always talked about how the Stars Wars franchise -- the comic books, the toys, the games, the lackluster prequels -- are there to allow him to make experimental films, returning to his roots established in his USC short films and on the set of THX 1138. He? never made good on ??this promise, but game developer and publisher LucasArts sure did.

While Star Wars games -- many of which were experimental and incredibly influential in their own right -- continued throughout the years, LucasArts used the revenue to invest into some of the most memorable and peculiar games of the '90s. I still don't know how to play Afterlife, I still think Outlaws sounds and looks like nothing else, and I still want to set aside time to check out Gladius and Herc's Adventure, one of these days.

What I'll think about most, when it comes to the LucasArts name, are all the days spent playing its adventure titles. I still return to The Curse of Monkey Island, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango, and instead of being let down by nostalgia, I find so much more to appreciate now that I know how rare it is to find quality storytelling, good humor, and innovative art direction in games. When I load them up on my Nexus 7, it still feels like the future to me and everyone else is just struggling to catch-up. - Allistair Pinsof

_{[image via AllGamesBeta]}

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The adventure veteran is working on an iOS game, until his next project

In 1990, Ron Gilbert made the genre-defining Secret of Monkey Island with Tim Schafer. Two decades later, Gilbert joined Schafer's studio, Double Fine Productions. And now, after releasing his latest adventure, The Cave, Gilbert is leaving Schafer again. True love just doesn't last, does it???

In December, Gilbert told Eurogamer that he wanted to talk to Disney, which currently owns the rights to the Monkey Island franchise, about doing a game. The Eurogamer interview ends with Gilbert saying he would make the Monkey Island seque?l at Double Fin?e unless Schafer fires him. Oh, the irony.

Gilbert isn't ready to announce his next move, but one can assume it's a game: "So many games left to be designed," he wrote in his blog. In the meantime, fans can look forward to an iOS collaboration with Clayton Kauzlaric (DeathSpank) called Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage to Discover the Ultimate Sea Shanty: A Musical Match-3 Pirate RPG. Such a catchy title. Do I smell the next Angry Birds?

Schafer will continue his own private love affair with adventure games in his Kickstarter-funded untitled game. Schafer offered a supportive message on Twitter: "Good luck, Ron! Thanks for The Cave!"

A Complete Map Of The Cave And Other News... [Grumpy Gamer]

The post Ron Gilbert announces departure from Double Fine appeared first on Destructoid.

GOG.com has been my go-to site for adventure gaming for quite some time. It used to just be for the classics I remember from my misspent youth; whiled away with pointing and, indeed, clicking. Now, more and more modern titles have been appearing, ever since the website did a spot of rebranding. Telltale's popular adventure series' seem like a good fit with GOG, which is convenient as two of them have been added. Tales of Monkey Island has been released on the service today, alongside Sam & Max's first two seasons. 

If you haven't taken them for a spin already, then now is the time to do so. To welcome the games to the site, GOG has put them up with a 60 percent discount until July 3. That gets you Sam & Max Save the World and Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space for $11.99 each, while Tales of Monkey Island is $13.99. Tellta?le have done a wonderful job bringing these franchises ba??ck and they are well worth your time.

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Double Fine is one of those rare anomalies that carries a truck-ton of admiration from its fans, almost no scorn or distaste from anyone in this industry, and yet it has still experience?d a fluctuation of moderate monetary success. And even more puzzlingly, the company simply asked fans for money, which resulted in over $3 million in contributions. Crazy!

While it remains the be seen what Double Fine delivers with their Kickstarter project, they've still carried on making games at their leisure. Coincidentally enough, one of those games, The Cave, is an adventure game in and of itself ... ??one they've actually been wor?king on for over a year now.

The Cave (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 [previewed])
Developer: Double Fine Productions
Publisher: Sega
Release: TBA 2013

First, I want to clear up what this game isn't: It's neither a point-and-click style game, nor?? is it in old-school 2D sprites. Can you at least handle that? Please do, because everything else that is so loved about this genre is certainly here, and in the cherished style of one of the genre's pioneers, Ron Gilbert.

For those of you who don't know who Ron Gilbert is, well, I feel a tad sorry for you. His body of work consists of some of the most cherished games in history: Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, and?? more. I'm pretty sure he also invented driving on two wheels while blasting Sabbath (screw it, might as well give him a little more). I'm an infant in this industry, compared to my peers, and even I've experience??d this man's games.

So an adv??enture title being made by a man such as Gilbert would be like an epic biopic being directed by Orson Welles, were he alive today. It's the creator ma?king another of his divine creations.

The Cave started off exactly how I expected, charmingly funny. An ominous voice explained how he has been a source of hope and desire for people throughout the ages -- those who simply seek for their greatest of wishes to come true. We were then introduced to the Cave. Really, it was a talking cave. Don't laugh at him, though. As he stated, "It's hard enough dating, a??s it is."

Players are given the choice between three of seven character archetypes: t?he wise Monk, the daring Adventurer, the slack-jawed Hillbilly, the methodical Scientist, the stalwart Knight, the rift-bending Time Traveler, and the creepy-as-shit Twins. All ??of these characters, as expected, have their own personality, story arcs, and special abilities. How you combine them, though, is where the real meat of the experience lies.

After picking a combination of three characters, players are thrown into the depths of the? Cave, where they must solve a vari?ety of zany and kooky puzzles -- in that familiar Gilbert fashion -- to reach that specific area of the cave where a particular character's wish will come true. Double Fine was pretty light on the details of each character's wish and quest, but after being told that the Hillbilly's ultimate goal is to find love, I can tell that plenty of gratifying heart, humor and hubris will be present in each character's journey. Stuff like this is where Double Fine excels, after all.

Did I mention the game is kooky? One of the puzzles shown consisted of the Scientist, ??Knight, and Hillbilly. At a particular area of the Cave, a giant, fire-breathing monster blocked their path (discovered after the lovelorn yokel was fried to a crisp). Just before the monster lay a spiked pit filled with bones, and above it hung the giant arm of a crane, which lowered into the pit and hoisted up whatever remains it could grab. To lure the monster to the pit, though, the Scientist had to reactivat??e a vending machine (which read "OMDOGGG!") with a bucket of water, subsequently providing a plump, juicy sausage. She put the frank on a spike in the pit, the monster began gnawing away at it, and then bam. The crane pulled the then-yelping and squealing beast out of harm's way.

Another such puzzle was from the Knight's storyline, where a large coin had to be retrieved from a deadly dragon, and then traded for a princess's tiara. Obviously, a head-on approach resulted in a flame-broiled archetype, but the Knight's special ability -- a magical aura that protected him from harm -- was the perfect distraction as the Scientist snuck into a gate behind the dragon with the words "Do not leave gate open" written beside it, nabbed the coin, and then ran?? off with it. Unfortunately, she ??didn't close the gate behind her, and as she ascended towards the princess, the sounds of chaos and bloody murder could be heard. One random voice even screamed, "What idiot left the gate open?!"

When the Scientist reached the Princess's tower, though, her hig??hness dangled from the gnawing jaws of the escaped dragon. No worries, though; the beast coug??hed up the tiara after he gulped her down.

These two puzzles are but a taste of The Cave's many different puzzles that are indicative of the adventure ga??mes that inspired it. They never really made much sense, logically sp?eaking, but they sure were funny and a blast to figure out.

A lot of you are probably wondering how the game looks and plays, though. As I stated before, it doesn't look as old-school as many fans would have liked, but it is still in 2D. Or rather 2.5D, to be specific. The game is being?? built with 3D graphics, but on a two-dimensional plane, based in a seamless environment (no more going from room to room, static screens and all). Nonetheless, it looks great, as is expected from the fantastic art direction that Double Fine typically provides.

With all that said, The Cave handles much like a 2D platformer. While no balancing acts or quick actions are required, the camera constantly follows whichever character is being controlled. Like I mentioned in previous examples, up to three archetypes are chosen at any given time, which requires the players to switch between them, depending on the situation or puzzle that is present. Basically, The Cave is an adventure game at heart, with some of the trappings of mor??e modern titles. Considering that the game wi?ll also be available on consoles, it only makes sense that such a control scheme would be present.

So there you have it. As countless eyes have been gazing at the activities of Double Fine, they've been slowly but surely working with a genre that many people? have long considered "dead." Obviously it's not; publishers have just kept it caged for many years. Thankfully, companies like Double Fine have enough faith in their fans and the genre to let it ?run loose for a little while longer.

And yes, if you caught the rumors from earlier this week, this is ?also being published by Sega. Weird, right???

The post Preview: Double Fine ventures into The Cave appeared first on Destructoid.

_{Check out the first part of the feature, here!}

The last few years have been an interesting time for the adventure game genre. A??fter a decade of disappointment, fans finally started to see more and more titles appear and most importantly, become successes. Big changes in the industry, such as the rise of digital distribution and the popularity of episodic content created a more favorable environment to craft these games in. More opportunities for indie developers started to appear as well.

In this, the second part of the feature, I'll be taking a look at what impact these changes have had on the developers and their games as well as what we might be able to expect in the future (hoverboards, hoverboards, hoverboards.) Providing us with words of wisdom are: Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry; Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games; Dave Gilbert, creator of the Blackwell series and founder of developer/publisher, Wadjet Eye Games; and Josh Nuernberger, creator of Gemini Rue.

I was something of a late adopter when it came to digital distribution. I clung to my boxes and physical media for as long as the world let me. Everybody has a price, though. It turned out that my price was the complete Space Quest collection on Steam. Imagine my surprise when I noticed that it was far from the only example of a classic adventure game on the platform, indeed, there were plenty of new ones as well. Steam al??ready had a massive user base and it offered a great space for promotion. 

Telltale Games is no stranger to digital distribution; its games can be found on all manner of digital platforms, including those of the console variety. CEO Dan Connors explained, "Digital distribution allows independent publishers to reach the customers without taking on the costs associated with building and marketing a retail title."? Telltale sells directly to their customers via their own site, as well. "We're going to be relaunching that soon, because we've learned a ton and we're really going to start making that a big part of our mission again, to get a community there and get people excited and offering them things they can't get in other places. It's a way you can test experiences, try new things, message however you want, position product however you want, provide information on products, and let people participate."

Along with Steam, indie bundles have been a massive boon to smaller adventure game developers. The first three titles in the Blackwell series and Gemini Rue were both featured in indie bundles, last year. Those games were the work of Dave Gilbert and Josh Nuernberger, respectively. Dave told me, "It was like launching the games all over again. I think more people have played Blackwell in the [week since it featured on the bundle] than they have in the last five years. My inbox and forums have exploded since the Indie Royale launch, and the association also gave Blackwell the final push it needed for Steam to accept it. We’ve been trying to get the series on Steam for tw??o years but they always said no. So we?’re very grateful for that."

One of the largest problems for adventure game developers in the years since the golden age of the genre was publishers' lack of faith in the products. When they were willing to invest in such a game, it was lazily marketed and rarely got the support it needed. With promotion and direct access to players, developers have been able to show that there's a healthy audience out there, which will hopefully lead? to more publishers investing in these types of titles.

Better tools have also made it easier for small developers to make a finished product. Adventure game studio (AGS) is a free development kit inspired by Sierra'??s interface for its adven?ture titles and it's been used to create a vast number of games, including many commercial ones. Most of Wadjet Eye's catalog used AGS. "The creation of third-party tools like AGS enable idiots like me to make these games, so more of them are being made every day." Although AGS games frequently favor a retro aesthetic, that's a design choice rather than limitations imposed by the software. Dave explained, "It’s a big misconception that AGS can only handle low-res games. It can actually go as high as you want, just most people prefer not to. So the decision to use AGS has nothing to do with aesthetic choice, but it has everything to do with money and time. Right out of the box, it has everything you need to make a point-and-click adventure game. Not having the experience or knowledge to make an engine of my own, it was the most logical choice."

Dave's own games have a distinctly retro look and thematically they are similar to the much-beloved Gabriel Knight series. Playing the Blackwell series instantly transported me back in time to the days when Sierra were still blowing my mind with new adventures. It's a wonderful feeling. "Blackwell is very much me trying to do Gabriel Knight. The story of Joe ??Gould and Jo?seph Mitchell was my Jensenian attempt at merging real-life historical people with supernatural events."

As Al Lowe reminded me, these smaller teams using AGS are a lot like the teams that developed adventure games in the '80s and early '90s. "I think that's great because it brings back the small team concept of one or two people working closely together on a project and actually putting their own personalities into it. I think that so much of what we see that's wrong with games today, that there is no ke??y personality th??at comes through."

While cost is obviously a concern, I do think that there's a tendency for adventure game fans and developers to be incredibly nostalgic and thus gravitate more towards retro design. I'm guilty of this, myself. My love of the genre classics means that I'm immediately more interested in titles which are inspired by those particular art styles or certain mechanics. In Telltale's case, Dan defends nostalgia, believing that older franchises still have much to offer. "Well I think that for us, with having Sam & Max as our flagship, we looked at the content as being so rich and relevant in the modern day... [It] needed to be brought up now. Having Sam & Max in 2004, and 2010 and all the times we've been able to use them as characters ... I mean they're just great characters and it's a great franchise.?? So for us introducing that content to a new audience was a huge thing."

Expanding into new markets such as consoles and handhelds has also increased the userbase. Adventure games used to be pretty much a PC only affair, with the occasional shoddy console port. While PC is still the focal platform, titles like Phoenix Wright, Ghost Trick, and 999 made the DS a must for lovers of strange adventures and interactive stories. PSN and XBLA have also seen their share of adventure ports, most of Telltale's games can be found there, for instance. Fans of the genre can even get their adventure on with their phone or tablet. Machinarium on iOS is fantastic and might be even better than it was on PC, thanks to it becoming a more tactile ??experience.

Dan seemed to be willing to embrace new platforms and technology. "It can bring more imagination to how you interact with the characters in the world and how you experience the story." He acknowledges the risk of doing that when it comes to traditionalist fans, though. "It moves away from traditional stuff and is a bit risky. So you have to be pure adventur??e game or you're in this vanguard story game type of?? place."

When I recall pla?ying most of my favorite adventure games, I remember pouring countless hours into them. Getting stuck on a puzzle meant that I was going to be doing a lot of trial-and-error experimentation, exploring loads of areas, doing a lot of pixel hunting? and then finally leaving the computer to go and contemplate it elsewhere -- maybe in a dojo or on top of a mountain. Failing that, I'd pester my friends.

Now there's a strong temptation to just ?go online and find a walkthrough, even if you've only just been stuck for a couple of minutes. It can ruin the pacing of the game and rob the player of their satisfaction at being able to think of a solution. In an effort to keep gamers immersed, or at the very least to stop them alt-tabing every time they get stumped, many modern adventures contain an in game hint system or simply less taxing puzzles. This can certainly frustrate old fashioned players, like myself, but one cannot deny it has lowered the bar for entry and possibly increased the genre's fanbase.

Dave doesn't think this is really anything new, however. "You often hear that gamers are less patient these days. I’m not sure if that's true. Back in the '80s, I would spend several months playing the latest Infocom game and never think of ordering the hint book unless I was desperate. But then I got the game Enchanter, which mysteriously shipped with the hint book. I finished that game in less than a week. If I got stuck for maybe ten minutes I'd reach for the hint book, because it was so accessible. The only thing that has changed since those days is that we all have instant access to that hint book via Google. There's no reason to force hard puzzles on people, because everyone can solve them. So the trend has moved away from difficult puzzle??????????????????????????s and more towards?? making the experience of playing an adventure game more enjoyable. It's a very hard balance to strike."

The importance of story in adventure games cannot be overstated. It's what drives the exploration forward and it's the motivation for completing the puzzles. One of the positive aspects on these titles not relying merely on head-scratchers is that there's even more effort put into the narrative. Josh Nuernberger's Gemini Rue contains one of my favorite stories in the genre of late. It's a tale of loss and identity set in a bleak neo-noir future. Ev??en though it's an understated adventure built using AGS, it's gaine?d a lot of attention and you'd be crazy for not checking it out. 

Josh advocates the importance of telling the story through gameplay. "What I'd really like to see is games that make these complex stories your experience in the game -- e.g. you are hunted by a mysterious oppressor, or you must face your alternate personality in physical ??form. Many games today are unfortunately sequences of simplified gameplay strung together by cut-scenes that provide context for your actions (see many first or third-person-shooters). Great games tell stories through their gameplay -- you understand the world and the story by the way you interact with them as a player."

Gemini Rue also has several action sequences: cover-based gun fights. "Although? in adventure games you can't always go the route of totally removing all cut-scenes, you can at least integrate other aspects of gameplay so they don't just turn into quick time events. I knew when incorporating combat I wanted it to be meaningful and to work on its own as a mechanic. The ultimate goal is to give players a unique experience and a quick time event doesn't really capture a gunfight in the same way that a developed combat system does." I personally think that the integration of interesting mechanics is something the adventure genre desp??erately needed to continue expanding its audience and I think we're starting to see a lot more of that.

A great example of a game that does this is Double Fine's Stacking. It was built around the delightful premise of controlling a matryoshka doll and jumping inside larger ones to gain their abilities and overcome puzzles and obstacles. It was incredibly inventive and its unique gameplay mechanic really made it stand out. Double Fine seems to have had more success with the downloadable market than it did with Psychonauts or Brutal Legend. Their use of Kickstarter to fund their latest project seems to have pa??id off, as well, with fans almost throwing money at the company. It will be interesting to?? see the long-term impact of Kickstarter on independent developers as more start to use it to secure funding.

Along with shorter downloadable titles like Stacking, episodic adventures have become increasingly common in recent years. It has always struck me as a perfect fit for the genre. Most classic adventure games can be completed rather quickly if you know the solutions to the puzzles. The games' lengths were augmented by the challenge of solving the puzzles yourself. It also meant that each episode could fund the next one, making it financially more viable. It's far from an automatic route to success, however, according to Dave Gilbert. The Blackwell series has been going since 2006 and contains four games, but not all episodic series are so fortunate. "The most obvious thing that can go wrong is that the game flops. What then? Do you forge on ahead? and finish the series, knowing that the first one didn’t do well? If you do, then you run a much greater risk of the sequel doing just as badly. If you don’t, then you lose a lot of faith and goodwill and that is hard to get back."

Episodic games require a big investment from players as well as developers. Dave continues: "The main problem with episodic games is that isn’t a lot of faith in the format yet. Only Telltale has managed to pull it off successfully and gained the trust of the consumers. While opinions on their games vary, nobody doubts they will finish what they start. By this point, the gaming public probably has a bit more faith in my ability to deliver than most, but I still get a lot of emails from people saying they don't want to get invested in Blackwell not knowing if it will ever be finis?hed. I can?? totally understand that."

It's not just independent developers and publishers working to bring adventure games to a new audience, though. Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, an interactive thriller that reminded me a lot of FMV titles from the '90s, made some big waves a couple of years ago. While it enjoyed both commercial and critical success, it also got criticized for being more movie than videogame. Our own Jim Sterling is far from a fan. Ho??wever, its success may lead more publishers to take risks on games with such a strong focus on stor??y.

The now-defunct Team Bondi made quite the impression last year with their investigative adventure (and driving simulator,) L.A. Noire. It made an even bigger impression with its implosion, some might say. The game itself, if not the treatment of the people that worked on it, still deserves praise, however. Before the genre started to have problems, it was ahead of the curve when it came to animation, so it's good to see so much effort being put into making believable game worlds and characters again. If you'd asked me, back in 2005, if I ever thought big studios would be designing AAA adventu??re games again, I would have laughed. Now it doesn't seem nearly as absurd.

I'm not going to be dramatic and suggest that we're seeing an adventure game renaissance. I wish I could, but it's simply not true. We're definitely seeing it making something of a comeba??ck, though. There's a lot more faith in them, both from publishers and players and that's gone a long way to start bringing them back into the mainstream. The fact that the market is growing at all is a massive step forward and looking back ju??st five or six years, we can see how far the genre has come. There are a lot of talented developers out there bringing us more and more experiences to enjoy. It might not be a renaissance yet, but that doesn't mean it won't happen.

The post The grand adventure: Making a comeback appeared first on Destructoid.

_{There's a second part, too!}

For almost a decade, I used to hate being an adventure game fan. It meant that I had experienced some of the best writing and most inventive gameplay the medium had to offer, only to have that taken away from me by?? a market that screamed, "No! We want to shoot more chaps in the groin!" The adventure genre went from being gaming's golden child to being commercially nonviable and generally ignored. On the rare occasion when a new game appeared to remind me why I loved the genre so much in the first place, it would flop, and I'd be left trying to explain to countless people why they were insane for overlooking some truly incredible titles.

That this grim era of desperation seems to have passed us doesn't mean the struggle is over, though. Not at all. I've been lucky enough to get the chance to pick the brains of four helpful gents, each who have had a significant impact on my favorite genre: Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry; Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games; Dave Gilbert, creator of the Blackwell series and founder of developer/publisher Wadjet Eye Games; and Josh Nuernberger, creator of Gemini Rue. They offered their insight into the state of the adventure genre, how it has changed over the years, and what the ?future holds.

In the first part of this two part feature, I'?ll be looking back at the history of the genre, its fall from grace and how it started its slo??w ascent back into the hearts of gamers.

The 80s through the mid-90s have been called the golden age of adventure gaming -- it's easy to see why this period gained such a moniker. It's hard to think about the genre without taking note of Monkey Island, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, or Indiana Jones, just to name a few. The adventure giants, LucasA??r??ts and Sierra Online, offered us an absurd number of challenging, witty, and frequently hilarious games as well as gripping mysteries and psychological horrors, in which we could immerse ourselves for far too many hours.

Although I've never been one to play a single genre exclusively, back then, I could have probably just played these games and been more than content. Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games -- a success story I'll be looking at in our forthcoming second half -- emphasized how important these titles remain today and how dissatisfied gamers still look to them as the high points of the medium. "From a creativity standpoint, it was a golden age then of just all this young, super talented, super brilliant people who had all this time to invest in creating these amazing characters that are totally perfect for the space, like Guybrush.... [It's] so deeply ?ingrained in the gaming culture and the gaming ennui."

A significant portion of my youth was swallowed up due to the creations and contributions of Al Lowe. While at Sierra Online, he worked on such classics as Kings Quest and Police Quest, but he's best known as the creator of Leisure Suit Larry, a series chronicling the misadventures of one Larry Laffer, a sleazy, horny, double entendre-loving wa?nnabe womanizer. Adventure games were still in their infancy; it was a time of exp??erimentation and risk taking.

"I remember going to a video store with Ken [Roberts, co-founder of Sierra Online]," Al reminisced, "We walked down the aisles and looked at all the headings above the shelves, and he said, 'Why are there no mystery games? Why are there no western games?' And so that was one of the things he tried to do, to get Roberta [Williams, creator of Kings Quest and Phantasmagoria and co-founder of Sierra Online] to do a mystery product and Jim [Walls, creator of Police Quest] to do a police product and me to do a western game [the hilarious Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist]." Al calls this the baseball strategy -- Ken would look at what was missing from the game space?? and he'd try to fill it, like hitting a ball to where there are no fielders. It certainly served Sierr??a well, as their products filled many niches.

Most of these games were written and developed by people who had to teach themselves. There certainly were none of the classes, courses, or workshops that we h??ave now, and there wasn't much in the way of a previous generation to learn from, either. "You have to understand, when I started, there were no computer classes available to me. This so?unds impossible to anyone growing up in the 80s, but when I started in 77, the only courses available were in COBOL and Fortran; BASIC was just a joke. I learned to program in BASIC merely by reading books, but Ken said my BASIC code wasn't good enough and I'd have to learn assembly language, so I bought a bunch of books... I couldn't take a class, there weren't any."

That meant there were a lot of design choices that would seem like shortcuts or attempts to make the game artificially longer today, but it was that trial-and-error approach that allowed them to perfect the genre. Being about the same age as the Leisure Suit Larry franchise, I'm young enough that my first foray into the series -- and into adventure games in general -- occurred right as the art, animation, and mechanics started to evolve into something more recognizable to the modern player. Simple sprite art was on the way out, and gorgeous hand-drawn art started to take center stage. FMV titles like Phantasmagoria and the Tex Murphy series gave players a whole new perspective to enjoy; while they didn't age particularly well, b?ack in the 90s, they made me feel like I was interacting wit??h the real world and not just with a videogame.

Although the FPS genre is often cited as the catalyst for the technological leaps in gaming, adventure games advanced the medium by leaps and bounds long before then, especially in terms? of how we interacted with the environments. I still have a soft spot for parsing, typing in commands, and hoping for the best, or at the very least, discovering an Easter egg or?? hidden joke. But that was eventually dropped for more convenient interfaces which involved more clicking and a lot less typing.

That's not to say that gamers didn't develop a case of rose-tinted glasses. Even back then, people wanted to return to the old ways. In Larry 7, parsing was actually included as an alternative feature, but it never took off. "The problem was," Al explained, "in Larry 7, people tried it once or twice and thought it was cool, then ignored it. It just proved to me t??hat whatever group of p?eople said to bring back parsers were wrong. They didn't really want to do that, they were just enamored with the concept."

Unfortunately, during the mid to late 90s, adventure games started to lose popularity. Even the big titles weren't bringing in many players. The future looked bleak for Sierra, as Al reminded me, "When 3D graphics cards came out, it looked like the future of gaming was going 3D. With the rise of the shooter genre, the money and interest had to come from somewhere, and it really came from adventure games. Plus, a lot of the games stole a lot of the ideas that made adventure games work, like inventories, puzzles, and conversation trees, and those becam?e integrated into those other games."

What I found most surprising about the way other titles adapted adventure mechanics into their gameplay was how so many people completely forgot where they came from. It was a sad time for fans like myself. "Larry 7 was the last adventure game that really sold well. I remember when Grim Fandango came out after Larry 7, it was at a time when LucasArts was producing these great products and everybody loved the game, the gameplay wa??s great, but it sold like crap."

Grim Fandango's failure was something of a tragedy, really. Such an immensely clever game, with memorable characters, a wonderfully told story, and a unique art direction, deserved to ??succeed. While the critics and those who actually played it loved it, it went by generally unnoticed by everyone else. It is somewhat fitting, however, that this tale of a Grim Reaper would herald what many felt was the death of the pointing and clicking. The focus shifted from stories and puzzles to action and graphical fidelity.

"Suddenly, these games where you'd sit and pound your head and try to figure out what to do next looked antiquated and old and slow. But the more I played the new games, the less I liked them and the more I appreciated puzzle solving. And also, I really liked humor -- I love Monkey Island and Space Quest and those games that made you laugh, where there was a big pay off and a belly laugh coming in. Man, that just went away completely. There were no products that had any sense of humor back then." Al's love of humor in videogames is something we share, perhaps because it is so rare. A game that makes me actually laugh is som?ething I cherish, even if it's just because of some terrible puns or a bit of slapstick.

That's not to say there weren't any developers trying to bring humor back into our wonderful hobby. Seven years after Grim Fandango felt the sting of an apathetic market, the game's designer and LucasArts alumnus, Tim Schafer, gave gamers the gift of Psychonauts, a unique experience that merged actio??n and platforming with the storytelling and puzzles of the adventure genre. People still talk about it today, but it's just a shame that ??few people were doing so in 2005.

Psychonauts' combination of styles is something that I think fits adventures very well. Story and puzzles are at their core, and there's no reason why players cannot experience those things through action and platforming or even driving and shooting. It was this sort of thinking that almost brought us the action/comedy Sam Suede. Al Lowe formed a new team to create a console experience which attempted to combine 3D gameplay and action with the comedy and narrati?ve of golden age adventures, but it was never finished.

It's clear that Sam Suede is still a sore topic for Al. "Psychonauts came out and sold 50,000 copies or whatever and went immediately to the bargain bins. It was like every publisher looked at our stuff and said, 'Well, what are your comparables?' We said there really aren't any comparables because we've got sexy girls, a lot of funny conversation, and they said, 'Well it's an action comedy and the only action comedy we know is Psychonauts, how did that sell?' Oh shit. So we evidently got tarred with the Psychonauts brush and we just ?could not find a publisher who would take a risk."

Even when the developers tried to bring gamers ba??ck into the adventure fold, publishers lacked confidence in the genre. It would be easy to just pin all the blame on the publishers -- after all, we do that a lot with other things. But when their biggest concern is the bottom line, if ??they don't see anyone buying these types of products, then there's no reason for them to take these massive risks.

By the second half of the 2000s, things were changing. After LucasArts cancelled the long-awaited sequel to 1993's Sam & Max Hit the Road, a group of designers left to form their own studio, known today as Telltale Games. Their first titles were Telltale Texas Hold'em, a couple of episodes based on the Bone comics, and a series of CSI spin-offs. After securing a round of investments, they were eventually able to work on adventure IPs like Sam & Max and Monkey Island, something old adventure?? game fans like myself had been waiting on for a very long?? time. CEO Dan Connors believes that this had a large influence on bringing the genre back into the public eye.

"Certainly, the adventure genre seems to have grown, as far as the size of the audience is concerned, since we started in 2004, and I believe Telltale has had a roll in that. Tales of Monkey Island and Sam & Max succeeded in capturing the essence of what was great about the original games and modernizing the experience." Dan recalled, "I think we built games that allowed a new generation of gamers to experience franchises that were considered legendary but weren't the type of thing the average gamer was going to dig up and play. With Back to the Future, we built a game that used adventure mechanics and was received we?ll by a mass audience."

By securing their own funding and taking out the publisher middleman, they were able to bring ?these games to a new audience despite the risk involved. Publishing these titles themselves was far from the only reason for their success, however. The rise of digital distribution and episodic content has had a massive impact. This is something I'll be looking at in greater depth in the second part of this feature.

I hope you'll join me, but until then, go and play ??some adventure games!

The post The grand adventu?re: Adventure games through the ages appeared first on Destructoid.

The Monkey Island Special Edition Collection, which?? could possibly be the longest and most complicated name conceived for a videogame bundle, is coming to Europe as a retail release on September 9t??h, 2011.

The Monkey Island Special Edition Collection (say that five times fast) will include The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition (say that five times fast) and Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck's Revenge (don't even bother to say that one out loud).

The special editions of both games include new recorded dialog, hand-drawn graphics, enhanced controls, and a hint system for when you don't know that combining the chicken with the pulley is the proper solution. Monkey Island 2 features an optional audio commentary from Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, and Dave Gros??sman, the bizarre minds that made the original?? games.

If getting two fantastic games isn't enough for you, LucasArts is adding some bonus content to sweeten the deal. You'll receive concept art and a soundtrack from both special editions. LucasArts was working with Industrial Light & Magic on an animated Monkey Island movie, wh??ich was never released, and you'll get to see some con??cept art and storyboards from that too.

LucasArts hasn't specified the pricing of this combo deal yet, and there is no word on a North American release. The Monkey Island Special Edition Collection will be available on PC, ?Xbox 360, and ??PlayStation 3.

The post Monk??ey Isl??and collection coming to Europe this fall appeared first on Destructoid.

Specifically, you'll get Tales of Monkey Island episodes 4 & 5 for free on WiiWare by filling out this survey. Yeah, that's it. Just follow the instructions on the survey and you'll get the games for free. Note th?at this only for pe?ople in North America and there are limited quantities available.

Speaking of free Telltale games, you can get the first episode of Monkey Island Tales HD for free on the iPad RIGHT NOW. The offer is good until July 22. Episodes 2 ??through 5 will be on sale starting tomorrow for $6.99 per episode.

All this free stuff sounds l??ike it'll be more fun than a barrel full of monkeys. On an island.

The post Fill out this sur?vey and get Monk?ey Island for free appeared first on Destructoid.

Finally! Here is part two of this season's HAWP finale! Anthony wants to apologize for the delay, but you can't really rush something this awesome. Once again, the sprite work (and the editing, and the sound mixing) was done by Ian Wexler with some help by Sam E, and the music was done by Danny Baranowsky. You can download the soundtrack here.

It's been a while since part one, so here is a refresher: when we last left our heroes, they were stuck in ?a bit of a dilemma, as the game characters they've mocked over the season began to strike back. Now Ash must solve the Burches' problems, Guybrush-style. Kinda.

On behalf of An??thony and Ashly,?? I hope you've enjoyed season two of HAWP!

The post Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’: Adventure Games, Pt. 2 appeared first on Destructoid.

Look behind you! A three-headed Sith Lord!

In one of the strangest bits of news I've heard all week, LucasArts has revealed that Monkey Island star Guybrush Threepwood will be appearing in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II. The mightiest pirate in the Caribbean will be an alternate costume for Starkiller. If ever there were a way to convince me to pay attention to Star Wars, this would be it.

The news was unveiled on the game's Facebook page, where a pair of images have been uploaded. Fan response there has been, shall we say, mixed judging by the comments on the image posts. Some of the comments seem positively incensed at the idea that something light and humorous might find their way into their sacrosanct Star Wars universe. That just says to me that some people take their entertainment way too seriously.

Guybrush Threepwood Skin [Facebook via 1Up]

The post Guybrush Threepw?ood, Mighty Jedi, in Force Unleashed II appeared first on Destructoid.

The first part of HAWP's two-parter finale is here! Actually, it was here on Friday, but I was too busy working on a finale of my own to be able to post abo??ut it here... thankfully, stuff this good never expires. And it's only going to get better in the upcoming second half!

Anthony doesn't think that this finale is as epic as last season's, but I think it's pretty awesome in a totally different way. A lot of work has gone into it, and we got some help from some top-notch dudes: Ian Wexler and Sam Ee (iconsam) did the art, and Danny Baranowsky composed the music. So, if you like t?he end of ?this part, thank them!

Enjoy!

The post Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’: Adventure Games, Pt. 1 appeared first on Destructoid.

Tim Schafer of Double Fine has hired on Ron Gilbert to make a new game. The pair are responsible for the beloved Monkey Island games. What could they be up to now?

Double Fine is working on four games for THQ, and the first of those will be a game called Costume Quest. This team ef?fort will be something different ??and new, though Gilbert says that he's not saying that they're making an adventure game specifically.

"The old adventure games are something that could come back," Gilbert told Kotaku. "The Monkey Island stuff did very well on the iPad and the re-release on XBLA. ?I think there are a lot of people who really do enjoy that kind of game. I think they really could come back."

They're so totally making an adventure game.

Tim Schafer Hires Ron Gilbert, Gets Funnier [Kotaku via Eurogamer]

The post Tim Schafer has hired Ron Gil?b?ert on at Double Fine appeared first on Destructoid.

LeChuck is a classic villain. ??He has a singular and grandiose focus, always has a sinister plan to achieve his ends and repeatedly opens himself up to being defeated by a bumbling loser with luck on their side. It doesn't get anymore basic than that.

And yet, he has a style and flair all his own. It's probably all of the voodoo. LucasArts Games released a group of images showing the development of LeChuck's look in the upcoming Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge Special Edition. 

I really like the page with all of the faces??. It's a hard line to walk between cartoonish and sinister with this particular character and I'm pl??eased with what they've come up with. What do you guys think?

The post Here ??is? the evolution of LeChuck for Monkey Island 2: SE appeared first on Destructoid.

For this week only, developer Telltale Games is offering the full season of its Tales of Monkey Island series and Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition for 20 bucks.

Why both games -- the latter developed internally by LucasArts courtesy of CEO Darell Rodriguez's embracing of older IPs -- are being bundled is anyone's guess. We're willing to assume that it's to give newer folks to the near two-decade old series a glimpse of the new beginning and hook them into Telltale's five-part episodic series -- and then perhaps make them interested in the upcoming release of Monkey Island Special Edition 2: LeChuck's Revenge.

The deal can be obtained through the developer's store until this Friday, May 7th.

[image]

The post Telltale offers up spectacular Monkey Island bundl??e appeared first on Destructoid.

Since you're probably at work and looking to slack off, I have just the thing for you: The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. Yeah, after the jump (provided you're running?? Windows?) you can play the game right here in your browser.

The playable game marks the launch of InstantAction's direc??t-to-consumer ??videogame distribution service, which will let publishers embed "premium" games anywhere on the web. Like after the jump, for instance. Did I mention that yet?

While the fancy tech to make this happen only currently works on Windows PCs, Instant?Action says that future games will support Mac and mobile devices on "a title-??by-title basis."

The game as embedded after the jump is limited to 20 minutes of play time, but you can purchase the entire thing (and play it anywhere, including on Facebook) for $9.99.

The Secret of Monkey Island:SE powered by InstantAction

The post Click on this story, play ?M??onkey Island Special Edition appeared first on Destructoid.

Double Fine's Tim Schafer's a funny guy. Great talker. Talented industry veteran. Makes some pretty great, clever games. That's why he'll be giving a g??ame design talk at this year's Develop conference in Brighton. Ma?kes sense.

Develop PR says Schafer will be making a "rare appearance in Europe." Not sure why Schafer hates Europe so much, but maybe he'll spill the beans during his talk. Or he'll trash talk Destructoid, because I'm pretty sure he's got it out for us.

The conference takes place fro??m July 13 through ??July 15. 

[Image]

The post Tim Schafer to invade Europe, talk at Develop appeared first on Destructoid.