Terrible commenters take even more from the internet

Return to Monkey Island was showcased on Tuesday, during the Nintendo Direct Mini showcase. It was an exciting gameplay reveal for the newest entry. But not long after, Monkey Island writer and director Ron Gilbert announced he? was shutting down comments on his personal site.

Gilbert's personal blog Grumpy Gamer has been a repository for his writing, thoughts, and an occasional April Fools' actual-announcement. Despite all that, after revealing Return to Monkey Island gameplay during the Direct, comments flooded into the blog. Angry, mea??n ones.

We're not going to share them here, but suffice to say, I've gone back to look at some and they are pretty bad. Most of them complain abou??t the art style before veering off into wild, pers?onal attacks and spiteful rhetoric. In response to how rough things were getting, Gilbert confirmed he's closing the comments down and going quiet.

"I'm shutting down comments," Gilbert wrote. "People are just being mean and I?'m having to dele?te personal attack comments. It's an amazing game and everyone on the team is very proud of it. Play it or don't play it but don't ruin it for everyone else. I won't be posting anymore about the game. The joy of sharing has been driven from me."

Dominic Armato, the voice behind Guybrush Threepwood, shared the comment and frustrations on Twitter.

//twitter.com/SkilletDoux??/status/1542333041887961088

Not very constructive

While Gilbert is going quiet, th?e blog is still up. It's frankly, honestly, very frustrating to see this sort of thing. Disappointment that the art style doesn't one-to-one match your wildest dreams or rosy nostalgic remembrances is one thing.

But from the Return to Monkey Island comments I saw, some were mixing that with appalli??ng vitriol. As Gilbert writes, play it or don't, but that doesn't mean you ne?ed to make peoples' lives miserable in the process. It doesn't do anything for anybody.

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

Return to Monkey Island ships off for PC and Nintendo Switch sometime thi??s y?ear.

The post Ron Gilbert won’t post about Return to Monkey Island anymore following rude fan comments appeared first on Destructoid.

Throwback Thursday

The Nintendo Switch is getting a lot of double-dip love as of late and we've got another contender on ours hands. The point-and-click adventure Thimbleweed Park is being ported over as confirmed by co-crea??tor Ron Gilbert, who shared a first look at the game running on a Switch in handheld mode.

Vague, cryptic, puzzling clue about our multiple Thimbleweed Park console announcements next week: //t.co/gpmFwfMlKX

— Ron Gilbert® (@grumpygamer) July 6, 2017

Gilbert also added that the port is being handled interna?lly. Even better.

In our review, Kevin wrote that 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 Bernoulli or Guybrush Threepwood what ?to do, you will?? too."

The post T?himbleweed Park looks double-dip worth?y on Nintendo Switch appeared first on Destructoid.

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 cutscenes to video games as a way of tra??nsitioning 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 onl?y one (easily avoidable) way to get y??ourself 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 controllable 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 support a controller on PC, but I elected to play it with a mous??e 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 b??it of fanservice for people who grew up with them or discovered the remakes later in life.

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 sto?ry well, and there's even animation that matches the charact??ers' mouth movements to the English 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 mos?t physical abuse 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 computer and programming related puzzles, and she's usually in charge of repairin??g 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 LucasArts 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 co??mplete tasks are highlighted so they stand out on the page, and it's easy to find the correct titles in the 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 finding a single piece of dust on every screen.

As much as I enjoyed Thimbleweed Park, it's not 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, which 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 ar?en'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 Bernoulli or Guybrush Threepwood w?hat to do, you will too.

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

The post Review: Thimbleweed Park appeared first on Destructoid.

Coming to Xbox One and computers March 30

Thimbleweed Park, an adventure game led by industry legend Ron Gilbert, doubled its kickstarter goal when it was announced in 2014. It's a beautiful throwback to early Lucasarts adventure titles like Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle-?- which is appropriate, since Gilbert and artist Gary Winnick got their start working on the former. The title has been in development for two and a half years but it's finally nearing release, and the team announced today that it will be available on Xbox One, Windows, Mac and Linux on March 30.

Thimbleweed Park will launch with English voice and subtitles, and the subtitles can be changed to the French, Spanish, or Italian languages. Russian subtitle??s are in development and will be added as a free update after launch.

I got a chance to play an early version at PAX last year, and it's been near the top of my most anticipated games list ever since. A Steam page for Thimbleweed Park launched simultaneously with the announcement, though the price has yet to be determined. The game will hit Steam, GOG and Xbox Live on March 30, and iPad/iPhone/Android later this year. The team says they'd li??ke to bring it to other consoles and platform?s, but no other versions have been confirmed yet.

The post Thimbleweed Park’s pretty pixels get a release date appeared first on Destructoid.

Thumbs-on with this thrilling throwback

PAX this year was a little strange for me. I was brought on to Destructoid just as the deadline to apply for media badges expired, so I went to the show as a regular attendee, and didn't take appointments like Brett and Jordan did. I still wanted to help out where I could though, so Brett recommended that I spend some time che?cking out independent games no one had appointments for in the Indie Megabooth and elsewhere on the show floor.

The first game I tried out was also one of my favorites. Thimbleweed Park was successfully kickstarted back in late 2014, and promised a single-player adventure in the style of the LucasArts classics Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle. It's being headed up by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, the co-directors of Maniac Mansion, and the demo I played made several references to their s?hared past at th??e studio and the games they created there.

The LucasArts adventure games of the late '80s and early '90s were known for two things: their sense of humor, and their friendliness to players. Unlike the competition, LucasArts adventures rarely had a situation where the player could permanently fail and have to reload their save. This encouraged experimentation, and left the creators ample room to put in jokes when you tried to rub two items together that didn't make a lot of sense to combine. Thimbleweed Park&?nbsp;looks to continue both of these traditions, and both my friend and I let a few giggles escape as we played through the PAX demo.

Thimbleweed Park begins with t?wo federal agents (legally distinct but bearing striking similarities to Mulder and Scully) examining a dead body, face down in a river under a bridge. Their first task is to photograph the corpse "before it pixelates any further." This seems simple enough, as the female agent is already holding a Polaroid camera. Unfortunately, she doesn't have any film.

This is where the game introduces the idea that each character you control has their own separate inventory. The male agent has the film, and you must use the "G??ive" command to pass it from one character to the other before you can take the picture and move the plot forward. You can select which character you want to control using a menu on the top right, and the "Give" command allows you to shuffle items between them as long as they occupy the same space. Once this is taken care of, the female agent must "Use" the film with the camera, and then "Use" the camera on the body to take the photo.

These commands are handled by clicking on one of the action boxes in the lower left of the screen. There are nine of these, and they allow y??ou to try different interactions with things in your inventory and in the world. These boxes should look familiar to adventure game veterans; for every object you can try to Open, Close, Give, Pick up, Look at, Talk to, Push, Pull, or Use it with another item on screen. It's a variant of the old SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) engine used in several LucasArts adventure games.

Once we had taken the picture, we looked around the crime scene a little more. We found a chainsaw in some deep brush and as we kept moving to the right, heard violin screeches that sounded like the shower scene from Psycho emanating from a?? nearby sewer grate. The male agent assured us that there was nothing to worry about, how?ever, just someone practicing their violin in the sewer. Like you do.

We decided at that point to head to town, and walked around a bit, separating the two agents to cover more ground. The town itself has a lot of character, and has clearly seen better days. Abandoned, run-down buildings abounded, and even though we were limited in where we could walk to in the demo, it was clear we'd be exploring the town thoroughly, so there was a lot of attention to detail regarding the setting. There's some weird stuff going on here, but it's all below the surface, and we got sort of a Twin Peaks vibe from exploring. One running joke?? is that everything in the town runs on vacuum tubes, and some of the puzzles seemed to involve finding or repairing tubes on various appliances.

We sent the female agent to the town's police station, and the male agent to a diner, where he struck up a conversation with one of the locals. The waitr??ess began telling him the story of the ruined carnival at the edge of town, and at this point the game shifted perspectives as we played through?? a flashback. We lost control of both agents at this point, and took control of a new character.

This section dealt with how the carnival's star attraction, insult comic (and Ronald McDonald lookalike) Ransome the Clown became cursed and lost his fortune. Before we could move the story along, we took control of Ransome, and had to find his makeup, comb his clown afr??o, and recover his joke book from one of the carnies, to whom he owed a sizable debt. I'm not sure how you lose money betting on the duck shooting gallery, but someh??ow he'd managed it.

Thimbleweed Park is clearly based on adventure games from the late '80s and early '90s, but it does make some concessions to more modern technology. Although everything is crafted out of pixels, there's no apparent limit on how many colors can be shown on-screen at once. I also noticed that Ransome's home is in a trailer, and the entire screen tilts to follow his weight as he walk?s from one side of it to the other. After we managed to prepare and go onstage, we lost control of Ransome and regained control of th??e male agent.

Some of the humor works better if you're familiar with Gilbert and Winnick's earlier work. Again, Thimbleweed Park isn't shy about reminding fans of Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, making references to both of those games as well as both men's former employer, LucasArts. For example, during Ransome's segment, the amount of money he needs to repay to the carnival worker is $1138 -- a reference to George Lucas's first film, THX 1138.

After finishing up the not-quite-tragic story of Ransome (who is, quite frankly, a total jackass), we wandered into a dark alley, where the male agent was hit in the head by a shadowy assailant and dra?gged off screen. Control switched immediately back to the female agent, who w??e'd left standing in the police station. It's worth noting that at this point we lost control of the male agent entirely, meaning we lost access to his inventory as well. Presumably, you'll be able to recover characters eventually in the full game, but once we lost him in the demo, he was gone for good.

We looked around the station for a bit, hoping to meet the sheriff or at least alert the coroner, but no one was there. One of the booth attendants we spoke with said that some of the characters that will be in the final game had been removed for the demo to make it flow more quickly. Still, we poked about in the coroner's office, discovering another Maniac Mansion reference when we clicked on the skeleton, advising us to return it to Dr. Fred. After wandering for a bit, we sent the female agent to the same dark alley to check on the male, and wouldn't?? you know, she got knocked out and dr?agged away too. Since we were now fresh out of playable characters, this ended the demo.

Some of the town was blocked off, and it was clear that there was more to ex??plore in the full game. My friend and I had a lot of fun even in the short time we had to play the demo, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of this one before its targeted January 2017 release.

The post The spirit of SCUMM returns in Thimbleweed Park appeared first on Destructoid.

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 into a new adventure IMO.  In amongst all the AAA titles and VR, I just wanted to gi??ve 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 puzzle?s, witty dialogue, and pixelated 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!}

The post Backing is now closed for Ron Gilbert’s Thimbleweed Park appeared first on Destructoid.

'Use balloon animal with corpse'

Today at Microsoft's gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany, The Secret of Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert took the stage to announce that his upcoming adventure game Thimbleweed Park would be coming to Xbox One and Windows 10.

Thimbleweed Park raised over $626,000 on Kickstarter in late 2014, nearly doubling its initial $375,000 funding goal. The project is a spiritual successor to both Maniac Mansion and the Monkey Island series, aiming to evoke the experience of late '??80s/early '90s adve?nture games. 

The title i??s also coming to Mac, Linux, and mobile platforms, and aims to launch by June 2016.

The post Ron Gilbert’s Thimbleweed Park coming to Xbox One, Windows 10 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 lif?e 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?

The post How?? Ron Gilbert would maybe make a new Monkey Island game appeared first on Destructoid.