Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 342: Escape from Monkey Island

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

Our non-chronological exploration of LucasArts adventure games continues with an episode all about the legendary developer's final entry in the genre: Escape from Monkey Island. Unfortunately, EMI ended this era of LucasArts with a whimper, as the clunky 3D interface and questionable puzzles make Guybrush Threepwood's Y2K adventure feel more like a voodoo curse than a barrel of monkeys. On this episode, join Bob Mackey and Nina Matsumoto (Thimbleweed Park cover artist and designer at Fangamer) as the two examine this unloved entry in the Monkey Island series to find out what went wrong. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

Retronauts is part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. For more information, please go to greenlitpodcast.com. This week on Retronauts, we escape from Escape from Monkey Island. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Macky, and today's topic is Escape from Monkey Island. Yes, it is another one of our LucasArts mini-series episodes. We're not going in any order, but this is the final LucasArts adventure. And oh boy, what an adventure it is.

It's nobody's favorites, although I'd like to hear anyone beg to differ in the comments. But yeah, today talking about all the year 2000 game, Escape from Monkey Island. And who is our special guest for this episode? You might have heard her before on the previous three Monkey Island episodes. So it might not be surprised, but who are you? Hello, I'm disgusting sushi eater, Nina Matsumoto. Yes, isn't sushi, like, can you believe people actually eat raw fish? Raw fish?

Ew. Why do they do that to themselves? I hear that's what people in Japan eat. So exotic. Frankly, yeah, I don't understand it. But I guess in the YouTube... I prefer my food cooked. Exactly, yeah.

And we're going to hear all about the distaste for sushi this game has, which I find inexplicable, but yes, this is the last Monkey Island game we're going to be talking about. This is not the last episode of our miniseries. We still have quite a few games to cover, and we will be covering tales from Monkey Island, even though it is not a LucasArts game. It is over 10 years old, and it's much better than this. And I got to say, this game, I'm going to try to be kind to it, but I think this game truly brought me to the brink of madness over the past two weeks.

It really brought me down. I'm spending a lot of time thinking just what am I doing with my life. It has it really come to this. And yeah, this is the first time I truly committed to a playthrough. And now I feel like I need to be committed to like some sort of asylum. You were really suffering there when you were playing it. I felt so bad for you. I'm sorry.

I played it over a weekend for like two days. And you stretched it out. I could only play like two or three hours a day. And I'm sorry that I made you play. I don't know if that's considered a form of abuse in a relationship to force your partner to play. I managed to escape from Escape from Monkey Island for 20 years until now. Yeah, me too.

Like, I would always stall out in the first two or three hours of this game. And now I totally understand why. And I was smart to stop playing when I was a much younger man. But for the sake of this podcast, I sat down and played through all, like, I don't know, 12 to 15 hours of this game and had a miserable experience. It's going to be fun to talk about. It's not all going to be complaints.

But I think with our complaints, they're going to be constructive in that we can see like what makes a good adventure game and what makes a bad adventure game. Yeah, I'm going to try to be kind to this game as much as possible. It's going to be tough at some parts, I got to admit, but yeah, I'm also trying to be constructive with my criticism as well. And this truly represented the end of an era for adventure games. I mean, this is a year 2000 game. And adventure games, as we know them, would not really come back until TellTale did the Sim and Max reboot in 2006. It was only six years.

I mean, people were still making adventure games that they were not, like, really on the map. But that six years felt like a very long time. And there were so many think pieces written about what has become of the adventure game. Will they ever come back? And now I think we're doing fine with them. I think now people are playing Japanese adventure games a lot, too. I think we're in a good place. But at this point in time, it was a nightmare.

I'm glad I finally played this game all the way through. It was a major gap in my monkey island fandom. Yeah, me too. Did you? So I want to go over our history with this game. When did you first encounter it? Were you buying it the like day one purchase? Like where did this game find you? So a quick recap. I first played secret when I was of single digit age before Lechuk's Revenge came out. I loved it. It's my favorite of all time. Lechukes Revenge, which I played when it came out. That actually might be my favorite of all time. I keep switching back and forth between the two. And then it played Chris when it came out. And if you listen to my last appearance, you'll know, that I was disappointed by it, but I could acknowledge its amazing technical execution, but escape, especially, like, since I wasn't too

thrilled by curse, I didn't look forward to it. And I've never been a big fan of CG animation, so I didn't like this new look at all. Like, I had played Grim Fandango before this, and I know Grim Fandango is a big adventure

game fan, darling, but I could never get into that game either. So I just think the Grime Engine stuff is for me. Yeah, it's, or is it grim? It's, I think it's grime because, I mean, we have skill and grime. It's all keeping with the same, like, disgusting fluid terminology. Ah, okay.

Yeah. Got it. And, yeah, the grime engine is, was just a miserable time for adventure games. We'll talk more about that when we get to the format discussion. But, yeah, like, I do like grim fandango. I appreciate it more for its story and its setting and its characters. But until very recently, it was a miserable pain in the ass to play. Like, these tank controls, the, that.

The inventory system, the bad graphics, it just makes for just a bad time all around. But Grim Fandango made it out okay. Now that the remastered version has been out for a few years, that's still worth playing, but there are still a lot of problems with it. So I did get escape when it first came out because I'm such a big fan of the series. So I gave it a chance back then. I never got very far in it. I remember getting as far as Luker Island, which is the first island you go to when you leave Malay.

And I believe my overall disinterest in the game and the fact that the game was very buggy made me stop playing. And about 10 years ago, I thought, well, this is a big gap in my mechanical knowledge and I didn't want to play it. So I decided to watch a playthrough on YouTube. And even that bored me so much that it couldn't even go through with watching all of it. So this is truly my first time seeing the entire game. Me too. Like I think so I've been a PC gamer since 96 and I've never really stopped playing on the PC. And when this came out, I don't know if I bought it day one, but I'm pretty sure I bought it within the year it was out. And I didn't really get around to playing it until a few years later. Like in the early 2000s, I was doing sort of like a Monkey Island replay, like playing all the games in order like I did for Retronauts. And I got to Monkey Island for Escape from Monkey Island. And I got to a bug and I was like, you know what? I'm done. I'm just going to tap out here. Yeah, I did not encounter that bug this time, although I think it still exists in the game, but I did push myself to the end, and I will say, I'm going to enjoy doing this podcast. I'm going to enjoy talking about it, but ultimately, as a Monkey Island fan, I don't think it was worth the playthrough at all.

You finished playing it like, what, two, three days ago? I finished it around two days ago as of this recording. Okay, and like, we had to keep stopping ourselves from talking about it too much because, like, we kept wanting to talk about it and we're like, no, we have to save this for the podcast. Yeah, like, we talk pretty frequently because they're separated right now. And like every time I would call you, it would be like, the sushi puzzle. Oh, monkey combat. What is with these rolling the rocks, the lava flume? It's, there's a lot to talk about.

Yeah, there was so much I wanted to say, but I've just been withholding it until now. So now we can let loose. Yes. And before we go off on this team. We're trying to be as gentle as we can. We're going to check our levels. A lot of screaming will be happening. But first, let's talk about the production info all about this.

game. So let me set the stage for everybody out there. It's the year 2000 and adventure games are definitely on the way out at LucasArts. The company was essentially a Star Wars factory in a time that Star Wars was very big. 2000 was one year after episode one. And even though everyone hated that movie, people were still very excited about Star Wars. So this company was the Star Wars factory in the year 2000. There were six other games outside of this released by LucasArts. They were all Star Wars games. And Sierra at this point in time was getting out of the adventure game game. And I believe I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. The last adventure game they made was Gabriel Night 3, also an infamous game, and that was 99. So the thing was, and we talked about it before

on previous episodes, is that adventure games always sold well for what they were. They retained the same audience, but other genres were much, much, much bigger after Doom happened. So there's a reason why after publishing Half-Life, Sierra doesn't want to make adventure games anymore. There's a very big reason for that. Was that Gabriel Knight game 3D? It was, yes. Okay. Yeah.

Space Quest never went into 3D, even though I think the sci-fi setting would have translated decently well into 3D. But then they attempted 3D with Kings Quest 8, Mask of Returnity. Which is also a game nobody likes. I was going to say there was a really nasty 3D King's Quest and not good. Yeah. Yeah, like, if they had just stuck with. or just been satisfied with the audience that they had and wanted to keep that audience,

they could have just stuck with a typical adventure game formula and been fine. But instead, they chose to alienate adventure game players and just made a game that's like so in between genres that nobody could get into it. Yeah, the game, like this, around this time and even before this, they were getting a little insecure about making adventure games. So there'd be a lot of more, I wouldn't say action, but a lot more timing-based puzzles, which don't really fit in and are always bad. And we're going to be talking about a lot of those coming up.

But, yeah, I feel a real sense of insecurity. And I feel like around this time, they knew this would be their last adventure game because, you know, LucasArts was changing. And it changed a lot, like, from the early 90s. Like, I think by the mid-90s, management was much worse. That's why, like, there was a mass exodus. Tim Schaefer is already gone.

Months earlier before this game's release, he would have found a double fine. So people that we associate most from LucasArts had gone a long time ago. And of course, Ron Gilbert left in like 1991. So do you think they felt pressure from the markets to like go into more of the action stuff? Oh, definitely. Just just the executives are seeing what other games were selling and especially just putting the Star Wars license on anything. You could sell 10 times more than anything with Monkey Island or even God forbid a new adventure IP. So do you think the creators themselves were like perfectly fine with

the adventure game formula? It seemed like, yeah, the few people left there who were working on adventure game. So I can tell you how this all came into being. It's not an interesting story, but it just shows you where LucasArts was at the time. So they were very reluctant to approve an adventure game at LucasArts. So they would really only approve a sequel to something they had made before. And if you go back to our full throttle episode, we talk about how that game was approved. And Tim Schaefer was talking about how when you pitch games to LucasArts, they would always want one Maniac Mansion pitch and one Monkey Island pitch in your collection of pitches because they were very comfortable with returning to a sequel series. So they went for this project with

the safest thing, which was another Monkey Island sequel. At least he didn't go with a 3D Maniac Mansion game, I guess. I'm glad that franchise has remained unsullied by a truly bad game. You could just imagine them trying. I'm glad. I'm really glad didn't happen. So one of the people who made this game, one of the two leads, Michael Stemmel, he had recently made the game Afterlife, which is a very atypical LucasArts product. It is a afterlife sim. I believe we talked about that on the Sam and Max episode, but I really enjoyed it.

It is a fun parody of SimCity. It doesn't play very well, but it's just a very cool idea that didn't pan out especially well. But Michael Stemmel was the lead on that project. So after that project ended, that game was released in 95. He and his team started work on a new project called TV Wasteland, a very similar in-tone sim kind of game, where you portrayed, you are in the shoes of a TV network executive.

So it was going to be like a TV network simulation that was a parody of like the state of television in the 90s. So they were both parodies of the like sim games? Yeah, I think after doing afterlife, he just was like, what else can I do with the sim genre? And I kind of really missed that era of PC gaming. I love SimCity and like the theme park and theme hospital games and things like that. All the like Zootopia. That was a very interesting era for games that's basically kind of dead now. Yeah, they're fun.

It's interesting how. they leaned towards that and then went on to make something completely different. Yeah, sorry, I meant zoo tycoon, not Zootopia. That's a movie. But yeah, so they were working on this project called TV Wasteland. And at that time in 96, Diablo had come out and everyone in the office was hooked on Diablo. So they wanted to make a Diablo game style game with superheroes. And they worked on this for a year before scrapping it entirely. So they wasted a lot of time on two different games that would never come to pass.

after the afterlife game. It would be like City of Heroes, but with, like, Diablo clicking controls. Basically, yeah. And there'd be a lot of Diablo cones, but LucasArts would never make one. So after this, Mike Stummel went on a two-month vacation. He had saved up a lot of time off. So inspired by Sam and Max, a game he worked on. He went on a road trip around the country,

visiting a lot of locations that you go to in Sam and Max, or at least the, you know, source material for those parodies. And when he got back to Lucas, Arts to the Bay Area, the company was like, all right, we want a new Monkey Island game from you. And your buddy, Sean Clark, who you worked with on Sam Max, you guys can put

together the game, and that could be the fourth Monkey Island game. And so that was how this game came into being, not as a labor of love, but as the company saying, make us another one. We don't know. You can kind of tell. Yeah, I'm a bigger fan of Samo Max hit the road than you are.

Yeah. I listened to the episode about it. I did agree with your points about like how it could have been better. And when I found out that the escape was made by the same team that did Sam and Max, the tone of the game made a lot more sense to me because Escape satirizes tourist traps and capitalism and kitsch and all that stuff, all the kinds of themes that Sam and Max made fun of, except that game did it with more success, I think, primarily because their universe and those characters work better for that kind of humor.

Yeah, Sam and Max is a lot more biting and it made more sense in that way. world because the comics were of that same tone. It wasn't being, that tone wasn't being forced in something where it didn't exist before. Yeah. So I want to talk about the people who made the game. So we talked about Michael Stemble before. So yeah, this game was led by Sean Clark and Michael Stemmel.

They were two of the creative leads behind Sam and Max at the road. I believe they did most of the design work. Steve Purcell and his wife, Colette Mischo, were also designers on the game, but they were not really video game designers. They were more in charge of like the writing and stuff like that. Clark and Stemmel were the ones who made that game in a very, very short window of time. But as much as I don't like how it plays, I think it's a much better game than this. So, Sean Clark, this info was from our Sam and Max episodes.

So you might have heard it before. But Sean Clark, he started as a programmer at LucasArts working on the FM Towns conversions of Loom and the Secret of Monkey Island. FM Towns was the Japanese system in which very pretty versions of these games were ported to. And Sam and Max at the Road was his first role as designer. and he is also the director of the version of the dig that came out. Another LucasArts game, I'm kind of lukewarm on, although I really want to play it again to see if I like it more or less than this. I think the dig will be better than this.

Yeah, you said you might like the dig more than escape. I'm not sure because I have played the dig, and I don't know, it's a better, well-made game, but it's just so dull. Yeah, that's another conversation, I guess. The dig was LucasArts making a missed game, and I don't think they should have done that. Yeah. I just don't like the puzzles very much. But I did read the book based on the video game that came out at the same time.

Wow. I've got a lot of books based on video games. There really were. So Sean Clark is now the VP of Big Fish Games, a casual gaming company. That's where he ended up. In Michael Stemmel, we talked about him. He is the afterlife guy. He started as a tester on the original Secret of Monkey Island that moved on to being a programmer on Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis.

And along with Sean Clark, Sam and Max hit the rest. Road was his first design role. And he eventually would go on to work at Telltale, a big wheel at the Telltale factory, did a ton of design work for classic adventure games like Sam at Mac's Season 3, Tales of Monkey Island, a Strong Bad's Cool Game for attractive people and back to the future the game. So yeah, a lot of LucasArts people ended up at Telltale working on the spiritual successors of the old Lucasart stuff and he was one of them. So he eventually would go on to work on more adventure games 10 years ago. And you said he directed the first

Tales of episode? Yeah, he is the director of the first Tales of Monkey Island episode. And I think we both agreed that was the weakest chapter. I think it is. And thinking about it, it's been a long time since I replayed it, but thinking about my fuzzy memories, I do feel

like the puzzles have a similar flawed design to them as I see in this game, but not nearly as bad. How involved was he on Back to the Future, do you know? I think he was pretty involved on that, like creative director or something like that. I did like that series a lot too. Yeah, I'm kind of lukewarm on that one.

I think it started off strong and then kind of lost me halfway through. The puzzles never stopped me and I just liked more official back to the future lore because there is none, but this is canon. Yeah, that's true. It was the only, yeah, go ahead. It is better than escape. It's true. I don't see that much.

It's the only other Back to the Future canon that exists outside the movies. But there are a few interviews online with Semmel and Clark, but what I can't stand about, these interviews from this time period is that they are so jockey that you never get any real information. And I can see it being fun to sit down with these guys who are like in their early 30s and it's like, oh, it's the go-go early 2000s and you're having fun with them. But it doesn't really do anything in print once you're reading it 20 years later. So I think it's because they were insecure about the game? I think it just, they were just two goofballs and this was just the

tone of gaming interviews at the time. The game's press was much different and I think this is just the product of that. Right. But, yeah, like, not a lot came out of these interviews that I read, only a few things. Like, they were a week late with the game, which is nothing in game development. They were just a week late. Although, I don't know if that was a joke. But in this interview and other ones, they point out, like, oh, yeah, like, there's a final puzzle in the game that Nina and I will talk about later. But we never gave a reason why that puzzle works, why the solution works.

And I'm like, that is a big problem. All they said about it was whoops. Exactly. You figure they, I don't know, there was not enough time, but something. the third act was written very late and that was a problem with that. And all the social commentary in the game was Mike Stemmell's baby and Mike Stemmel is the afterlife guy. So you can see how he was the one spearheading this.

I'm sure he had like a subscription to ad busters at the time. He was like a snarky Gen Xer, waiting to take it to society. And that's what we see just like a little dash of that in this game. And that's all him. Yeah, those interviews are kind of interesting. Like there was that rumor that you could play as Elaine apparently, a rumor. they quickly denied in the interview. But I wish there was a section where you could play as Elaine.

Because this seemed like the perfect storyline to do something like that because Guy Rich is off running errands and he often goes, gee, I wonder what Elaine's up to you. And she's doing far more interesting things. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they make a joke about it. Like Guy Brasher is like the put upon kind of henpecked husband in a way that's sent on these errands because he's just irresponsible or he'll muck things up. There's too many jokes about that, I thought.

Yeah. And they also say at one point in the interview, Instead of going for twisted and sarcastic, they wanted to go for goofy and charming. And you know how I feel like goofy. I'm not a fan. You hate the man. I hate the man goofy and I hate the concept of goofiness.

I would have liked more twisted humor in the game. And while there is a bit of charm, there's also a lot of sarcasm too. So I'm not sure if they achieved the charmingness they wanted to go for. And other people behind this game, the music is by the usual gang of Monkey Island musicians, but unlike Curse of Monkey Island, it's not just Michael Land. I like the Curse of Monkey Island soundtrack a lot

because I think just having Michael Land on there doing the entire soundtrack gives it like a very singular vision. This soundtrack is not bad, but it is very just there. It doesn't really do anything for me. A lot of it is just like rehash songs from past games. Yeah, too many remixes. This game does rely on nostalgia too much, I think. And there was one newcomer to this group, Anna Carney.

who at the time wrote music for a lot of Star Wars games and for Sims-related games. So she is the new composer on this. But that's basically a lot of old-timers on this project. But, again, a lot of the people that we associate with Luke Starts games are gone by the late 90s. And Tim Schaefer, Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman, the three guys who built the Monkey Island, not anywhere in the company at this point. Oh, about the soundtrack. I thought there was another guy who worked on it who's also named Michael Land.

That seems... I think that is a joke. joke because I did research on that and it feels like based on what I could find, that is not a different person. That might have been an inside joke because there are like wacky credits. Why are they making jokes like that? I don't get it. I guess we should ask one of the directors because it feels like a joke only they know the answer to. So I have no clue.

Much like a lot of other things in this game. It's true. So this game runs on the Grime engine, named after Grim Fandango, of course, the engine that was created for that game. And it's the year 2000, you know, finally we have the tech to make, you know, beautiful high-res, two-de-gris two-d-degree. graphics. So let's just throw that all away and make everything out of crude polygons and just throw up some very CGI plasticy backgrounds of this vintage. It's a mistake. And boy, oh boy, games of this era are so ugly. I really, it's a hard error to return to, especially when you consider how good this could have looked as a 2D game on par with like Curse of Monkey Island.

Like if they advanced the Curse Monkey Island technology to the year 2000, think of how beautiful this game could have looked. Yeah, you know, my first thought was that maybe Cruz was too expensive to make because of all the hand-drawn animation and all the work that requires. But back then, doing these sorts of graphics was probably just as expensive. I would say that or more so, yeah. Yeah. If we want to talk about the graphics a bit, like right off the bat. Okay, so recently I played and finished hypnospaced outlaw for the first time, which is an amazing game. If you don't know, it's an indie game where you're basically playing an internet detective in the year in 1999. And when I first started, when I cracked open this game again for the first time in 20 years, I thought, oh,

the graphics remind me of Himinal Space Outlaw because it takes place in the same era this was released. And that's not a good thing. No, no. When I first played this 20 years ago, I was not happy with the graphics at all. But this time, I find them oddly charming, but only because I've developed sort of ironic fondness for low polys CG. Yeah, I mean, I do like, I do like some crusty old polygons and I do like some, you know, crusty old preundered backgrounds, but for whatever reason, these just strike me as like aesthetically awful. And so an earlier episode this month we did was Final Fantasy 9, same month, same year. Obviously a much higher budget. But boy, the CGI backgrounds in that game are gorgeous and the polygonal characters are very pretty as well. So you could see like what was

possible in the year 2000, this just feels like it was below par for that era. Maybe that's an unfair comparison, but I feel like at the time I was like, boy, this doesn't look very good. The CG backgrounds in this is actually one of the only things I like about this game. You could tell they were trying to follow the curse style, especially with the clouds, the big swirling clouds I love in the background of curse. Yeah. I think for the most part, they succeeded with that, but only in the style of like the buildings and the back and the skies, everything else. feels too sparse and empty. Yeah, like, I feel like

with Curse, you might not like it, you might like it, but the visual style was very bold and consistent, and with this game, I don't see that at all. And I see them borrowing like motifs from Curse, like the Swirly Clouds, but it doesn't go far enough. It's like sitting between the, like, photorealistic and

Curse of Monkey Island. So it just like, it doesn't feel like it's really going for anything in general. Yeah, and it doesn't feel like the characters fit in with this world that's made in the background of well definitely and it's just a weird mix of styles and tone and there's a lot of pre-rendered video in this game and I have to say like when I was watching these pre-rendered videos I was like I don't even think they made new models for these videos like a lot of the pre-runner videos look like they're

just using the models you see in the game like the real-time models it's not good I mean like this is happening at LucasArts they were like adjacent to people making effects for Star Wars movies they had the technology they I don't know if they had the budget but Like, it just, it looks still amateurish. Yeah, and, um, if we're going back to the Grime Engine, I, I just don't like the Grime engine at all. That, it's what turned me off from Grim Fandango, and I, I really hate the tank controls. Oh, yeah, yeah.

The tank controls are the worst. I, I, I turned those off immediately when I started this game. How did you play it? How did you play it then? Oh, you can, um, adjust it so that it's like, not tank controls, but what's the opposite of tank controls where you, um, if you press right, it's like, you're right, not the character is right? Oh, uh, camera relative controls, I guess.

Yeah, let's call it that. I don't think, you can set it, any options. I don't think that would have made my day any better. I did stick with tank controls, but yeah, look, we don't. Oh, my God. Yes. How could you play? I guess I didn't find that option, but I can tell you, uh, we could break down

the, the grime engine, but yeah, like, we are in the air of tank controls and guy brush. I would say it's more like boat controls is in my notes because he steers like a wayward vessel, some of the most painful parts of this game is when you have to like steer guy brush towards like a flight of stairs or like a ramp onto a higher level. Like whenever you have to steer him into like a narrow spot, it is painful. I don't know if it was less painful for you with the camera relative controls, was it? I don't know. I didn't play in tank controls except for like the first second of the game. But even without the tank controls, it still made it hard to play

because like you have to walk up to an object to interact with it. And also the game decides for you what object you want to interact with because there's no more clicking. And so, like, positioning guidebridge perfectly so that the object you want to attract with comes up in the list at the bottom is such a pain. There are so many times where I was bumping him against things and he was like vibrating wildly because he was like jittering against the objects. I'm going to blow, I'm going to blow your mind. You can use page off and page down to go through the list of objects.

Oh, I know you can go down the list. Okay, I wasn't sure based on your description. I was just waiting for the thing to show up on the list at all. Yeah, that's the main problem. problem with the Grime Engine. Sometimes I'd walk past the sweet spot and then I'd have to go back there and find it again. I really wish that they would use the mouse in this game because like, you realize, like, it feels like you're like a limb has been severed when you're playing without the mouse because like in an adventure game, when you have the mouse cursor, you can just mouse around the screen. Like, okay, what can I interact with?

Mouse around the screen. Okay, I can see everything. Where are my exits? Mouse around the screen. Okay, I know where my exits are. Are my entrances? Oh, there's a doorway there I could use. For this game, you have to literally steer a character.

character around as if he's a cursor with much less mobility towards the objects, towards the interests, the exits, and you don't actually know if they're there until you are nearby. It's a major flaw, and it makes every part of this game take so long. In adventure games, one of my hero things to do is explore with my mouse and clicking everything going, ooh, what's this, what's that? But with this engine, I am limited to whatever Guy Brish can walk to or what he chooses to focus on. It's such a pain. Yeah, yeah, it just takes me. Everything takes so long to do.

When I was looking at, I took notes of, like, every puzzle as I was playing, and I was looking those over for taking my final notes. And I'm like, you know, I didn't actually do a lot in this game. But for some reason, it took, like, 13 hours to do. A lot of it is just, like, driving guybers around. You're like trying to parallel park him into the objects. Exactly. And there are so many times where it's just like, no, he just spun around because I hit a corner or something.

It's just like, no, go up the stairs, up the stairs. And it makes a lot of sense that, like, there is a button on the keyboard to bring you out of any environment instead of walking towards a door because they're even admitting like we know walking towards the doors it's like the eject button hit the O button to get out and just visually it doesn't look good

because whenever I think of grim pandango and escape all I can picture is Manny or Guy Rish holding a piece of inventory in one hand and slowly walking through a room with their neck crane down and their gaze fixated and other object you interact with

until their head snapped back up and finds another object to fixate on it just feels so unnatural. Yeah yeah like Like, it's a tell in the game to let you know that you're looking at something he can talk about or, you know, pick up or use. But it's very unnatural. And it's even weirder when you're talking to like Murray. And as he bounces up and down, like guy brush his head just follows him up and down. Yes.

I noticed that. Oh, that was so weird. Like, I was thinking to myself, why didn't they fix that? Did they just not have time or did they not care? I guess it's just like, ah, who cares? Or they just didn't have time. But, like, you have basically four verbs in this game. You have, you just use the keyboard keys to do these verbs.

So you have examine, talk, interact, or pick up. And you mentioned the inventory. It is a slight improvement over Grim Fandango because in Grim Fandango you hit I to go to the inventory. And then it's a shot of Manny's like the front of his suit jacket. And as you hit the arrow case, you will pull different items out of his suit jacket. In this game, you see like a... One at a time.

One at a time. And you don't know like what's before or after. In this game, at least, you can see a ring of objects like Secret of Mana style or like Tomb Raider style. I do like that because my complaint about Curse was how the giant box pulls up the entire screen and you can't see anything on the screen anymore. It is nice, but it is not, it's not any better than going to an inventory box and clicking on a thing and then going and leaving.

What did you think about whenever you pull up an inventory in a new room where there's another character, they kind of comment on Guy Rish rifling through his pants? I thought it was stupid and I just was like, let me get to my inventory. I've heard this joke before. I found it, I found it annoying. I'm like, let me just look. Come on. But yeah, there is a circle of items when you hit the I key and you can like just like swirl through them.

It takes too long and this is like you said earlier, Nina. This is like a very modal system in which you select the inventory item and when you select it, the inventory goes away and your character removes it from their pants and they're holding in in front of them. And from that point onwards, you are now in the use item on blank mode and you walk around holding that item and whatever you do you are using that item with whatever you're interacting with until you put it away so it takes so long just to select the item pull it out use it on a thing and then put it away if you don't need it which is um a big pain in a in a puzzle

that you hate that we can talk about later yes yeah everything it just takes too long and it's like i i totally understand why they had to make these games the way they made them like they wanted to stay contemporary but if you go forward in time you You can see, like, oh, no, you can make a Monkey Island game with polygons, but still have a point-and-click interface. Like, it's totally possible. And this game could have easily been a point-and-click game, but they were not confident about making an adventure game. And that's why this leads to a lot of problems with the engine and with the design of this game. I really think the fact that it was made in 3D affected the game world.

Because in past games, Steve Purcell would go to town adding detail to the background. And then the dev team would write lines and jokes about a bunch of different things you can look at. And I'll tell you right now, it's relatively easy to draw a bunch of little objects into a background. Modeling those things, though, that's a whole other ordeal. And because they couldn't achieve the level of detail that past games could, you end up with less interactivity and less world building and easier puzzles because there aren't that many objects to work with. Yeah, and I really have to wonder, so we talked about how the SCUMM engine,

which is what the 2D games were based on, how it allowed for a lot of improvisation and design. it was just very easy to use and very easy to just, you know, change things around, change puzzles, add new actors. It was just a very, like, user-friendly interface for a game designer. I have to wonder if the Grime Engine was as user-friendly because it's just so much more complex when you're dealing with 3D environments and characters. And I wonder why if that is why a lot of these puzzles aren't good, because even if, like, through testing and through design, they realize, like, it's not that great, it was just too complex to change them once they were already, like, in the works. Yeah, I think with Curse, because they added voice acting, it kind of limited, like, how much you could add to it in terms of the dialogue or what you could add in at the last minute. This time, now they have that limitation with the puzzles.

Yeah, and, you know, drawing in like a 40 pixel character in the background is much less complicated than, like, having to model a new character and drop them into a scene. Not just puzzles, but like the world building. Yeah. Which is an important part of this series, I think. and it's just so lacking in it in this game it just feels like a very empty world because like they're just not a lot of assets to shove around

there are also a lot of parts in a room where like Guy Brish can't walk to because there's an invisible wall yeah and they're never really clearly like it's never really clearly indicated like oh he's turning around now I guess I can't go there it's like it's people

it feels like people just working in this format for the first time and not understanding like what they need to show the player or what needs to be visually indicated And, I mean, ultimately, like, this control setup is just an awful format for the adventure game. And, like, this game was just so frustrating to play. Like, it was just a, it put me in a horrible mood, and I'm sorry if I was in a bad mood for the past 10 days. But just sitting down to play this, I'm just like, I hate moving Guy Brush around.

I hate just making him run. I hate how I'm missing these staircases. And I guess we were talking about visual design. Like, what is your opinion on Guy Brush and his big, stupid book? buckle in his rat tail. I mean, you didn't like Curse a Monkey Island guy brush that much. And I know you felt like Tails was a good, a good way to bring lanky guy brush in like Monkey Island two guy brush together at last.

Like this guy brush, just throw him away. No, I don't guy wish his red coat outfit at all. It's two fancy pants, even if he is married to the governor, his enormous belt buckle that you pointed out that has a logo that looks like the first Trump Pence logo. he is penetrating the G I didn't even notice that until he pointed out and now I can't not notice it and his super high

dawn cherry collar I know it's a turtleneck but the graphics made it is sort of hard to tell his rat tail like you mentioned is terrible his lips that never close yeah it's just it's hard to make these characters emote because they're just like textures

plastered on a very low poly model and they try very hard to make this cartoonish But I feel like for the year 2000, as hard as they wanted to try, like we were not ready tech-wise for expressive cartoony characters at this level of technology. And this game tries, but ultimately fails on making these guys expressive. Like whenever a comedic moment needs to happen through like Pratt Falls or action, it is just very, very awkward. Which I think why a lot of the cinema scenes could have been done in engine,

but they just didn't have the tech. The engine just wasn't up to snuff. So they just made them pre-rendered. Even in, like, the spright games, like the first two games, Guy Brish was kind of stoic-looking, but especially in Monkey Island, too, there were moments where something, like, goofy would happen, and you'd see, like, these, like, wild new animations that, like, put squash and stretch from Guy Brish, and those were really cool.

But they don't do anything like that in this game. It's just always the same model, no matter what. Yeah, it felt like their hands were tied. And you know, Grim Fandango, this is like a more advanced version of the Grime Engine. Like you needed a 3D video card to play at the time. But in Grim Fandango, it made sense. Like the engine was limited, but the characters you were playing were skeletons. So they were naturally like stiff and not very detailed.

Like we are not very far beyond that. And it is so hard to do something so much more advanced with the same limited technology. For sure. Even though I'm not a big fan of Grim Fandango, like I said, I do like how it looks. And they definitely worked with the limitations they had. like if the skeletons aren't emoting it's not a big deal because there are skeletons of course they don't have like eyebrows or whatever but when gyrish has the same expression

throughout the game it just feels off especially when he was so expressive and curse they should have made them all skeletons that would have worked yeah they're all dead and like one more thing to nitpick whenever he's out shopping on another island he wears his outfit from from secret but why like i consider that his pre pirate outfit when he's just a little dandy boy I don't like how they go back to that

It feels like a lot of this game feels like fan service in that this was the 10th anniversary of Monkey Island And it was never like officially like Here's our big throwback But I mean it starts on Melee Island The intro video is like The greatest hits of Guy Brush

Like it does feel like a celebration Of Monkey Island as the company is about to stop making adventure games Yeah in one of the interviews They were asked Why did you decide to go back to Malay Island in this game And one of the guys said Pure unadulterated fan voyishness is what prompted the return to Melee Island.

But that was a bad choice, I think, because every Monkey Island game, except for Escape, starts you off in a completely new island, which I love because it's exciting to explore a new setting. And if you return to an old occasion, and it's different, like different because of technical limitations or story limitations, it's going to be disappointing to the fans,

so why not start fresh? Yeah, like, I feel like a lot of the appeal for this game in 2000 was to see Melee Island in 3D. Like, I feel like that was like, ooh, can you believe it? We're here now. And yeah, it doesn't work. And I feel like they weren't even faithful enough to make it appeal like nostalgia wise. Definitely not.

And Escape also name drops a ton of older islands right out the bat. And it's unnecessary because you don't even go to them. And it also bugs me how they're, like, when you pull up the map, you see all the islands you've been to in the past. They're also close together for some reason. And there are two islands called Spittle and Pennypinch on the map that you never even go to. and they say on the interview that you were never meant to go to those islands, too. So why are they on there? Yeah, I don't like that they show you islands you can't go to,

but I was ready to stop going to islands about halfway through this game. You were sick of it. Please end it. I do want to talk a little bit about, before we go on to the game itself, like the voice acting in the game is uniformly great, like Dominic Armato. It was great to hear more of him as Guy Brush in this game because, you know, he has been Guy Brush.

They retconned him in his guy brush and the remakes. And also, so it's like a murderer's row of all the hottest voice actors around this time. So there's like Tom Kenny and Rob Paulson and Cam Clark and Tress McNeil and Pamela Adlon and just everybody who's anybody in voice acting is doing a voice in this game. And of course one thing I pulled out that I thought was interesting and I thought it was like, oh, was this a miscredit? But no, comedian Maria Bamford is in this game because she was doing voice acting around this time. So Maria Bamford is Brittany the Bank teller doing a very chipper Maria Bamford like parody of a nice chipper white lady. voice. So she was a nobody back then? She was a comedian, but she was also doing voice acting on the side. Okay. Yeah. I didn't know she did voice acting. Yeah, yeah. I had no idea either. But she was credit. I was like,

that can't be real. But then I looked at the credits and that's her. So yeah. So Maria Bamford in this game in a very early voice acting. So that's pretty cool. But any other, any comments about the voice acting? It just feels like, oh, you got all the greatest people. I love the figurehead because it's Pamela Adlon doing basically a more Feminine Bobby Hill That's true I wanted to see more of that figurehead

Me too She gets a very little play in the game Yeah the voice I think is great I can't complain about that It has the better Stand voice

Because they don't like the Stand voice Yes In the other game I was gonna say I like the stand voice a lot And I'm glad they moved away From the game show host guy

Or whatever they were doing In that last game Yeah We've got the more high energy Phil Hartmaney Stan Which is exactly how I pictured his voice But we have a

American Elaine, and I'm not a fan of that. She does a good job, but I mean, I just, I liked how they cast her in the last game, and they went back to that actress after this game, and I can see why. Yeah, like, I don't hate her. And she, like you said, she does a fine job. It just feels off. I don't know. Why do you think she works better with a British accent?

I just think just like the colonial nature of her being a governor of this Caribbean island, it makes more sense for her to be like a member of the British Isles. or whatever, like the British Empire. Okay. Yeah, I mean, aside from her, I think the voice acting is the best part of this game. And of course, Earl Bowen returns as Lechuk. And also, for the first time

in Monkey Island history, they had to cast characters who had appeared previously. So Otis, Carla, and one other character, Meathook. Meathook. They had to cast all of them, and those voices, I believe, were retained

for the remake. Okay. I wasn't sure if they came back for the remake stuff. Yeah, it was cool to see those characters again and have them voiced. I just wish I did more, especially Carla. Yeah, and I want to say that I don't think Lechuk appears outside of pre-rendered cutscenes until the very end of the game. I don't like how Lechuk looks in this game either. Yeah, yeah. They give him his demon pirate look again because they can come up with a new look for him for this game.

He has no gimmick this time, that's why. And he shows off all his other forms in this game, and the zombie one looks terrible. How they figure that out in 3D is really bad And I was disgusted when he turned into it Not for the reasons intended I'm just like that's a bad render No, it's just gross Like he's legit terrifying in Lechuk's revenge

And he's just gross in this one The zombie version I mean And in one superstar in this In this game voice actor Edie McClurg I think you're about to point her out Is that she is She's in everything

She's been in everything You might know her best as the Rooney's assistant in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the nine times lady. Always playing a very nice Midwestern lady. She is in this game playing Miss Rivers, the teacher. They said in the interview that they kind of jokingly suggested her as a voice for the teacher because that's who they pictured and then they managed to get her.

So good for them. And I read another interview that they wrote a Jeffrey Jones type character and Jeffrey Jones actually appeared to voice the character, but they either never used him or didn't cast him. Who is that? Jeffrey Jones is the dad in Beetlejuice, and he was not so great things happened to him in terms of, yeah, so I guess we don't need to go over here. So they're just a big fan of Ferris Bueller, I guess. Yeah, yeah, I didn't even make the connection.

Yeah, he's the principal in Ferris Bueller. Why did I say Beetlejuice? We just were talking about Ferris Bueller. Still a great role. But any other final things before we take our break and move on to our game discussion? If this were an earlier adventure game and no one had quite nailed down how to make games of this genre, I think I would be a lot more forgiving of it but you know what I don't like

Zach McCracken at all but that was made before Secret of Monkey Island and they were figuring things out by this point in Lucas Hart's game history though after three successful Monkey Island games like among other great games I don't think they have much of an excuse like it took several steps backwards

and it breaks quite a few of Ron Gilbert's rules to making a good adventure game oh yeah dear God yes and like I played Zach McCracken towards the beginning of quarantine and I was like you know what I hated this experience but I understand they weren't there yet but with this game I'm like I hope we're towards the end of quarantine

but I was like they they should have known better they had so many games under their belt they really should have known better like why didn't they take a look at what worked and like the weird thing is I was reading reviews of this game and people liked it and I don't understand why like people are like oh what a fun and charming adventure game great puzzles I'm like were we just like in a different headspace

in the year 2000 I just don't understand I was surprised to see that too Maybe it was just the graphics. Did they think it was really good back then? It could have been just the novelty of a 3D adventure game. That could have just paved over all the issues for most people. But now we're so many years later, we've seen too many 3D games to count and they're just not as special anymore. You know, I went into this game thinking like, oh, maybe I was wrong about this game all these years.

Maybe I'll enjoy it, actually. But you know what? I tried and I just see too many problems with it. Yeah, I was with the game until Melee Island section ended, and then I was like, I really hate this. But we're going to take our break right now, and you can hear us talk all about the actual meat of the game after the break. On Apocrapels, we talk about the parts of the Bible that a lot of people skip over. Like the wizard battles. The angel jacuzzis.

A goat full of sins. 500 drunk elephants. And a man named Porky Party. And yes, that's all really in there. All this and more on Apocrypal's every other week. on the Great Lit Podcast Network Retrograde Amnesia is a comprehensive podcast where we relive a classic Japanese RPG

Season one covers the cult classic Xenogers In season two, we're covering Chrono Cross Each episode we take a section of the game and unpack the story, mechanics, music, and themes And we have an AI companion, the fake net They'll make sense later Find Retrograde Amnesia wherever podcasts are found Come on, guys, we're going to be late for class

Oh, darn, not on our first day. Don't worry. I pressurized all of our bike tires to optimal PSI for speed. Wow. So we should be able to average 9.6 miles per hour, which should get us to class on time. We love Podford University for teaching us with skills. Podford University, iTunes, Spotify, and everywhere you get podcasts. Hey, folks, it's AwesomeCon, CEO, Editor-in-Chief, over there at shack news.com.

Give a listen to the Shackcast, the official Shack News podcast of Shack News, over there on the Greenlit Podcast Network. So already this is going to be a very long podcast. Hopefully enough people have paid Escape from Monkey Island to get something out of this. But this is probably going to be like two hours long at least. But we can go over the main plot here. and then as we can go through the game itself and any standout moments after that. So the plot of the game is that Guy Brush and Elaine return home from their honeymoon. And at the end of the first game, of course, at the end of the third game, they got married.

They're going back home to Malay Island, and they've been gone for so long that Elaine has been declared dead. And some guy named Charles L. Charles, obviously, Lechukh is about to take over his governor. And so Guy Brush has to go to Lucre Island to visit Elaine's lawyers and have her declared not dead. And there he finds out about something called the ultimate insult and his frame for a bank robbery. So that's essentially the plot of the game. It's pretty messy. At a certain point in the game, I was like, what am I doing and why am I doing it? But how did you feel about the setup for the game and where it went from there?

Well, so right off the bat, I didn't like how the game looked. Like, when I think of the beginning of this game, I just think of the identical pirates on the ship. you'll see that same pirate model a lot in the cutscenes and the tutorial level if you can call it that it's similar to the tutorial level of curse in that you use a cannon on the ship

to end it but to get there you do like one thing and I don't know if that's enough to teach you how to play the game it's a nice intro to how awkward the controllers are going to be from that point on like this is what you're going to be dealing with

get ready I like that at the beginning guy bridge is tied to a pull and so you're very limited in your movements and that's what the game feels like yeah it's like you're going to be tied down even more but just in turn we're going to break down the individual parts of the game but i meant like the story as a whole like where it began where it went from there again i felt myself like feeling pretty lost into like what i was doing and why i was doing it it didn't feel very pirity it was just a lot of like red tape they had to go through and guy brush didn't seem like he even wants to do anything in the game he's just doing stuff because elaine tells him to do it

Yeah, like, there's no super strong motivation on Guy Bruch's parts. There's no drive. There's not really a ticking clock or anything. I just felt like it was a lot of this game just feels very meandering. And that's a big part of it. Yeah, and like right off the bat, there's also like the, the specification of Guy Brish. Do you mean? Like, there's a lot of jokes about Guy Brish being with by Elaine.

Like other characters also make jokes implying he does whatever she tells him to. The game has a different tone that I feel like it's, it's. does feel a bit ugly now like Guy Brush is like he's emasculated he's forced to ride a pink boat like a lot of these jokes that were probably very very funny in the year 2000 I just didn't feel like the kind of humor that this series really excels in like oh we're going to masculate the main character and that's funny oh for sure like like you said guy which has always been a very self-driven motivated character but in this game he's more of a dufus who who doesn't want to do things and everything is a big chore to him and he literally goes to run chores yeah the game

is a series of chores and so it's like yeah you go to lucre island to prove a lane is alive and at that point in time somebody you know dressed as you robs a bank and that's when you find out about the ultimate insults and you have to then assemble it and once you assemble it it's stolen from you and then you are uh shanghai on monkey island and then you have to essentially rebuild the ultimate insult with the parts you find there and the game ends like not a lot happens in the game and i just don't uh it all revolves on this thing called the ultimate insult but uh my issue with that it's like it's not an insult it's a magical object that zaps people yeah like why would you call it that it's not really quite clear what it does exactly and i also love how the the ultimate insult

pretty much becomes the ultimate neg because that's what the chuck wants it for exactly yeah to just like destroy the the fighting spirit of elaine to marry her yes by insulting her it's the ultimate and egg. And I apologize to our listeners if you're getting lost in this story by my description, but it is just very all over the place. I do want to talk about the new villain in this game. His name is Ozzy Mandrill.

He's an Australian real estate developer in a direct parody of Rupert Murdoch. So like a little bit of the tiny bit of satirical bite of this game is contained within him. He is a slightly different figure in the pre-George W. Bush era, Murdoch is.

But he was still a billionaire tyrant, gobbling up, you know, media and telecommunications operations. And, yeah, so this figure is based on the Rupert Murdoch of the pre, like, the pre post-9-11 era that we associate him most with, like the pre-phone hacking scandal thing, the pre-Rise of Fox News. Like, this is where Rupert Murdoch was, a guy with a silly accent and a lot of money who was buying up, you know, media stuff, and we just have to consider him evil. I really wish he kind of melded Ozzie and Charles L. Charles into one character Yeah.

That would have made him a lot more medicine and it would have made more sense to have him as a villain. The villains in this game are Lechuk of course, who returns and he is Charles L. Charles L. Charles. Do you think it was meant to be a surprise when it was revealed Charles L. Charles Lichick.

No, because they point out like that was very obvious, wasn't it? And he's also voiced by Earl Bowen. So even the game was like, yeah, you knew this was going to be Lechuk in disguise. But yeah, like Lechuk is barely a presence in the game until the very end. Like I said before, he's only seen in

pre-rendered cutscenes until the very end of the game where you fight him. And Ozzy Mandrill, like, you go to his house and talk to him for a bit, but after that, like, one island, you never really see him or really feel his presence. I mean, I guess you feel his presence in that, like, the islands are becoming more

commercialized. But I felt like the villains, more of a presence for the villains could have given this game, like, more of a less meandering quality, because it's like, without the villains constantly clashing against Skybrush, it just feels like he's just a drift. I like Ozzy's voice acting, and I think his character design is good too. I mean, it's just a redock, but still, as a character, though, he's not very menacing,

and Lechuk is just so useless in this game, and it would have made more sense. Like I said, like Charles L. Charles was like the billionaire that was buying everything up and wanted to, like, commercialize everything. because Charles, Lechuk was already doing that in Crystal Monkey Island by setting up an amusement park on Monkey Island. So why not continue that trend and have him take over the entire island area? Yeah, I do like Ozzy Mandrill, and I think he's misused because there could be a lot there. I do like the idea that he is able to take over all of the islands because he has the superior insult fighting techniques

and that he uses Australian slang and no one can actually figure it out. I thought that was funny. And I thought the ultimate battle was going to be Guy Brush learning like Australian slang to use against them. But you actually learn a different language to insult sword fight in this game. Yeah. There is like insult arm wrestling in the game. That's like the only time you use actual insults. But then that was that also felt like a big like, oh, remember this kind of moment?

Because like it's like a mashup of insult sword fighting on land and insult sword fighting at sea. sometimes they rhyme sometimes not like some of the insults are taking straight from secret and somewhere straight from curse yeah they're not even new insults yeah I don't think even counts as a puzzle it almost feels like they're testing the player to see if they remember the previous games yeah like just just borrowing a puzzle wholesale feels kind of cheap to me

and like I said earlier like you know this Aussie mandrel stuff is part of the satire of the game and I do want to talk about like the satire of the game because it's very much a product of its time and I feel like the satire in Escape for Monkey Island is very much like what was on the minds of Gen Xers in the Bay Area pre-9-11 like end of history like the biggest problem in the world was commercialism man like

there's a Starbucks in every corner what's the world coming to all my cool record shops are closing like that was I mean I feel like that sure that's a viable issue but I feel like maybe we're just so cowed and maybe the corporations have one so long ago that we're not even thinking of this is a battle but I'm like aren't there bigger problems than just like oh, there's a Starbucks over there. Oh, no. Like, I feel like we're currently recording this in, like, a pandemic-ridden world and with lots of conflict with police and citizens and looming wars. Who knows?

But I feel like the concerns of this game are so petty that I think, like, 20 years later, removed from the context, it's just like, why are you so upset about Planet Hollywood? What's going on? You know, the concerns that Guy Brish comes across and is running errands, which is all the gentrification and commercialization of islands they seem to pale in comparison to what Elaine is going through

for like her running against this crooked politician just making false promises yeah I also feel like this game actually came out a day after or sorry a day before I believe the 2000 election oh yeah one day before the 2000 election and I feel like there was going to be like

more like election humor in this game and the stuff The only thing you hear about Lechuk was like a very neoliberal perspective of like, oh, that guy's just giving away free stuff. That's wrong to have free stuff. It's a false promise. And that's why he's winning. There's nothing more to it than that perspective. And it just, it's very, very weak.

And it feels like there was going to be more of that in this game if you could play as a lane. And, you know, frankly, like you said, her story seems much more interesting than guy brushes. I really wanted a part where you like snap back to her, like what she's doing. and you could control her for like even just like one scene would have been cool. Yeah. I'm surprised like the games haven't, hasn't done yet yet. There are some very pivotal things that are happening with her and I'm like, I want to see more of this or like I want to have her perspective, but you just don't get it. And I mean, this could be like a giant assple for me, but I feel like this game does feel like a reaction to people living in the Bay Area as it was being changed by the tech bubble of the late 90s or 2000s.

like it really feels like that is the anti-commercialism present in this game as the bay area was changing like i moved here 10 years later and when it we had already lost that battle it did like the tech bubble had taken over and destroyed the entire culture of the bay area but it feels like it was just happening now and people had a viable reason to be mad about this stuff but now it just seems so petty just like oh no there are more sushi places you poor baby like it's it's so it's so bizarre it feels so petty now and like you said up front I'm like, what was their deal with sushi? The sushi in the game wasn't even portrayed as like, this is gross.

It was just like regular sushi, but they're like, sushi, ugh. I couldn't tell if that was the writers projecting their own feelings about sushi on to Gyrish, or if Gai Brix is supposed to be like a big baby about sushi because that was important to the puzzle sort of, because that's like the one, the thing you need for that puzzle, the sushi puzzle is that you don't order sushi. you order the one thing that's cooked Is that what they were going for? I don't know who they're signing with in that in that perspective But it does feel like like it just feels like

Oh man all these trendy sushi places Like when can I get a burger And then when you're in the Starbucks parody It just like I think Guy Brits at one point just says Coffee's coffee I just want a coffee I don't want your fancy Frappuccino drink I just want a black coffee Like that kind of like Dennis Leary style humor

I just want to roll my eyes at Like Starbucks yeah It's a real shame they've taken over the country But they gave people access to good coffee, I would never taste it before. So I'll at least give him that. Remember in Monkey Island, too, when you make a bet with the fishing guy to catch, like to see who can catch the biggest fish?

And if you lose a bet, you have to eat it raw. You have to eat the fish raw. One of the things you can say is Skybridge is like, oh, raw as in with like a bit of soy sauce and wasabi or something like that. Do they not remember that part? Like he's open to the idea of eating raw fish as long as it's prepared, right? That's why it feels like more of the creator's perspective bleeding into this. But yeah, again, it does feel like, again, just tie.

to being in your late 20s, early 30s, in the Bay Area, in the year 2000, your pre-9-11 qualms where the Starbucks appearing and, you know, trendy theme restaurants popping up and stuff like that. You can see these themes in a lot of stuff around that same time, like a lot of people making fun of these same topics. But again, it just seems very petty for what we're, what's happening right now. Maybe that's unfair, but I'm, if I could, tell them like they could have predicted any of this. If I could go to a Starbucks without wearing a mask, I'd be in heaven.

right now. Yeah. But, yeah. It feels weird to put, put those views on to Guy Rush. Exactly, yeah, it doesn't really fit. And I feel like it's weird because, like, a lot of Monkey Island is born from, like, the sneering affection for commercialization that the creators had. Like, the monkey island of the early 90s was, like, the Disneyfication of culture.

At some point, it was, like, isn't this bad. But at another point, it's like, it's kind of, like, nostalgic and, you know, surreal. Like, I feel like they, in early, like 10 years earlier, they were kind of on board with commercialization of culture. But now it's like, you know, a much more cynical age and they're not as on board. Like, how do you feel about that? Well, that's part of what feels so off about the tone of this game, I think. It just definitely feels like it was written by different people. Yeah, it was.

And I feel like they have a different perspective for sure. Because, again, it was, uh, there was a bit of melancholy to the earlier games in that it was like you get to the, the, uh, the fun, uh, dangerous. out of location after it becomes like a tourist trap. But at the same time, I feel like those creators were drawing upon like the road trips and travel of their childhoods of the 60s and the 70s and having some nostalgia even though it was a bit sneering at the past. And this is just all like cynicism and snorkeiness. And just kind of empty too.

Which was a style at the time. Yeah, for sure, for sure. But yeah, that is my take on the satire of the game. Well, how do you feel about how Elaine is portrayed in general in this case? game because she also feels a bit different. Like her and her relationship to Guy Brish, but they're finally together and married. She feels very competent,

but Guy Brush does feel like the very Homer Simpson style husband where it's just like you want to keep him out of trouble is like the perspective here in this game. Yeah, I do like how they have a sweet relationship. Like they're very, I guess there are times when she's kind of like snarky towards him. But they are like a loving couple. which is nice to see, but I'm not sure how I feel about horny Guy Brish. Yeah, there's also a weird thing where, like, somebody thought it was very funny to have Guy Bruch talk in a Barry White voice. Yeah, he hits on so many women in the game.

I mean, it's not, maybe it was funny in the South Park era or something, but, like, it's not funny, and it's weird to have him horny for other things outside of Elaine. Yeah, like, they have a loving relationship, but then he goes around, like, hitting another woman. I'm like, what's the deal with this? I didn't like that at all. And also, like, though the way he talks about their honeymoon all the time. Yeah. With that, with that, like, weird tone in his voice, whenever he mentions their honeymoon and the giggling when you examine their bedroom door. He also, like, makes a joke about, or not even a joke, I think is serious about wanting to sneak into women's locker rooms.

Yeah, yeah. It's weird. It's weird. Like, I don't want to think of guy versus, like, a sexual creature. It's weird. It's weird. Maybe they're trying to make this a little more body for the, for the time. Again, we're in the South Park era of humor, but it just, it feels, it feels off to me.

you're right. But right off the bat, he just won't stop talking about their honeymoon and wanted to go back to their honeymoon. And I don't like it. It's weird. Yeah. I don't like him being this Randy. But yeah, and I want to go over the different acts right now.

And act one is very, I mean, these acts are very long because there's three of them and they all stretch out pretty long and visit different locations. But act one is a very monkey island style act in that you are literally on melee island where the first game took place for the most part. And you are tasked with getting a ship and a crew, but I don't believe a map. So very similar to the first game, you need to get a ship and a crew to make it to your next destination. And this stuff here, I thought these puzzles were reasonable. And I was like, okay, this is a smooth start to this game. How did you feel about Act 1?

At least the Mealy Island stuff. Yeah, it was fine. I don't like how, as soon as they land, they're immediately greeted by Timmy the Monkey. I was like, who the hell is Timmy the Monkey? Yeah, am I supposed to know who Timmy the Monkeys? The Guyvers says, like, hey, it's Timmy the Monkey. It's like they expect you to know who that is. It turns out it's like Elaine's pet monkey who was in none of the other games.

Okay. So, to me, the monkey is invented for this game then. Yeah, it was. Okay. And they act like he's always been around. And I think all the puzzles in this section are easy because you're just given everything you need because it's like, you meet Carla and Otis. I do like how Carla and Otis are scarred from you abandoning them on Monkey Island, which is the canonical. Yeah, some continuity there.

Yeah, like it's continuity that Guy Bruch destroyed the ship and abandoned them there. I like how they're kind of scarred, like Carla has become an alcoholic and Otis is back to being a kleptomaniac. And, yeah, you just essentially find the papers you need to recruit them at the Gover's Mansion. And then to get the other person on board, Ignatius Cheese, who now wants a scum bar, you have to do insult arm wrestling. And it's all very easy. And then to get the ship, I think you just need to get like the gubernatorial symbol from Elaine just to get the ship. You also meet the voodoo lady who acts as a hint. guide immediately.

Do you just tells you what you have to do right off the bat? Do you meet the voodoo lady at first? Like, I didn't actually talk to her until the second act when you returned to Malian Island. No, I talked to her on the first act. How do you get her to appear? How do you get to her to appear, though? You pull on the finger on the chair.

Oh, I thought I pulled every finger, but I guess I didn't. You pull on the pointer finger. Wow, so you skip her entirely. I did, yeah, and I was like, it's weird that you don't talk to her until the second act, but I had no idea that I'd get too clever, too clever. To pull my finger to make her. to make her appear? Yeah.

See, that's not good that you can skip her entirely like that. Yeah, yeah. You shouldn't be able to miss that. Like, she's an important character. And Curtis, like, you have no choice but to talk to her to advance the plot.

Yeah, like, they should have just had you pull a string like you normally do, not like find the right finger on a hand. Yeah, I know. It's so tedious. Carefully maneuver yourself around the hand to find the right finger that you can interact with. It's bad. But yeah, once that happens, you go to Luker Island,

you see Elaine's lawyers, you find out about the ultimate insult. and then you go to the bank to search the safe deposit box of the Marley family to get, you know, what you need. And that is when the bank is robbed by Peg Nose Pete in a guybrush mask. And after that, there is, I think, the makings of a good puzzle, but it's a puzzle of threes in which you have to apprehend the criminal and find the evidence he stole and find the evidence that he actually did the crime. So in keeping with this kind of adventure game formula, it's a puzzle of threes. but I don't like how any of these articulate and this is really where I began hating this game. There are a lot of puzzles of three in this game.

It seems like there's many points in the game where you know exactly what three items you have to get because a game or a character outright tells you what to get. I wanted to talk a bit about the ship you take to looher actually. Oh, sure. The pink ship. The dainty lady? Yeah, here's another part where Garbich's characterization seems off to me.

Like he just can't get over how, pink the ship is and you can tell he absolutely hates it but like I don't I don't know like in Mike Island 2 when Guy Brish has to wear a dress to get into the costume party

I think it's cool how like there's no negative reaction to it like Guy Brich never says ew I'm not wearing a dress the shopkeeper goes okay here you go like unlike in like Space Quest 4 there's a part where the main character Roger dresses up as a woman and the shopkeeper calls him a sicko

but there's nothing like that in Monkey Island too like even the person guarding the mansion says something like oh hey that's nice and doesn't make fun of him meanwhile Guy Brish in this game can't even stand the thought of having a pink ship

like they're just emasculating him when they don't need to do that yeah again all of those jokes feel like they're not appropriate for this character and it's not the type of humor I want to see in this game but yeah I don't want to move on to the to the puzzle where you find the criminal

So, like, this is the first of a puzzle of three. So I realized, like, again, I was going through all these puzzles. I'm like, oh, you don't actually do that much in this game. So the first puzzle of threes is getting the three things you need to apprehend in the criminal. The second puzzle of threes is assembling the ultimate insult. The third puzzle of threes is assembling the ultimate insult again on Monkey Island. And ultimately, that's not a lot to do. But what you have to do to make all that happen is just a massive pain in the ass.

I don't want to go into a few of the puzzles here that might not make a lot of sense to you out of context. But I do want to discuss them just in a vacuum of like why they're bad puzzles. And the first one I want to talk about is the prosthesis shop organization system. And again, I really hope this makes sense to listeners at home. But it's one of the many trial and error puzzles in this game in which you have to figure out the organization system of the prosthesis shop in order to find a person's name. But there are far too many variables. And the way this works is there's a dial. There's three dials and each one has a different set of like five symbols on them.

And each symbol represents a different span of the alphabet. and you have to try different combinations of them to figure out which symbol represents which span of the alphabet to find the right set of letters to find something you need. That's as best as I can explain it. Yes, it is very confusing. But again, there is no immediate way to know this. It is just like, keep trying, keep trying and writing things down.

Like a lot of this game is note-taking. That's not a good puzzle. Whenever I hit a puzzle like that, I just looked at the solution. I'm like, you know what? If I work at this enough, I can probably find this. solution, but I don't have time for this. I don't want to deal with this. Because also, like, what makes it public so tedious is how long it takes to reach the solution because of the long animations in between.

Yes. And actually, there's another puzzle in this same, uh, in the same shop, this prestigious shop. So the joke is the prestigious shop is run by a guy who's like, all of his senses are dull because he's got like hook hands and he's got like two eye patches. And, uh, you need to steal something from the shop later in the game. And the, the way you steal it is, you place a music box on the counter and turn it on because we all know how loud music boxes are right and then you need to steer guy brush towards a very specific item that is very hard to spot and actually steer yourself to in the span of time before the music box closes and it took me maybe like three tries like the first of so many timing based puzzles where you are given a

short span of time the controls are very bad and it takes too long to set up again to try again and you learn nothing in your failure other than I hate this game the guy doesn't even like comment on the music box he doesn't say like oh what a nice tune or anything like that and uh why does guy rich even want the hand to begin with i don't get it it's it's so weird and it's like there's never even a comment and then like the um inventory system like wow this music box is so loud it's just like no music box is famous for being like soft and tinkly no one has ever like oh turn close that music box my ears are bleeding it would have been funny if you like open the music like the dainty little music box and box and like heavy metal music came out of it from some reason that would have been better and uh yeah in this section my only like the only good puzzle in this game is that you have to find uh peg nose pete's hideout that's the guy who you know took your identity and rob the bank and uh you're you're finding your way there using um you know instructions and this clock to sort of steer your way there through the system in the game and along the way you meet yourself in the future and uh your yourself in the future says certain things and

gives you certain things in a certain order. And when you meet up with that person, you're now the guy who brush in the future, you have to give him things and talk to him in the same order that you met him earlier or else there's like a time paradox and a resets. Like I think that is a genuinely clever puzzle that the first time I did it, I was like,

oh, I know what I did wrong, and I use that information to solve the puzzle again. That is the only good puzzle in this game. That's the only puzzle where I wrote cool puzzle in my notes. Me too. There's also a Bill and Ted reference, right? Yes. Yeah, I just like, I'm you from the future.

here's something you need. If you really meet, what number am I thinking of right now? Yeah, yeah. There's actually a few Bill and Ted's references in this game. Okay, yeah. I only watched the movie for the first time a few weeks ago with you. So I was glad I got that reference. And also the whole no-nosed man framing Guy Brish is like a fugitive reference.

Yeah, yeah. So Pegg knows Pete and everything. And the entire missed-time thing is a missed reference, I think. Yeah, I think so. I think it is. It's such of the way it's spelled with a why. Oh, you know what? just realized that. Yeah. I think like the whole like foggy nature of it is also supposed to be

like a missed reference. I guess it's like mist. That's why. But it's funny how like they made fun of mist in Currisom Monkey Island. And yet I would rather play mist than this game. I would. I mean, so that that is that is act one. Anything else you want to pull out before we move on to act two of three X or four X rather? I want to go back to the prosthesis shop. Oh God. Okay. So this breaks a big rule of how to make a good adventure game. Ron Gilbert says you should never come across a solution to a puzzle without knowing what the puzzle is or why you need that item. So I completely at random solve this puzzle. So like you're supposed to get prosthetic skin from the prosthesis shop and I got the skin without even knowing what I need the skin for or how you even get the skin. So like the prosthetics guy

gives away free prosthetics but he tells you a story first with missing names. So there's three missing names and and you get three possible names for each slot. Then based on your answers, he gives you a prosthetic part. And you need the skin, I'm just going to give away the solution to this puzzle. You need the skin to put over a manhole. And when you remove the manhole cover,

you see three names etched on the underside of it. And those three names are the solution to the dialogue puzzle with a prosthetics guy, who then rewards you with the skin. The very first time I talked to him and got him to tell me a story I randomly chose three names and they were the correct ones

so I got the skin right off the bat yeah I don't I don't know also how you connect the names of three random people with getting free skin other than like those names you've seen elsewhere and there are names that are possible selections from a list when he tells you a story like I don't understand the connection between the manhole

and the getting free skin but yeah I got a fake ass that I carried around for the entire thing yeah so you can keep giving him other names to get other names to get other parts, like a liver, a stomach, intestines, a foot, a heart, a butt. And I think there are other ones, but I didn't get them all. They're all these gross parts. And it kept doing that because I didn't know what the skin was for. And I thought, oh, you probably have to get all the

parts to like assemble something. You can put those extra parts together to form like an abomination of a man. It's just for fun, though. You can't do anything with it as far as I can tell. But I never completed the man because once I found out that all I need is the skin, I stopped getting parts. But these uses prosthetics, prosthetics stay in your inventory for the rest of the game. Oh, my God. So they're clocking up your inventory for the entire game. Yes.

I mean, I had stuck them all together to form this gross thing, but it never went away. Yeah, I had that butt for the entire game. Did you try using it on things? I didn't because I just hate taking things out of my inventory in this game. So only necessary things came out. That's act one. I want to move on to act two, which has one, starts off with a majorly bad puzzle. So, you know, you go back to mainland, you find out Charles is Lechuk. If he becomes governor, he'll have access to the ultimate insult.

So you, Guy Brasch, need to assemble that before he can get his hands on it. And when that reveal happens, he's in Guy Britch and Elaine's home. And I thought to myself, this should be a major moment. You know, like when the main villain, especially someone who's tried to kill their protagonist multiple times, is inside his house. Like, it should feel scary as hell. But instead, he talks about how he has political powers and leaves out the front door. Yeah. And that just made me laugh by how non-threatening Lechuk was in that moment.

The fact that it all happens in like pre-rendered cutscene just makes you feel more removed from it too because nothing can happen because it's just all already set in stone so it's just like all right I'll watch this happen and I'll watch this unfurl but ultimately like I feel like they wanted to make a longer set of puzzles but they didn't really

have time for it because you have three of the wedding gifts you need to go to where the ultimate insult is you just need the fourth one which is this this map something blue the good lady just gives you the other items yeah like I feel like they wanted to put in like more puzzles for you to find them but they're like I'll just find just take them

just find the last thing but finding this last thing is is one of the worst puzzles in a game of very bad puzzles because you find out that meat hook uh he is doing like wax paintings uh in his spare time now and he painted over the map and that was sold to the sushi restaurant so uh i i might like have a nervous breakdown if i tried to describe this puzzle nina so can you talk about the sushi puzzle and why it's bad. Yeah. So the scum bar has been taken over. It's become the Lua bar and it's become a rotating sushi bar.

I actually used to work at a sushi restaurant that had the exact same kind of rotating bar with little boats carrying sushi on the water. So I kind of like that part. Is it a rotating bar or is it like a conveyor sushi place? It was in water just like in this game. Okay. It's like the boats are floating on water which then like pushes the boats around. Oh, so the sushi place you went to actually had boats? yeah you worked out wow I had no idea okay

so that's kind of remind me when I worked at one okay so you're supposed to use you're supposed to order the only non raw item on the menu because guy bridge is so disgusted by the concept of sushi for some reason he can't stop talking about how disgusting it is so the only non raw item is literally on fire and it's placed on one of these sushi boats

and the flaming dish goes around the sushi bar in a loop and you're supposed to jam something into the conveyor belt right as the flames or in front of the wax painting hung in the wall. You use chopsticks at first, they break, and then you get to jam meat hooks, paint brush that you steal into them. And I will say the timing, the timing. I thought that was kind of necessary.

It was. And the timing is very, very precise on this. Like, you need to try it a few times to get the flaming boat to stay right underneath the painting. Yeah. What I mean, like, it has to be right in front of the painting. I mean right in front of it. Because if you're even a little bit off, it doesn't work.

And I was doing the right thing, like over and over, except I, didn't get it like exactly in front of the painting and so uh the puzzle didn't work and if i looked up the solution on a walkthrough on uh youtube i was like oh okay i was doing the right thing i just wasn't getting the timing exactly right and the game makes it very difficult because there's like a one second delay between you executing that command and guy which actually doing it and if that's all there is to the puzzle it would have been annoying but i would have been like okay fine i understand but there's more there's much more to the puzzle you also have to like okay so once you stop the the conveyor belt the chef comes out of the kitchen that you sneak into the kitchen

and you need to pour grog into the the machine that is something that felt completely random to me just like i don't understand yeah randomly pouring grog into one part of the machine will shut it down i know like i didn't understand why why isn't stopping the flames in front of the painting enough i guess i guess that stops the flame for longer but it just it's an It's a not necessary part of the puzzle. And if you take too long, and there's like, there's a lot of items in the kitchen. If you take too long, the puzzle resets, you have to order the food again. You have to wait for it to come out.

You have to jam in the chopsticks again, or sorry, the paintbrush again. You have to go to the kitchen again. Like, you are learning nothing from mistakes other than like, I'm frustrated. I'm like, I'm getting nothing out of having to reset this puzzle again and again. And it is so frustrating. I really didn't like how if you left the Loua bar and you came back, then you had to start all over again. Why can they just leave the flaming boat there? But you have to order again.

And even to order the food, you have to sit down at the right stool. You have to flag the waitress. And you have to select the flaming thing on the menu. Yeah, it just takes too long. Too many steps. And again, timing based. And for me, at least, it was so hard to steer Guy brush into that little platform that legs up to the kitchen.

I'm just like, no, no, you overshot it. Hurry up. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. And I just thought it was funny how once you finally solve the puzzle and the wax melts off the canvas, the chef just gives a ruin painting to Guy Brisch. Like, why?

Yeah. You just vandalized your restaurant. Yeah, what the hell? Speaking of hell, did you notice how family-friendly this game is? They never say the word hell. They say heck and heckle. Yeah. At first I thought maybe they were just doing that to be funny, but I think they were censoring themselves.

I think so. I do want to move on to the next set of puzzles, which is assembling the ultimate insult. Essentially, you're assembling it based on what you need. So you need a bronze hat, you need a silver monkey head, and you need a golden body. and these all are found where you need to find them on Jambalaya Island. And the bronze hat was stolen from a statue in the town square. The Silver Monkey is a souvenir mug at, I believe, Planet Threepwoods, which is the Planet Hollywood parody. And the Golden Man is the trophy for the diving contest.

Which one of these puzzles did you like the most? Oh, boy. I can tell you which one is the worst. Actually, these are all pretty bad. I'm having a problem deciding which one is the worst. but actually I know which one's the worst but which one did you find least offensive um least offensive

I guess the diving thing they're all I don't know I didn't like any of them actually they're all really bad yeah I know which one's the worst so the diving puzzle it feels like it's training you for the future monkey combat section that you're kind of learning a language and that you have to copy another character using the arrow keys to input a command as you dive but it's not just that you also have to get the dunce cap in order to make sure

your splash isn't too big and blackmail a judge into giving you a 10. You need to do all of that and you need to imitate the dive of the other diver. And also because there's a rematch, you have to chew up a free sample of like bagel with smear on it, spit it into his bottle of oil and then he'll be attacked by seagulls. None of it really tracks for me. There's a lot going on there. Yeah. If that sounds crazy to you at home, it is.

Like there's no like logic to a lot of this stuff. How did you feel about how, like, when you talk to the tourists on the island, they all tell you where you can find these items? I thought that was at least charitable. I was like, okay, I know where to find them, but the problem is, like, how do I get them? It's too handholdy for me. It's like, I could have figured these things out by myself. Come on. Also, I knew you had to get the dunce cap because I had seen it when I watched a YouTube playthrough of it, like 10 years ago. But does the game give you any indication that you need the dunce cap?

No, like, one of the judges just tells you your head is too flat. And then, like, once you find the dunce cap at the teacher's classroom, I don't know, like, it doesn't tell you how you can get the dunce cap exactly. Yeah, like... It's kind of had, it's another trial and error puzzle. It's weird and that guy brush won't just take it. Yeah, exactly. When you need it, he will only have it if you fail the quiz and you're given it. She doesn't, like, the teacher doesn't even say, like, um,

If you fail that too many times, you're going to get the dunce cap or anything like that. Yeah, it's really weird. So that is the diving puzzle. We could talk about the worst one is the parrot puzzle just in its execution in that you need to find the bronze hat. It was buried by a pirate. He has two parrots, one that tells the truth and one that always lies. And what you need to do is you need to decide which parrot is which. And based on which parrot is which, you have to feed one of the parrots grog in order to tell, like,

okay, so the swaying parrot is the one that's telling the truth or the swaying parrot is the one that's lying. You're using some sort of item on the parrots. Or coffee. Yeah, you're using an item on the parrots to tell the difference between them and then you follow them like eight different times to new rocks. Every time you talk to them, they fly up

and fly back down on land and that animation takes forever. Yeah, and like you're just given new directions every time. So you talk to the parrot that tells the truth. It's like, okay, go east. And then you go east. You wait for the animation to start up again. You you make sure everything's correct then you talk to the right parrot again

then it tells you where to go yeah you pull out the whistle you use the whistle you wait for them to land oh yeah the whistle's part of it you put away the whistle yeah you talk to the parrot you wait for them to fly around you'd wait from it to land and then you walk in the direction they tell you to you have to repeat that over and over

so many steps and it's just like this game has a real problem with like okay I get it but then they make you do it like five more times like I'm getting nothing out of doing this as many times as I had to do it. Like, I got it. Like, just let me get to where I need to go. And

they won't let you do that. It's so tedious. Speaking of tedious, though, like, there are a lot of items that are kind of tedious to get in this game, but then a lot of items have the opposite problem where they just feel too easy to get. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, there are some things are just like,

uh, yeah, it's in the background, just grab it. It's fine. It's like the glue you pick up is just like, yeah. The glue by Stan's time share. Why is it just sitting on the wall? it makes no sense like there was glue and curse and that was in the voodoo ladies place she said she had some kids over

and they were doing like crafts and such and you see scissors and paper and everything else crafty that's why the glue is there in this game it's just sitting on the wall of Stan's time share it makes no sense yeah this game is like

it really messes with you because it either gives everything away or it withholds completely like it's weird where they help you and where they don't help you in this game I also don't want to backtrack too much but the duck on Luker Island Oh that's illegal

You can't talk about that now No I want to talk about it No because like That duck like Okay so in Let's talk for revenge You need a rat at some point in the game And that's a puzzle to capture the rat

And In this game You just kind of scoop out the duck And cram it down your pants With no trouble I guess so And the duck it's also like on the cover of the game But you use it for like one puzzle

And that's it I expect a lot of ducks in this game. I was, it was bait and switch, in my opinion. And you didn't even know you had to pick up the duck, right? No, it just seemed like a random background thing. Like, why would I pick this up? Yeah, it's weird, because it was just walking around. Everything else is such a pain in the ass in this game.

I was like, they're not just going to let me pick up a duck. Yeah, I was like, oh, I wonder how I had to catch this duck. It's like, pick up duck. He does it. I'm like, oh, okay. So that wasn't a puzzle? But I do want to get to the final puzzle on Jambalaya Island, which is like the very trendy island. It's that you need to get a silver monkey mug. And you can do that by ordering a

meal at the restaurant, which you need a free meal ticket. There's another thing to go through to get that, but once you- A meal that you never get, by the way. Exactly. But once you order the meal, you're giving the mug, but you can't leave the restaurant with it. So what you need to do, this all sounds very crazy. If you've never played an adventure game before, and you're listening to this podcast, you must think they're just games for people with just like severe brain damage or something because I don't understand how anyone can figure this out. But in order to get the mug, what you need to do is there's a man in the restaurant who'll do your caricature. So you need to order the mug, get a caricature of yourself with the mug, and then get that

caricature, cut the mug portion out of it, paste it onto an existing mug in your inventory that's not the monkey head mug, and leave that behind and take the silver mug with you. So you need to basically switch it out with a different kind of mug. So you're cutting a picture of a mug out of a piece of paper and pasting it onto an existing mug and when you do that puzzle a guy brush is like this should never work like that's the most obvious thing you have to be like near-sighted it's got to be dark you have to be like very stupid and then it works so i i hate the puzzles where even the character is like why is this the solution this should not be the solution at all the character talking about how stupid it is

doesn't excuse the puzzle i say make a better puzzle well there's that and also like if you're got to do an absurd puzzle like that just just let it happen you don't have to be insecure about and have your character comment on it because there is like a similarly absurd puzzle in Curse and that's where you have to take a family portrait cut out the face

and then Geiberch sticks his face through and then another character looks at the portrait and thinks Garish's face is a face of their ancestor and I think that's like a really absurd like dumb solution but you know what they don't make a joke

about it because just let it happen And it's like, okay, well, fine. That character's looking through, like, what, a peephole? So it's, like, plausible that they could think you're part of the picture, right? No, he's not. He's not looking through a peephole. He's just standing in the hallway. Okay.

Looking at the painting or garbage his face. But you can buy it more than just gluing a picture of a mug onto another mug and someone, you know, walking away with that saying, oh, here's the mug I left behind. I guess so, like, well, also that character is a bit of an alcoholic, so maybe that has something to do with it. But still, like, there's no need to undercut it with those kind of jokes. Yeah, yeah. And at this point, I do want to move on to Act 3. So you assemble the ultimate insult, and it doesn't matter because when you go back to Mali Island, it's taken away from you immediately. So all that work you did is absolutely not for anything. And instead of killing you, we find out that Ozzie and Lachuk are working together, they decide to strand you on Monkey Island for no reason because it's like we could kill Guy Brush, but maybe in the future it could be a hostage. So let's put him on Monkey Island. So now we are finally at the reason. for this game to be titled the way it is you are now trying to escape from Monkey Island

that's another thing they keep pointing out too like Garber says escape from Monkey Island several times at the beginning of the game like too many times it's like okay we get it we get the joke and this for me is just dire like I go back to that first Monkey Island podcast I think that's the worst part of the first

game it just becomes very meandering the puzzles are weird like the navigation is like tedious but this is all of that times a million and they're some of the worst puzzles in this game. We get the monkey combat later, but there are so many things that I just hate.

Like, there's one puzzle that feels like, guys, you're making, you're making an adventure game. Stop doing this, where you have to roll four different rocks at certain intervals in order to have an effect that you're not even sure

is the right effect you need. Because ultimately, you need to create a pool of lava far away for reasons you'll find out later, but you can do this puzzle at any time, and you're not sure if you're doing the right thing. But it's all timing-based. It's all controlling this character awkwardly as you drop different balls and different holes

and watch as they clatter around and interact with each other. But it is just so irritating and requires so much precision that this game is not made for. I think they were trying to go for like an advanced version of the rock puzzle and secret where you push the rock off the cliff and then it launches another rock that then hits whatever you aim it at. Except this is like way more tedious. It takes forever. And this is another puzzle where I just looked at the solution in a video. And even though I knew exactly what to do, it still took me like three tries to execute it perfectly.

Me too. In that rock puzzle in secret, it was not timing base. Like you had to move around the thing and then activate it. You didn't have to like do things in like a certain window of opportunity. Yep. So it was better there. This is also the act where you run to Firm and Toothrod again. That's true.

You don't see him in curse. Yeah. And there's like a massive retcon. of Herman tooth rot that like integrates Aussie mandrill until the lore of Monkey Island in that Aussie mandrill met Herman a long time ago and Herman basically told him all the secrets

of the Caribbean and in exchange for that Aussie mandrel like knocked him into a whirlpool and stranded him on Monkey Island and it turns out that Herman toothraud is actually Elaine's grandfather. I didn't like that twist. No, no, no. It's a weird, it's a weird retcon that

I don't care for it all. You know what? Although I like seeing Otis and Carla again in this game, I don't like how they made one of the possible endings of secret canon. They could have just let that be. They could have just made it so that it doesn't matter which one you went with. I think so. But yeah, it is weird that they chose like the darker interpretation. Also like Guybrush left up monkey hanging on the switch in the first game to the point where it's starved to death. Okay, you know what? That bothered me. So you meet a new monkey character called Jojo Jr. And Jojo Junior says his father was trained to hang from a totem pole to open the gates of a giant monkey head, but never let go and died. But the piano playing monkey in revenge is also named Jojo. So is it met, did they mean for it to be the same Jojo?

I think. But it can't be the same Jojo. I found some discussion about this online and it's not the same Jojo. It's just like the monkey in the first game was never named. So you can assume that there are two different Jojoes. Well, they shouldn't name it Jojo then. That's just confusing. I agree.

I agree. But I found it more disturbing that Guybrush, you know, stranded his shipmates and let a monkey die. That's very dark, yeah. I was complaining about how easy it is to pick up certain items. So this game also has the return of the banana picker. Yes. It's just lying by a cactus and you pick it up. And for me, it was still easy to miss.

That's true. Yeah. It's hard to see. I actually did miss it several times when I went to that area. And do you remember how hard it was to get the banana picker in? Secret of Monkey Island. It felt like such an important item. And once you found it, you couldn't figure out how to get it out of there.

And it was such a fun-looking item. And it was so gratifying once you finally got it. But in this game, it's just there. And you just pick it up. It doesn't even look the same. Yeah, it's weird. Because it has to look like a golden man because of the puzzle, right? So they have to change the way it looks.

They've got called the banana picker. Another, I want to go through the puzzles here really quick before we get to the main one. That is like the most infamous part of the game. The log flume ride puzzle. is just confusing. It takes forever to set up. It's timing base. The controls are really bad.

You essentially have to steer this log from around to get to the pool of lava you created with the Boulder puzzle. But again, this game is not built for this sort of gameplay. And it took me a few times to realize, like, oh, I can control this. It's not just going on its own.

Like, it's so bad and it takes, again, a long time. Like, if you mess up, you've got to go through a bunch of dialogue options. You've got to watch Skybrush go down the waterfall. And then you're given this like window of time. in which to do what you need to do, but it's never very clear

based on what they're showing you. You also have to steer it towards a bottle that you have to grab with a brick sticker. That was also tedious. I hate that too. I did like the ghost priest in this game. I did like that character. Yeah, like the Russian Orthodox priest.

Yeah. It's part of like a greater part of the lore that they never really touched on again past this point, which is the Church of Lachuk or something. something like that. There's like a whole like religion based on the truck and it's only referenced here. Yeah, I like I like the the castle too like the stained glass windows. It's really cool. It reminds me of like the wedding scene in the first game. Oh, totally. Yeah. I like that part. But then they just never explore this part again.

Now nearly two hours into the podcast, we must talk about monkey combat. So this is what really made me not want to play the game. I didn't know what it was. I just knew like this is what people took away from the game and it's a very tedious puzzle that is a variant on the insult sword fighting the series is popular for but it is all about taking notes and like learning a very rudimentary language in order to do an advanced version of paper scissors rock and it took me about an hour to 90 minutes to get through but I had no fun doing it and it's all about consulting the notes

in front of you in order to do it and all you're doing it for is to get a hat you are Doing all of this to get a hat. It's randomized with each game, so you can't just look up the solution online. You have to go through with this. That's the worst part, I think. You have to do the entire trial and error part. You have to take notes. And in past games, like, when they're assault fighting, even if you didn't have all the solutions,

you were still able to challenge the boss of it. Like, even if you're not perfectly equipped in insults, you can take a risk and confront Carla or Captain Roddingham. but in monkey combat the boss refuses to fight you until you have all the solutions Oh and it takes so long And in these battles

You have to do them perfectly Almost all the time It's called monkey combat And they had the parody Of the Morla Combat logo But that's as far About as far as a parody goes Yeah I was telling you

It feels like They started with this idea Or this idea was like On a whiteboard at LucasArts For like six years And they wanted to do it At some point And this is the time they do it

But they don't commit to it at all Like I thought it would have been hilarious if there was like maybe they played music that was like mortal combat maybe if they read the graphics so like guy brecht was like a real digitized human fighting a real digitized monkey that would have been very funny and committing to the bit but here it just so half-assed like isn't it funny that we're doing this but they're not doing it very hard and even when they have a character go monkey combat it doesn't even do it in the way you hear mortal combat screaming in the famous commercial which is what the parody is yeah it would have been quite

gruesome if guy was just able to finish a monkey they could have found a funny version of that like there's not even a fatality parody or anything but in case you're wondering like you might be wondering what monkey combat is like imagine paper scissors rock but let's say

Nina and I are playing paper scissors rock in the first round I throw scissors Nina throws paper I win right in the next round I want to throw rock in order to go from my previous throw of scissors to rock I have to know a three a three sequence code to switch switch from scissors to rock. That is essentially how that works. And instead of just three possible

things, there's five possible things. Yes. And like with paper scissors rock, it's, it's obvious like visually like what is the, the winner of every battle, right? It's like, just like, oh yeah, scissors cuts paper, rock spashes scissors, et cetera. With this, it's like, it's charging chimp and Gimpy Gibbon and whatever the other ones are. It's like, you're just basically learning a code and taking apart the code when you see it in front of you to put it in the right results it's not fun at all

like once you get all the variables written down it just basically inputting them in reaction to what you're seeing in a very joyless and wrote way I love looking up other people's notes on this because it just looks like it looks like a biology chart or something

it doesn't look fun even look at the notes if like I if I like went missing and people went through my apartment and found the monkey combat notes they'd be like Well, Bob Mackey clearly lost his mind. They would think you were a serial killer or something.

Drunken monkey beats anxious ape. What does that mean? Yeah, again. Yeah, it's just staring at notes for the whole entire time. Like with insult fighting, the solutions, like, you don't have to, like, write them down, really. You can just, like, tell by looking at the dialogue what goes with what. You don't have to take notes. But in this one, you have to take notes unless you have a really good memory.

I don't suggest doing this without taking notes I think that's almost impossible You have to be like a super genius Yeah and it's like it feels like it was written by Like does a programmer think this is fun Like what is the What's the appeal to this It just it's so joyless

And then when you fight the final boss Like it's not even like they don't amplify the music They don't like heighten anything In fact like you there's no twist You just do the same thing you did before And I thought it was funny that in that same village you have to trade

an accordion for symbols you give this accordion playing monkey symbols so you can play those instead so in the background of my final battle with Jojo Jr., you just hear the symbols going off constantly and it was extra annoying. Oh, I didn't even notice that actually.

Yeah, yeah, it sucks. It's bad. And monkey combat, I get why it's hated, but like there are so many things in this game that are on par with that. Like, I was able to sit down and figure out monkey combat

and do it and it took forever. there are so many things that I couldn't sit down and figure out that still took forever. I don't know. I still think monkey combat is the worst thing in the game, only because there's no way around it. You have to go through it. You can't just look up a walk through. And it's just like staring at notes the entire time. Yeah, there is no way to brute force it. You have to basically pick apart the code piece by piece as it's given to you. And again, it is like a 90-minute speed bump in this game. And it is what everyone warns people about. Like, oh, a monkey combat. Like, I posted my notes and people are like, oh, Jesus, why?

Why are you doing this? And the most horrifying part is, once I was over monkey combat, I was done with it. I almost erased all my notes, which I didn't write down on paper. I had typed it down in my Google Doc. So I almost erased it, which would have screwed me over later in the game. I wrote mine down on paper. I was about to get them tattooed memento style to my body to be like, I can't forget this. And it's all.

Quarantine has not been kind to you. That should have been the finale of that act, but it's just like, no, you do all this. You do 90 minutes of work to get a hat, to get one of three items you need to solve this problem. Yep. And I don't like the monkey either. Yeah. So once so, uh, so you assembled the ultimate insult earlier in the game. So you have the golden man, the bronze hat, and the silver monkey head.

You do that later in the, in the next act, although the monkey head is a giant monkey head from the first game. The bronze hat is a hat that Jojo just has for some reason. and the golden man is the banana picker and that becomes a giant mecha monkey that you ride in into the final act of the game. Yeah, the giant mech monkey, you know what? I don't like giant mechs as a parody point. It's just so, it's so overdone

and it falls into like monkey cheese ninja territory by this point, I think. I know this is a series called Monkey Island, but the first two games didn't have that many monkeys. I'll have you know. So we're introducing like a lot of monkeys in the third game it feels like monkey cheese ninja was the most popular web comic of the year 2000 so yeah that's true but yeah you don't even do much as a um piling the giant mech monkey anyway it's another thing where it's just like if you had committed to this at all i would have respected you or at least found something but it's just like no isn't the idea of this funny there's like isn't the idea of monkey combat funny it's like well yeah but it's the execution that makes it work like if they would have done like anime angles or like anime style. voice acting or like redid the characters to look like more anime like Voltron style or

whatever like at least do the bare minimum but they're like no it's just funny there's a giant monkey giant monkeys am I right maybe he had like a crazy theme song to go with it kind of like the Nintendo 64 Goemond game exactly yeah like they knew what they were doing in that game and that takes you to guy

act for Guy brush kicks unusually a large butt in keeping with the guy brush kicks butt theme of the final acts of the game oh by the way can we mention the title card of each act Oh, it's so terrible. Yeah, like, I forgot to mention the opening credits really set you up for, like, this is going to be a cheap looking game because it's essentially... It's a slideshow.

Yeah, it's like, it's like PowerPoint. Like, the Curse of Monkey Island and like all the Monkey Island games have really cool credits. Opening credits and closing credits. So this game is just like, ne text on existing assets. That's fine. Even Secret of Monkey Island, where it's just like a shot of the island the entire time, that still is better than what this had at the beginning, which is a slideshow that ends with a slow zoom into. a rope like that's the best they could do with the intro yeah it just looks so it looks so cheap it looks and like each uh like title act card is a torn paper background with like a small font that's like

way too small for the for the screen that says like act one whatever and then two character models and that's it goofing about yeah yeah well we're about to hit hour two of the podcast officially and i'm on like hour five of podcasting today so i really need to talk about the final uh puzzle in this game in which you are going back to Mali Island and your giant monkey mecca and once you're there you watch about 14 minutes of cutscene that tells you everything that's happening basically Lechuk enchants a statue then Ozzie takes control and you essentially have to fight a giant Lechuk statue as the Mecha monkey and in order to win this battle like you can do the insult sword fighting monkey combat stuff as you did the entire game and nothing

will happen like his health just keeps recharging so there's there's a trick to it, but there's no dialogue, there's no clues, there's no way to consult anyone as to what you should be doing. And the only way to win this is to draw three times is to throw the same move as your opponent three times. And that's easy to do, but there's absolutely no reason why you would do that naturally at all. And that is the way to solve this puzzle. And again, the creators admit like, oh yeah, we never told you why that works. Yeah, first of all, I really hate how the entire game, Lechuk, is just some frail old man's lackey. I don't even know why he listens to him.

It's like, it was just like a classic kind of Kafka, Final 56 Kafka situation. I wish he had just like killed Ozzy immediately. Yeah. As soon as he gained power. Once he does, you're like, well, Ozzy's done for it, but then Ozzie's just like, well, I'm going to zap you with my ultimate insult that I still have and control you. So, yeah, the giant Lechuk statue is being controlled by Ozzie. Also, Lechuk calls Ozzie a girly man and a panty waist. Yeah.

Which just feels unnecessary. It's weird. And like, like, again, like Lechuk gets the upper hand, but then Ozzie immediately takes control again. So it's just like, I hate seeing Lechuk punk like this, even though I like Ozzie. And I was reading like trivia about the game. And apparently in regular monkey combat when you're fighting against a monkeys, like, if you make them draw three times in monkey combat, which is something you would never do naturally. It's like counterintuitive. You would never do it naturally.

The monkey will like beat on it. its head in frustration. And that is your clue that because Ozzy's on top of Lechuk's hat and the giant statue, if you draw three times against Lechuk, he'll pound his head and kill Ozzie. But there's no reason why you would have ever seen that unless you were playing counterintuitively, which most people are not going to do. Holy crud, I never thought about that. I'm not sure if I ever saw the monkey do that when I was doing monkey combat.

You wouldn't have because. If they did, I totally didn't remember it. Even if, for whatever reason, if you played in a certain way that you would see that animation, you would have been just thought like, oh, the monkey's doing a thing. I don't care. I was so confused by why he started swatting his head. Why, wait, why would even do that anyway? He's not a monkey. There are many questions that this raises. Like, how can Lechuk enchant a statue and make it grow? I don't know. Why didn't he do that in the first place? And then by squashing Ozzy and the ultimate insult, he just blows up. And I guess that's the end of him. I mean, for as much of the resolution as they try to give you, this does race towards the end in which once Lechuk is destroyed, they kind of just shove Grandpa Marley into the governor's chair. When I say, that insane old man has been rotting on an island for like 60 years, he's not fit to be governor.

Yeah, and Elaine talks about how she hates being a governor and like she wants to live the pirate life and go on swashbuckling adventures. That doesn't sound like Elaine to me. No. She's been coming her for a long time, and it seems like she's good at what she does, and she doesn't seem like she's into, like, pirated adventures. It feels like they're setting up a fifth game that never happened, and they are kind of setting up tails in a way, and that Elaine is with you, having fun. But, like, yeah, throughout the game, there's a lot of wishful thinking in which they talk about,

like, their five-game contract, which never came to pass eventually. Oh, right, yeah. So lots of mention of, like, oh, it's part of our five-game contract. So a lot of wishful thinking about this. game. Yeah, I really don't like what they did with Herman there. Like, why would he want to be a governor again anyway? Yeah. He just likes to be a castaway. That's been established. It's taken care of so hastily. And then you're just at the credits, very cheap-looking credits. And then at the end, Guy Brush Falls or gets stuck. And he's calling out the names of people. He

calls out the names of characters. He calls out the names of people who worked on the game. And then he let it sit long enough. The last thing he says is Jar Jar. And then the program closes. So for 10 years, the final thing Guy Bras Thiepwood said was Jar Jar. I didn't even know about that until you told me about it because I didn't stick her around to see the whole credits. No, no. I was like, I want to see whatever singer you've got for me. I've played 15 hours of this game. I want to see the final sliver of content because I'm never going back to it again.

Yeah, I don't really feel like playing it again either. Although, like I said, I'm glad I finally played it just so I can say I played it. Yeah, I mean, we are at two hours, a very long episode. hopefully again I don't recommend playing this because I had such a hard time with it but I hope you got something out of it even if you haven't played it

because I think we talk about the puzzles in like enough of a context to let you know why they're bad and why we didn't like them and I think this was a productive discussion even though it was me just venting a lot and Nina as well although I think I was angrier at this game than you

yeah you know it's okay to like a game but not this one not this one if you like this game stop list I'm just kidding it's fine no if you like this game game or if this is your favorite monkey island i don't know if anyone could say that uh i'm gonna guess

this was the first monkey island game you played or one of the first adventure games you played i can't imagine someone having fondness for this game without like a strong nostalgic tie to it i feel like if you were if you were locked in a basement without any like light or entertainment for the first 10 years of your life and someone shoved this in front of you it might be a good game oh wow uh that could be extreme i don't know i I like to be fair on these podcasts, and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings if they like it. But my final question for this was, like, would you recommend it for Monkey Island fans? And honestly, my answer is no.

I feel like it was such a huge waste of my time. And if you really want to experience what little story there is in this game, there are full let's plays, just full, like, long plays on YouTube. And that way, it's just a hands-free way to experience everything you would have experienced without having to fight the controls or the bad inventory system or anything like that. like but even so like I don't think you're going to get a lot out of it it's not a very funny game uh the story isn't very good and I think like we're going to talk about it and I honestly I can't wait to play it and I might fast track an episode about this tells the monkey

Ellen did right what this game did wrong like it is the right way to do a sequel without the people who work on the original games even though Ron Gilbert consulted on tails he wasn't a huge part of it and I think those people their heads were in the right space and these people their heads really weren't you asked me if this game made me appreciate curse more and I had to say, no, not really. But it did make me appreciate Tails even more than I already did, because Tails did a good 3D Monkey Island game. Yeah, for me, it was like, I respect Tails a lot more and I did before this,

but I was like, I was in the middle of playing this, and I was like, oh, look at some curse of Monkey Island footage to see what that looks like, and I remember playing that back in May, and all the 2D graphics and the soundtrack was so good, the puzzles made sense, it was a funny game, but yeah, I mean, no offense to Sean Clark and Michael Stemmel. I'm sure they're good guys. Maybe they still live in the Bay Area. Hopefully they won't beat me up after this goes live. But guys, I know you tried your best. I know it wasn't a great time for adventure games, but I wish this was better. But I've lived through the experience. I'm glad this podcast is getting me to play these games I put off playing for

like now, now 20 years. Like we're in the 20th anniversary of this game right now. Like we just passed it this month. And yet I haven't heard anyone talk about it. Well, right now we're in August, so we're not going to be talking about the 20th anniversary for a few months. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend playing this either. Not just because it's not a great experience, but also it's so buggy. The game crashes a lot, and there are several points of the game where it feels like you're being softlocked. There's one part of the game where you come across these chess players and you have to go through some dialogue with them. And at some point, the game just stalls. And it feels like your game froze. But if you wait like a minute, they start talking again and then you can get through it. But I didn't know you could just weighted out. I thought, like, I defined a save point past it or something. Yeah, there's like lots of little, like, issues like that with the game, um, itself. Yeah, that's a bug that got me the first time.

And I wanted to go back. I wasn't trying to be snarky by saying, well, it's not November yet. So no, it's not talking about. It's like, no, if anyone cared about this game, they would have been talking about the 20th anniversary, like in January. Like, but when we get to November, uh, in our timeline, no one's going to be talking about the 20th anniversary of this game either. I think like it's, it's not remembered well in any way.

But yeah, you're right. The game is a technical mess. You can buy it on Steam. It technically does work, but I recommend a program called Escape from Monkey Island Launcher, I believe use that too, Nina. Is that correct? Yes, that's what I had to use. I couldn't get the Steam version to run right on my computer. And it was so messed up for me that I had to run a game in one resolution, and then to run the

pre-rendered videos, I had to run it in a different resolution or else my game would crash. So I had to, like, save before every pre-render video, close the game, launch it in a new resolution, watch the video, save, close the game, launch it again in my old resolution. So I worked very hard to play this. It's hard for me to recommend watching a play-through of this game, too, because like I mentioned, I tried that 10 years ago, and I was so bored by it, I couldn't get through it. If only there was a novelization like The Dighead, you could just do it that way. I read, like, a couple of people's defense of this game, and it seems like a lot of their defense just comes down to, like, oh, I like the puzzles and the writing, and that's it, you know, like. Yeah, I didn't like either of those things

And they didn't articulate well enough for me To be convinced that those things are good And worth checking out So if anyone generally likes this game I do want to hear like a defense of it Yeah, I hope I didn't annoy any people who like the game And it's okay to like this game I honestly do want to hear from defenders

And let me know like what did we What are we getting wrong about this? What did you like about it? Because it's just hard to find anything to salvage from this game Like I said, I think in my opinion and it has one good puzzle and just so, so many misguided ones

that could have been fixed with a better interface, less timing-based. I really would love to see an overhaul for this game, but honestly, you'd spend your time in a better way just by making a new game.

Like, there's no reason to revisit this. There's no reason for a full-scale remake like Grand Fandago. Like, let this game exist into the year 2000. It's fine. I'm glad it gave it a chance, though. Yeah.

Finally. I can say it's a notch on my belt. My belt is just covered in notches these days. And now I don't have to play it again Exactly, it's behind us So thank you, Nina, for being on this super-sized episode We are dying to talk about this game for the past week

We made it past the two-hour mark So everyone's getting a supersized episode about a game They probably haven't played But we're here to educate you and entertain as well But yes, Nina, let us know what you're doing Where we can find you. This episode goes live on November 30th So what will you be doing in three months from now?

So you can find me on Twitter at Space Coyoto that Space Coyote with an L at the end instead of an E and I work for FanGamer, so you can go to Fangamore.com, sort by artists, click on SpaceCoyote to see my merchandise, my video game merchandise. Most recently, I designed merch for Metal Gear Solid, perfect dark, Conquers Bad Bird Day, and Goemond. You can also go to spacecoyote.com to learn more about me and my art,

and buy my new book, Sparks, Double Dog, Dare. Probably not by the time this episode is released, but currently it's the second best-selling children's book in Canada, and we're beating Love You Forever and Paperback Princess, so take that, Robert Munch. Take that love. Yes, Nina, thank you so much for being on the show and for suffering through Curse of Monkey Island for my sake and for the sake of our listeners. Thanks for giving me a reason to finally go through with this game.

And as for us, we are Retronauts. You can find us on Twitter as Retronauts. And by the way, this podcast is entirely fan-supported. So if you want to go support the show and get some cool stuff on top of that, please go to Patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you sign up for the $3 level, you get all these. episodes one week ahead of time and add free and at a higher bit rate, but if you sign up for five bucks a month, you will get two full-length episodes that are exclusive to the Patreon every

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