Hacker Cinema
Monkey Island
Film · 50 min
Escape to Monkey Island, deep in the tropical forests of Sri Lanka, where troops of toque macaques, tufted grey langurs, and purple-faced leaf monkeys have made their home among the crumbling ruins of ancient temples. In this verdant jungle, abundant fruit provides ample feasts for these foragers, but even in primate paradise, trouble awaits. Follow these charismatic monkeys as they deal with unpredictable weather and struggle to raise their young in an environment where hidden forest dangers lurk around every corner.
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14 comments on Hacker News
I played it when it was released and mostly enjoyed it, though I can't remember what difficulty setting I picked. I bought it mostly because I like Mark Ferrari's art, but ended up completing it. Some characters and jokes were intensely annoying, especially Ransome. I did like Delores, though.
Afterwards, I revisited some LucasArts games I'd played before (Monkey Island 1 and 2), and tried my hand with some I hadn't (Fate of Atlantis, Sam'n'Max, Full Throttle and also Flight of the Amazon Queen, which isn't from LucasArts). I think what you describe is actually fairly representative of the overall LucasArts experience. Character building is limited, even the funny jokes get tiresome after you've clicked through them a fifth time, some puzzles are illogical even for games with a sillier tone (monkey wrench, anyone?), and there's often a lot of walking about, repeating conversations, and clicking randomly just to see what happens. Some of them (Thimbleweed Park, MI2) also have exceptionally poor endings.
Out of the games I played, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was the best, though I got stuck (by forgetting some object in a room outside a complex labyrinth) close to the end and didn't bother completing it. The main character is pre-established, the plot feels like an Indy movie, and I can't recall any genuinely preposterous puzzle solutions (though it was a few years ago now).
I love the Monkey Island games, they're a part of my childhood. But I mostly love them for the music and graphics, not necessarily for the puzzles or the many gags that other people always seem to find a lot funnier than I do.
I think one understated problem Grim Fandango had is that it's too adult.
Today "adult" often means "there's sex and/or gore", but the content is still simple and juvenile. But Grim Fandango isn't like that, it's just full of themes that probably confused the heck out of almost every kid that tried to play it.
Like the very first chapter throws you right into office politics. You deal with stealing a job from another salesman, sabotage a pneumatic tube messaging system, and sneak into your boss' office.
It all makes perfect sense for adults familiar with office work and all the movies it references. But I recall I tried it when I was maybe 14 and I couldn't make head nor tails of it. I didn't even realize the pneumatic tubes were actually a thing.
Things like Monkey Island and even Full Throttle are far more accessible.
I thought there was a book somewhere in the mix as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Stranger_Tides Wikipedia tells me the book inspired monkey island, the ride inspired both the book and monkey island, and the book inspired the fourth movie.
Well I was *hoping* you'd pick up on many of the tropes of male-written femme characters brought out in that sub were applicable to the character mentioned above.
But here's an article to list some of the tropes out more explicitly:
https://baos.pub/what-happens-when-men-write-women-b89bf325c18b
I admit I'm not very familiar with the Monkey Island series but literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article for it points out that the primary purpose of this character is to be the primary love interest of the (male) protagonist
Bonus, here's some really fun visualizations that I think you'd enjoy regardless of whether you agree with me or not :)
https://pudding.cool/2020/07/gendered-descriptions/
https://pudding.cool/2017/08/screen-direction/
https://pudding.cool/2017/03/film-dialogue/
I mean, you could say more or less the same about movies.
Early film (as soon as people realized that film != theatre, at least) was wildly experimental, because qualities of the medium were still largely unexplored. But after a while the rules became more and more codified, so that if you wanted to find something "new/more", you often had to look past the mainstream offering. Which, I mean, makes sense? As demand grows, a part of the industry will inevitably focus on the "tried and true" formulas. It allows them to play it safe and get more-or-less predictable returns on their investment.
(And about Ron/Monkey Island, actually he is being very clear he is not doing a retro game and he definitely wants to move the franchise forward. I surely hope so!)
I think the focus on combat in game mechanics is what ruins most games from a interactive fiction / interactive movie POV. Players of Monkey Island gams don't and can't ignore the plot.
What are the reasons why Hollywood hasn’t yet mined the old Lucasarts games for movie ideas? They seem such natural source material.
Are there IP ownership complications?
Are the games themselves too derivative of movies (e.g. Monkey Island being inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and thus reverse-retrospectively derivative of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies)?
Would it be too hard to adapt them as comedies, or would they be too boring as non-comedies?
Is the built-in audience actually not as large as I imagine it would be?
Are there some gaming-ignorant egos involved? i.e. what lead to the 4th Indiana Jones using the lame Crystal Skull story instead of the great Fate of Atlantis story?
Is the world simply not ready for Day of the Tentacle on Disney+?
Fun fact: Pirates of the Caribbean began life as a film adaptation of Monkey Island at ILM.
Quite a few details survived the script rewrites...remember the jailhouse dog with the keys in its mouth in the first Pirates?
I believe Gilbert has petitioned Disney a few times now for the rights to Monkey Island to create new games, though I don’t think they’ve responded.
I think it is a must to play the monkey island adventures then! If you want to compare this to a movie or show, Pirates of the Caribbean would probably be mentioned, but monkey island was first.
I grew up with this kind of games and the Lucas arts games were the ones I liked the best. Zak McKracken, Day of the Tentacle and lots of other adventures was what I like to play in the 90s.
I am sad with this threads discussion. Or I'm old. This is a logical step in lock-in disguised as user experience.
Back in the day, if you could maintain the data, my 15 physical 3.5 inch rather unfloppy floppies were monkey island. I lost my personal copy, but if I moved the data, I could have my own copy of monkey island right here. I personally failed on my own maintenance there.
Then we had - skipping some steps - something like private WoW Servers. they worked 90% of the way. But Blizzard kept some code and that never worked privately. Most stuff worked on the client side, most stuff on the server side could be reverse engineered.
And now we're planning to stream games via something similar to team viewer / citrix, put bluntly. At this point, what difference is there to an interactive movie? I can replay several single player games I acquired on steam off-line as long as I have the binary and a windows instance. I'm sure I can play FTL or slay the spire in 2040 without any developer interference.
If you stream those games, those games will die harder than the multitude of multiplayer only games with dead servers once the streaming servers get shutdown due to business decisions. Which can and will happen < 1 year after a failed launch in my book.
They did make a good video game movie: it's called "Pirates of the Caribbean", and it's an adaptation of Monkey Island.
I know, I know, it's the other way around. But it should be proof that a good videogame movie is at least possible - you would have to change surprisingly little.
The commentary works really well in the Monkey Island remake; it’s not very intrusive. There’s just a button in the corner that you can toggle if you want to hear it for the current screen.
The entire game is a bit cinematic, so it’s not much different from listening to commentary while watching a film.
I love Monkey Island series and other Lucas Arts Adventure games, spent way too many hours playing them. However, I am a bit disappointed in this article because it feels a bit concierge-mvp to nostalgia (feeling the grounds before a full-on Kickstarter campaign), unfortunately without any interesting build upon what those great games offered. Well, consider this as my feedback to the mvp. Grim Fandango was a breakthrough, including its no-interface approach and clever use of camera angles to script the player. I have never seen a game script coming alive so strongly, it was like playing a movie. But Monkey Island re-pixelated? Although I played it on my iPad and switch back and forth between old-new renderings, I would expect these wonderful minds to be more inventive than nostalgic when producing something new.
Enthusiasm doesn't constitute arguments though.
Quoth Wikipedia:
"Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction."
If you can't loose, and hooking up random input to the game solves it after a while, how can you consider that challenge? Is it really enough to say "we have more content waiting for you, and challenge you to find it by either deliberately or randomly mashing buttons" -- ?
For example, Monkey Island is a great story, and I still adore it; but in the way I would remember and like a movie, not in the way I remember playing Speedball or Empire Deluxe as a kid.
Those enthusiasts you mentioned, do they keep playing these games over and over and over, like a Chess enthusiast would? Is there any measure by which one could say they improved, until they mastered it? I doubt both. So that they're nostalgic about something that they have long sucked dry, just reinforces my point about that not even being a game. I mean yes, skipping over the cracks in the sidewalk is also a game, but come on..