5 Comments

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  R2GEEK2
  September 24, 2009 at 10:09 pm

  i don’t know man. the guys who made this new monkey island… a TON of them are the guys who did the first games. also the gameplay is supposed to be great (full disclosure, i’m good friends with one of the writers). but yeah it doesn’t look half as cool as full throttle. and this is what wii games look like. it’s the same shit as gamecube.

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  darth
  September 24, 2009 at 11:14 pm

  AH Yes! Can you smell that?! that is the smell of a debateussion (debate + discussion x blog = debateussion)! Every good blog has theirs, and this is VaderWeeklys first! The site is coming to life, sort of…I mean, its only VW staff member R2Geek2, not some stranger from the darkness of the deepest interweb void, but i’ll take it.

  RE: monkey poo.
  Yes, i would bet a brand new kegerator that your friend can write circles around the rest of the video game writers out there. The writing was always one of the strong points of the M.I. & F.T. games — did they do Grim Fandango too? — and i look forward to some funny shit from them again one day.
  The wii art capabilities are sorta a bummer i hear, but the interaction is what the wii is all about, so maybe they figured out something fun to do with this, I’ll give em that.
  BUT, i gotta say, the art! Have a look at the first game and the shit they were doing with that 256 pallet. Or even a simple game like Spyro The Dragon on PS1 showed a real understanding of color theory and how powerful the screen can feel when used correctly. The environment art in these vids is all over the place, making the characters look stiff and awkward in their under-realized world.
  It makes sense then when you say a ton of these (artists) have been at Lucas Arts since the first monkey island released in 2000. Institutionalized artists who haven’t made a move or voluntarily lit a fire under their own asses in over a decade are about as creative as a tumor. IMHO

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  R2GEEK2
  September 24, 2009 at 11:44 pm

  Unfortunately, LucasArts as you are referring to it hasn’t existed for a decade. At least. That’s some unfrozen caveman lawyer shit you speak of.

  The guys that are working on it are a company called Telltale Games, founded by one of the back-in-the-day geniuses of LucasArts named Dave Grossman.

  Telltale did new versions of Sam and Max (which worked better visually) and the Wallace and Gromit games (also pretty slick looking, and great animation). All the stuff that Telltale does is on PC first (woops! there’s your problem!), episodic (they are hammering these things out like a game a month), and ported to Wii. They’re trying a whole new model, and are the only people doing episodic games correctly. I agree that this Monkey Island art direction was a weird choice… the character designs and color palettes are odd and the animation, is a little rigid. I haven’t played the game, but assume it’s traditional adventure/puzzle solving stuff. Which I always dug. Day of the Tentacle is one of the best games EVAR.

  And Spyro wasn’t simple! That’s one of the best games for that platform, from a developer made of the best coders in the business (that engine was ridiculous at the time) and mostly ex- Disney feature animation artists.

  You know what DOES look fuking incredible now? Brutal Legend. That’s from Tim Schaeffer (Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Psychonauts)… and is the metal fantasy comedy game with Jack Black. Goddam. (in a prior life, Vader Weekly Staffer darth and I tried to bring a similar concept to life… and by Jobe, we will one day).

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  R2GEEK2
  October 28, 2009 at 7:24 am

  i just noticed this P.C. post. so fuckin funny