Return to Monkey Island trailer [video](grumpygamer.com) |
Return to Monkey Island trailer [video](grumpygamer.com) |
– Guybrush Threepwood, when seeing something big
Because I have a hard time recognizing the noses as anything but face wounds in some of the shots, and I wonder why the colors were chosen this way. Characters don't stand out from the background very much, which again, is an intentional choice of colors. And the animations seem to happen mostly via rotations and stretches in the 2D plane, which makes everything look flat. (I think that's also what gives the "flash game" vibes that another commenter described.)
Is this supposed to look like it's made out of paper cutouts (in the style of other games with a "hand-crafted" look, like Paper Mario or Kirby's Wooly World)? That's my best guess, but I'm grasping at straws.
Still, I'm gonna buy it. It's another Monkey Island. By Ron Gilbert. It could be a text adventure, and I'd still buy it.
It would make sense to not try and target people like me: The bulk of potential players were probably not born when the previous Monkey Islands games were released.
Back in the late 1940s and the 1950s, there was an animation studio called United Productions of America, founded by Disney-trained animators who wanted to rebel against the “illusion of life” so beloved by Walt and experiment with the cool new visual ideas coming from an art movement known as “cubism”, as well as experiment with highly abstracted and stylized forms of movement. Find a copy of Amid Amidi’s book “Cartoon Modern” for a nice survey of this time in animation; look up anything in it that sounds interesting on DailyMotion or Youtube. The sound sync will probably be off by a few frames, which is super noticeable in things this stylized, but you’ll still be able to see how striking this kind of animated cubism can be.
It’s a lot harder to animate than it looks; to really make it work you need to have a firm grasp of animation and 3D movement despite the drawings looking super flat. Over time this look went from super hip and new to the cartoons cranked out for TV by Hanna-Barbera. And design drawings that were inevitably reworked into something less stylized - pick up any Pixar art book and you’ll find a ton of great drawings in this mode.
If you’re willing to split your drawings up into smaller shapes and create more of an illusion of three dimensionality, you can do some gorgeous stuff. But I doubt Gilbert had the budget to do this, given the results in this trailer. Instead we just have cool drawings that are snipped into a few pieces and moved around, which is a thing that hasn’t really been satisfying since Flash made it super easy to do this. And super easy to make animation with no lines.
Two relatively modern examples of this style actually working: Samurai Jack and Psychonauts. One is done by hand, one is trying to adapt these kinds of abstracted shapes into 3D models without super-abstracted rendering.
[1] https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/our-treat-to-you
Just look at how much better Prince of Persia from 1989 is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia_(1989_video_g...
The choice makes sense though, as creating handdrawn animations for today's resolution and framerate is an immense amount of work.
I'd still argue it could use a little more contrast between fore- and background, but we will have to wait for the game itself to see if it works better without all the quick cuts.
I agree with your other points about characters not standing out etc but they don't bother me as much as the faces.
If anything, this art style resembles Deathspank [1], another game by Gilbert. Btw it had hilarious trailers like this one [2].
All in all I don't hate it, but it's not my taste. I absolutely loved the style of COMI, and I think I get what they're trying to do with the art in this game, but it doesn't feel like they've gotten it quite right.
Then again, I never played them until the mid 00's. I have no expectations.
By the end of it, that never impacted my enjoyment. The story is always what did it. And I realized later that some stories would have been hard to tell in the realistic setting.
The point being that art and story are intertwined somewhat, I'll reserve judgement till I experience the full thing.
If he's going to do this kind of style, he needs to go watch Samurai Jack over and over until he is channelling Genndy Tartakovsky who knows how to do this kind of minimalist, angular style properly.
They could have used a more modernized pixel art version - like in this game
The Last Night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXeQJnbc9bA
Appreciate it would have been more expensive to produce to use this modern pixel art style.
But, if I do have a complaint based on the video.. it's Guybrush's voice. I know Threepwood's supposed to be a slightly limp, out of place character, but that voice to me sounds like some average contemporary Joe from downtown Boise, Idaho* with absolutely no historical, Caribbean/Pirate bent or jolly character to it.
That said, unless it's an absolute stinker (like some of the later episodes were), I'll be buying it.
The soundtrack sounds amazing, and I'm going to have the Main Theme stuck in my head as an ohrwurm for the next few days. Again.
.
* As a Brit, I have no actual idea what a Boisean accent is.
Everything thereafter is a blur that just got worse and worse.
Perhaps I should give this one a miss, then? (I won't)
That's precisely what I like about Guybrush's voice, it adds to the comic effect!
Here's the original one in all its Roland MT-32 glory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdd2CNlcqn0
I've done transcriptions of the MIDI data included in the game for a few of my favorite themes:
https://musescore.com/user/36584999/scores/6891053 (opening theme)
https://musescore.com/user/36584999/scores/7810499 (ghost ship)
https://musescore.com/user/36584999/scores/7725812 (LeChuck)
MI2 and CMI feature the LeChuck theme, a little bit, but for some reason they've made it quiet and slow. In the original game, it's a high-energy, in-your-face evil theme rather than trying to be a subtle background element. I hope that will be true again in RMI...
Still, the original Monkey Island is one of my favorites. I had given up hope and imagined the "secret" of Monkey Island would only ever become a deathbed confession, so I'm really excited for the game!
Fingers crossed the magic is still there, and the jokes are irreverent as ever.
Maybe the HN crowd is too young, but both MI 1 and 2 were originally released on floppy disc, and had no voiced dialogue at all, just text on the screen.
They didn't have voices until they were re-released in 2010.
The art style feels whimsical and absurdist/cubist almost?
I feel like an 8 year old kid again :)
The eventual publisher knew the guy at Disney in charge of the LucasArts rights portfolio.
Really looking forward to this.
Also: Murray!! I was afraid he would not be there because he was introduced in the post-Ron Gilbert era.
But jokes aside, this is probably much more than a little teaser and given that it is in good hands I'm sure you are correct that it's well on the way to completion :)
Nailed the style.
Not sure those who haven't played the originals will get it, but still.
Pixel art is what they used due the time and circumstances of the original games, not because they like pixel art better than other media.
https://grumpygamer.com/when_i_made_another_monkeyisland
> Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of-the-art tech and art.
> When Dave and I first started brainstorming Return to Monkey Island we talked about pixel art, but it didn't feel right. We didn't want to make a retro game. You can't read an article about Thimbleweed Park without it being called a "throwback game". I didn't want Return to Monkey Island to be just a throwback game, I wanted to keep moving Monkey Island forward because it's interesting, fun, and exciting. It's what the Monkey Island games have always done.
There's also a talk by (I think) Mark Ferrari, where he talks about how they hired artists for these classic pixel art games. Artists were hired on the strength of their art skills, and they had to adapt to the pixel medium in order to make those classic games. Easier to hire an artist and train them to make pixel art, rather than hire a pixel pusher and teach them to make art.
[1] https://mixnmojo.com/media/galleries/Monkey-Island-2-LeChuck...
But as a designer - you're not just creating for yourself. More importantly - with a property like Monkey Island - you're creating for your audience that spans decades,. This loyal audience might have fallen in love with the original style.
It would have been better to move that old style forward - build on it and not completely shift direction.
This new style just looks 'cheap'. Cheap is probably not a fair description - it looks too 'childish'?
Maybe he's targeting the new generation / children and not so much us old timers?
I'm sure the game will be fun though.
If he'd stuck to his principle of using 'state-of-the-art tech and art' - he'd use the art style of 'The Last Night' or similar.
But again - The Last Night is not cheap to produce and you'd need a much bigger team.
Here are more pixelated art games[0] - which to me feel richer than the clean & wonky lines and flat and over-polished feel of this latest MI game.
[0] Check out the games by Wadjeteye Games
> I have made one pixel art game in my entire career and that was Thimbleweed Park. Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't pixel art games. They were games using state-of-the-art tech and art. ...
https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_secret_of_monkey_island_spec...
I think they had to figure out a lot of stuff that hasn't been done before and they have a small team. Check this interview snippet [0].
The art of dead cells looks good!
-----
[0] Tim Soret in reply to a question: "-Hello Tim, I was wondering how you balance the pixel art and the visual effects in The Last Night. What steps do you guys take to decide which aspects should be pixel art and what needs to be real life looking? And how do you make sure the pixel art of the game is still prominent when viewed? Is a scene considered complete when everyone else in the team agrees to it?"
"Very good question. As the game is getting more & more 3D, for sure it looks less like a parallaxing 2D illustration, and more like a little pixel art movie set with cute props. I wish I could have continued the game like shown in 2017, but relying only on pixel artists to illustrate everything manually became impossible given the surface to cover - and we would have missed all the dynamism offered by our current tech."
"As we're a small team, we prototype using a lot of bought 3D assets (buildings, trees), and even by swapping all the shaders & textures with ours, they don't look exactly like we need them to be."
They were just the best art they could do at the time.
I agree, but that’s also not what Gilbert is saying. The problem is not whether it “is” a throwback, but whether it is perceived as a throwback by the general public. That kind of perception drives conversations about Thimbleweed Park and shapes people’s perceptions about it.
Pixel art is, unfortunately, perceived to be low effort. All I really mean by this is that there’s a discrepancy between how hard people think pixel art is to make, and how hard it actually is to make. This makes it more challenging to actually sell games that have pixel art.
PS Try Sierra’s Quest for Glory series (VGA versions).
I played the first two games on my Amiga 500 many moons ago and they’ll always be special to me for igniting my love of the genre, but hearing the characters talking for the first time in 3 blew me away :)
His performances are usually more... Lively? Swashbuckle-y? Guybrush is out of water but enthusiastic and trying for the pirates drawl, and I just didn't feel that with this trailer. I hope it's just because he wasn't warmed up for the role again.
The special edition is basically a step up from the original pixel art version, so to me it still maintains that original 'feel'.
This new style distorts the faces for some reason - as others have already pointed out.
The new style at least has a bit of character of its own instead of trying to copy the intention of a pixel art original.
You're welcome to like pixel art if you want. I don't actually like the new aesthetic either, but I respect the choice--and I do like similar approaches where it's not high-res painting or 3d rendering and instead is abstract art.
[1] https://weareludicrous.com/blog/2018/pixel-sharp-graphics-at...
That’s true for console games like the article you linked uses as examples, but PC games did have sharp pixels because they used RGB monitors rather than consumer television sets.
Not just in terms of graphics which were beautiful but also in terms of difficulty and story. Monkey Island 2 for example was much too difficult for me to beat on my own. MI3 was doable (as was MI1 though which was epic).
The only thing that was a shame that Elaine was frozen for the whole game (spoiler alert lol).
MI4 was a bit meh in terms of jokes IMO and the vector graphics were too premature to be beautiful.
But I think the style of MI3 is difficult to do in vector format and it's kinda expected these days. I wouldn't have minded another 2D game but I do have to say the action scenes in the video look much better than they would have been in 2D.
But... it is another 2D game. Those action scenes are being rendered in 2D. There isn't a scene in the video where e.g. the camera angle changes. It all appears to be sprites against backgrounds.
> MI4 was a bit meh in terms of jokes IMO and the vector graphics were too premature to be beautiful.
...and MI4 is a 3D game; it doesn't have vector graphics.
I didn't notice the camera angle didn't change there. Will have another look.
Personally I would never be interested in a console only title for the controls handicap I'd using a controller. Controls are for platformers only.
#/media/File:Prince_of_Persia_1_-_MS-DOS_-_Gameplay.gif){kind=link}
