Adventure Gamers - Forums

IT wasnt for Disney nor Guybrush or anything but these times only one thing mattered, there was a code of pushing the par of computing-gaming-tech to sell the tech 1st, then the games. adventurers just tend to forget.

Henke - 15 November 2018 12:26 PM

I’ve heard this before. Can’t help but wonder if you have even played the first Monkey Island. It’s full of stuff like a guy in a troll costume, a vending machine, neon signs, a staple remover, printed t-shirts, etc.

First Monkey Island games have a good deal of their own small anachronisms, they are comedy games after all. Those didn’t influence the general perception of the world/settings. Curse and especially Escape turned this comic universe inspired by a theme park into a theme park itself where everything is meant to serve as a bait for potential customers. Characters use modern sales terminology, there are all sort of corresponding professions (life insurance and merchandise salesmen, talent managers, cabana boys, etc.), every landmark is now seen from the perspective of tourist attraction and so on. At least for me this kind of approach is more destructive than the Monkey Island 2 ending (as people claimed, I take the whole sequence for “some horrible spell” as Elaine placed it).

It is indeed true, that Larry from the first game wasn’t a balding, pudgy midget, nor in the second or third. In those games, he was at least average in height but he turned to look more like his box cover images with the 5th game when Sierra went to VGA.

Despite he was shown as cartoonish in the boxes and the manuals, his in-game character was, at least in Larry 2 and 3 was more realistic looking, at least in comparison to how he looked in Larry 1 in his only close-up. And while there aren’t any face close-ups of Larry from Larry 3, his body shape as seen in the intro seems quite normal, as does the small part of the bottom of his face that can be briefly seen in the plaque near the binoculars.

This can be mostly chalked on, that none of the first 3 games has any genuine art direction going on in them. It only came from the VGA remake and Larry 5, when the series went to more cartoonish appearance altogether. Before that, the games were dotted with realistic looking people, but with the VGA palette and new engine, everyone started to go a bit more cartoony, including the women.

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Detective Mosely - 15 November 2018 09:21 PM

Donuts McGee - 15 November 2018 04:58 AM

Larry Ahern didn’t want to have any of it. His mantra on the backgrounds was “If people look at it and say it looks like a Disney film, we have failed.”

It’s strange that that was their intention.  By those standards I’d say they absolutely failed, because it looks 100x more Disney like than the previous games.

Do you think so? I don’t remember any Disney movie that looked like this

The characters might be Disney. But not the backgrounds.

Heh, Curse gets labeled all over the place, from Disney to Saturday morning cartoons. It does look a bit Disney-ish, but in my opinion it does enough of its own thing as not be called out as a rip-off.

Indeed, I take the Disney comparison in the sense that the quality of the art (and animation, sort of, though that suffered more from the limitations of the time) is on par with Disney stuff, not that it actually looks Disney. Especially when it comes to background art - you will rarely see angles and proportions so skewed and exaggerated in classic Disney flicks.

I will concede that Guybrush’s head looks Disney-ish. I think it’s the fact that his nose is very Alladin-y. However, there’s an almost saccharine quality to most Disney characters that you will not find in the more bold and sometimes grotesque design of CoMI’s population.

Donuts McGee - 15 November 2018 09:41 PM

Do you think so? I don’t remember any Disney movie that looked like this

I don’t remember any LucasArts game that looked like this either Looks like some concept art that didn’t make into the game.

Now here’s the Neverland from Peter Pan:

And here’s Plunder Island from COMI: