Monkey Island 4

[Ha Ha I am OK]

I'm not sure this goes in this section, but...

I did not like Monkey Island 4.

I think that because they got rid of that 2D-point-and-click-iness, the game is just not Monkey Island like anymore.  It's almost as if they just made a game with a plot and characters similar to the ones in 1-3. 

Am I wrong to think that?

I just think that if they kept it 2D it could have been better.  It would feel more authentic.
Sadly,  people would much rather play a game adventure that doesn't lack a third dimension.

My question: Why?

But I'm getting off topic.

Another thing that i don't like about MI4 is that you have to get Guybrush uncomfortably close to something in order to interact with it.

In the older ones you just had to click on an object (or person,area,etc) and Guybrush "magically" walks over there by himself.

Did he get dumber or something?

I don't know...

What do you guys think?

[Helm]

I think you are OK.

[Steel Drummer]

I'm not sure this goes in this section, but...

I did not like Monkey Island 4.

I think that because they got rid of that 2D-point-and-click-iness, the game is just not Monkey Island like anymore.Ã,  It's almost as if they just made a game with a plot and characters similar to the ones in 1-3.Ã, 

Am I wrong to think that?

I just think that if they kept it 2D it could have been better.Ã,  It would feel more authentic.
Sadly,Ã,  people would much rather play a game adventure that doesn't lack a third dimension.

My question: Why?

But I'm getting off topic.

Another thing that i don't like about MI4 is that you have to get Guybrush uncomfortably close to something in order to interact with it.

In the older ones you just had to click on an object (or person,area,etc) and Guybrush "magically" walks over there by himself.

Did he get dumber or something?

I don't know...

What do you guys think?

Yeah, 3d adventure games are almost always worse. Except Mordy 2, which isn't fully 3d, but still. Most people nowadays think 2d graphics or pixel art graphics 'suck'. I think it's the other way around. I mean, 3d graphix look realistic, but 2d graphics have more heart, and they had hours of time put into them. Nowadays, you can just get computers to do it for ya. I guess in making MI 4, they were trying to cater to the trends of 3d, but try also to keep the fanbase.Ã, 

[EagerMind]

... the game is just not Monkey Island like anymore.Ã,  It's almost as if they just made a game with a plot and characters similar to the ones in 1-3.

Actually, I had reached that conclusion after playing MI3.

... but 2d graphics have more heart, and they had hours of time put into them.

Hey now, it can take lots of computers lots of hours to render all that 3D.

[Meowster]

Yeah, 3d adventure games are almost always worse. Except Mordy 2, which isn't fully 3d, but still. Most people nowadays think 2d graphics or pixel art graphics 'suck'. I think it's the other way around. I mean, 3d graphix look realistic, but 2d graphics have more heart, and they had hours of time put into them. Nowadays, you can just get computers to do it for ya. I guess in making MI 4, they were trying to cater to the trends of 3d, but try also to keep the fanbase. 

3D environments take hours too. You can't just tell a computer what to do and it will make that environment for you. To suggest that 3D environments don't have hours of time put into them is a bit ridiculous.

2D graphics don't necessarily have more heart by default, either.

[Misj']

I did not like Monkey Island 4.

You're not the only one. But to be honnest...with the exception of some of the puzzles (including the famous monkey combat) and some story elements (for example the continues 'making fun of itself') I consider it actually a quite nice adventure game. Sure it will never be the best of the series (or secondbest, or probably even thridbes).

I think that because they got rid of that 2D-point-and-click-iness, the game is just not Monkey Island like anymore.Ã,  It's almost as if they just made a game with a plot and characters similar to the ones in 1-3.Ã, 

These are of cause two different things: story and graphic excecution. Let's start with the latter. Personally I love 2D. I would have preferred to have seen MI4 as a high resolution cartoon graphic adventure game. Furthermore, I think the 3D was quite terrible. Since the backgrounds are all pre-rendered, there is (and was) absolutely no reason why the caracters had to be so blocky...In Grimm F. they could get away with it becouse of the skeleton characters, but for MI4 it should have been better.

As for the story...well, I kinda felt Guybrush was quite the same (thanks to the great voice acting of Dominic Armato). Sure, he's not the same guy he was in MI1, but what did you expect? - After all he's been through he should have been different...in some ways. But I think one of the problems with MI4 is that the world around Guybrush has changed (which is basically the story, because Ozzie Mandrill consideres that the whole pirate thing does not fit within the modern society he envisions. The problem is, that this story will automatically have a different atmosphere, because Guybrush is not set within his own world (even though it does bear a resemblence to it). So maybe it wasn't that wise to chose this story...but they did.

Another thing that i don't like about MI4 is that you have to get Guybrush uncomfortably close to something in order to interact with it.

In the older ones you just had to click on an object (or person,area,etc) and Guybrush "magically" walks over there by himself.

Ah yes, the GUI. To be honnest, I really have no idea why they chose for this keyboard thing. My only guess is that is has to do with the fact that they wanted to port it to game consoles (but having never used a game console this is just a wild guess). Since the backgrounds were pre-rendered (and thus 2D), which didn't affect the interactivity with the 3D charaters, it should not have been that difficult to envision the same mouse-driven-point-'n-click GUI they had in MI3. It would have worked perfectly...and yes, I think it would have made the gameplay a whole lot better (same accounts in my opinion for Grimm).

So summarizing I'd say: MI4 was not that bad (at least not in my memory). It just didn't excel either. The choice for 3D would have been ok had they A. made the characters better (either closer to MI1/2 or MI3...MI4 just looks sloppy) and B. created a mouse-driven point-n-click GUI that was based on their previous adventures. I can understand why they made the choise to go to 3D. I was not nessacary, but that does not mean that it was impossible...just not well excetuted. As for the story...I would have chosen a different one set in a different world (closer to MI1, 2, and 3). But I did have fun discovering this one, and there were some great moments throughout the game. Some others were terrible however. And I don't think they were true to the extra's (like Herman).

MI4 could have been much better (we've got 1, 2, and 3 to prove it). The choices they made in story and graphical excecution were - I think - wrong. So you're right about those things. Apart from that...it didn't kill the series for me. 

[Nacho]

This has been discused before...To make a short brief. MI4 is not totally 3d... The BGs are in 2d, and the characters are in 3d.

3d is not necessarilly evil, Grim Fandango was in "3d" (Same considerations as MI4) and it was great.

The problem with MI4 is that is was basically poor. Do you remember the 3d model for Murray??? How many polygons it had? 4? Amateur fan arts is 10 times better than the art seen in MI4. The story is poor, the bad guy is patethic and how Guybrush and LeChuck are degradated to be just servants of Elaine and Kangoo... Also the puzzles were really stupid (Look at sewer, Mork and Mindy were married in Inky Island, you get the protesic skin and you enter to the ban...) Really stupid.

Well... no need to critic it more, since it killed the AG genre for Lucasarts...

Some people extends this critics to MI3... Dunno, I liked it.

[vict0r]

Anyone else noticed that in MI3, the voice actor for elaine is clearly british, but in MI4 she's american? I actually enjoyed MI3 tho. Can't really see whats wrong with it..

[GarageGothic]

Two words: Monkey Kombat (and the first person to say "but hey, it wasn't that different from insult swordfighting" will be wearing my sword like a shish kebab)

[Nostradamus]

I think what we have here is a classic case of us internet old school adventure game fans automatically shunning and hating anything that's 3D or uses new technology. It's cool and popular among us to say that 3D adventure game sucks. But I'd like to take the CON opinion.
Yes, I too grew up with old school computers, my first adventure games I played where some of the very first EGA text parser games. But it's wrong to automacally hate and shun all 3D adventure games. True, MI4 did not had the heart or spirit MI1-2 had. Sure, it wasn't what Ron thought of when he wrote MI1. But what sequel ever can capture the heart\spirit\magic\emotional qualities of the first ones? very rarely. The first one always capture you most because it's an original concept, a different concept. So you'll always like it best. But MI4 had an interesting (though flat compared to the previous 3) story, very cool puzzles, great dialogue and a lot of great humor. You guys said for 3D the graphics sucked, but in the year the game was released they were quite good and par on the market's qualiyt of 3D graphics. You can't compare it to today's 3D engines because they or their technology didn't exist back then. I think MI4 is the least good of the 4 but I think it's still an excellent game which people shouldn't disqualify just because of the graphics or GUI. And that over negativity by us old school fans maybe does more damage than good because most  times a popular series' 3Dish adventure game came out it was the last becasue it got so much unjustfied negativity from us old school guys. Take Larry 7, I played all Larry games and IMO it's the best game of the series. It was the funniest, it had the coolest puzzles, had extensive easter eggs (and if you found them all and all Where's Dildos you ca na special alternate ending), awesome voice acting and its graphics were 3Dish. But people were negative about it and hence Larry 8 never came out and the series ended (Magna Cum Laude doesn't count since it's not an adventure game, and Larry isn't even it). Or QFG5, which followed QFG4 which totally SUCKED, it had endless bugs despite all patches, boring story, boring characters and many boring puzzles. And then came out the 3D QFG5 with a great story, great puzzles, a more close to real RPG system, everything about it was excellent. And it's my 2nd favorite in the series after QFG2. But again people failed to see its excellence and ranted on the 3D. Hence no QFG6. Another game which I just finished last night - Broken Sword 3 - had the best story, best puzzles, best dialogue of the first 3 and also great 3D graphics and a unique console style GUI because it was also made for consoles and some little action sequences which were real easy and if you failed the game would automatically let you do them again. I think the GUI rocked, the available actions change according to the item you were looking at, it was easy and fun to control, and the action aspect was not mindless action but action that's part of puzzle solving, an action you need to think about to do, and there wasn't too much or too hard of it. It's definitely my favorite of the series so far, superior to the first 2 in every way. Here too people ranted about the GUI but luckily Broken Sword 4 DID come out but with tradidtional GUI. I'm gonna start it tonight, it might be better it might not, I'll see.
In conclusion you can see that my point is that while many 3Dish adventure games can suck if they are all about the graphics, it is wrong to automatically disquality and hate every one of them, and MI4 was defeinitely an very good game (again though being the least good of the series) and so were the others I've mentioned and too much negatriveness about graphics and GUIs sometimes makes us more damage than good.

[Nostradamus]

As I posted above, GarageGothic posted too.
As for Monkey Kombat yeah it sucked, but the concept of the parody was funny IMO. It may have been too long, frustrating and not at all in adventure game spirit, but too many people hate the whole game just because of that and that's also wrong. Does one annoying part of the game ruins eveyrthing to you?  it shouldn't. I for one always hated the stupid mindless mazes old school adventure games had. They really pissed me off. But they didn't make me stop or hate the game. It's just an annoying part you have to pass while you enjoy the rest
of the game.

P.S. this thread should be in adventure talk & chat

[Mr Jake]

I... I really liked Monkey Kombat.

My view is that MI4 was a sucky MI game, but a decent enough adventure game in its own right.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Well... no need to critic it more, since it killed the AG genre for Lucasarts...

You can't be serious, Nacho.  The consumer market killed the AG genre.  People want zap-pow explosions in full 3D as a majority gamer market.  Sam and Max 2 would've done just as poorly (or well) as EFMI if they had finished it.  Same with Full Throttle 2, though I suspect that would have done a bit better since it was an action game thinly veiled as adventure, with you going around beating the crap out of people and not really solving many puzzles that didn't include beating the crap out of people.

Also, I don't think 3d requires less effort, just a different kind of effort.  Sculpting realistic humanoids in 3d isn't easy, though I would say that pixellated art allows the creator to put more individuality into his work than I've seen with 3d so far.  It seems that most companies are competing to create the most realistic looking 3d characters rather than the most stylish or visually interesting.

Oh, and I actually enjoyed Monkey Island 4 and hated 3 with a passion.  Go figure!

[ManicMatt]

I was going to say what Nostradamus said, that the graphics were ok back then, but they've aged with time. 3D ages far quicker than 2D.

I loved MI4. I didn't even think for a second "Hey! This is not a MI game! it's all wrong!" or anything like that. In fact I love all the Monkey Island games.

Look at the new broken sword game. I haven't heard anyone but me talk about it here, and it's not even in a lot of shops! I haven't even bought it myself, but that's a financial issue more than anything. And they've handled the 3D thing worse than MI4 if you ask me, in terms of controls. (Based on playing a demo) But the game is only about £17.99 on Amazon!

[voh]

I was elitist and closed-minded once, and then I played Grim Fandango. It is, even today, my most favourite adventure game ever. The controls were awkward, but the story was great, and the atmosphere even better. After all that, the controls weren't that awkward after all, and once gotten used to, worked great.

MI4, then, was sort of the same. I enjoyed it, and had a hoot of fun playing it. After having played Grim Fandango from start to finish many, many times, the controls felt natural and fine to me. What made me hate the game was the fact that it crashed my system twice in a row, something no other game and/or program has ever managed.

I am now scared of it. Though I still feel it's a Monkey Island game, it's far from the real Monkey Island games (which is 1 and 2, not 3, which also seemed to lack the character I'd gotten used to from the previous two games).

Conclusion: MI4 is decent, but not awesome. The problem is that we've been groomed to expect awesomeness rather than decentness from LucasArts' adventure games department. Nowadays we've been shown that we can expect crap, shit and sometimes decentness from them.

Also, I like how decentness isn't a word, but I still use it.

[Nacho]

The "You automatically and hypocritically hate 3d" theory is wrong since the very moment that most of us LOVE Grim Fandango.

And trust me, I was not aware of the internet current saying MI4 sucked when I bought it, I did not have internet by that time, and I bought the game being really happy and enthusiastic about it. It was after some hours of gameplaying when I started to hate it.

So, if you want to call me lier, ok... But I can swer that this was which happened in my case.

[Paper Carnival]

Actually, I loved the graphics of MI4. Sure, I prefer the 2d graphics more, MI3 was beautiful. But, I thought MI4 was still very atmospheric and thought that the graphics weren't off the spirit of its prequels.

As for the game itself, it was indeed a disappointment but still fun to play.

[Nacho]

Prgo, while I agree with you in the overall panorama you describe, I was talking specifically of Lucasarts. And MI4 killed the AGs for Lucasarts. There were so many critics and they were so fierce that they gave up with FT2 and S&M2 because they were realising that the thing was going to be similar to MI4. Lucasarts could have been a reduct company for AGs. If MI4 was overally recognised as "good", FT2 and S&M2 would have been done, and, if they were good, we could have seen more adventures.

[Domino]

I have MI4 for the PC and for the PS2. I kind of liked it, but some of the puzzles in the game got me so frustrated that i couldn't figure them out. But when i did get past them, i got stuck again in puzzles later on in the game. I remember the throwing the boulders into those holes or something like that puzzle that really made me just quit the game.

I liked the graphics, but not as much as Curse of Monkey Island, and the only reason i bought it for the PS2 is because i think it may become rare and it was fun to play on a television instead of a small monitor.

I am just glad that the PC version that i bought (in the large box) came with a small walk-through that helped me out earlier in the game.

Shawn

[ManicMatt]

The "skin on manhole" was pure genius. All that time I was figuring out how to get DOWN the manhole. Thanks.