Thimbleweed Park Podcast #45

Is this some sort of advice for a pirate wannabe? ;-)

Anyway, are you sure asking for forgiven is easier than asking for permission?
The amout of time and effort to ask is equal, but if nobody grants the permission you can spend a wonderful saturday in some other way.

If you waste -instead- your saturday in an effort that has as the only effect to upset some people you admire, and then you also have to cope with that guilty sensation you have to apologize, and then you have to hope to be forgiven...

Well, I think that the best deal is to ask for permission in advance. And, let me add: if it is a sunny saturday on the Alps (just like the last one) with a springtime temperature and a soft and floury layer of fresh snow fallen during last night, the very best deal is if that permission isn't granted at all! :-)

Far be it from me to upset someone.
I ask permission because the podcast is a wonderful gift you give us, and I don't want in any case to substitute it -- that's absolutely not my idea.
The podcast is and will remain 'your thing' without any doubt.
My goals with the podcast I'm going to make are:
- to give people an answer to their question (any kind of answer, not necessarily the correct one), in order to give a little bit of joy
- to entertain, as far as I can :-)

Thanks for your granting!

It will probably take me more than one day, but I am in no hurry.
If there is a wonderful weekend, on the Alps or in the Po valley, the podcast can wait :-)

Ron, I think I'm speaking for everyone here when I say we really appreciate your work for this phantastic blog and the podcasts. I enjoy each and every new entry and every new episode.

But since you have complained multiple times about your amount of work for the podcasts, I wonder if it is really necessary to have perfectly edited episodes every week. I could very well live with unedited versions. Just record and upload them and be done with it. :-)

I just added it.

I'd expect #@&ing %*#§s.

Will the beeps be fully censoring or leave some first or last letters visible/audible (which is funnier and allows us to guess what the f<beep> you really wanted to say.)

Thanks, Sushi.  Now that you mention it, I do vaguely remember such a comment earlier.

I would love to differ and simply claim that the C64 version is always the best and quite obviously so. Then again, I did play that c64 version aeons before I peeked at Indiana Jones on other systems. So could it really be that others fail to see the truth and not judge the C64 the best? ;-)

I think you are being too diplomatic. I, for instance, played MI on the Amiga first then the CD version and I can easily see and feel that the EGA version just feels right and captures the spirit of the game best.

Thanks for the very thorough and satisfying answer to the question BTW.

I think there will more often than not, be a definitive or canonical version of something, being it a peice of fiction a picture done in multible iterations, a product or a peice of music.
And it's interestingly enough almost always not the newest, or on the surface most refined version of that 'thing'.
Look at for example the Sony Walkman. When you imagine a Walkman you don't remember all the overblown, feature packed models from the 90's. You remember the iconic WM20. The essence of a Walkman.
In somewhat the same way Maniac Mansion, warts and all has that same feeling of being the essence of that concept.

The music in the NES version is really good and I like the graphics. It was the first version I played.

The poodle comes from the suburbs of the Burbs?
About MM and RE
There's a need to investigate a misterious mansion in order to rescue someone. That lead to the discovery that there's something bigger, an evil force that has taken control over the scientist(s) who originally discovered it. The mansion has this huge entrance room with a big stair. At the ground floor, altough at the opposite side, there's a door to a dining room with a loooong table. There's the dark room with the possibility to develop films. There is a hidden basement with secret laboratories. There's a bathroom with a bathtub and a puzzle about the water that is in it. There are different characters in a team, and you will play the adventure with controlling three of them, which actions are mutual in order to accomplish the tasks. And I could go on and on...
But the point of view, the gameplay, are completely different, as you well said before.
Alone in the Dark: I felt it was really different from MM, I thought immediately to The Fall of the House of Usher by Poe as an inspiration, there's an evil force that has taken possession of a mansion but... it is more a metaphor of individual fears, psichological insanity, and not a bio-hazard or an alien meteor...
In the end RE to me it's a synthesys of MM and AitD.
Thimbleweed park, I guess, will be more on the Poe's side, since its references are the X-files, David Lynch, and so on...With a lot of comedy in it...Which is GREAT!!!

You'll see soon :-)

Time Traveler???? hihihihi :D

I think Grim Fandango is a great game that was extremely difficult to sell...

With most games you get some idea of what's going on from the title and the box art (Monkey Island was clearly a cool pirate adventure with ghost pirates, etc. and Maniac Mansion was clearly something to do with people going into a mansion where there were maniacs)...

But with Grim Fandango I distinctly remember going into the store when I was about 16 and seeing it displayed prominently and having zero reaction to it because the name didn't suggest anything and the box art seemed to have lifeless cartoon skeleton things and no indication if those were the bad guys or what. I picked the box up and looked on the back and there were those blocky 3D graphics and nothing that resembled the adventure games I was used to and so I put it back down... it was about 15 years later that I got around to playing it and found out it was a great game!