Thimbleweed Park Podcast #54
by Ron Gilbert
Jun 19, 2016
Jun 19, 2016
In today's episode, we talk about redesigning a puzzle much later than we should, but that's what makes it exciting! Right! Right?
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You can also get the podcast directly from iTunes.
- Ron
BTW when do we get the "best of" thimbleweed podcast including all the funnies :)
/*
Ron, David, Gary, thank you for the lovely podcast on this Sunday evening. Just what the doctor prescribed. (I was sick since Friday)
I am looking forward to the game and hope you are going to consider making another one.
Love the contest, love the T-Shirt and Mousepad. Sadly T-Shirts are not my thing, however the mousepad is really something. I might get that one for work. If you *could*, would you also provide some extra nice posters with panorama view of building like the occult book store?!?
Anyways, see you later. Best wishes,
Andreas
*/
return 0;
}
I hope you'll have pictures of the TP team (or their avatars) in Thimbleweed Park's after credits!
Gary, who is this Mary you keep speaking of?
Thanks!
Or some small piece of non-spoilerish information about Franklin or Delores? Just to make me stop talking.
Thank you! This is the best TWP Dev blog *EVER*
Thank you
These are images from artist Marco Ferraris application "Skip the day" featuring non animated, non palette cycling, static,
fully dithered, 3 bit, copyright free, landscape images. ;)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tujj1q0q26me32q/STD.zip?dl=1
@ Ron: How many 750 MB Zip disks would TP need?
I also remember having a combo drive which could use orginal 3.5" floppy disks and their own 120MB ones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
:-)
Seems almost a fake name, as, for example, Dave Fennec, or Jerry Losenik, or Jon Albert...
Damned, so close!
Pretty close myself! (918)
Good to know 1) I was not the only one to try that, and 2) it actually was a good estimation.
Good luck next time!
"The wisdom of crowds" would have won too:
Average: 1104.33 (ignoring guesses bigger than 9999)
I am always impressed by these things...
That would be appreciated (just to let you know)
A huge sanatorium nearby?
But maybe Thimbleweed Park is just a small town near Thimbleweed City.
Ok, i give up :)
This means most people of Thimbleweed County live in the woods (in tree houses with telephone connections obviously).
-> Precisely, Robin! The only possible meaning!
Thimbleweed Park has a population of 81 (or whatever it has) and is the district town for the Thimbleweed county.
In the Thimbleweed county there is another town called, let's say, Thimbleweed City with a population of >3000 People.
So no one has to live in the woods. :)
Thimblecity is a good and likely explanation, but also a very boring one :P
It was really great, but now idk where i'll get 3rd part. I cant find it on steam.
Or should i play tales now and skip curse and escape ????
(this is maybe bad place to ask, but i thought that all of you here are big MI fans :O)
I am a big fan of all Lucasarts Adventures.
I can say you can skip episode 3 and 4 of Monkey Island series, they are not strictly connected each other.
If you can't find them, go to play directly Tales of Monkey Island (5 parts)!
WARNING mild ranting probable
Actually Tales of MI does refer quite often to Curse of MI (Murray! The relationship between Guybrush and Elaine, the general look and feel), but indeed ignores everything that happened in Escape from MI, which is a good thing (The Ultimate what-a-reno?).
I'd say Curse is better than Tales, as it is 2D and the puzzles are better. (c'mon how often can you use the same object to solve the same puzzle... - yeah, I am looking at you Pyrite Parrot and at you, hook which picks EVERY damn lock), the dialogues are better (in Tales I often was able to get out-of-order dialogue trees, which are like reverse puzzles, where you first solve it before you knew you had to solve it. I hate it when e.g. Guybrush knows the cat"s name while he never asked for it. And then you can select a line where he asks "what is your cat"s name?" Probable you can avoid it if you only prune every tree from top to bottom, but what is the fun in doing that? Then I prefer that certain dialogue only unlocks if you passed another relevant dialogue choice first)
But still Tales is waaaay better than Escape or any of those "classic 2D point and click adventures with beautifully hand-drawn art" that followed in the slipstream of the great LucasArts Adventures ( yeah; I am looking at you, Broken Sword, Runaway and a bunch of other close-but-not-quite-so-magical games)
MI3 and MI4 cannot be bought currently. You would have to buy it second-hand (or "find" them somewhere else) and use ScummVM to play them.
Curse of MI was the first MI game which was not designed by Ron. If you ignore MI 1 & 2, you're actually able to enjoy Curse of MI. It's completely different on several points, but it's the most felicitous sequel. Of course, Ron would have done it differently, so it's actually non-canonical. If you don't find Curse of MI anywhere, you should look for a second-hand copy on a CD-ROM and play it via ScummVM. In some respects, you can consider Curse of MI as a consolation for the absence of a third MI game by Ron. It's still a nice adventure game.
In my opinion, you should avoid both 3D games from the series (Escape and Tales). I admit that I never really played Tales (only the demo), but Escape was clearly a low mark of the complete series at that time. I even think that a MI game with 3D graphics is foredoomed. Neither is comparable to MI 1 & 2 - not even to Curse. They are no more than average commerce, sadly.
And the story is also funny, really! Especially the 5th episode!!!
I played Back to the Future: The Game by Telltale and I found it to be worthy of a play. By the way, the hint system was a bit too appealing to me. That doesn't mean that I was overstrained by the puzzles. I was just too impatient for avoiding the hint system, whereas I seldom take a look for a solution in the internet if there is no hint system in a game. Well, I don't like to find myself cheating, so I totally consent to Ron's abdication of a hint system.
I will definitely not play Tales until I have finished TP and some other games, but maybe at a later date.
I decided to play Curse so i downloaded ScummVM and started playing it.
I was curious how will they continue after Big Whoop, well it wasn't much explained.
I also really like that talking skull, he is really funny !!! (i think his name is Murphy )
I think i will skip Escape, because everyone is saying that it have clumsy controls and bad jokes :(
You can use UHS (universal hint system) i find it very helpful it first starts with small hints and then give full solution.
P.S. i hope you understand me im from Czech Republic and i dont speak english well.
Regarding controls: remember you can switch between character relative (tank controls, wohooo!) and screen relative if this makes it better for you.
Murray is awesome! Also he want to kill us all.
Keep in mind that Ron wasn't involved in CoMI, so it's not the *real* outcome of the Big Whoop story.
After all Disney allowed remastered versions of DOTT and FT, so who knows what will happen in the future... but until then I cannot blame anyone...
Regarding pirating Curse of MI: you can find used copies on Amazon. It's not because it is not available, you can legally download it for free from a torrent...
If we would have applied that reasoning way back before the Internet existed and local computer shops had very little stock, we would have been pirating 99% of the games we played.... Oh I see :)
Well, the graphics from MI 2 may also be no pixel art, because they are pictures that were scanned, just as the graphics from Curse. But, in my opinion, the graphics from MI 2 actually look pretty much like pixel art, due to the lower screen resolution - and probably thanks to some digital postprocessing as well. And I assume that the characters from MI 2 are still created completely digitally, unlike those from Curse.
It sounds plausible what you've said about MI2.
I disagree with CoMI: The graphics look perfectly fine resolution and colour depth wise. I would buy such games if they would be released now.
(Honestly I don't care so much about remastering, I care that the game is available for purchase again on as many platforms as possible so all the soon-to-be fans can enjoy it!)
What they could improve is the scaling of the characters when run in higher resolution (see TWP), and I also like commentary.
I've never played CoMI with ScummVM filters, do they look any good?
They told that the heads of the characters had been larger in the prequels only because of the lower screen resolution. They explained it as if they found the proportions in Curse to be more realistic than the proportions in the prequels. It really sounds like a flimsy excuse to me, seeing how slim Guybrush has been in Curse. I'll never understand it.
Interestingly, they joked about how they would be going to create the sequel of Curse, which they eventually didn't make at all, as we nowadays know.
I can imagine CoMI having these proportions and comic-like style being a design decision (hey they already had amazing VGA resolution!) and not a technical one as it was especially with e.g. MM, Zak.
I agree that it's obviously a design decision. Nonetheless, I don't understand why, because it only increased the cut between Curse and its prequels. I remember that I needed to accustom myself with the new proportions of Guybrush back then. The difference is much heavier than the difference between Bernard's look in MM and his look in DOTT, for instance.
I've never tested any ScummVM graphics filter with Curse either. But I don't think that it would make any significant difference, because all the filters I know are designed to bring the edges of every single pixel down to a round figure, whereas the pixels in Curse are already a bit too small for a noteworthy effect. By the way, I played Full Throttle with such a filter and I really disliked how it looked, because I prefer pixels that look like pixels.
If you compare it with DOTT: I think MM with the bobble heads looked cartoony from the beginning while MI1 and MI2 had a realistic look (also when looking at the box covers).
Maybe they went for a more cartoony look with CoMI because when going to higher resolutions it's easier to draw and animate more abstract characters than realistic ones. It also fits Guybrush a lot better than making a cartoony Indiana Jones adventure :-)
But nonetheless I would prefer a "REAL" MI3 from the man himself.
(Oh *no*, I *think* Ron *broke* the Internet!)