Does Thimbleweed Park belong to the pack?

Seeing the following photo had a great effect on me.

A few months ago we discussed “Where does Thimbleweed Park rank for you” among the adventure game classics of our youth.

I still have to understand if the game will ever reach for me the same importance of the games that I really loved, but observing the physical box of Thimbleweed Park among the boxes of “Maniac Mansion” and the first two Monkey Island games has changed my perspective a bit.

So, does Thimbleweed Park belong to this pack? Obviously, all games are connected by their creators, but does TWP deserve also to be on the same shelf of MM, MI1 and MI2 from an artistic and quality point of view?

(Photo by Christian Klein - Original source on Twitter)
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It. Does.

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Hi Low! TWP was a different experience to me. I did like the game itself, but not as much as MI or Loom. But I femto-helped to create it, I saw it growing, I flew to Berlin to meet the game and its creators and other fans. So, in my life and memories, it WILL have a STRONG place.
Monkey Island was the game I played first.
Loom was the poetry of one rainy Sunday.
Day of the Tentacle was the game my father bought for me as a gift and surprise.
Indy IV helped me to live some difficult days as a young student.
TWP was the game I anticipated, prepared, shared with others, “played” and enjoyed well before and beyond I could even touch the mouse.

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It does not. It is missing the “LucasFilms” logo at the bottom, which makes it completely incompatible with the others. :laughing:

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I suggest we give a vote to : jokes, puzzles, story, setting, graphics, music.

That could result in a slightly more objective answer to the question.

For me:

Jokes (how funny it is): TWP 10, M2 8 , M1 8, loom 0

Puzzles (structure of, inspiration of): M2 10, Twp 9, M1 8, loom 7

story (mysteries, interesting events, characters): twp 8, m2 7, m1 6, loom 10

Setting (location/atmosphere/mood): m2 10, m1 10, twp 7, loom 10

graphics: m2 10, m1 9, twp 9, loom 8

music: m2 10, m1 9, twp 6, loom 10

Well all I can say is that it is so dense every room has so much going on in it. It´s like poetry, it rhymes.
Doug is the key to all of this, he´s a funnier chracter than they ever had in the other games before.
They may have gone a bit too far in a few places. But it´s stylistically designed to be that way.
However it can´t beat Titanic, nobody can…

Then MI2 is incompatible as well. :stuck_out_tongue:

@seguso : I don’t like very much the idea of minimizing a game (or other forms of art) into the sum of its aspects, but I’ll play your game nonetheless because 1) I also love polls and numbers and 2) I want to test the new table syntax of Discourse:

Game Jokes Puzzles Story Setting Graphics Music Average
MI1 10 8 9 10 8 10 9,2
MI2 8 9 10 9 10 10 9,3
Loom 1 7 10 7 8 8 6,8
TWP 6 8 6 7 8 9 7,3

Why?

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That sentence has a second part that answers your question. But read the whole post very carefully, something might have went over your head…

Oh, sorry, I didn’t recognize it! :smiley:

Good, I don´t want to ruin anyone else´s fun recognizing it, by explaining. :slight_smile:

Was I the only one who found Loom quite funny? Just the right balance of pathos and whimsy. And graphic wise, at least on EGA monitor, it had to’ve been among the most stunning games ever. A VGA facelift didn’t do it any favours though.

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Could be. After 20+ years I might have forgotten the jokes :slight_smile:

You just said that to one of the few people in this forum who liked the VGA version more. :stuck_out_tongue:

We discussed the EGA/VGA versions of Loom in this thread.

Was Loom for Amiga the same as the EGA version? Because I only played on Amiga, and then for VGA years later. (And the second time it did seem to have lost some magic, now that I recall)

As far as I remember, pretty much, yes. But I don´t remember much about the blood censorship.

I didn’t find Loom funny, too. Though, Loom is not even one of my favorites.

As I wrote in the “Where does Thimbleweed Park rank for you” thread, TWP is my 4th most favorite adventure game. So, I think, it is basically on a par with Ron’s first point & click games, which are shown in the photo above. Though, the TWP box art is less colorful.

Me personally, I like it´s attention to detail, and it´s colorfulness, and how it fits with the tone of the game, and looks like a throwback product of the 80s, and the mood that tells me whacky comedy with only a slightly serious tone and …

You need to divide all the scores by the nostalgia quotient to normalize them. You’re seeing MI through rose colored glasses. I remember someone on the blog during a post about bugs saying that MI didn’t have any bugs. That was followed by someone posting all the bugs in MI. I have a 600 page bug report on my bookshelf with pages and pages of unfixed MI bugs. I remember reading a review of MI1 someone did in the last year where they have it a score of 10. No, it doesn’t deserve a score of 10.

Do I think TWP deserves to be next to MI1, MI2 and LOOM? NO. But in 15 years, MAYBE. I’ll hold TWP up against MI anyday. Remember, MI wasn’t a success back in 1991. It got good, but not great reviews. It sold for shit.

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As a product, it doesn’t deserve a 10. As something that flooded people with emotions when they were kids, it fully deserves a 10.

That maybe true, but if that’s the case, then MI (and games like it) and a product of their time. That game today is Minecraft.