Well, anyway that post is no longer the last one… 
So maybe better on top than in the middle… 
Er, you’d better jump to posts with number 17 in the future then…?
Well, if there are about 30 posts, I wouldn’t know about a poll in post #17, unless the subsequent discussion still centered on it.
@Ema: In order to avoid confusions, it may be useful to delete the “old” poll in post #17.
It is closed, so nobody can make confusion.
Anyway, polls cannot be removed after 5 minutes from submission.
Ok, nobody please suggest to move the poll in The Last Post™ every time a new post is added.
I’m done with suggestions, by now
By the way, this thread was open under suggestion, too… 
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Oh wait, was that was @BigRedButton meant?
Btw. since you are in editing mood: you spelled my name wrong 
Ok, corrected.
You:
- Asked me to open the thread… DONE
- Asked me to add a poll… DONE
- Asked me to correct your name… DONE
- You started telling me in which mood I am.
Mhmm, you start resembling my wife… 
While @BigRedButton asked me to delete the old post, I didn’t do it with an excuse. He starts resembling my boss.
I’ve gotta quit this forum!
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Why would you want to quit the forum when you can have the same life you have in real life here on a forum! But with more Thimbleweed Park!
MI1 was really a test of my rules of adventure game design and I stuck to them very closely. MI1 is a very tight design. MI2 broken some of the rules and because of that, I think it’s a looser game, and more fun and playful. Sometimes you have to miss a few notes.
This is only my opinion and I’m sure you’ll all find flaws and arguments with it.
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Yes, but this was true until the 1992 VGA version of MI1.
This version improved a lot the gameplay experience.
Graphics became 256 as MI2, and a lot of music was added. Almost no part of the game remained silent. The game didn’t support iMuse, but the CD tracks had a very high quality professional MIDI sampling, better than the one in MI2, since that sampling was done by the audio card of the player.
And there was the addition of live recorded sound effects, which are astounding.
MI2, as far as I know did never have a new polished version until SE.
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Ok, I perfectly got what you mean. But “more tightly designed” doesn’t necessarily mean “better designed”.
If the break of a rule makes a more enjoyable result, why not?
Breaking rules sometimes, in the right place, at the right moment and not too often is an art.
And I think it’s good design.
In what I was saying it does. Better designed does not always equal more fun, but it’s still better designed.
People who write characters with prefect grammar do not always write the most enjoyable characters. Sometimes your text not being perfect is what makes them fun.
But let’s not argue semantics (who am I kidding, this is the internet).
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You make me think about the unnameable Monkey Wrench puzzle. 
It breaks rules, you said somewhere you regret it, but it’s funny.
May I ask you what is the puzzle(s) you are more proud/satisfied of?
All in all, both games are awesome. Therefore, this discussion feels a bit like nit-picking to me. Nonetheless, I’ve always considered MI1 to be the (slightly) better one, but I cannot exactly tell why. Some possible reasons are the characters, the dramaturgy, the swordfights, the artworks, the exploration of LeChuck’s ghost-ship and, last but not least, the fact that I played MI1 first and it was love at first sight.
But, like I wrote, both MI games are awesome. The best games I ever played, without doubt. A touch of genius. So, Ron, I really have to thank you once again hereby at this point for all of your adventure games (incl. The Cave)!
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MI2’s music is still awesome (it’s so good), the concept of point&click adventures still is but the games aren’t this great by todays standards anymore. If you take a look at the output, it’s not surprising that point&click adventures are behind other genres. The downfall of adventures is home made.
What’s Ron Gilbert’s most up-to-date ‘list’ on how to make an adventure?
I remember funny and insightful hints from Tim Schafer about adventure game design. Some of his ideas were simple and profound. You were able to imagine how things work together and make sense instantly. There exist smart and valid opinions from others too. There’s Google, there are talks, where devs offer detailed (sometimes also superfluous) insights. So, knowledge, experience and a history is available. Still, most adventures suck.
How do you value talent/taste/education/knowledge/experience/resources/…, different preconditions/needs/cultures/goals/… has someone researched this?
I am curious what where the rules that Ron violated in Monkey2 but followed closely in Monkey1. (There are a couple of unfair puzzles in Monkey2. Maybe he is just referring to this?)
To answer the original question: I think Monkey1 is more important, but Monkey2 is slightly better. In puzzles, music, graphics (strange, I like scanned backgrounds more than pixel art).
Monkey1 too has some incredibly good puzzles, even more original ones than monkey1. But monkey2 has some puzzles that you could base a degree thesis on.
(as for the story, I couldn’t tell which is better. I’ve always seen the story of these games as a pretext to enable puzzles and jokes.)
But I think ultimately what makes monkey2 a better “experience” is the vastness of part 2.
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Guybrush was already a “mighty pirate” in MI2. He was just hunting for treasure. Guybrush wasn’t hunting for treasure in the first game.
As for Elaine, all Guybrush did was sweet-talk her in an effort to get a map piece, which ended up pissing her off, and instead of trying to fix things, he continued on his quest to put the map together. The only reason Elaine bookends the game is because she went looking for Guybrush to find out what mess he was making. That’s a far cry from the “falling in love with Elaine and trying to save her” plot from the first game. Elaine was just a minor character in MI2.
Sure, the voodoo lady was an element in both games, but considering it was possible to complete the first game without ever meeting her, she wasn’t exactly instrumental to the story. Guybrush’s three trials and his efforts to rescue Elaine are far bigger parts of the MI1 story than the voodoo lady ever was. The voodoo lady’s role in the second game was far more significant, with much of her knowledge being instrumental to the plot.
Out of the four story elements you listed, only defeating LeChuck is a significant common element, and lots of stories have recurring villains. And LeChuck’s motivations are entirely different this time. In the first game, he was obsessed with marrying Elaine, and in the second game he’s so consumed with revenge against Guybrush that he’s forgotten all about Elaine.
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The still backgrounds feel like a technical limitation to me. Especially when water is not animated.
The engine could do this for sure, but most computers were slow at the time, and games had to fit on a certain amount of floppy disks. They could have add them in the “enhanced” CD version, but it seems they didn’t bother. In fact, they messed up quite a bit when porting the game to SCUMM V5, ie. some animations are missing, many actors have less colors and they introduced a bunch of bugs too.
Am I the only one who does not care much for the lack of animations in low-res, but I do when it’s high-res?
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You are not. I agree with you. But, since both of us might have lived through the point & click era back in the early 90s, maybe it’s a matter of what you are used to.
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