Same here. Translating it also helps to discover new things. Or they might be only in easy mode. It seems you can get Jojo drunk from the looks of it.
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There is no “realisation” that you need to make him stop playing the piano. Nothing in the game indicates that you need a monkey, want a monkey, or anything about a monkey. You could just as easily argue that you needed the piano, and the monkey was stopping you from getting to it.
Hmm. The problem is that there is nothing on the pump to indicate that you CAN turn it off or on, so I don’t see why you’d even want to try. Even if Guybrush said, “It’s on” when you looked at it, that would give you some hint that it could be turned off.
What puzzle on Dinky Island involved audio?
The one where you have to follow a path based on the sounds.
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/translations#5631491f8195c35c3195e867
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/translations#5634ca3e8195c37c7f55fd2e
And here Boris Schneider was mentioned, possibly referencing the interview posted above:
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/podcast50#5742f5077dce7cd775d14d8f
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I wanted to write something similar a while ago, because monkey and banana are the perfect combination. But you don’t combine the two. And even knowing the puzzle, banana and metronome does not seem like anything useful would come from it. The best outcome one could expect would perhaps be stopping the metronome by impaling the banana. So I would argue that banana + metronome is also a bit of a leap.
Can’t remember such a thing, in neither MI2 nor Tales 
. I assume it’s one of those bits that can be solved by simply walking around until arriving at the desired destination, without really realizing that there’s a shortcut, or a puzzle. If not, I’m slightly worried about the state of my brain …
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Maybe when I played Tales recently I just thought it was exactly like in MI2 and it actually wasn’t? In any event I had more fun mapping out the mazes in Zak than I ever did with the jungle puzzles in Monkey Island. In MI1 it was delightfully creepy though. And I quite liked the MI4 time swamp.
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I replayed MI2 the other day because of this thread (and quarantine), and even I’m not sure. Must mean the talking parrot giving you directions after you give him crackers? I can’t speak to Tales because although I bought it, I stopped playing after about 20 minutes for lack of charm.
In terms of this monkey wrench puzzle, I was 8 years old when this game came out so there were times I got very stuck and I literally just used everything on everything.
Monkey+metronome is easy, cmon you have a banana in your pocket, your name is Guybrush Threepwood, a monkey appears out of nowhere one day, and you aren’t gonna do everything you can with this banana to that monkey, even if it means sticking the damn thing on a metronome?
In terms of the waterfall and the pump, I mean - there’s a dead end with a very usable, out of place object at the end of it. Even if using a frozen monkey on that pump makes no sense, you’re gonna do it if you get stuck. Is it good gameplay design? Maybe not, but of the era, it’s genre-defining.
Also in the mi2:se commentary regarding something else (traveling between islands, i think), Ron or someone mentions the need to kind of stretch things out to hit the “40 hour” playtime goal. Sticking in some nonsensical puzzles gets you there. And I don’t know if this was brought up before, but another meaning of ‘monkey wrench’ in America (at least) is ‘sabotage’ and surely this puzzle sabotaged many players day or days and definitely increased average playtime.
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In that case I must’ve indeed conflated Tales & MI2. Either way the jungle felt like padding. 
There is an audio maze in Tales, 100% sure of that.
In MI2 there is the bones song and the parrot, but you can solve both without audio.
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And don’t forget that sound cards weren’t standard in PCs back then. So a lot of players would had problems with an audio only puzzle. Ok, there was the speaker, but I can’t remember anyone who turned that on.(*)
(*) Well, I did and the bones song was really great on the speaker. 
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No. There was nothing like this.
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Because a banana is to a metronome as a monkey is to a piano. It’s pretty straightforward, to me 
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…or the metronome.
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Tangent here, but in terms of MI2 puzzles I think one of the toughest ones was that damn spitting competition. As a kid, and now as a geezer, when I was trying to figure it out last week.
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To be fair, you couldn’t even turn it off, unless you built in a switch for it or simply pulled the plug. Nothing what the average PC user would do.
If you like annoying audio puzzles, there is one in The Witness:
Despite this and some other minor annoyances, that is a really great game, imho.
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The IBM PS/2 I had in my room in the early 2000s actually had a green volume slider, so you could turn it off. Also it sounded great. (The burned in grayscale CRT was slightly less amazing, looked perfectly fine though.) By comparison, we had a Soundblaster 16 in our Pentium 100 with decent enough speakers, so I knew what properly good audio sounded like.
Though the spitting contest is easy when you know what to look for. Though as a kid I could only solve it by brute force.
The one that I still have no clue about (and keep forgetting what actually matters) are the hand signs. I think if I had to replay MI2 right now, that’s where I’d be stuck for sure.
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Chaos on Deponia had an audio puzzle of sorts that was extremely clever.
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The hand signs I figured out or remembered quickly, the answer is always the # of fingers he shows first. In the commentary they said that it was one of the designers relatives who always tricked them as kids with the puzzle and they could never figure it out.
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