There is a fan-made "demake" of MI3 in the works that tries to remake MI3 with the graphical style of MI2

I think that low-res could tickle the player’s imagination more than hi-res.
And that’s the funny part of playing a game.

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Mark Ferrari explained well this thing. When you have only a limited set of tools to make something you go for the limit and try to achieve some greater results. When you have all the tools the universe can offer you kinda feel lost and possibly the results will not match what you hoped for. This is really true artistically speaking. That’s why they made such amazing low res masterpieces!

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Are you hating hi res for just one game? Although CMI not following the original style was a big disappointment, in the end I enjoyed the game and some of the backgrounds were quite good to me.
I have both MI SE and they have more movement than the original games.

Then make more animations. Whats the problem? By the way, I hate adventure games on 3D. Even though I enjoyed very much GF and MI4 I think they went the wrong way there. For adventure games I don’t need a 3rd dimension, they are not FPS.

If I want to use my imagination I would lay on a comfy bed and let it fly, no game needed. If I want to use less imagination but still some of it then I’d read a book, less of it a movie, and so on…

If that would be the case (people wanting to use their imagination) adventure games would still be a pile of text on the screen and command line where you introduce text like “look chair” or the like. But that was discarded eons ago, maybe people don’t want to use that much imagination.

Last weekend I showed the best games of the world to my cousin’s kids that came home, and guess what they said… What’s that with those graphics? you want us to try that game? Yep, I wanted them to try it but their first reaction was apathy although they are the best games of the world. One of them managed to play SnM for some minutes and he liked it, but guess what… If they see the screens of the game on a magazine that is one game they won’t buy.

This happens also in programming. Old machines had so many limitations that programmers had to invent countless tricks to squeeze all the power from the chips. The whole demoscene is a result of this approach.

More recently, I discovered that even big companies like Google still have to optimize their code and their data structures in crazy ways to get the most of it and to reduce costs. So, the need to optimize things doesn’t occur only when there are fewer tools but also when higher-level tools would impact performance too much.

All art, even the most immersive one (VR) involves a certain degree of imagination by the consumer, and how each of us fills the gaps differently, is why it’s called art.

I agree with you that most people probably don’t enjoy very much “less explicit” games, in which the mind of the player has to fill all the gaps that a simpler art style or direction has decided to create, but I still believe that there is a small audience that can appreciate this kind of experience.

For example, this is the game that in this moment is at the top of my Steam wishlist and for a textual adventure it’s doing pretty well. It’s of course an exception to the rule, but in my opinion so are adventure games:

I’d play this if it wasn’t Windows only.

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Personally, I never was into text-only adventures (I missed that era by a few years), and what I heard or read about even the most elaborate Infocom masterpiece makes me glad I did.

However, I did “play” and like a lot of Chose Your own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy style books, which I guess fall into the same broad category. I might also be inclined to try a pure text adventure today, provided it catered to modern sensibilities (i.e. no dead ends, no illogical puzzles, no sudden death). I still do very much enjoy text-heavy games like TToN, Sunless Sea or 80 Days (and am really looking forward to No Truce With The Furies). All of those do have graphics to go with them, but a lot of the things going on are only really available in text form.

In fact, I guess I simply find reading a quite enjoyable activity, be it in books, games or this forum :slight_smile:.

If I want hi-res 3D, I look out the window or go for a walk ;-).

But undeniably, shiny, attractive things grab our attention more than something hideous and ugly. And even though beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, it’s difficult to achieve a wow-effect with low-res pixel graphics these days. And one must not forget that the pixel graphics of MM or MI1 that might turn away many of today’s young gamers have been top-notch, state-of-the-art visiuals in their own day and age.

I usually try to not judge things by their cover, and value good gameplay much higher than good looks, but when all you have are some screenshots or a trailer, the look is certainly a deciding factor.

I vividly remember those days when it was exciting to see flashing images on a screen that wasn´t the TV screen AND being able to interact with those images!

My first contact with Maniac Mansion (and I´m sorry to say this, Ron!) was in one of the so called “Disc Boxes”

Those things that people used to share around with dozens and dozens of copied discs where you had NO pictures and just your imagination what the game would be like be reading the title.

It was that sort of discovery that not even playing Thimbleweed Park could recreate for me, just that sort of surprising factor when you never knew what the game you were just booting up would be like.

So one of those disc in one of the two boxes we had said “Maniac Mansion” on it. What would it be like?

Woaaahh, what´s that? That doesn´t look like Battleships, Donkey Kong or Pitfall at all!

What was the consequence of that? Buying legally Zak McKracken and every Lucas Arts game that came after that.

I´m not sure where I´m going with this, maybe that we were more easy to impress back in the day and kinda lost that sense of wonder. Or that taking a step back and checking stuff out even though it looks weird at first might turn out to be rewarding in the long run, even today. It did then so why not now? People love Minecraft afterall and check out how THAT looks.

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First of all, i really like the effort! i always appreciate any fans remakes, because it takes tons of time and in most cases, looks interesting.

example, I really like the Dig HD intro remake, that was done very well. I only wish the characters were more detailed. Other than that, great job.

What I like most and its new in this demake, is the look of guybrush character. That gave me little excitement, on other hand…it needs to be HD :slight_smile:

Hello all! this is my first post ever in the Thimbleweed forums. Having been a huge fan of the LucasArts games, most notably the games created by Ron, I started this little project that is being discussed here.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=42299.40
and
http://cmioe.blogspot.com/

Sadly though, time became my biggest enemy and I stopped working on the “Monkey Island 3: Classic Edition”. However, a kind spanish fan approached me and asked if I would be okay with him finishing what I started and I agreed.

When I started this project over 6 years ago, my aim was to give COMI a retro feel by recreating not just the game itself, but also recreating every bit of artwork, from sprites to backgrounds in the 8-bit MI1-2 style as best as I possibly could. However, without help, this quickly became a very daunting task.

Edger, that kind chap that has since picked up this project, has be doing simple shrinking and some modifying of the original COMI sprites and backgrounds to move the project along. It seems as though he has made some impressive headway with the game. (It would be nice to get some credit though. Oh well, beggers can’t be choosers)

Any hoot, I am just glad that there are still people out there that are enjoying what I started so long ago.

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Interesting, I would like to play the demo, but the link is dead… where is your latest version?

dead:
http://cmioe.blogspot.com/p/downloads.html

Here is the link to the folder that contains both the last working version i did and the raw files for AGS, just in case you wanna look at the work that i did.

https://mega.nz/#F!H0oGmBbA!4Zpwm9-9UtxSERlpOZjoxQ

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Thanks, I’ll resume my AGS copy. Last time I used it was in 2006.

As much as I like lo-res graphics, this demake just feels wrong… Guybrush looks like a toddler next to the other characters… the backgrounds are still using the curly cloud style, which just make it look like a gameboy color port. I am not saying it didn’t take a lot of time and effort to apply filters, replace sprites,… but it looks … well… not something I would rather play than the actual CoMI…
Seeing how fan games take ages to create and rarely get finished, I’d see more value in a smaller 5 or 10-room MI3a chapter with a whole new story and puzzles than a demake or HD remake of an existing game, which can feel as awkward as a school play based on a movie or at best as a big budget musical production you only watch because you like the original.
Anyway, just saying the effort might be better spent on a smaller but more original project than on recycling a huge game with slight odds of ever getting finished.

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