Below, you can find the Guybrush – version five – that actually made Monkey Island 2: Special Edition (you can confirm this for yourself by looking at this screenshot) in addition to an assemblage of comparative shots from the forthcoming remake.
Don’t forget to vote for your favourite Guybrush-ne’er-to-be (“Special Edition” is currently in the lead)!
LucasArts have been curiously posting old concept art revisions on a Facebook page dedicated to the forthcoming Monkey Island 2: Special Edition. Four scrapped versions of your favourite leading man, Guybrush Threepwood, have appeared so far:
My question is, which of these discarded Guybrushes would have been your favourite?
For a completely different type of comparison, you can check out our earlier post that juxtaposes old and new cover artwork from the game.
Below, LucasArts’ all-new Monkey Island 2: Special Edition key art, side by side with my Mac box cover for LeChuck’s Revenge:
When I linked these to a friend, he instantaneously called the new art “’special.’” Yeah… yeah: Even the poor little monkey responsible for numbering the sequel got a visual keelh… uh, overhaul.
If nothing else, contrasting the original with this all-new interpretation goes a long way in illustrating the amazing talents of the man behind the original cover, Steve Purcell. Steve, you’re awesome.
LucasArts recently re-released their long-running, beloved Jedi Knight series digitally on Steam to a rather ecstatic response to boot; only, a major wrench got thrown in the gears when the parties responsible failed to appropriately revise the games for the most current generation of operating systems. As a result, the three earliest releases – Dark Forces, Jedi Knight and its expansion disc, Mysteries of the Sith – suffer from instability, incompatibility, crashes, bugs and other lesser issues.
This is a rather shocking turn of events after a wildly successful reintroduction of the classic LucasArts back catalogue to audiences old and new, and indeed strikingly qualitatively different from the previous batch of releases, especially so when taking into account that fixes to some of the aforementioned issues are in fact readily available! For instance, players who already own the games on CD can simply extract the original wave audio for their background music to work (thanks Richard!).
It is only natural, however, to find the company trying to think up ways to maintain the newfound revenue flow and subsequently benefit from the excitement caused by these re-releases. Therefore, it’s also all the more disappointing that oversights such as the aforementioned might considerably affect the public perception of the company’s current endeavours.
LucasArts and Valve announced today a new initiative to bring classic adventure games in the LucasArts catalog to Steam. Much loved titles such as Loom, The Dig and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis will be available tomorrow on Steam.
The announcement was being teased throughout the day yesterday on LucasArts’ twitter, and now there are a few extra facts being shared there as well. Firstly, this first batch of 10 games is “just a start”, and there will be more to come. Apparently each title has been reworked to run in Windows XP and Vista, and those that previously required SCUMMVM or DosBox to work, now won’t. They are now self-running executables that will work in modern-day video resolutions with switchable full-screen and windowed modes. The physical DRM that came with the games back in the day in the form of cardboard inserts, like the Grail Diary, will now come digitally in the package.
In related news, the first episode of Telltale’s new five-part Tales of Monkey Island series is about to drop, with the website taking last-minute pre-orders. Later this month the special edition of Secret of Monkey Island will launch, a re-imagined makeover of the original game with high-resolution graphics and a remastered score.
