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Comment by godot | Hacker News Reader

Was actually rather surprised to find that he didn't like MI3 (Curse of)! While I definitely loved MI1 and 2, I actually call MI3 my favorite one. (4 was pretty bad, I couldn't get through even the first 20% of the game)

It takes getting used to the art style, but I felt like 3 really hit the spot with the humor, puzzles, voice-acting (!) and even mostly doing away with verbs (something he stated that he wanted). I totally get that there is a certain charm in 1 and 2 that isn't in 3 because of the major differences in art style. I just feel that 3 is such a strong game that shouldn't be overlooked. If I had to criticize it, I would just say that the last act (or two?) falls short. When the theme park part starts, it felt like they just wanted to rush to finish the game. The rollercoaster ride at the end as the boss battle was also lacking. Though, it was actually structurally quite similar to the final battle in MI2.

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It is not really a matter of liking it or not, but just that it is an entirely different game.

Other people took the licence and did their own thing with it.

They disregarded many elements of MI 1&2.

  (MI SPOILER WARNING)

There was always an ambivalence between Guybrush being a pirate or a kid playing at being a pirate. In MI3 this has completely disappeared (the different art style also prevents us from having an ambiguous look). Guybrush being trapped in the carnival (or sent back home) is also evacuated in the first minute of the game.

It does not make it a bad game, but certainly one that does not really offer a continuation of the first 2 games and is more interested in doing its own thing.

That's perfectly fine but I am curious to see what RG would do with MI3

I'm lukewarm on 3 because it's got that feeling of "made by fans" instead of original ideas coming from the original minds. So you see repeats of insult swordfighting, the lazy crew that do nothing once you put to sea, etc.

Murray and the "A Pirate I was Meant to Be" song are both great, though.

Dueling banjos were also great.

MI3 is a good adventure game in its own right, but it's a very different flavor of MI than the first two, which are decidedly more literary/surreal/sardonic.

To elaborate, MI 1 and 2 can very much be seen as the glorified daydream of a child imagining himself to be a pirate. (There are certainly some books that play with this sort of thing, but I'm not remembering them at the moment. Pan's Labyrinth and Sucker Punch are movies in this vein.) Hence the zaniness of the world, and Guybrush having little personality of his own beyond a naive aspiration and a certain wit--he's a sort of surrogate for the player. The ending of MI2 suggests this is very much the case, but leaves it ambiguous. An MI3 by Gilbert would undoubtedly have continued along these lines.

CMI pretty much eschews the MI-as-daydream idea altogether in favor of MI as a sort of off-Disney world/production, meant to be taken at face value, with Guybrush becoming more of a character in his own right rather than a player surrogate.

He didn't say he didn't like it.

He just said it wasn't his game, in the sense that it wasn't his way of continuing the story, and that he'd like to pick off where he left of after MI2.

Given the tone of Gilbert's post I'm not sure he would have been pleased with any version of MI3 that wasn't his.

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