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Comment by rvieira | Hacker News Reader

I played the original ones and I would have preferred a pixel art closer to the original.

That being said, I subscribe what Ron and many people here said. If you don't like it, don't buy it. There's no need for all vitriol. I will buy it the same, since for me Monkey Island was always about much more than the graphics.

On top of everything, this is the actual _creator_ of all the games and stories' vision. It's not like it's some knock-off copy or money-grabbing reboot. If this is how he imagined the new Monkey Island we should at least be happy there's another one!

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Pixel art like which of the originals? Monkey Island 3 and 4 had nothing remotely resembling pixel art and were still beautiful.

Like Ron Gilbert wrote in one of his previous blog posts, Monkey Island 1 and 2 were (what is today called) pixel art because pixel art was "state of the art" at that time. He already (co-)created a retro pixel art game with Thimbleweed Park, no need to do it again...

For Return in particular it does make sense to compare it to 1 and 2, since Return seems to be picking the series up where Gilbert left it and ignoring what others did since then.

(For what it's worth, I remember Curse causing some controversy when it came out, because of that shift to the toon style from the original pixel aesthetic.)

All indications are that while the game picks up threads from MI2 and starts at the end of MI2, the bulk of the game may happen after Curse and even Tales. Ron has said multiple times that "it's all canon" and about the only things that he's acknowledged are kind of ret-conned around are some things that occurred in Escape, which even Tales partly ignored.

We don't have much details yet on how exactly it fits into the canon as the game isn't out yet, but Ron has kept pointing out that Return isn't "MI3a" like he originally grumped an idea about, but a post-Tales Monkey Island game in just about all senses.

Given Murray's involvement in the trailers to date, I think comparing the art style to Curse is more accurate, personally, and I think there's a loving conversation there. I like what I've seen of the art style so far. (But also I like Double Fine's "house style" and this clearly has DNA ties to that, too.)

I was talking about "Secret" and "LeChuck's Revenge". When "Curse" came out I was "too cool" for computer games. Now I'm back at being "lame" :)

Entirely off-topic, but this resonates so much for me - I think I went entirely off computer games for about three years, peaking around the age of 18. I left the world of the Amiga and then later got a PC for Uni and slipped into an entirely different gaming world, running at 5x the clockspeed. On school holidays I'd come back to an ever-failing disk collection, to the point I only had a shareware game called Galaxy Wars (I think?) and an install of SimAnt (on a 20Mb HD, lol), by which point it was clear that the Amiga was truly dead in the water!

If there's one thing I'm looking forward to with this new MI, it's the updated theme tune, which sounds glorious. It WILL be my ringtone again!

They were quite pretty but Ron Gilbert wasn't involved in MI3 and 4. That's why this is a bit like a branch off MI2

> I would have preferred a pixel art

Nothing wrong with a preference but online everyone bikesheds this. I heard endless complaints about Wind Waker cel shaded graphics and that was one of peoples most favorite thing about the game.

Sometimes I wonder how a site can disable or discourage bikeshedding in their comment section. It's probably impossible or needs so little traffic a moderator can handle it (1K comment per second is impossible)

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