Monkey Island – Insult Swordfighting Game | Hacker News Reader

Monkey Island – Insult Swordfighting Game

int33h.com

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Fun fact/veiled attempt to ask for money: Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossmann are creating a new adventure in the style of Maniac Mansion: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thimbleweedpark/thimble...

(No affiliation, I'm a backer though.)

I remember Maniac Mansion, I played it as a kid. It was a) extremely scary and b) impossibly hard. Although I imagine that was because of my age mostly!

It came in a bundle with Monkey Island, Loom and Zak McKraken.

Zak McKraken and Maniac Mansion were the two I couldn't make any progress on!

For me the most impressive thing about Maniac Mansion is how more advanced in terms of gameplay it is, compared to many graphic adventures that came later, since you can select different characters and still beat the game, by solving different puzzles.

Later adventures had better graphics/story/characters, but were more linear than MM.

Thanks to the parent for the kickstarter heads up: I will be backing as soon as I get home!

Maniac Mansion gave me nightmares about nuclear meltdowns when I was about eight. It's still a bit creepy as an adult, but the humor elements are a lot more obvious.

I had the same bundle! Loom one of the best games of all time.

I think the bundle also included Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis. Sucker punches all day.

Ron Gilbert (who worked on the original Monkey Island game) has a site is kinda fun if you liked adventure games. He's been posting old artwork/ideas, some of the puzzle diagrams and things he's been digging up from his storage locker. A fun read.

http://grumpygamer.com/

Dave Grossman is working for reactive studios[1], not on Thimbleweed Park. Ron is working with Gary Winnick, his partner on Maniac Mansion.

[1] http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/11/18/dave-grossman-joins-r...

Hello, I am the programmer of this little game. I wanted to thank you, it is a great satisfaction to be on HN! If you want you can take a look to my other small demo/game that can be found linked just below the game: these are all projects that I did in my spare time, just for passion! Again, thank you so much!

Good work!

Bravo!!! :-D

Very, very cool! So you extracted images and dialog from scummvm game data and programmed the interactions? Or you are interpreting scummvm data straight out?

I took a lot of screenshots from scummvm, many many screenshots, it was a nightmare! Luckily there was no antialias or something so I was able to crop the sprites easily.

I've shared this into the facebook Commodore Amiga group [0] where it's getting a lot of love :)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommodoreAmiga/

Wow, brings back memories. Thanks and... you fight like a dairy farmer!

I like your CV and web site layout as a game, great idea. I enjoyed looking at it.

I think ( found a small bug in the font/encoding. The text in the menu didn't display the ß in "Füße" (German), but the pirate said it right.

The same goes for the ö in "hören".

Oh, I had a hard time playing through this part. My english was just basics and with the all the colloquial speech and puns, I just couldn't understand, or even make sense of the sentences.

Took me some time to realize I was just supposed to fight through different enemies to gather the right answers and use them on the later battles. And even so I was just trying to match keywords between sentences to realize what was answer to what.

Oh, how much fun one miss playing adventure games not speaking english.*

*(TWPFWP - Third World People, First World Problems).

Likewise - I learned a lot of my English from classic adventure games.

For me there was also the additional challenge of growing up in an ex-Eastern Bloc country where you could find dodgy pirated copies of games more easily than the real thing.

So you'd end up in a situation where you're trying to beat a bootleg Legend of Kyrandia translated to Russian by looking up walkthroughs in English and somehow trying to match up both without knowing either language very well.

Those were the days.

Heh, now I'm going to learn Dutch thanks to some Minecraft server chat, where most of the players are from the Netherlands.

You can change the language in the upper right corner. Here's the link for PT http://www.int33h.com/test/mi/index.html?lng=pt

And yes, as you've never played Monkey Island: You indeed have to learn the right answers by fighting multiple battles until you're 'trained' enough.

I did play Monkey Island. I was talking about the experience of playing this part in the original Monkey Island, no the OP.

FWIW, I learned a lot of German playing a German-language copy of Civilization.

Same here: when I was growing up, Italian translation were done occasionally, but they were far from common. Now I'm glad.

I surely lost some enjoyment by missing some of the puns at the time, but it's very satisfying being able to play them now, and understand them 100%.

I loved English classes at school, since I could basically NOT study, and still get good marks.

Origin and Lucasarts games were my real teachers :)

Haha indeed! It's scary to think of how much of my English came from answering the intro-questions to Leisure Suit Larry. I cursed myself the day I discovered alt+z, but now I am happy :-)

Fun fact time: The dialogue for all the insults and responses in MI1 was written by Orson Scott Card!

Really? That's really interesting. Do you have any more info/background how it came to be that he wrote them (and only them?)

I don't know anything more than that he was involved with writing the insults in MI1 and had some involvement in several other LucasArts games including the Dig, which I never played.

Ah The Dig. Such a nice premise, but a very disapointing execution.

Why do you say that, I quite enjoyed it, way way back... :D

Well I do have fond memories of it, I just try to forget the awkward parts. Especially the weird [dinosaur|dragon|bird]-like higher beings that you manage to wake up. They had a nice sci-fi premise and ruined it with some fairy tale mumbo-jumbo.

I do remember though that it had, some harder than usual(for a Lucas Arts game) puzzles, that I really enjoyed.

> They had a nice sci-fi premise and ruined it with some fairy tale mumbo-jumbo.

A common criticism of Card.

Here you go: http://www.gamefront.com/gaming-todays-exclusive-interview-w...

(found through Wikipedia)

My only problem with this is that the pirates (and you) don't move around as little dots on the map screen, having random encounters. Clicking on portraits is less fun.

Luckily there are us who don't mind minor details like that. For me it was so much fun to complete this and to get Swordmaster to say "OK, you win. Well...I hope you’re happy."

The best lunch for a while.

Oh, it is fun and brings back memories, for sure. But it'd be even better with the dots. :)

Perhaps. But on the other hand, then I would have been hunting down the moving dots and spending less time on the actual insults. And I probably wouldn't been able to finish it in reasonable time to call it a lunch break.

Fair point. They could add an option to skip that.

It isn't quite the same when I'm not holding a rubber chicken with a pulley in it.

I always thought that the insult fencing mechanic of Monkey Island games was fun and amusing, but it always felt like a gratuitously inserted grind to me, with the need to wander around the island to find new retorts. It would have been better to add new retorts to progress gates, such that the player is guaranteed to have them by the time he or she needs them.

If you prefer your jokes bluer and your graphics cruder, there is always the "insult beer pong" portion of the obligatory pirate subquest at http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/ .

And I still know most of the retorts after all these years. Way too much time spent on those!

This was what I spent most of my childhood playing on my Amiga! A few years back I got an emulator working and completed it again - it's such a difficult game!

Very appropriate. The right insult at the right time is what makes the decisive impact on closing that deal or fixing that bug in 71% of all cases. This is a good pedagogical means to teach our youngsters the importance of not just wielding the power of wit, but to apply it right. Bravo :)

Someone got it completely wrong. Down-voting my previous comment is not the right insult and not a show of wit. I am disappoint.

Doesn't quite work for me. The answers aren't right - they never change. So whatever insult I have, I get the response for the dairy farmer & shish kebab one followed by ones like "I am rubber, you are glue". I don't see the right one to choose

You learn insults and retorts by fighting other pirates.

In the beginning you don't know how to sword-fight. You will lose. Next time you have a few new insults that you will use and they will know the answer. Next time you will have the answer for that insult.

If I remember correctly, you're always allowed to start the first insult. Pick an insult you don't know the answer to. Hopefully your opponent knows the correct response. If he does, you learn a new response to an insult. If he doesn't, you win that round. That means you will advance a bit, and the enemy retreats a bit. If you win enough rounds (insult - retort), you win the fight. Win enough fights and you get to play against the sword-master, who knows all the insults and reponses.

That's how I remember it too. But it doesn't seem to be learning any new ones... Let me try again.

If I remember right, it's a very time-consuming, grind-y process, pretty out-of-character with the rest of the game. Just gotta be persistent through it. The feeling of success from finally beating that puzzle is great, though, due to the time investment.

This is my favorite game ever! This is one of the best parts of Monkey Island of course, so I thank whoever created and shared this. I just wish they brought back "The Curse of Monkey Island" for iPhone and iPad some day..

I guess you already know it, but at least The Secret of Monkey Island is already on iOS (https://itunes.apple.com/se/app/secret-monkey-island-special...). I'm pretty certain there are emulators if you're jailbroken though...

ScummVM has iOS version.

Here's a soundtrack for this game: https://soundcloud.com/martin-leblanc-eigtved/monkey-island-...

The best part of the game, bookmarked for future nostalgia too!

I'd really love to know the library used to get these lovely pixelated graphics - did this gentleman write his own, or are there mature options out there?

They're the sprites from the original 1990 game (with the campfire scene from the sequel)

http://vaughnroyko.com/state-of-nearest-neighbor-interpolati...

Hello, I've used the createJS library http://www.createjs.com/#!/CreateJS For the graphics, I ripped it directly from the original game.

Excellent stuff, thanks for responding

If you want to take a deeper look, the full source code is available directly from the game page (it's just below the game)

This was one of my favorite games growing up. There was something about it that was just fun and addicting. Thanks for sharing the link.

"I got this scar on my face during a mighty struggle!" "I'm glad to hear you attended your family reunion."

No dice. :(

"I hope you learned to stop picking your nose."

Wow, this brought back some really good memories. I was surprised how many of the answers I remembered!

I miss my Amiga. :)

My favorite part of Monkey Island is the music. I could listen to MI2's sound track all day.

Did you hear mix remix? https://soundcloud.com/martin-leblanc-eigtved/monkey-island-...

"Welcome. Stay a while. Staaay fooorever!" Brilliant!

not bad at all! not sure it's legal, thought

So awesome, thanks a lot!

Aaaaaaaaaand there goes my productivity.

Ohhh yeah. Sitting in a Seminar, listening goes down the drain... ;-)

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