Not for long, hippie.
Thoughts on the game:
The artwork looks nice independent of knowing about the original version. It's clean and spacious and sharp. I really enjoy, for example, the fact that there is now a line of ships behind the Scumm Bar, which adds a lot of depth to the game. The water effects look nice and aren't overbearing.
However, part of the charm of the graphics has definitely been lost. This might just be me, but I enjoyed that the first part of the takes place entirely at night. The new graphics have a lot of areas (Swordmaster's, for example) that are very light, as if the sun is coming up. A dumb complaint, I know, but it goes a bit further. I prefer the sharper "lighting" of the original, where you just have big yellow squares in windows and hard colors. The new version uses alpha blending and other effects to give a more....well, taking-advantage-of-the-new-tech look. So the windows glow and the circus appears more vibrant. I just don't prefer this - the older version feels much more organic, much more "we had to work with what we had and it still looks awesome."
Which, in a way, makes me appreciate the old graphics more.
The characters overall aren't great. They are functional, but some are horrid. Toothrot comes to mind. Stan works BUT I hate how chiseled he looks. The shopkeeper looks brilliant. From a performance standpoint, they look great. But after that, it comes to personal preference, and I really don't prefer them. The random pirates look pretty bad as well.
The new graphics also hurt the animation side of things. I hate how Guybrush scales perfectly now - I much prefer the old "become a puddled mess of pixels" look when he goes far into the background. Getting shot out of the cannon looked weird. Riding the pulley chicken looked too smooth. Guybrush's walk looks overly smooth. The talking animations take advantage of the fact that the graphics are of a much higher resolution, which makes them look lifeless, since there's basically just a small mouth opening and closing. Watch the cook when he's crying, for example, and compare it to the old one - they were working under worse conditions, so the movements had to be more exaggerated. But now we've got this minimal animation that just....looks much more lifeless.
The music is excellent, and plays great homage to the original. I can't say I prefer it over the older stuff, but it works very well, to the point where I'm not noticing issues. That's a good thing - even par.
Overall, this is the same problem/feelings I had when I got Street Fighter 2 HD Remix - you have these nice graphics, but now it only highlights the limitations they aren't fixing in the graphics department. So when there's close-up conversations in the Scumm Bar, there's still little to no animation (you couldn't put in mouth movements?). Yes, this preserves the original look, but it looks out of place because I halfway expect them to update it. So, when you had these beautiful SF2 characters doing 2-frame victory animations, it just looks odd. Meathook's "Hello Roger" doesn't look near as charming.
Gameplay remains good, but I don't like the new interface. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to double-click to fast travel somewhere, and no reason why I need to keep hitting the button to move on a scrolling screen. Let me assign one stick to a camera pan and the other to pointer movement, and that would make things a bit easier. The inventory being on its own subscreen sucks. The fact that I don't have control over the hotkeys sucks - I ought to be able to assign commands to the triggers instead of having them wasted, and I ought to be able to use the dpad better. Many times a command won't execute from the inventory screen, and I have to do it a few times over. Likewise, the highlighted item doesn't highlight enough - make the border for it flash. Overall it's sort of a mess - serviceable, but nowhere near as good as it could be. The grog puzzle to get the guy out of jail was a hassle - I switched to the old interface to get through it easier.
Voices are good. I hear Yakko Warner/Old Man Lollypop, Tom Kenny (Spongebob/various piratey voices), a some other notables. HOWEVER I really, really hate the lag in between the jokes. The dialogue really needs to pop better. Right now, a lot of it sounds like a bad sitcom (Everybody Loves Raymond), where the lines have too much dead silence in between them. The scene at Marley mansion comes to mind, which needed to move a lot faster.
I really wanted the option to play with old graphics, and/or voices, and/or new music. The scripting engine seems to handle it flawlessly when I switch in mid-sentences, so I fail to see why it couldn't be given to me. I'm sure there's a technical reason I'm not privy to, but oh well.
I just got to Monkey Island, so I've a ways to go. Overall I'm giving the concept an A++, but the current execution about a C+/B-. Yeah I'm sounding overly critical, but I just
would that be the solution?"
