[HN Gopher] Speed running Monkey Island ___________________________________________________________________ Speed running Monkey Island Author : mepian Score : 133 points Date : 2023-06-02 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.grumpygamer.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.grumpygamer.com) | schnebbau wrote: | I'm still sour about the ending of Return. Come on Ron, release | the real ending! | soneca wrote: | Just to have at least one counterpoint in this thread, but I | loved the ending. Much, much better, IMO, than a non-meta epic | fight with LeChuck, for example. | | I took it as a very interesting and profound discussion about | the role of games and fantasy in our lives as adults after | playing it from a different perspective as kids. The dialogs | during the ending are very well thought and thought-provoking. | The role of Elaine in it is special. | | I loved the whole game, but the ending brought it to a complete | new level for me. It's probably something that I'll want to | play again a few years from now. | davidivadavid wrote: | That ending was such infuriating sophomoric "meta" bullshit it | only cemented my perception of Curse as being the best MI game. | norwalkbear wrote: | Same | aflag wrote: | He's made the ending he always wanted. The "secret of the | monkey island" was supposed to be that it was all a park | attraction all along and that was why there are so many | anachronistic things in the game. | davidivadavid wrote: | I'm sure he did. It's a terrible ending. | yetanotherloser wrote: | He already did the "it's a theme park" ending in MI2 and | it was fine. Not tbh my favourite part, but fine in that | context in that time. There was something about the new | one which was appallingly "fuck you for still liking | Monkey Island". | legitster wrote: | Oh wow. I got bored of Return a few hours in - I guess | it's validating to hear that the ending is also bad I | guess. | jdwithit wrote: | I couldn't bring myself to finish Return either. Which is | a huge bummer, since the first couple games are near the | very top of my list of favorite and most (personally) | influential games ever. But the nostalgia tour and | nonstop callbacks to prior games, rather than actual new | content, didn't really do it for me. | rerx wrote: | Very much how he rolls, see Thimbleweed Park. | geraldwhen wrote: | Yes. It's clear he lacks a capacity to commit to an | ending. Endings put a point on things. Endings will be | judged by their impact on the story. | | "It's a game lul" isn't an ending. It's an escape from | the criticism both inward and outward that would result | from a real ending. | bhj wrote: | Highly recommend this channel for well-researched and | entertaining mini-documentaries on adventure game speedrunning: | https://www.youtube.com/@OneShortEye | EscapeFromNY wrote: | I'm always happy to see a speedrunner decompile the game they're | running. I've always thought it was an underappreciated part of | understanding a game. | | But I wish companies would just release their games' original | source code after a while. Monkey Island is almost 30 years old, | and people have already reverse-engineered it, so they won't be | losing too many sales by releasing it. And for Monkey Island | specifically it's not a case of losing the source - the original | devs gave a copy of the engine and game source to the Video Game | History Foundation[^]. But us outsiders will never get to play | with it :( | | [^]: https://gamehistory.org/monkeyisland/ | lnrd wrote: | Considering how easy it is to emulate Graphic Adventures thanks | to ScummVM, I doubt releasing the source code would impact the | sales in any shape or form. People that want to play for free | already have the easiest life possible. I think it's one of | those cases where emulating is as much convenient as grabbing a | copy on Steam. | | You rise a good point. After X years releasing the code of many | things would benefit the public so much without hurting at all | the owners, are there movements about this concept? | madmoose wrote: | ScummVM is not emulation, it's primarily a collection of | reimplementations of game engines based on reverse | engineering, with the occasional donation of original source | code from the developers. | | So with ScummVM you can study how the original SCUMM virtual | machine worked, but to see the original SCUMM scripts before | they were compiled we have to rely on the kindness of Ron | Gilbert :) | lpapez wrote: | As a younger dev I often dreamed of devs releasing the source | code to ancient games so that I could learn from it, but now | that I know how corporate works I've made my peace that it will | happen rarely or never. | | I bet that devs in a company like LucasArts these days need to | wait for weeks on corporate to give permission to use a | alternate email client, just imagine coming up with a proposal | to abandon copyright claim on something. It just can't happen, | you would have a very hard time even finding one single person | inside the company who might actually have the authority and | pull to greenlight it. | moritonal wrote: | Fun fact, for a charity event Introversion released the | source code for a collection of their old games. But they are | also the opposite of big corporate. | Thorrez wrote: | You don't need to abandon the copyright claim to release the | source. It can be released under a license that prohibits any | redistribution for example. | lencastre wrote: | Carmack's release of quake comes to mind. I may | misremember,... | mewse-hn wrote: | Carmack was the textbook definition of rock star programmer | and had a sizable portion of company ownership when they | released doom/quake code, kinda hard to emulate that as a | cog in the machine | madmoose wrote: | You can study the reverse engineered code of a lot game | engines. ScummVM is a massive collection of reverse | engineered game engines, with the occasional donation of | original game code from kind developers. | wizzwizz4 wrote: | Publishing something doesn't mean you disclaim copyright over | it. | erk__ wrote: | Well the post you are commenting on is the original developer | of both the game and SCUMM, so it is not really a | decompilation. That said it would be cool to get a commented | version of the original code if that exist. | | Also the tasvideos forum is nice to lean about games on though | they are not much for point and click games. | EscapeFromNY wrote: | I hadn't noticed, thanks for pointing that out! There's some | fascinating stuff buried in his blog. | jheriko wrote: | his small print is bad, and he should feel bad. | | (its not, but its an annoying rookie fail) | autoexec wrote: | Wasn't it something like Ctrl-W to win? Seems like the easiest | game in the world to speed run! | butz wrote: | Press Alt+W to instantly win the game. | RajT88 wrote: | I played some text-based adventure game which also had | graphics. | | I wish I could remember what it was. It was cool for the early | 90's, sort of fantasy-horror haunted house kind of game. | | I recall finding a bug on a replay of the game, where I | accidentally typed a command one room early in the house, and | it immediately went to the end game screen. Apparently the bug | was that at any time you could basically type something like, | "Open the last door" and you would immediately finish the game. | | That's got to be the fastest speedrun I've seen, just by virtue | that the game intro was a lot shorter than Monkey Island. | rerx wrote: | Could it be Hugo's House of Horrors? Somehow I remember the | name quite distinctly, although I couldn't play it much back | then (did not know English at that age). | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo%27s_House_of_Horrors | RajT88 wrote: | Could be! I remember the house looked more blue and was | centered on the box cover, but there could be more than one | box art. | rerx wrote: | There are screenshots on the author's web site: | https://www.dgray.com/hwpage.htm | | Now I'm contemplating buying the set for 6$. | RajT88 wrote: | OK, the one I am thinking of was definitely different. | | But I definitely owned and played that second Hugo game! | | I am going to have to dig into this tonight and see what | I come up with. | | ETA: It's also possible my memory is totally wrong. Or as | well, that it was just some lone dev who barely got his | game published. I definitely remember buying it from the | bargain bin of crap PC games. | mattl wrote: | That would be my guess too. | somat wrote: | I find software archeology like this very interesting. | | My understanding is that this lispy looking language, we will | call it scummL, compiles to a stack based virtual machine which | is what the game executable would run. scummvm is a third party | opensource reverse engineering project to replicate the virtual | machine so that games written to it can be played in current | execution environments. | | Are there any compilers for scummL known to exist in the wild? I | found scummC but it is more C-ish in specification. | | https://www.scummvm.org/old/docs/specs/scrp-v6.php | | https://github.com/AlbanBedel/scummc/wiki/ScummC-Grammar | madmoose wrote: | There are no original compilers of SCUMM script available | online as far as I know, although certainly Ron Gilbert and | Aaron Giles and probably some other LucasArts programmers have | the originals. | | I don't think there were even any samples of the original | scripts online when ScummC was developed so it can be forgiven | for not matching the original format :) | seba_dos1 wrote: | What you call "scummL" isn't even publicly described in any | other way than by the kind of snippets like in this article. | You can find some more in GDC slides, but that's pretty much | it. | ftxbro wrote: | oh a game on the front page | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147399 | CobrastanJorji wrote: | Such an odd complaint. Not only is this not really a forum | about games, but also the recent Zelda release was at the very | top for like a whole day. | rerx wrote: | Speed running MI2 takes a bit over 30 minutes if you were | wondering: https://youtu.be/5_I7hlaWVCE | chrisdfrey wrote: | A great video on the history of Monkey Island speedruns: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0mso2jW6Jc&t | msephton wrote: | That was very good! | wly_cdgr wrote: | But why ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-06-02 23:00 UTC)