[HN Gopher] Speed running Monkey Island
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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
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(page generated 2023-06-02 23:00 UTC)