This is a rather momentous year, and was shaping up to be that way before we came down with an aggravated case of Return to Monkey Island. That announcement would have been enough to dine out on through December 31st, but you might recall that we were already celebrating the 25th anniversary of The Curse of Monkey Island*, the third and in some respects most influential Monkey Island game.
And while we can’t speak for how you were celebrating it, we were doing it the Mojo way: By kidnapping Jonathan Ackley and Larry Ahern, trapping them in a giant bottle, foisting 600 questions on them to answer in longhand, and occasionally reminding them that air holes are for closers. The end result is right here for your discerning entertainment. If Lucasfilm doesn’t see fit to give this game a remaster, you know who not to blame.
*Not to mention Mixnmojo itself, as the fan scene and CMI are very much joined at the hip in that babymaking heyday of early internet access that was the mid-to-late-90s.
I speculate that the alligator puzzle may have been cut for being too similar to Gator Golf in Sam and Max.
Also, this was a fascinating tidbit for Full Throttle: "SCUMM isn’t really that limited a development platform, although it is optimized for adventure games. Making an action game fun is really in the programming. While working on Full Throttle, I was asked to do a little programming on the Crush-up-Derby. The controls weren’t to my taste, so I went in and changed them. I did this for both the cursor and keyboard controls. The original implementer found my mouse code changes and reverted them, but he missed the keyboard controls. I have a strong feeling that most people wound up solving the sequence with the keyboard."
I don't know if I ever noticed this? I want to try it out now. Also, I wonder how they handled this in the Remaster.
KestrelPi
It occurs to me though that the stage lights puzzle IS the maze puzzle of this game, for all intents and purposes.
Good call. I buy that.
(It occurs to me though that the stage lights puzzle IS the maze puzzle of this game, for all intents and purposes. At least, to me all a Monkey Island 'maze' puzzle is, is that you have some sort of unusual map, which you have to figure how to interpret in order to navigate to the goal.
And I wouldn't have it any other way, personally. I like the maze puzzles - it's not like they're just brute-force solution maze puzzles designed to slow the game down, they're things that can be figured out and usually require just a little bit of lateral thinking, so I don't know why they're more objectionable than any other style of puzzle the game might have)