#herman toothrot

[arcanetrivia]

[dominustempori]

Elaine to the rescue!

Though why she sailed to Terror Island and somehow navigated her way through the cave maze and the dark waters and just HAPPENED to have a rope and...

Whatever. It's a Monkey Island game! (Thanks Ron and Dave!)

[captmickey]

Stream is done for the night!

We got some progress in and that included robbing a museum, overthinking puzzles, ditching Herman Toothrot in a hole, dethroning an (ice) queen.... which I only got the pun as I type that, became a member of a semi-secret club, cried over the love that is Elaine, choked a bird, and found three of the five keys.

Thanks to everyone who dropped in, I’ll pick things up again on Friday 8:30pm EST.

Until then, see ya!

[the-philosophers-shirt]

That reminds me of Herman Toothrot from Monkey Island

[dragonairice]

What if Escape from Monkey Island was good though

[writinginthesecrettrees]

In my family, wandering around the house in a shirt and no pants is called “Herman Toothrotting,” after a character from Monkey Island and his iconic response to the question “what happened to your pants?”

“What pants?”

And he wanders off giggling like the madman he is.

[greatchampion]

Monkey Island Appreciation Week Day 2 - Funniest Moment

you'll never guess what's the answer guys

[arcanetrivia]

Me at 30 seconds: Haha that's funny

Me at 1 minute: Okay, tee hee, I get it

Me at 2 minutes: HOW STINKIN' LONG IS THIS VIDEO

(I'm a little surprised neither Guybrush nor Herman ran out of patience, honestly.)

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to see it, what color is the tree?

Guybrush answers.

[tellytabby]

Secret of Monkey Island SE Part 10

Check out my channel: youtube.com/tellytabbygaming

[azurefishnets]

7, 13, 18

Thank you for your ask!

7. Name a game that taught you something that you still remember.

I can't think of one specific concrete thing but I do believe playing games like FFVI and CT when I was so small taught me a lot about using my imagination to build more out of these worlds. Never enough worldbuilding! Never enough character interaction! So it really influenced my imagination to start making up the rest.

13. Describe what would happen if the main characters of the last two games you played switched places. 

In Prehistory, it's Murray!

In Imperial China, it's Earthen Heart Master Herman Toothrot!

In Twilight of the Edo, it's Warimaru B Fiido (with the best damn map of the castle you've ever seen)!

In Wild West, it's GUYBRUSH THREEPWOOD, MIGHTY PIRATE COWBOY!

In Present, it's Elaine Marley!

In Near Future, it's the Voodoo Lady!

In Distant Future, iiit's Robo-Murray! (What goes around comes around you see)

And meanwhile on Mêlée Island, Pogo, the Shifu, Oborumaru, the Sundown Kid, Masaru, Akira, and Cube are having an excellent time doing various trials and becoming a mighty pirate crew...!

18. Name the first game you beat. 

You know this is actually harder than I thought on first glance because I distinctly remember playing FFVI first but I remember seeing Chrono Trigger's main ending before I saw FFVI's. And I can't imagine my older brother letting me play TWO games on his precious SNES at once, but I think I really did beat CT before FFVI. Maybe. 🤷‍♀️

[thenugking]

Return to Monkey Island Predictions/Hopes

Obviously we have Guybrush, Elaine, Lechuck and, judging by the trailer, Murray. Stan and the Voodoo Lady will almost certainly continue to appear. 

Unless the background on the Return to Monkey Island site is lying, we’re also returning to Melee.

The other characters in both original games are Herman Toothrot and the Men of Low Moral Fibre (Pirates) so there’s a chance of them too. Obviously Herman’s more likely, as a more popular and central character, but it would be great to see the Men of Low Moral Fibre (and a rat) back too.

Largo seems fairly likely, although honestly I’d prefer Bob.

I am begging on my knees for more Carla, Otis and Meathook. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but it does seem fairly likely, if we’re returning to both Monkey and Melee?? The more “canon” ending of Secret ends with them still on Monkey Island, pissed at Guybrush, and wanting revenge. Would love to see that, but it would also be nice to go with the opposite ending to Escape so Both Can Be Canon. It’s probably unlikely considering how hated Escape was, but I’d also like to keep the stuff it establishes about them. Let Meathook retire to do art, he deserves it.

I’m also hoping the Cannibals are still living on Monkey Island in this universe. And I mean the original ones, I want Red Skull and Sharptooth back. (We know Herman Toothrot existed as a character so there was someone to talk to during most of Under Monkey Island so there’s going to be people there and look we have so many great possibilities here, I need the crew Or the cannibals at least.)

Wally is a strong possibility! (We’d better have Wally back and they’d better have him confirmed to be Okay by the end of the game, I can’t deal with two Monkey Island universes leaving his fate uncertain.)

I know it’s too much to ask for but it would be nice if they confirmed the grey monkey with Elaine’s root beer was the same one from Monkey Island and in this universe definitely Didn’t starve to death.

It’s possible we’ll get more characters from Curse onwards, since we’re getting Murray. I adore Morgan and Winslow and would love to see them again, but Tales very much feels like its own thing, and I’m not really expecting any characters, islands, or lore from it?? Other than Murray, I think the only characters from Curse and Escape I wouldn’t be surprised to see would be the Barber Shop Quartet, but I still don’t think that’s super likely.

Parrots. Gotta be more parrots. Monkeys would be nice too, y’know.

I’ll be very surprised if Lechuck doesn’t get his fiery beard. It’s so iconic by this point.

Also the Monkey Island volcano has to stop being dormant, right? If you say in the first game that there is a volcano sitting on the island, in the third game it absolutely must erupt.

There’d better be an easier way to get to the north of Monkey Island this game.

We have Monkey Island, presumably Melee, and likely Dinky too (I doubt we’re keeping Curse’s retcon that Big Whoop is actually on Monkey Island). As much as I’d love to return to Scabb and Blood and Lucre…  we’re probably more likely to get a new island than a nostalgia tour. 

I don’t know if Guybrush and Elaine will end up together or not, but I’m assuming we’re not going to go from Elaine going from being annoyed at Guybrush, to declaring he’s the only man she’s ever loved and getting engaged to him with nothing in between this time. Considering Ron Gilbert’s part in writing her in Tales, it seems like she’ll get a lot more autonomy and generally Better Writing than Curse.

Also y’know we’re presumably getting an Explanation as to what the hell was happening at the end of Lechuck’s Revenge it’s been 30 years but finally. I’m assuming we’re getting a different explanation for Big Whoop than in Curse too.

We might finally even discover….. What Is the Secret of Monkey Island?

[arcanetrivia]

Monkey Island Sprites by buloght on Pixel Joint

(original size 350x345; enlarged to show details)

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #448

Top Ten Moments in The Secret of Monkey Island

This week was one of those weeks where I had a list all ready to go, and then I discovered something that made me throw the whole lot in the bin and write something new in a hurry. And the thing that I discovered is that it is, approximately, the 30th birthday of my favourite videogame of all time, The Secret of Monkey Island.

When I was a kid, I’d go round my cousins’ house and play on their Spectrum or their C64. I played the usual 8-bit hits of the era; Dizzy, Ghostbusters, Skool Daze, that really weird and probably insanely offensive Spitting Image beat-em-up… then I got my Amiga around Christmas 1990, and I figured games would be more-or-less the same but with more colours. I was wrong.

I got two games in short succession that utterly changed my appreciation for the medium: Lemmings and Monkey Island. The first was funny, inventive, colourful and characterful; a fiendishly difficult puzzler that nevertheless made you want to come back for more, because you just fell in love with the Lemmings themselves. It was like nothing I’d seen before, and felt impossible. Monkey Island, on the other hand, was not only better, not only more my cup of tea gameplay wise, but just blew the doors of my perception of what games were and what they could do. It was like an interactive movie before that was even a term; a living cartoon where you were the main character. A funny, wordy, witty adventure story, full of gags and references that I didn’t quite get but that I knew were smart and humorous (and there was lots of daft humour in there that I did get, too). It wasn’t just a case of being able to talk to people – I’d done that in stuff like Skool Daze – but the ability to solve problems, to divine solutions; to work out that you can drug dogs by smearing meat with dubious petals. And even when do did something like that, the game was irreverent enough to put a disclaimer on screen assuring you that the dogs were only sleeping. It broke the fourth wall, and I was only just old enough to understand what that meant in narrative terms; this was a game about gaming, about stories and adventures. It was filled with movie references (George Lucas even makes a cameo!). It inspired me to write into Amiga Power for help with a particular puzzle, and they printed my letter, but by the time it came out about three months had passed and I’d solved the puzzle on my own.

Monkey Island was the first game that I loved as much as the cartoons I watched or the comics I read; Guybrush and Elaine and LeChuck and the rest were the first gaming characters that I took to my heart in the same way as Bumblebee, Garfield, or Peter Venkman. I’ve said it before, but I’m not sure I’d love games the same way if I’d never played Monkey Island. It certainly changed the types of games I wanted to play; even though I’ve enjoyed my fair share of platformers, racing games, and shooters, it’s always the slower-paced narrative games that I come back to, the Fables and Mass Effects and Deus Exes of this world (even faster-paced games like Halo, Gears and Half-Life still grab me with their stories, as daft as they may sometimes be). Basically, Monkey Island made me a sucker for a dialogue tree.

Monkey Island was my gateway to a whole host of other LucasArts adventure games; Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango��� Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer were among the first names of games creators that I ever knew (probably the very first, in all honesty, was Peter Molyneux – I am British after all). It was a window into a much larger world, one filled with choice, consequence, non-sequiturs, and rubber chickens with pullies in the middle.

Anyway, to celebrate Monkey Island, here are my Top Ten moments from the game. See you next year for the Monkey Island 2 list.

How to Get Ahead in Navigating: I’ve gone about it before, but this simple, daft joke – swapping a guide book for an actual navigator’s head – blew my mind as a kid. It forced me to think differently about puzzles and comedy and how to approach the game. For little old me, it was a revelation, and just desperately funny.

How Appropriate, You Fight Like a Cow: a discussion of Monkey can’t be had without talking about the innovative swordfights; a wholly successful attempt to replicate the verbal parrying of a classic Hollywood swordfight, the insult-riposte dynamic also reinforced the puzzle mechanics of the game. Sublime.

Order Hint Book: Monkey Island was the first adventure game I played, so I didn’t realise at the time how innovative its gameplay was, because you could never get hopelessly, game-ruiningly stuck, and nor could you die. Except at one point, when you drown, but even that is a hilarious gag that is easily avoidable. The control verbs changing from things like “Pick Up” to “Decompose” is just tremendous.

Use Staple Remover on Tremendous, Dangerous-Looking Yak: Monkey plays fast and loose with game conventions, sending itself up in the process; the moment when Guybrush enters a room and is hidden from view, undergoing a series of preposterous and expensive-sounding adventures, which you only know about because you can read his actions in the sentence line as if you were still controlling him (“use… gopher repellent… on another gopher…”), is a phenomenal piece of comedy stagecraft, a game parodying games parodying itself, using its own architecture to tell a joke (as well as being a play on the whole “noises off” style of gag in the first place).

Ask Me About Loom: like I say, I’d never played an adventure game before; I’d never heard of any LucasArts (sorry, Lucasfilm Games) titles, apart from maybe Maniac Mansion. So the bloke in the SCUMM Bar with his “Ask me about LOOM” badge, who launches into an intense sales spiel when you speak to him, didn’t make sense at first. But when it clicked, the very idea of a pirate in this game directly referencing another game was fourth-wall-breaking hilarious genius; happening right near the start of the game lets you know what you’re in for.

The Rock: when you get to Monkey Island, there’s a puzzle where you need to use a makeshift seesaw to catapult a boulder onto a tree (or something). If you line it up wrong, you can sink your own ship (and presumably drown your mutinous crew). The first time I played the game, this is what I did; there’s another great gag where castaway Herman Toothrot turns out to have a ship of his own. But the second time I played through, I didn’t sink my ship, and sailed back with my original crew. This blew my mind; whilst obviously not at Warren Spector levels of emergent game design, the fact that you could actually change what happened, to have a different experience to another player, was phenomenal, and another one of those watershed gaming moments for me.

Men of Low Moral Fibre (Pirates): the trio of loitering pirates are funny in and of themselves, with their breath mints and Pieces o’ Eight and minutes from a PTA meeting. But what I always found really funny was that they are literally called “Men of Low Moral Fibre (Pirates)”; that’s what it says in the sentence line when you hover your cursor over them (an aside: Monkey Island and Lemmings probably taught me how to use a mouse). Again it was the game using the structure of a game to tell a joke.

Rescuing Otis: this is what promoted me to write into Amiga Power back in the day: how the heck do you rescue Otis from the jail?! There are delightful red herrings regarding files and whatnot, but the eventual solution – juggling acidic grog from mug to mug as you make your way through the town to eventually pour it on his lock – was a rare moment of fast-paced tension in a relatively slow game. Solving it on my own made me feel so clever at a tender age. And it’s funny! So great!

A Rubber Chicken with a Pulley in the Middle: ah, my beloved rubber chicken. Found early on in the game and used in a couple of puzzles, I don’t think I quite grasped the silly brilliance of it; as a kid you’re just more accepting of the surreal. Why does a rubber chicken have a pulley? It’s basically just so you can zip-line across a chasm; it’s a wholly functional, boring plot device. But it’s also a rubber chicken. It’s sublime comic genius. And then you cook it! Madness!

The Voodoo Root: I’ve not even mentioned The Ghost Pirate LeChuck yet (if I’m honest his best “moments” are in the sequel) but the finale of the game, when you’ve distilled your Voodoo Root and you’re dispatching ghosts left right and centre, brilliantly marries an epic adventure action sequence with the point-and-click structure of the game itself. But then you fight LeChuck and he boots you around the island, until finally you crash land on a soft drinks dispenser, and finally defeat him with… a can of root beer. Cue fireworks and a strangely romantic ending. Is it as good as the ending of Monkey 2? No, but nothing is. Literally nothing, in the history of the universe.

Wow, there we are. I never had room for the dance steps, the recipe, finding the treasure, defeating the Sword Master, or Stan. Stan! I didn’t have room for Stan! See, that’s how good the game is; I barely mentioned one of the greatest gaming villains of all time, and I didn’t even get round to one of the medium’s funniest supporting characters. Blimey.

Man, I love The Secret of Monkey Island. Ron and the rest of you guys: you done good. Thanks for the memories.

[captmickey]

ESCAPE FROM MONKEY ISLAND IS COMPLETED!

After a grueling session of Monkey Kombat, I managed to not cause Herman Toothrot (who is totally NOT Elaine’s grandfather) to go silent on me like last time, ranted for a a solid three hours why Escape (part three mostly) is a nightmare, murdered an Australian and gave a sneak peek at the end of Tales!

Thank you @nexttrickanvils for putting up with me and dragging her through Escape (as well as keeping me conscious) and thank you everyone who dropped by. Annnnnnnnnd also an apology for losing it during Monkey Kombat. And forcing ya’ll to witness that.

I’ll pick up the first episode of Tales of Monkey Island on April 21 at 8:30pm EST. Until then, see ya’ll then!

[stagmanparty]

Well Rise of the Friendz-I mean Rise Of The Skywalker Honestly...I really liked it! For real! Waaay better than the other two messes. Sure Abrams did this one?

Heard Lucas helped and boy it shows cause finally good writing!

Now I can buy this people are friends cause they actually spend time together. And while still not a huge fan of her acting (sorry) finally I can like Rey since she has an actual arc. Same with Kylo.

They retcon the shit out of the two previous movies (good!) and even how the Force works but hey I welcome it, it looks cool. I even like the Herman Toothrot cameo XP

I´m still a prequels guy (they came out in my teens) and ep III forever will be the best one. And I doubt this series will go out with so many iconic or meme scenes like those but at least this one I actually want to see it again unlike the other two BLEURGH

[ollamhproductions]

Time to delve deep into the brain of one Herman ToothRot. Not that I *WANT* to, but surely he has something interesting to tell us....