I feel like the visual identity is much more distinguished in Day of the Tentacle. The only places you can see the style of Monkey Island 1&2 are the close-ups in 1 and the boxes of both. And they're mostly meant to be real people. Kinda like the art of the old movie posters. I completely agree with you, though. I don't mind the art of MI2 SE but the art in the first is just... Odd. Especially the close-ups.
Oliver spoke amazingly well. Super interesting. I'm only halfway through the video as of now, but I couldn't help but comment early! Edit: Yeah, both these guys were great. Good talk.
They could have mentioned the ResidualVM project that reimplemented GrimE and fixed bugs like Domino's dialogue before Grim Fandango Remastered came out.
17:47 - this sentence lit my mood :) I love Flash! This summer I was playing Leisure Suit Larry 7 and couldn't help but notice how cruel the graphic scaling is and having an up-ressed version of all the animation frame in vector based graphics the game could stand the test of time. Of course one man can only do so much so I quickly threw away the idea to try and remaster LSL7 in Flash but it was fun thinking about it for a week.
38:38 It was tough for us fans because before the Remastered versions were released Tim Schafer talked a lot about how these would be the "Criterion Editions" of his games, and that tiny details would be added in only ways that people who worked on the original games would know. (He gave the example of a tiny badge on one character's hat -- that only his team would know what it should look like in high resolution.) The first game they shipped was Grim Fandango, which was an utterly fantastic remaster in many, many ways (controls, music, graphics, etc.). There is LOTS to recommend it. However one puzzle in the game relies on you knowing that a particular liquid, a high-end liqueur, contains real bits of metal in it (or "Gold Flakes"). So after all the promises of tiny details that only the remastered team would know and understand... for them to ship "GOLO FLAKES" was disappointing. It wasn't just a slip in quality control (the label didn't look like a high-end liqueur once it had been remastered), but it also said the wrong thing on it, breaking the puzzle for people who hadn't played Grim Fandango before. Maybe Tim got expectations too high when he described the level his team was going to go through on the remasters, but it SEEMED like the promised "low level" attention to detail wasn't there. (Although, again, to be fair to everyone who worked on it, the detail was there in other places -- in fact all the remasters are the best versions of their respective games, and everyone should play them, despite these niggles.) So, after much badgering, they eventually fixed it... for the PC version. (Yes, it remains wrong on the PS4 version to this day.) Shiny Show (see what I did there?) doubled down and put "GOLO FLAKES" in Day of the Tentacle Remastered. An odd choice, as it was a small moment in time that's now been immortalised in THAT game. Not really keeping in the spirit of each remaster being a "Criterion Edition". ("We goofed up on the King Kong Criterion Edition, so we added a giant ape to our Citizen Kane release.") (And, despite what Mark says here, somebody nixed adding Golo Flakes to Full Throttle Remastered, despite there being a bar where it could have easily been added. Someone at DF seems to have said, "I think we're done with the Golo Flakes" thing, thankfully.)
I'm a 2D artist like those guys and I despise Illustrator. For me it's a counter-intuitive piece of software that's so far removed from real drawing. I use it for logos and design stuff, but for all the actual fun stuff I use Photoshop. By the way, they did get the characters redone in Flash. Which is a vector based drawing tool that's way more intuitive.
I am a professional game artist/manager and probably the artist team just stuck with that they know best. In this industry few artists know Adobe Illustrator. Disregarding this human factor, I do agree that Illustrator would've been more efficient to work with because of the visual style of DOTT. But probably nobody can really tell if it would've been a time-saver for the team.
