On Warlord Games' "Bolt Action"

As I've said before, I collect toy soldiers. I don't know why I like them. It's weird.

In any event, I have, or had, three main toy soldier games that I play:

Kings of War, the fantasy battle game by Mantic Games (I also play their sci-fi stuff intermittently, like Deadzone)

Dystopian Legions, the steampunk, or to use their own words, "Victorian Super Science-Fiction" battle game by Spartan Games

Bolt Action, the World War Two battle game by Warlord Games.

I say "had" because I think I've more or less given up on Bolt Action.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't given up on Warlord Games' Bolt Action models. I still buy them. They're nice models, if a little chunky, and they make a huge variety of different Second World War style soldiers. No major complaints there.

But Bolt Action the game may have seen its day for me, after a good many games over the last year or so.

In some respects, there are a lot of advantages to Bolt Action. It's quite simple, with very standardised soldier, weapon and vehicle rules making most aspects of it pretty quick to learn. Some aspects of it are quite effective. Shooting, for instance, isn't enormously powerful if you use cover effectively. There are, however, quite a few issues with the game:

1. The activation system.
   You draw dice from a cup or bag and whichever player's die it is, they activate a unit. I think this is meant to represent the "ebb and flow of battle" but if can very easily result in one army suddenly hurling out an enormous number of actions, if their dice keep getting drawn, while the enemy sits around doing nothing. It's also possible to "game" the system by adding more dice to the pool with oddball units like medics and special weapons, making it more likely that a certain player's die will be drawn earlier.
    
2. It in no way represents historical Fire and Manoeuvre tactics.
   Maybe this is a pedantic thing to care about, but Bolt Action seems to base itself on a "Warhammer 40k" style system in which squads of soldiers are kitted out with an "assault" weapon and a "heavy weapon", as Space Marines typically are in Games Workshop's game. In reality, in the Second World War, a squad of ten men didn't advance together with a light machine gun, rifles and any short-ranged weapons all firing simultaneously. Rather, the squad would be in two sections, with the light machine gun section laying down covering fire for the rifle section to advance on the enemy. As the smallest squad size in Bolt Action is usually five men, it's essentially impossible to replicate this, as historically most light machine gun teams would have featured at most three soldiers.
   It doesn't matter in any event, however, because in Bolt Action light machine guns are so ineffectual that they are generally not worth taking. Their limited firing (they only get two more dice than an ordinary rifle) and complete lack of any enhancement to "pinning" an enemy unit means that they cannot provide covering fire in any way beyond three riflemen, which costs the same as a single light machine gun in terms of points, albeit with a slightly improved range. It annoyed me a bit recently when I saw some posts on the Warlord Games forums arguing against squads taking a light machine gun and sub-machine guns because they serve two different purposes in the game, when that's exactly what historical squads were equipped with: the two squad leaders (sergeants, corporals and the like) were often, and in some forces always, equipped with a sub-machine gun for short-range firepower. Their main job was to direct the riflemen and/or light machine gunner anyway.
    
3. There is insufficient differentiation between vehicles.
   In Bolt Action, there are only four different gradations of armoured vehicle: light, medium, heavy and super-heavy. As such, Warlord has very little room to move when classifying tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles. This makes for a rather unrealistic scenario in which, for instance, a late war Panzer IV German tank is identical to the Soviet T-34/85. In actual fact, even the latest models of Panzer IV were markedly inferior in terms of armour and firepower to the T-34/85 (which is the whole reason the Germans developed the Panther).
    
4. It is too difficult for infantry to deal with vehicles.
   Technically you can buy "anti-tank grenades" to allow your infantry to more easily charge and destroy a vehicle, but this is a fiddly process which far from accurately represents the situation, in which infantry on a tank could shoot into gun slights, toss ordinary grenades into turrets and down hatches, smash treads and gun barrels, and a whole host of other creative things the tank itself would be powerless to prevent. In Bolt Action, unless you've gone to the trouble of buying "anti-tank grenades", the likelihood of your infantry charging or damaging a tank, even a fresh unit which has suffered no casualties, is very slim, which is a far from realistic scenario probably again deriving from Warhammer 40,000 in which "power fists" and the like are needed to damage vehicles in close combat. In Bolt Action it's quite simple for a tank to simply steamroll an enemy line without the slightest concern if enemy armour or AT weapons are destroyed or preoccupied. As an average platoon can only purchase one tank, this essentially means that whichever army uses its tank to kill the enemy's tank first now has a weapon which can ride roughshod through the enemy army, when in actual fact a tank which drove unsupported against infantry would have very quickly found itself with any number of problems.

Those more or less sum up my main issue with Bolt Action: it neither encourages nor rewards any kind of historical authenticity. Sure, I personally am not interested in exactly recreating actual historical battles, and enjoy a bit of a Hollywood or Company of Heroes kind of vibe, but at the same time it would be nice to think that the game was in some way a Second World War game and not just an incredibly generic platoon-style military game with a veneer of Second World War imagery slapped over the top. But it is, and it's done well because of its admittedly good models and flashy presentation. Here's how I'd change the game:

1. Split squads up into historically composed sections for fire-and-manoeuvre.
2. Give light machine guns a bonus to "pinning". They don't necessarily need more shots (but they maybe should have them too).
3. Add an extra two armour and heavy weapon classes. This would involve reworking the vehicle system a bit, but it would be more realistic.
4. Turn the "anti tank grenade" rules into the normal rules for infantry assaulting vehicles. Then units with specialised explosives can have another bonus.
5. Revise the activation system in some way, possibly involving spending command points if you want an extra go straight away without handing over to your opponent. This would also give more of a role to officers, when at present they're just walking morale bubbles. There are also some odd consequences of that, too - why would my Inexperienced Officer be remotely Inspiring to a group of Veteran Commandos, for instance? This is a problem with Commander units in tabletop games in general.

Of course, it wouldn't really be Bolt Action anymore, would it? My advice, really, as I know more than a few people are disgruntled with Bolt Action's limitations, is to look at alternative games. You can still use all the miniatures perfectly well, of course. My current direction is Disposable Heroes and Coffin for Seven Brothers by Iron Ivan Games, which is a game which basically renders Bolt Action completely redundant, although I'm looking into Chain of Command by Too Fat Lardies as well. I hear Rules of Engagement is good too, and I mean to look into it. In any event, don't be seduced too easily by smartly-dressed rulebooks. You're not necessarily getting the experience you could be.

Opinions Can Be Wrong Plays! The Consuming Shadow

Want to see me play through and almost win at The Consuming Shadow but not actually win because I suck at the game's combat system? Well your wish has been granted!

Some Further Thoughts on 'The Consuming Shadow'

So I've been playing some more of 'The Consuming Shadow', Yahtzee's horror roguelike, and I have some more things to add to my previous post. I've now completed the game once, which is to say that I got the 'A' ending with The Scholar, who is the default character of the game. I went to Stonehenge, figured out the god's rune and beat back the Ancient, which is actually very easy. You just whack his tentacles and eyes as they appear and then counter his magic as you would with a Cultist enemy by copying his spells. I was probably lucky, however. I had a good playthrough in which I managed to unlock two new characters. Firstly I unlocked the primarily mêlée character, The Warrior, by completing the lockpick delivery mission and beating the subsequent dungeon. This, nicely enough, gave my Scholar an advanced close combat attack of his own for that playthrough, which seems to have been useful as my pistol-whipping of the Ancient's tendrils was surprisingly effective. As a result of this completion I also unlocked The Ministry Man, who is seemingly one of the "challenge characters" of the game - he only has 24 hours to save the world, rather than 60. I've now had a few goes as them and my thoughts are as follows:

1. Yahtzee probably should have re-written the in-game dialogue for playing as The Warrior. Something one notices when playing a lot of Yahtzee games is his rather verbose style. He's no Hemingway, and his elaborate prose can at times be a little jarring depending on the character in question. I can more or less accept The Ministry Man using the same dialogue as The Scholar, because while The Scholar is an intellectual and might be expected to express himself in such a way, The Ministry Man is heavily implied to be an existing Yahtzee character known for his rather involved note-taking activities. The Warrior, however, is described as "a two-fisted man of action in a world beyond his understanding". All of The Scholar's descriptions and so forth are retained, however, giving this apparent henchman of organised crime a fairly unlikely voice. This is particularly noteworthy because The Warrior does have unique starting lines and various others which establish him as more "plain speaking" and less of a user of complex language compared to The Scholar. I did appreciate the unique text messages the characters receive, however.
   On the other hand, Yahtzee in general uses way too many similes, and (no offence to him) often pointless, trite or ineffectual ones which add nothing to what he is saying. In general, though, he just uses too many similes. There are plenty of other language techniques out there to choose from!
2. I'm still convinced that combat is clunkier than it needs to be. While The Warrior has a dodge move, I feel as if the characters in general could use a duck or crouch manoeuvre. Another thing which surprises me, really, is the lack of stealth elements in the game. I'm surprised that it's not a valid option to hide from enemies, at least as a way of giving combat more variety. It also seems a bit awkward that The Warrior's more powerful mêlée attack is a kick, even though he has a knife in the insanity minigame. He could at least stab up some fools. Often your mid-range, waist-level kick is "hitting" creatures hanging from the ceiling or otherwise out of reach, which only really makes sense with the arcing move of The Scholar's pistol whip, which makes The Warrior's attack look off.
3. It's possibly too easy to get gear. In most "safe" towns you can find a cheap piece of gear immediately, and more are available in dungeons. Something which added to the challenge of a game like FTL, which I've never managed to finish (yes, yes, because I suck at computer games), is how situational the random events could be depending on your ship layout, your crew and a host of other variables. I find that if I'm regularly collecting gear in 'The Consuming Shadow', most random events become a breeze. This is particularly true when one uses the Lucky Charm to harvest gear more quickly.
4. To refer back to my point about atmosphere in the last article, I think some more "English" dungeons could have worked. There could perhaps have been a historical or ruined building layout, especially given that the UK is riddled with mouldering architecture. A nice ruined abbey or some such would fit the bill. The house, office, warehouse, park and brick building environments are maybe a little generic.
5. The game doesn't really tell you this, but it's possible to narrow down information on the rune, colour and aspect of the Ancients by inspecting the markings and bodies in dungeons. This information, however, is not recorded in your notebook, so you have to do it straight away in some fashion.
6. I appreciate the references to Yahtzee's older Chzo Mythos games, particularly the possibility of Chzo as one of the Ancients and the concession in the game of an existing "Tall Man", like the hunter monster in this one. Furthermore, it's nice that The Ministry Man is heavily implied to be Trilby, one of the protagonists of the Chzo Mythos. It's interesting to see that although Yahtzee tends to characterise the Chzo games as a bit pants in hindsight, he still uses Trilby. I also like the use of the Ministry of Occultism, as in those games, and the idea that by 2015 Trilby would have become a high-ranking agent. The use of codenames like T, C and F are good nods to the history of British Intelligence as well. My initial thought, actually, was that C would be Yahtzee's old character (and one of Trilby's supposed colleagues in the Special Talent Project) Chris Quinn, but I don't think that really makes sense.
7. One thing I will say about this, however, is that in the Alpha of the game the Ministry texts were completely anonymous, which gave them a certain unsettling feel when you received the negative ones. Now that they're addressed from "T", this sympathetic character, some old texts like threatening to shoot himself unless you give him good news, contemplating taking his cyanide and having disturbing thoughts about his secretary (the last of which in my opinion was the least necessary) from early Alpha days seem weird and out of character. This is especially true because T's diary entries, which you unlock by playing the game, emphasise his level-headedness and actually describe his conscious difficulty with bringing the apparent apocalypse into meaningful perspective.
   It's worth noting, by the way, that the game's wiki currently describes T as "your handler at the Ministry", but if you read the diaries it's evident that T has possibly never met The Scholar before, and at least has not seen him for a long time. It's also apparent that apart from seemingly being an associate of Keegan, The Scholar is largely unaffiliated with the Ministry, even in an unofficial capacity, and that they've simply "kept an eye" on The Scholar.

In any event, 'The Consuming Shadow' is still fun. I've been watching Yahtzee's 'Ego Reviews' on Youtube and he mentions in the one for 'Trilby: The Art of Theft' (another favourite of mine) the possibility of additional content for 'The Consuming Shadow' at some point, perhaps in time for the Steam release. Hopefully that's also provided to everyone who purchased the game through other means. At this stage I'd argue that the aspects which would liven things up in further content would be another dungeon environment or two (perhaps with some more background assets), some event artwork, possibly another playable character (although I realise I haven't unlocked The Wizard yet) and maybe some kind of custom mode. I imagine alterations to the game's combat and so on would be too big a task. In any event, this is one I'll be attempting to keep multiple blinking-from-the-darkness abominable eyes on.

SPOILERS! Ending A screen below!

"I just wanted to go into Stonehenge!"

Some Initial Thoughts on 'The Consuming Shadow'

As I once stated in my article 'On Zero Punctuation', I quite like the works of Yahtzee. I'm not a complete Yahtzee fanboy, mind you. I certainly think he buys in a bit too much to this whole "Oh no there are evil forces of political correctness who want to lock us up for making crass jokes" paranoia which seems to exist on the internet, but I think for a mostly one-man team he's made some pretty fun games in his time, games which have given me just us much entertainment as many notionally "professionally" made games and a good deal more entertainment than even more such titles. With 'The Consuming Shadow', however, he seems to have progressed properly into "profesh" territory himself, as this is not a free title but one you must purchase for the sum of ten American-style dollars.

I'd been keeping my eye on the game for a while, but lost track when it actually game out, so I've only just grabbed it as of a few days ago (as of writing). I'd played a bit of the alpha, but not too much, and I was looking forward to the improvements made in the full version. In case you're unaware, the game is a procedurally-generated "roguelike", which is to say that every play-through is randomly generated but at the end of each playthrough (regardless of how it ends) you get experience points and thus levels which contribute towards your next playthrough. The game's in two dimensions with a fairly simple interface and a silhouette art style, which leaves a lot to your imagination.

August 16th, 2015. Made the mistake of looking at the 'Latest Threads' on The Escapist forums...

Here are my thoughts so far:

1. The game is fun. It's not overly complicated, it's quick to play, and the procedurally-generated nature of the content gives it a feeling of longevity, in my view at least.
2. The dungeons feel a bit limited. Dungeons are a single storey of a randomised assortment of screen-sized rooms, regardless of whether you're in a fancy home, a warehouse, an office building, a park, etc. Thus the dungeons themselves can be a bit monotonous at times. There's also not a great deal of background material in most of them.
3. The controls are also a bit limited. You can walk forward, run forward, turn, shoot, make a short ranged close combat attack and cast spells. Apart from one unlockable character with a dodge there's little variety of movement, like ducking, jumping or what have you, which can make gameplay feel a bit stiff and unrealistic.
4. The art style works. I don't think Yahtzee always gives himself enough credit for his artwork, and claims that the silhouette style in this primarily compensates for his limited skills, but leaving the enemies up to your imagination gives the game an unsettling feeling. There's a decent variety of enemies as well. The music and sound effects are quite good.
5. The game has a nice deduction game appended to the main dungeon gameplay in which you have to gather clues to figure out which ancient being you're meant to be banishing from the universe and which exact magical incantation you'll need to do so.
6. It's possibly not as atmospheric as it could be. It certainly is atmospheric in the sense that it gives a nice uneasy feeling of Britain falling under a mysterious darkness that no one really wants to acknowledge, but I feel like it's not as quintessentially "English" as it could be. Admittedly, you can also travel to towns in Wales. I feel like one thing which could benefit the game would be some unique artwork for the random encounters and a little more artwork for the town screens, a bit like the visuals that come up each time you reach a new city in Organ Trail. I need to put a bit more thought into this, and obviously Yahtzee wanted to limit his artwork, but I still feel like this could have helped.

Overall I think 'The Consuming Shadow' is a pretty decent game to play if you've got the inclination. It's spooky and sombre with a definite sense of progression. For a mostly one-man job I think it's very admirable indeed. At the same time, I feel like if someone was to take inspiration from this game for a project of their own, there are a few ideas which could be expanded to really capitalise upon the potential of a concept like this.

A Brief Comment on Fantastic Four (2015)

It's bad. Yeah, everyone is saying that (but not everyone), but what makes it bad? I'll sum up:

1. The plot never stops setting up. Meet Reed! Meet Ben! Meet Sue! Meet Johnny! They build a teleporter! They use a teleporter! They get powers! The government exploits their powers! They build a new teleporter! Doom got powers! What's going to happen now? Oh, we beat Doom. The end.
2. There's no sense of "family". They're a bunch of thinly-written characters who barely relate to each other. They never even work as a team until the very end. Part of the point of the comics was that the Fantastic Four expressed the idea that your "family" is a group of people with whom you have a shared experience. This never comes across in the film, and Sue never has their experience. If anything, the 'Four' in this film is Reed, Ben, Johnny and Doom. This leads me to:
3. It's kind of sexist. Yeah, the old comics are sexist too, but so is this. Sue never goes to the other dimension until the very end. She gets her powers in a very arbitrary way. None of the men even think of bringing her along even though she was part of the team that built the teleporter, and it's never brought up that they didn't.
4. They make exactly the same mistakes with Doom as in the 2005 film. He's attracted to Sue, so he fails as a reflection of their embrace of family: remember the classic line "Doom needs no one." Doom rejects the society of others because of his massive inferiority complex. In the film he also has superpowers. Thus instead of being a character who pursues power, he's simply a character who misuses power, making him just an arbitrarily evil version of the other main characters. There's no explanation for why he's that way.
5. The film is grey, flat, boring and colourless.

This might have worked as a crappy sci-fi film about teleportation and body horror, but there was no need to waste the characters of the Fantastic Four on such a concept. Even an incredibly generic film where the Four got powers and Reed's old colleague Doom, now a power-hungry tyrant, attacked them because he thought they were the biggest obstacle to his taking over the world/becoming a god/whatever, and they had to defeat him, would have been better. I didn't mind that they made Johnny and Sue into more active characters in the plot, but they could have done a lot more with it. You'd be better off watching the 1994 one than this.

Monkey Island 2: The Lost Cutscene?

Update in 2020: Some new information about the "lost cutscene" has appeared; see below.

 

Typically I go through phases where I'm really interested in this or that thing. Currently I'm very interested in the Monkey Island series of graphic adventure games, particularly the curiosities of the second game, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. I've been trying to come up with an explanation for the ending, and I've been scouring blogs, interviews and game transcripts looking for any scraps of information which will help me to piece together a more coherent explanation for the ending than that which has come before. I haven't quite managed that yet, because so far I feel like nothing seems to really cover every bit of the plot, but in my exploration I have come upon something else. For my own amusement I was using a program to look through the recorded dialogue for the Special Edition of Monkey Island 2 and came across some curious dialogue I hadn't heard before. At first I thought it was maybe something they'd recorded for the Special Edition which was never implemented, but then I checked a transcript of the game's dialogue which was made before the Special Edition was released.

As a result, I believe, at the risk of tooting my own horn somewhat, that I've discovered a lost cutscene in the game which has hitherto been unrecognised by Monkey Island enthusiasts over the past twenty-five years. Now I could be wrong. Maybe other people are aware of this, but so far my online searches have revealed nothing. Basically, what I've discovered is an additional cutaway to LeChuck's fortress which seems to have been set between the first cutaway, which featured Largo, the Voodoo Priest and the newly-resurrected LeChuck, and the second cutaway, which is Largo and LeChuck discussing Guybrush having acquired the first map piece to Big Whoop. I'll let the dialogue speak for itself. If you want to find a pre-Special Edition version of this dialogue, check here.

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, back at the fortress...

LECHUCK: Aye...
LECHUCK: Largo...
LECHUCK: I hear that Guybrush is looking for the lost treasure of Big Whoop.
LECHUCK: This be true?

LARGO: Well... yes sir, but...
LARGO: What good can a chest full of money do him?

LECHUCK: It is not the treasure that is important.
LECHUCK: It is what is buried beneath the treasure that concerns me.
LECHUCK: He must not find the treasure of Big Whoop.
LECHUCK: See to it.

LARGO: Yes sir.

I wonder if this was written but never implemented because the designers felt that it gave away too much about the end of the game. In any event, as far as I can tell there's no time in the game in which this cutscene ever appears. That being said, it's clearly been lying around in the game script, because they got the voice actors to record it. Presumably they just printed out everything and got them to record all the dialogue they found just to be on the safe side.

This is just to illustrate the scene. Given they used everywhere else,
my guess is that the dungeon room would have been used for the lost cutscene (or not! See below).

On the one hand, this is an interesting cutscene because it establishes more clearly why LeChuck cares about Guybrush looking for Big Whoop. Something I always found confusing about the game over the years were the existing cutscenes, because I couldn't figure out what it mattered to LeChuck whether Guybrush found Big Whoop or not. In these cutscenes, Largo keeps showing up to tell LeChuck about Guybrush's progress, and LeChuck is increasingly frustrated. Why does he even care? It felt to me like the designers thought that LeChuck should just oppose Guybrush's goal simply because he's the villain. Recently I decided that it must have been that LeChuck, like the Voodoo Lady, knew that Big Whoop contained the "secret to another world" and wanted to stop Guybrush from finding it because if he escaped into another world he could never get his titular revenge.

Now I'm not so sure. This cutscene seems to reveal that LeChuck knows all along that there is something buried under Big Whoop. In my opinion this also means that, in Monkey Island 2, Big Whoop is definitely just the treasure, and "Big Whoop" isn't the name for what is buried underneath, ie the tunnels and whatever else is going on in the weird ending, although apparently it is the name of the mysterious Amusement Park at the end. That being said, I have a couple of theories about all this.

1. It's possible that the tunnels and so forth under Big Whoop compose at least part of the "plenty of booby traps" which Marley and his crew apparently buried with the treasure. How the four of them built this massive system of tunnels is beyond me, but then again implausible stuff happens in those old Monkey Island games all the time. These would have been designed to keep safe the "secret to another world" contained in Big Whoop, which appears to be the E-Ticket. That doesn't explain, however, why there is so much stuff specifically from Guybrush's past down there, unless part of the "booby trap" is that the tunnels take shape as a sort of "dream" of whoever is inside. Seems like a bit of a stretch. LeChuck would want to stop Guybrush finding this because if Guybrush was trapped or killed by this, it would deny him his Revenge.
    
2. The tunnels are some kind of means of accessing different times and places. Someone once suggested a similar idea to Ron Gilbert and he said it was wrong, so I'm kind of doubtful about this one too. My only theory based on this would be that the tunnels link Dinky Island to an amusement park where Guybrush became separated from his parents as a child, as well as to the back streets of Mêlée Island at a time when the street was literally "closed for construction": ie part of the town was being built. LeChuck would obviously want to stop Guybrush finding these because it might allow him to escape into another place and time. I don't think this one is right either, although Mr. Gilbert has implied that time travel is involved in Monkey Island at some point and this seems to be the most likely place.
    
3. Okay this one is going to get really weird. A lot of people argue that the ending of Monkey Island 2 reveals that the whole thing was just a daydream on the part of a young boy and the Monkey Island world isn't real. It's a fair argument, but it doesn't explain all the facts, like Elaine waiting by the hole, Chuckie's eyes, or the simple fact that Ron Gilbert has said this one is wrong too. I'm going to rework this one a bit: the Monkey Island world is "real" within its own narrative, but there is another world where the Monkey Island world is fictional. This world is sort of like the actual real world but rather than Monkey Island being a series of computer games, Monkey Island is a set of attractions at an amusement park. It's possible that Guybrush is from this world but ended up in the "real Monkey Island" world as a child. This explains the E-Ticket: it's a piece of evidence proving the existence of another world. Marley and his crew would have sealed it up due to the appalling existential dread they experienced at the discovery that their world was partly-real, shared its existence with another world, or seemed to be the figment of other people's imaginations. This of course doesn't explain how LeChuck could possibly know any of this such that he would have a motive to stop Guybrush from finding it, apart from the fact that it would allow Guybrush to escape him, although in Revenge LeChuck generally does seem to know more than he's letting on about quite a few things.

I can't explain it, but I do feel as if this cutscene adds some more fuel to the fire. Maybe one day the circumstances will arise which will allow Ron Gilbert to make his "true" Monkey Island 3, or maybe one day he'll just give up and spill the beans. He has said that his Monkey Island 3 would take place "two minutes" after the end of Monkey Island 2, "in a carnival" which seems to suggest that at least what's happening at the end isn't some kind of fleeting illusion. Who knows, though. At the end of the day, though, this is the sign of a good composition, a good work of art, even: a comedy adventure game which keeps people like me wondering about its ending twenty-five years later. Somehow I feel like if I cudgel my brains sufficiently the answer will reveal itself, but it hasn't so far. Then again, I've never really been that good at solving adventure game puzzles.

Update in 2020: This article from Video Game History Foundation sheds a little more light on the "lost cutscene": it was present in unused artwork. The cutscenes with LeChuck and Largo would have originally taken place as close-ups, in this case with Largo facing LeChuck at his "desk" (which is visible on the left hand side in the key room of the fortress in the final game). This still doesn't explain the significance of the text in this scene, or why the dialogue was cut from the final game (obviously the graphics were cut to save on disc space), although, as I've established, it's still present in the game's script. It does, however, demonstrate that it must have been part of the game's development for a while. I'm still of a mind that it was cut because it gives away too much about the ending.

SOURCE: The Video Game History Foundation (link)

Monkey 2 Lite Differences and Adventure Game thoughts

Lately I've been getting back into some Monkey Island, the classic adventure game series by Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman et al, formerly of Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts. One thing I'd never experienced before, however, is the "Lite" mode of the second game, notionally for game reviewers and inexperienced players. I'd heard of it, and knew that it made the game supposedly woefully easy, but I wasn't sure of how. The version I grew up with didn't even have the "Lite" option. It was just the proper game and that was it. Sometimes people describe it as "easy mode" or even the normal version as "hard mode" which seems a bit odd to me. As far as I can tell there's simply the main game, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, and then this heavily stripped-down version which was seemingly added in so that reviewers could breeze through the game and experience all of the story. I had no desire to play the "Lite" mode because I didn't see the point. It wouldn't be the complete thing. It's a bit like not drinking full cream milk.

Nonetheless, the other night m'colleague and I sat down and played "Lite" mode purely out of curiosity. More specifically, as one did as a child in the Nineties with such games, he played and I sat next to him yelling out advice. It probably took us all of half an hour, but although we're both seasoned players of LeChuck's Revenge, it's hard to imagine how anyone would struggle. What I thought I would do, however, is go through the Lite mode and mention all the changes I observed, because I can't see that anyone's ever done that, and it's an interesting exercise.

Part I: The Largo Embargo

You still have to make the voodoo doll, but it's pretty simple. As with the main game you use the paper taken from Wally's house to wipe up Largo's spit and use the shovel from the sign in Woodtick to dig up the grave to get the bone, as well as nabbing the hairpiece from the room. What they completely eliminate is the "thread" puzzle, which in the main game involves the bucket, mud from the swamp, the door to Largo's room, the laundry shop, stealing Largo's claim ticket from the back of his door and receiving the comedy bra in exchange. All that happens is you simply find a white shirt of Largo's lying on his bed, so it's in exactly the same room as the wig for the "head" component of the doll. It's doubly odd because the shirt is a unique inventory item only found in the Lite version. There's no bra on the bed. I guess that means if you play "Lite" you're getting fewer jokes as well as fewer puzzles.

You still need money to hire Dredd's ship, but you don't need to get Bernard the chef fired by dumping the rat from the laundry in his cooking. In fact the rat is unable to be selected and the components of the trap are either missing or reduced to background elements. Bernard himself is missing. There's unique dialogue from the bartender that the chef has already been fired. What's interesting about this "Lite" mode is that not only does it eliminate puzzles, but it reduces interactive components of the game so as to not distract the players. Dredd already has a lucky sailing necklace and you don't need to steal Wally's monocle. It really reduces the content of Part 1, making it feel like less of a narrative and more of a series of arbitrary fetching chores. Probably the only real "puzzle" is cutting Pegbiter the alligator loose so that the innkeeper is distracted.

Part II: Four Map Pieces

Given that this is the longest and most expansive part of the game, and possibly any LucasArts adventure game, the way this gets trimmed down is really remarkable. Let's go by map piece.

Young Lindy's Map Piece (found in the Booty Boutique):

This one is no puzzle at all. Rather than the piece being valued at six million pieces of eight and having to be traded for with the Mad Monkey figurehead, the shopkeeper will simply sell it to you for one hundred pieces of eight, little under a quarter of the money you get from the bartender. As there's no need to get the Mad Monkey head, Kate Capsize is completely removed from the game, as is the Spitting Contest, because there's no need to win the Spitting trophy to sell at the shop to raise the money to hire Kate's help. Now that I think of it, it's kind of odd that Dredd can't navigate to the coordinates, because it's not like Kate does anything besides give you an anchor to ride up on. I guess the point is Dredd knows how to get between the three islands but otherwise isn't an especially competent sailor. Anyway, as the spitting contest is gone, the old fellow with the cannon is gone too.

Rapp Scallion's Map Piece (found in the Scabb Island Cemetery):

This one has slightly more of a puzzle element, but all you need is to open the crypt. Rapp's coffin is clearly labelled with his name and a unique description which doesn't appear in the main game, eliminating the quote puzzle, and inside the coffin his map piece is simply sitting on top of the ashes. You still need to trap Stan in the previously-owned coffin to steal the crypt key at his shop on Booty Island, but you can simply take the hammer and nails from the Woodsmith in Woodtick. He merely tells you to bring the hammer back when you're done and to take as many nails as you like. There's no need to distract him by sawing off the Man of Low Moral Fibre's peg leg at the laundry. Similarly there's no need to use Ash-2-Life from the Voodoo Lady to temporarily resurrect Rapp, nor do you need to obtain the Famous Pirate Quotations book from Governor Phatt's bedroom. As a result, you never even speak to Rapp, which scraps a funny moment from the game, and you never need to go to the Steamin' Weenie hut.
I've been digging through the script and files for the game and I've discovered that it is possible to resurrect Rapp. I guess they couldn't be bothered to program out the Ash-2-Life sequence. If you do so, however, all he says to you is "What are you bugging me for? This is Easy Mode!"

Mister Rogers' Map Piece (found in his house off Phatt Island):

This is the next most absurdly simple after Young Lindy's piece. On Phatt Island, the waterfall is already "turned off" to reveal the Newly Discovered Gaping Hole. You don't need to turn the pump at the top of the waterfall using Jojo the monkey, and as such you never put the banana on the metronome in the Bloody Lip bar to get Jojo to stop playing the piano. When you're arrested on Phatt Island, the Gorilla Envelope containing the banana is missing. You still need to do the bone puzzle with Walt the dog to escape the jail, however. After passing through the Gaping Hole and subsequent tunnels, you arrive at the house to discover that Rum Rogers is completely missing. There's no drinking contest. As Kate's been eliminated, it's impossible to obtain her Near-Grog by framing her for your crimes on Phatt Island anyway. The telescope and mirror puzzle is also gone. All that you need to do is "open" the trapdoor at the far end of the room of the house and Guybrush falls through to discover the skeleton holding the map piece.

ASIDE: I originally referred to this as "Rum Rogers' Map Piece", but did you know that in LeChuck's Revenge, the "Mister Rogers" who was first mate on the Big Whoop expedition is never referred to as "Rum Rogers", let alone "Rum Rogers, Sr."? The man at the house is referred to by Guybrush in exactly one piece of dialogue as "Rum Rogers", but it's never indicated that "Mister Rogers" was also called "Rum" or even that Rum, as in the man whom you actually meet in LeChuck's Revenge, is even the other man's son. I'm suddenly inclined to believe that Rum Rogers might actually be meant to be Mister Rogers' brother. Rum only says that he "inherited" the cottage "two months ago" (although he also says "I wish I'd never bought this house" - which is it?). The idea that the character Guybrush meets in LeChuck's Revenge is the son of "Mister Rogers" who found Big Whoop seems to be something that was invented in The Curse of Monkey Island and has been retroactively applied to the previous game in fan consciousness completely accidentally. The "brother" interpretation would fit with the fact that Rum Rogers calls himself "retired" in LeChuck's Revenge and is clearly an old man.

Captain Marley's Map Piece (found in the Governor's Mansion on Booty Island):

This, along with the Rapp Scallion map piece, is probably the more complicated of the four, but it's still pretty darn easy in this mode. To obtain the invitation to the party, you simply need to play the roulette game in the Phatt Island alleys once. There's no need to solve the "if this is X, what's this" puzzle because whichever number you pick in the game automatically wins. After going to the party things progress more or less normally: you swipe the map piece, are identified by Guybrush the dog, get stopped by Filbert the gardener and speak to Elaine. When she throws the map piece out of the window, however, it simply hovers on the front lawn without blowing away. You simply pick it up there and you're done. The clifftop and Big Tree rooms are completely removed. As such, there's no need to obtain the fishing rod: the fisherman on Phatt Island has been removed from the game. If you try to bang the garbage bins outside Elaine's kitchen to trick the chef into chasing you so you can steal a fish, nothing happens. The chef doesn't come out. You can't take Guybrush the dog as you never go up on top of the Big Tree to sort through the papers (or to obtain the telescope, as that puzzle has been removed from Rum Rogers' sequence). For this reason you never have the accident on the Big Tree and the dream sequence with the bone song never takes place, nor do you need to take Elaine's oar to the Woodsmith to be repaired. You can still take it, but there's no reason to.

This also cuts some other stuff from the game, effectively. There's no point in going to the Phatt City Library, for instance, although you can. There's no need to get the drinks from the Bloody Lip bartender. As a result of this again a lot of jokes and narrative content gets eliminated from the game, making Lite mode seem like a decidedly anaemic piece. The ending of the part is identical, however, with Wally being kidnapped while analysing the map and Guybrush travelling to LeChuck's fortress via shipping crate.

Part III: LeChuck's Fortress

In this part, because of the changes to the game, there are effectively no puzzles at all. There is no dream sequence in Part II so there's no solution to the "ugly bone thing" puzzle, which was probably scrapped for being too hard at any rate. You simply walk past the "ugly bone things", Guybrush commenting that they're too heavy to open. This leads you straight to the big door and the key. There's no spitting puzzle with LeChuck's death trap either. You don't have the drinks or the straw, as there was no need to obtain them. What is added, humorously, is Wally complaining that he needs to go to the bathroom, and then urinating on the candle to turn off the trap. It's actually quite funny, albeit literally taking the piss with what an absurd solution it is and how effortlessly it's achieved. You still light the match to blow up the fortress, but that's hardly a puzzle. What this does is turn an already weirdly short Part, which you would think would be important, into an even shorter and more seemingly-irrelevant one.

Part IV: Dinky Island

As far as we could tell, this part underwent the least alteration. The only major change is in the surface section of the island, in which there is no need to break open the hanging bag of cracker mix with the broken bottle or distil the sea water via the Martini glass. You simply find three crackers straight away in the barrel where you only find one in the normal game. You still have to follow the parrot's instructions, take the rope from the crate, use the crowbar to open the crate to obtain the dynamite, dig up the X, use the dynamite to blow open the concrete at the bottom of the hole, and use the rope with the crowbar to assemble a makeshift grappling hook.

The final confrontation with LeChuck is identical to the main game. I found this slightly surprising because it's not exactly an easy sequence of events. I particularly feel as if the puzzles for obtaining LeChuck's underpants and beard are challenging. It's not as if, for instance, you'd assume that helium would help your rise in the overburdened lift, or that you'd remember that you even had Stan's complimentary hankie from way back in Part II. I suppose, though, it'd be virtually impossible to streamline these puzzles to any greater an extent, and even the game reviewers deserved a challenge at the end.

The ending of the game is as weird and baffling as it ever was, but the elimination of the dream sequence from Part II means that it is less effectively foreshadowed and doesn't feel as thematically consistent with the rest of the game.

I've read that "Monkey 2 Lite" was effectively a joke on the part of the developers, intended to be absurdly easy to mock those who lacked the patience and determination to puzzle their way through challenging adventure games. I don't know if that's true, but the entire mode is an interesting lesson in adventure game design. For instance, because of the nature of Part II, it's virtually impossible to simplify any part of any particular sequence without setting off a chain reaction which simplifies the rest, to the point where puzzles are abandoned wholesale and you virtually only need to do the bleeding obvious to complete the game. I've recently read criticism which argues that adventure games are essentially nothing more than elaborately disguised "pick the right key to unlock the door" games, and this is to an extent justified, although I would argue that part of the trickery of adventure games is that sometimes the door you can unlock is different to what you might think.

Furthermore, part of the point of Monkey Island at least is that the puzzles are a means of enabling jokes. Using Jojo the monkey to turn the pump on Phatt Island, for instance, is basically just a key in a lock, but the point of it is that it causes the absurd and incongruous situation of a modern water pump "in a pirate game" and the sight of Guybrush putting a piano-playing monkey into his jacket, which he later uses like a wrench. As a result I would argue that traditional adventure games are one of the more effective ways of doing game comedy. For the same reason I would argue that the obvious and probably intentional deficiencies of Monkey 2 Lite indicate that adventure games can't simply be reductively described as locked door games where the puzzles divide up chunks of story, because eliminating puzzles eliminates a lot of the funny, strange and interesting parts of the game in the same way that watching someone on YouTube playing normal Monkey Island 2 is never going to be the same as playing it yourself. It's about your personal interaction with the game world. Sure, the adventure game may be a relatively simple genre, but it doesn't need to be more complex. Its core method is a very effective way of conveying storytelling and humour. In many respects, all games are "find the key" puzzles, even if the "key" is simply having the right reflexes or knowledge of game mechanics or whatever.

If I was to argue that anything would improve adventure games, it wouldn't be shoehorned roleplaying or action elements beyond the existing extent to which such elements are already incorporated in parts of adventure games. My one suggestion is that more adventure games ought to have multiple solutions for puzzles. This would obviously take more programming, but it would also give adventure games more complexity as well as potentially reducing their inscrutability. Weirdly enough, I think this is something Lucasfilm Games actually did originally with Maniac Mansion, in which any combination of three of seven characters could be used to complete the game, but didn't really do afterwards. They did, of course, go down the route with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis where there are three completely different middle acts of the game, but that's another story. Multiple puzzle solutions would also eliminate the "I've come up with a perfectly sensible solution but it doesn't work" dilemma. It just involves a lot of forethought on the part of developers. I think a reasonable amount of playtesting can accommodate for that.

My point at the end of all this is: don't play Monkey 2 Lite, or rather, only play it after you've played the real game for a laugh. The normal game isn't "hard mode" or whatever, it's just Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge as it was meant to be played: with tonnes of interconnected and baffling puzzles that barely make sense. Don't write off the classic adventure genre, because its limitations are also its strengths. Those "find the key" tasks can be a force for good, and scrapping them leaves you with nothing but a thin gruel smirkingly served up by developers to mock reviewers writing for early Nineties computer magazines.