In celebration of The Secret Of Monkey Island‘s 30th birthday last month (30!), the Video Game History Foundation held a stream discussing the classic adventure game with boss man Ron Gilbert. That cost $10 to help support their preservation work, but after a few weeks they’ve made it free for everyone to watch. Seeing as the Foundation are well into the development of games, not just finished products, they also delve into cut content and even give a live demonstration of SCUMM coding. If you fight like a dairy farmer, this is for you.

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Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge will always be among my favourite LucasArts games. The sequel to The Secret Of Monkey Island was where things got a lot more Pythonesque. But it’s a lot more than just a treasure hunt and a barrel of laughs, it was very clever for its time.

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If you played Ryse: Son of Rome you may remember it for the serviceably clangy combat. My friend Jack , a police officer from northern England of several years standing, recalls the game for other reasons. There are those bits where you join a shield wall – you’re in a tortoise formation. There are public order situations that are like that. Most officers in Yorkshire get riot training, because of the riots in Bradford. And that sense in Ryse of having all your colleagues alongside, you’re all behind your shields, getting pelted with stuff, there are flames going off everywhere and you’ve got your enemies in front of you… That’s real! That happens.

City riots are, he adds, scenarios that could be great in a third-person action game – our wide-ranging conversation is rife with jarring transitions of this sort, where talk of broken bones and drug dealing flips over abruptly into talk of reward mechanics and hardware specs. Certainly with the advances in technology, the latest consoles and PCs could cope very easily with the amount of animation required, the particle stuff like smoke, all the crap that comes up off the floor, people getting hurt all around you. It’s like that and it’s scary.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the crowdfunding waters – the Old Men Of Videogames are back, and they want your cash so they can pick up where they left off. Again. This time it’s Ron Gilbert & Garry Winnick, creators of Lucasarts point’n’click grandparent Maniac Mansion (not to mention a little game called Monkey Island), and they’re after $375k to make a spiritual sequel named Thimbleweed Park. … [visit site to read more]