Rose

Return to Monkey Island ultrawide solution

Added 2022-09-19 20:48:37 +0000 UTC

I was as excited as many people about the upcoming release of the latest chapter in the Monkey Island franchise, as I have vivid memories of playing the originals back in the day.

By now you probably know that this community is my only support when it comes to finances (and much more, of course), but before this I always had to be a patient gamer and wait for every game to get to a deep discount, which used to be around 75% off on Steam but now usually 60% or so, which tends to happen about two years after the release of a game. I didn't mind, as I always had many other games to play.

Naturally, making fixes for the community had to change this approach, and thankfully along the way I also got review opportunities to help me out. Now with hardly any left, I have to rely on my own purchases just for the task.

That was the case with this game, as I saw the requests for an ultrawide fix on Steam, Discord and reddit. Quite overwhelming for a game that is much better than many others in that it pillarboxed but to a wider aspect ratio than 16:9.

I rushed to look into it via a friend before purchasing a copy for myself, and it didn't take me long to get to a solution.

Unfortunately - though expected from a game like this which relies on static backgrounds and scenes - a number of the scenes still did not have enough content width to display after I forced the game to support any aspect ratio, whereas even for the side-scrolling scenes the background asset was limited at 32:9, making it a weird floating box surrounded by black bars. Still, as I've always been told, and as I do believe myself, it's better than the alternative of having black bars everywhere. Besides, it's better to give people a choice than none, right?

The post is light on screenshots but that's only because this was a prompt fix and the game is puzzle-based, which takes some thinking to progress, but I was more focused on its code and the solution preparation. WSGF member pho was further into the game, so I trusted their testing for the later parts, as seen in this video.

That concludes it for today!