Bugged animation on Lucre Island, chess match?

[xanthusous]

On Lucre Island, I'm attempting to interrupt the chess match in order to steal the clock to navigate the swamp ; but every time that I distract the skinny pirate the game seems to hang up after he completes his "I'll show you a move!" line (at which point I can still pause the game or open the menu, but nothing else).

Any way around this, short of restarting a new game or finding a different save file?

[MJS WARLORD]

whilst they are distracted LOOK at clock then press the pick up key , and as you have found out it is bugged , just keep repeating the distraction conversations.This game is a perfect example of how a game AI works , example just knowing where the bonze hat is not enough , you can dig forever but you will never get it unless the AI recognises you asked a certain person enough questions

[xanthusous]

Thanks -- unfortunately in the situation my game is in, once the skinny pirate has made his distracted/poor move - the second 'successful' distraction - I cannot interact with anything (i.e. movement keys do not respond, action prompts disappear and do not respond, can't access inventory, and all animations on screen stop).

[Sangas]

I've ran into this exact same problem too. The game soft-locks after the skinny pirate says "I'll show you a move!". I started a new game and it also happened again. This was quite frustrating.

Thankfully I discovered that only a two weeks ago (9 Oct 2020) it was announced that ScummVM (https://www.scummvm.org/) was adding support for Escape from Monkey Island (as a result of merging in the sister project ResidualVM which hasn't been worked on as much as ScummVM). If you don't know what ScummVM is, it's not an emulator but a complete rewrite of all the executables that the LucasArts adventure games were built on. So as long as you have the game files you can play it in ScummVM.

Now the support hasn't made it into the stable release yet (currently v2.2.0 at time of writing), but the latest daily (unstable) Dev builds do. I was able to run Escape from Monkey Island through ScummVM by just pointing it to the downloaded steam game files, and then accepted all warnings about missing files and the fact support is still "unstable". I tried loading my steam saves (pointing ScummVM to this save file locations), but unfortunately they could not be read from within ScummVM.

I was however to start a new game again (in ScummVM) and play past the Chess game soft-lock without any issues. So I'm at least happy.

[nobsterthelobster]

As you say unfortunately the save files are not compatible with scummvm and I didn't feel like starting over.

Fortunately I eventually got over this hang either just by waiting long enough or pressing ESC on the keyboard a bunch of times. Not sure exactly what did it but the game suddenly started working again after being frozen for around 30 seconds.

[KCadventure]

I get this problem running the original game on Windows XP. It's not something unique to the Steam version, or that anyone will be fixing any time soon sadly. If anyone else experiences this, know that the game doesn't freeze completely, you just have to wait a very long time before Guybrush will move again.

[gabrielestebanm]

***SOLVED***
I had the same problem, almost uninstalled it.
The solution is very simple, just wait for some minutes without touching anything and eventually starts working again.....

[Sven_Q45]

Sometimes after a few seconds.

[magomenie]

Thanks a lot for the answers!

Since this was the first google hit for that problem I just wanted to point out that the whole ScummVM thing which is marked as an answer may be nice but not really the easiest solution since save games aren't compatible and I won't start over again.

So just have patience and wait about < 1 minute and the game will move on!