Anyone that wants it deserves to be separated from their cash. lol

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I loved MI2 including the ending. It's humanist, life-affirming and all-around positive, because the message is exactly the opposite: The real world is magical. Children's imagination counts. Fictional characters have their fictional lives. You can daydream and drop by for a visit.

1. *Beep* nostalgia. I want to feel like I felt when I was a kid just discovering media, I want to resurrect that sense of wonder. This means INNOVATION.

2. *Beep* references. The first Star Wars movie I watched was a pirate copy of 7, a year after its theatrical release. Yet, because I am on the interwebs, even before Darths and Droids was a thing, I knew plot details of the six previous movies rather well. I could "get" jokes and whatnot. And that's basically the situation with references!!!!!1!!!!11111! in adventure games. ZOMG I'M SO CLEVER WE'RE SO CLEVER GET IT GET IT HAHA YOU GOT IT I CAME. These painfully unfunny but instantly recognizable as cues to laugh, like jokes on retirement home television, endless references to references to references to references, until transcription breaks down and everyone has alzheimers. No. Just no. Please get a creative vasectomy and *beep* off forever.

3. *Beep* caricature nihilism. Not only I like meta stuff, I am supposed to like it. It's a major part of my self-image. I instabuy and instaconsume media that have to do with fiction vs reality and the constraints of the medium, I love The Neverending Story, The Phantom Tollbooth, that one Russian book about a baby dragon, Spectral Stalkers, Immortal Defense, Planescape: Torment, Primer, Watchmen, Monkey Island 2, Space Quest IV, Hatoful Boyfriend, The ______ _____ of ________ (GOG game), Costume Quest, Last Action Hero, The Truman Show, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the Gamers movie, the webcomic YuMe, Toy Story, Umney's Last Case, Brom's The Plucker, Only You Can Save Mankind, the framing story of Assassin's Creed (what an amazing metaphor for video gaming it could have been), the *beep*-you endings in Tom Holt's books, [reading about] *beep*ing with the audience in theatrical performances. *Beep*, I read the whole first books of Thomas Covenant and The Dark Tower; both were *beep*, but I persevered because I was "supposed" to. I struggled through Undertale until the twee *beep* became too much.

The difference is, in all the good and passable stuff, the characters matter. In Thimbleweed Park, they don't. Not only there's no real story behind the fictional story, the fictional story falls apart when you look at it sideways, too. 15 minutes in, we have two corpses. Who killed them?
NO ONE. It's a game. It was scripted and programmed this way. There are no in-game character motivations. No one killed Franklin, the game just faded to black and then started using a floating sprite with the same name. No one framed Reyes' father -- he doesn't have a father, "he"'s just a sprite. Really, the only way the game can redeem itself at this point is if the characters hunt down Ron Gilbert and punch him in the *beep*s, IRL.

Not really either. I see this DLC as some kind of very specific "making of" bonus. Similar to bloopers or line rehearsals, but not quite. I agree that the bleeped version is the one that should be played normally, the "true one", and i agree that it may be confusing in the eyes of those who don't get the bleeping joke, and who assume that (as is usually the case) the unbleeped version is the originally intended cut. But still, a "making of" bonus shouldn't be blocked behind a playthrough.

I adore the Blackwell adventure games (as I often said, my ~1000 games backup folder is just named "Blackwell, etc"), and of course I've played them before re-playing some with the dev commentary on. But still, I think that anyone, for whatever reason (maybe because for some people peeking behind the curtains is more amusing than the innocent spectacle itself, or just because they're curious about it without feeling hooked enough to 100% complete the game, or whatever), should be free to jump into the "making of" version directly. Just like we're free, if we want, to listen to the dvd/bluray audio commentaries on first watch. Not my choice, but if someone comes from that angle...

Just make clear that the bleeps are intended, and that the unbleeped parts were mere placeholders to facilitate the voice capture, available for the curious about the making process. But don't add walls of cumbersome obligations.

Yes, notes on things never to do. It's the kind of thing that may make some kind of perverted half sense within the first month or two after release. My savegames still happen to be on my laptop, but even so I'd still be pretty annoyed if I had to copy them over to this computer to start a new game with the different audio enabled. Imagine having to rewatch a movie before being allowed to watch it with the director's commentary. It's already bad enough that sometimes you have to sit through long-winded menu animations first. (Yes, that also applies to many games which aren't as well-made as Thimbleweed Park.)

I've felt humiliation in my gamer years, certainly, when buying Gothic 3 or The Fall - Last Days of Gaya full price. People have put down three digit sums to back the Project Phoenix, Mighty Number 9 and ShenMue 3 Kickstarters. THAT is humiliating, oh god. People have backed the Kingdom Come Kickstarter and were informed of massive reward downsizing and cardboarding in the 140€ and up editions (no apology was issued) only when DHL had started sending out the parcels. The sheer shame for trusting these devs and the publisher, woo-hooo.

Thimbleweek Park - Ransome Unbeeped, that's two bucks for a funny mod. If that feels like "humiliation" but the stuff up there doesn't, there are a few short circuits in your bionic gamer entitlement implants.

Besides, "I'll cross this off my wishlist" is a hilarious threat.

Good news is: The average customer won't find the option to turn the DLC on.

But seriously: Maybe it's because I don't have real DLC experience (I buy games only on GOG) but I'd never assume DLCs are the way to play/experience a game the first time. There are different kind of DLCs I can thing of:
- Artbook DLC: I wouldn't read it before playing the game.
- Some (useless) clothes/hats DLC: Yeah, playing Marcus Fenix with a panda mask can be funny. I wouldn't do this on a serious first playthrough though.
- prequel or side-story DLCs: I wouldn't play them before completing the main story.

What kind of DLCs are there which make sense to already have them in a first playthrough?

EDIT:
- additional content which is embedded into the main game (additional places, quests...)

As already mentioned this only looks like a good idea at first but is just annoying otherwise.
Don't remind me... Their explanations/excuses were ridiculous.

This surprises me.

And this too. For some reason you see MI2 this way but for TWP it doesn't apply.
The ending of MI2 can be interpreted in different ways (one way was what the MI3 team did).
If we assume those were really children's imaginations then everything happened was completely meaningless. It's a nice and fun story though, but nothing was real.
Somehow this is OK for MI2 but not for TWP?

Both MI2 and TWP have controversial endings, something Ron Gilbert likes to do.

Even MI1 already goes into such direction that the main character's story is more or less completely meaningless :-)
You don't even become a pirate. The only problem you solve (at the end, with root beer) is a problem YOU have caused.
Next time you play MI1 just go to the church, sit on its door step and wait until Elaine has taken care of everything. :-)

Tomb Raider (2013) is a slightly better game with the extra optional tomb DLC, although if you paid €2.50 for that you'd probably feel pretty ripped off since it takes all of five, maybe ten minutes tops.

Think of it as if the arcades in Thimbleweed Park were a DLC. It'd make sense to play with that on.

Typically : additional content (areas, characters, quests, items) in RPGs or other freeroaming games. Sometimes, having completed the story means you're too late for the new content to be accessible or even relevant. I like playing an exploratory RPG with its world fully and definitely fluffed out from the start.

No. MI2 is "real" in a positive escapist way in the grand tradition of children's books. In-universe fictional characters effectively have lives and motivations beyond the protagonist's experience and storyline (as evidenced by the post-credits scene, but also by the fact Guybrush can't just breeze through the game by making up best outcomes throughout, because he imagines fictional people as having complete personalities). The take-home message is children's imagination is wonderful and imagined experiences count and friends are waiting for you back there.

TWP is the opposite. The fictional "world" is just what you see onscreen, there are no personalities, no motivations, no consequences (including physics).

I like Elaine. I like Ray (the way she's written). However, "What does Elaine want" is a legitimate question that has an answer (per Ron Gilbert, "The only thing I objected to in the games that followed was Guybrush and Elaine getting married. She is too smart for that."). She's like an AI which runs on your wetware. (Maybe she's partially informed by a Big Whoop castmember. Maybe not.) Ray on the other hand is not even that. The game insists, again and again, that the concepts of fictional worlds (of which a work of fiction presents a slice) and fictional characters (same) are absurd from the get-go, you can't think "what does she want" or "what would she do if".

MI2 has two parallel storylines. TWP has none. When Elaine is not onscreen, she's in her governor's mansion ruling the island and in the tunnels having a smoke before the next show. When Ray is not onscreen, she's not anywhere; she's not anywhere even when the sprite IS onscreen. There are no characters in TWP, only pixels.

Spoiler-free addendum, pinging Telika:

Monkey Island 2 is basically The Neverending Story. Thimbleweed Park is a ytmnd of Michael Ende gleefully cackling and calling you a retard for crying over a fictional horse.

MOAR SPOILERRR:

It's much more complex as it seems. Like the first time I have read the journals I thought the numbering is a mistake. Of course it isn't.
The game introduces concepts like the upper and lower world and explains it using the text adventure.
You have to start thinking about it in more dimensions. When you controlled Delores controlling the text adventure wasn't actually Ron Gilbert pulling your strings? :p

With precision you have picked the one character (Ray) where you can be quite sure this is not true at all.
Ray is not from TWP town. Maybe she isn't even from this game? But she seems to be trapped here and you can help here escape.
She is a little bit like Neo but with a brick phone instead of the banana phone. :-) Also she's more corrupt.
Of course you can always say nothing matters what happens in the Matrix. But it does in the moment you are there.

Michael Ende wasn't prone to gleefully cackling and calling people retards, I tell ya. :)

We'll see. Someday. I'm compatible with both attitudes, I think (I have a full Terry Gilliam approach to imagination, but I also loathe tamagochis and manufactured empathy-mining items, like big eyed toddler-shaped walt disney robots and whatnot - I guess I hop from prodream to antifake on the basis of tenuous arbitrary details). But right now, all my financial resources are put on other things than games, so, it'll just remain a point of vague curiosity for a while.

I'll check it out some day, in the name of Zak Mc and Maniac. But without necessarily expecting full endorsement.