It’s one of my great shortcomings as a gamer that I never played any of the original Monkey Island adventure games released by Lucasarts in the 1990s. This is a shame, because those games and their SCUMMy ilk essentially created the “exploration and rubbing things together” blueprint for adventure games that dominated the genre for a long time. It’s also unfortunate because they were genuinely funny and entertaining, but with the recent release of The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition I decided to correct that.
What’s special about this Special Edition is that the developers completely redid all of the art (in a hand-painted style) and recorded sounds, music, and voice acting that wasn’t in the original game. But other than modifying the interface to work on the iPod Touch (or the Xbox 360 controller), the gameplay is completely untouched. You guide Guybrush Threepwood, a new arrival on Monkey Island who wants to become a mighty pirate. This is pure graphical adventure game material, so you walk from location to location, talk to characters, pick stuff up, and solve problems by combining, activating, or using items in your inventory.
The gameplay, well …it has not aged particularly well. The puzzles aren’t as nonsensicle as in some of the genre’s entries, but at the same time they’re not always entirely intuitive and you resort to just rubbing everything in your inventory against everything else. Either that or you can do what I did: make liberal use of the game’s built-in clue system. Just shake the iPod/iPhone and it’ll give you some text that nudges you in the right direction. Shake it again and it’ll flat out tell you what to do. Pride be damned, I used it whenever I got stumped. It’s a lot easier than hitting GameFaqs.com.
Fortunately the real strength of the game is in the writing, the dialog, the characters, and the environments. Those are all top notch and they still hold up really well. TSoME isn’t bust a gut funny, but it IS consistently charming, amusing, and smile inducing. I wanted to keep playing if for no other reason to see what would happen next. It also made a great portable game, since no puzzle or interaction will take more than a few minutes.
So, Lucasarts, if you’re listening: give me more of these remakes! I will give you more money in exchange! More Monkey Isalnd would be great, though I also haer good things about Day of the Tentacle, Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, and Sam and Max. Any of those would be fine.
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