The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition Review
As I stated last week, Lucas Arts has undergone something of a transformation in recent months, foregoing their planned release schedule of “A Star Wars Game Every Five Days” to expand their portfolio to include a few LucasArts Classics. The first game to come from the reinvention is a remake of The Secret of Monkey Island.
Now, perhaps I’m not the best judge of this game. I love the Monkey Island series like no other game. Some of my best memories as a child were firing up the old floppy disks of this game. But LucasArts has done a pretty incredible job of staying faithful to the old game. In fact, the new graphics engine is running over the top of the old CD version, and you can switch between the two at will by pressing F10, just to see how things used to be.
There’s not much “new” to the game. They did a really nice job painting over the scenery, though the characters aren’t particularly well done, the backgrounds are great. There’s also a hint system for people who need it. The biggest change, of course, is the addition of voice acting, including Dominic D’Armato as Guybrush Threepwood. In all, the voice work is excellent, though I will say that I wish there was an option to have the voices during the old style game.
The biggest issue with the update is the control scheme. While their toolbar is based off the old SCUMM system that adventure gamers will be used to, the update is built to be shared between the PC and the X-Box, so the menus are button activated and hidden from the main screen. The problem with this is that trying to play the game is incredibly frustrating.
To choose an action, you either need to pull up the menu with the Ctrl key, or scroll through them with the mouse (which isn’t terribly accurate). Using items in the inventory is even less effective, since you need to choose your action, open the inventory, choose the item, and then use it. To combine two items in your inventory, you need to do this all twice, which makes the grog ferrying quest exceedingly frustrating.
Extra Features:
The option to play the game in both “new” mode or the classic CD mode is nice, though the CD mode is missing a few jokes that were present in the floppy version. The X-Box Live version of this game has achievements.
Technical:
A few notable bugs hamper the experience somewhat. The hotzone for the cursor in the inventory and dialog is about a half-inch below the actual choice, which makes selecting items or lines a bit of a process, especially during insult swordfighting. Also, in the X-Box Live edition, a variable is off in the inventory, causing the “treasure map” and “Melee PTA minutes” tooltips to be switched, and Guybrush to read his pieces of eight backwards (742 when you actually have 247, for example).
Graphics:
The characters range from being extremely well animated (Herman Toothrot looks pretty perfect), to intentionally bad (Stan basically hasn’t changed from the pixel days), to weird. Specifically Guybrush looks terrible, mostly because his hair looks more like an art-deco piece than the actual windswept pony-tail he has in the other games.
The background art is extremely well done, once you get off Melee. Melee Island looks almost half complete. Like they didn’t have time to finish updating parts of the forest or main town. However, once you get on the Sea Monkey and to Monkey Island, things look pretty incredible. Switching back and forth between the old version and the update really gives you an appreciation for how much updating they did to Monkey Island, and it looks great.
Sound:
The voice-over work is, on a whole, pretty great. There’s a ton of dialog, and most of it’s really lovingly voiced, even though there are some weird readings. Guybrush has a weird echo sometimes, and Herman doesn’t sound quite right. I do like that they voiced the insults twice, one type for when you’re right and one for when you’re wrong, it’s a cool little touch they didn’t have to do.
Just a suggestion, though, is to turn the text scrolling way up. The voice-overs follow the rules set by the text scrolling in the old version, which means that there’s some really unnatural pauses between the dialog even in the voiced version. This can make Insult Swordfighting really excruciating.
The music is updated from the original midi, but mostly cobbled from a collection of Michael Land’s other work on the Monkey Island series. Not to say that I don’t appreciate it though, because it’s really a wonderful collection of songs that changes dynamically based on what’s going on.
Replay Value:
You can play through both modes if you’d like, and there are two endings. The best reason to play through it though, is the sheer volume of hidden dialog in this game. What you see in one run-through isn’t half of what’s actually in the game. There is literally hours of one-off, hidden jokes that one simply cannot experience in one playthrough.
Final Score: 9/10
The first Monkey Island is kind of like the first Star Wars. It’s nobody’s favorite. Everybody will argue endlessly over whether Empire or Return was the best of the series, but everybody will tell you how much they loved the first. Monkey Island deserved the re-make treatment, and it’s still an awesome game made even better, but people are still going to be arguing about the trippy, more dramatic LeChuck’s Revenge or the cartoony, more devil-may-care Curse for all time (and for the record, I’m Team Curse).
The update could have been better, of course. The menu system is terrible, I’m still not sold on the X-Box control scheme, and I’m even more pained to see the mock-ups the “Curse” artist did of what Monkey Island: Special Edition would’ve looked like with *that* engine. It’s beautiful. That having been said, this is definitely a worthwhile upgrade.
If you’ve never played the original, or if you haven’t played it in a while, you really have to do yourself a favor and pick this up. Especially since LucasArts has basically admitted that they’re testing the waters with this game to see if working on the adventure IPs is something they want to do again. And I’d take a new adventure series over the billionth Star Wars games any day.