In the winter of 1990 I was six years old and my memories of games from this period (now 20 years ago) has become somewhat faded, but one memory still clear in my mind was the day that my brother booted up the Amiga 500+ and inserted the first disk of Lucasfilm Games (now known as Lucas Arts) “The Secret of Monkey Island”.
Fast forward 20 years and “The Secret of Monkey Island” has returned bigger and better than ever on multiple platforms (Xbox live arcade, the Playstation Network, and on the PC through Steam). This game following the adventures of wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood struck such a chord with gamers that Lucas Arts felt the time was ripe to re-release it in the form of “The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition”.
Monkey Island focuses on the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood as he does his best to become a “notorious” pirate while in the process additionally trying to rid the world of the dread pirate Le’Chuck. Travelling from island to island you must guide Guybrush through a series of tricky puzzles in order for him to complete his quest.
This game set the bar for what is today called a “point and click” adventure i.e. you don’t really move the character overly much, more so, you point at an object or person and your character will automatically move to inspect or interact with it. I was happy to find that the Lucas Arts team have done a great job here in transferring the controls to the new console and the radial action menu feels very easy and intuitive to use when navigating the screen.
Outside of the main plot of this game, the real treasure that lies within is the fantastically humorous scripting that runs throughout. It was the humour that made fans fall in love with the original and it is the same humour contained within the special edition. Even better, where players of the original Monkey Island absorbed this humour through text; for the Special Edition of Monkey Island, Lucas Arts recruited the voice actors from future editions of Monkey Island to provide the audio for the new game.
So what else is new? Well, Lucas Arts decided to pay homage to the original Monkey Island but still wanted to modernise the games graphics so they implemented a nice little addition. While the Special Edition Monkey Island is displayed in 1080p High Definition at the simple click of a button this dissolves to reveal the original “The Secret of Monkey Island” (pixels and all) unchanged from the 1990 release. As a fan of the original game I can’t praise this feature enough; it instigated an epic nostalgia fest.
So what didn’t I like about this game? Very little to be completely honest, however if there was one area I would point a finger at it is what Lucas Arts have referred to as the Special Edition’s “Hint System”. The original Monkey Island had no such feature and it was the lack of this feature that made the game challenging as well as fun because players had to think outside the box and solve the puzzles by themselves. In the Special Edition a simple long hold on the X button provides hints for the user about the next step that they need to take, eventually the ease of use of this feature destroys the challenge of the game; maybe I’m a puritan but this is just my opinion.
Despite this one minor flaw, “The Secret of Monkey Island” is as fresh (to new players) and fantastic a game today as it was in 1990 and for the mere price of 800 Microsoft Points (roughly € 7.50 / Steam / PSN equivalent) there are very few games out there that’ll give you as much bang for your buck. I’d comfortably rate this game an uneven 8.5 out of 10.
