by Gregory Gay - 07.30.09
The Secret of Monkey Island was something of a revolution when it came out in 1989. Up until that point, adventure games were dense, inaccessible affairs. They were difficult, but not in the good “makes you think” way. They were frustrating, based more on luck than brains. It was common for one false move to lead to failure hours later. You had to check every nook and cranny, and leaving behind one item could be fatal. Monkey Island was the game that turned the tide, as it was deliberately designed to remove those frustrations.
Oh, it’s still difficult. Don’t mistake accessibility for ease. The Secret of Monkey Island’s puzzles will stump you. There were several moments where I had absolutely no idea how to progress. Even though all of the genre mainstays are present, this is clearly a game from a bygone era. The interface is clunky; clicking on an object isn’t enough, you need to open up a list of verbs and select what exactly you want to do with that object. Looking at and talking to a person will have vastly different effects, as will pushing versus pulling a rock. While the freedom is kind of nice, it sometimes feels like deciding how to interact with an object is a puzzle in itself. After a few hours, the extra interface overhead just gets tiring and you begin to understand why modern adventure games lack the extra “verb” options.
Likewise, the puzzle design is clearly antiquated. Pixel-hunting? Check. Nonsensical item combinations? Check. Endless backtracking? Check. If an adventure game contains any combination of those these days, it will get reamed by reviewers. Why do you have to go find the right stack of papers to light on fire? Couldn’t you just light the book on fire? Some of the design choices that made sense in the context of the era just don’t fly these days.
So, while it probably sounds like I hate this game, the truth is completely the opposite. If you can muster up the patience to deal with some of the frustrating gameplay elements, Monkey Island is still a brilliant game. The writing is hilarious, and the good puzzles give your mind a great workout. The “swordfighting and insults” sequence is repetitive, but is totally worth the frustration for the memorable dialogue that emerges. Monkey Island’s characters are some of the most memorable ever created by this medium. How can you not identify with Guybrush’s earnestness, his determination to become a “mighty pirate” and rescue Elaine? How can you not fall in love with Elaine’s sarcasm? Even the ghost pirate LeChuck has a charm of his own. Yes, adventure game design has improved over the past two decades, but you would be hard-pressed to find a modern game that can match Monkey Island’s characters or dialogue, and that is why this game is still worth playing.
Ultimately, new versions of classic games fall somewhere on a scale between rehash and reimagining. LucasArt’s “special edition” falls somewhere in the middle; they didn’t just slap the old game on a download service, but they didn’t exactly reinvent it either. The special edition is the original Monkey Island with a new coat of paint. Every location, every puzzle is identical. You can even switch back and forth between the original and remake at will. This HD update comes in the form of redrawn graphics and voice acting (from the cast introduced in Curse of Monkey Island).
The new artwork is the area that has drawn the most criticism, and it is clearly a “love-it-or-hate-it” situation. Ok, it is probably more of a “indifference-or-hate-it” situation. I think the main problem with the style is that it shows a clear schizophrenia in the art direction. The characters don’t quite look like sprites and don’t quite look like animated drawings. What you end up with are a bunch of ugly, stiffly-animated people wobbling around the screen. If you went in not knowing that this was a 2009 update of a 1989 game, you’d probably guess that it was actually a release from somewhere around 1996. The designers couldn’t choose between a retro or modern style, and decided on an intermediary that fails at both.
Yet, despite the awful-looking characters, I still played through the entire thing in the new style. Why? The rest of the art looks pretty good. The backgrounds are gorgeous, lovingly-drawn versions of the old scenes and the close-ups of the characters used for conversations (while still ugly) have a strange sort of appeal to them. Oh, and you can’t hear the voice acting if you switch to the classic version. The voice work is fantastic, it really brings the dialogue to life, and I can’t imagine playing the game without it now. The new art may be schizophrenic, but it doesn’t ruin the experience. Even with the ugly characters, the voice-over makes the “special edition” the best way to play through Monkey Island.
The Secret of Monkey Island was an important landmark for the adventure genre. It helped push the genre into the form that it enjoys today, and it remains one of the paragons of game writing. Its design is a bit antiquated, but the game is still worth playing for the dialogue alone. Even though I have my quibbles with the art direction, I am still grateful that LucasArts decided to give their adventure games another look. Here’s hoping for more “special editions” in the future (give me Day of the Tentacle and I’ll be a happy man).
Related Posts:
Review - Tales of Monkey Island: Episode 1 - Launch of the Screaming Narwhal
Telltale Q&A - Mulling Over Monkey Island
I’ve been playing Monkey Island recently on my PC (the original version), and I disagree with you on one crucial point: The old gameplay/puzzle design is where a great deal of its charm comes from. I love it. And for me, that’s all intertwined with the old, pixellated graphics as well. Pure magic.
N Rumas - 07.30.09 10:53 pm
I mostly played Sierra adventure games back in the day, but that’s just because I was a dumb kid who didn’t have the vast meta-mind of the internet to make it clear to me why I would like the LucasArts style so much better. For a long time, I just assumed all adventure games (as described at the beginning of this article) were designed so that every time you made a wrong decision trying to solve a puzzle, you got killed. I also thought it was standard for an adventure game to be filled with traps, ie: areas the game would let you into even if you didn’t have the items necessary to get out again. Perhaps the most unpleasant Sierra “dirty trick” that I thought was a standard thing was making puzzles that were time-based, which really goes against the whole idea of carefully thinking one’s way through a puzzle, and in my view that’s the very essence of an adventure game. Also, because of games like the Kings Quest and Space Quest series, I thought that all adventure game humor was derivative, cliche, and/or a lame parody of something- as was Sierra’s tendency… But lo and behold! There was another type of game that wasn’t like this. Sadly, I didn’t discover the joys of the LucasArts style adventure game until Grim Fandango came out, and by that time the golden era of adventure games was nearly at a close. Of course, I’m always free to go back and play all those great LucasArts games I missed out on- and I have been doing that lately- but I just don’t have the kind of time I used to as a kid to really devote to them… Oh well, this is just one more item on my long list of things to go back and tell my younger self, should I ever gain access to a time machine.
angry lemur - 07.31.09 2:16 am
Ok angry lemur, I DID make some sweeping generalizations there.
Gregory Gay - 07.31.09 10:51 am
Reading back over what I wrote last night, I can see how it might be seen as sarcasm, but that wasn’t how I intended it. I really did only play Sierra games as a kid and they were always plagued by the problems I mentioned. LucasArts games weren’t perfect early on either (I, like you, see the tediousness in having half the screen full of word commands that are way more specific than they need to be (push and pull for example)). But in terms of overall game design, characterization and especially endlessly enjoyable dialogue, LucasArts certainly had a leg up on Sierra. I mean, Guybrush Threepwood vs. the generic King Graham from King’s Quest? No contest. One was a compelling, original character, and one, well, one was more of a cardboard cutout of a character, at least to my mind.
angry lemur - 07.31.09 1:25 pm
The backgrounds are pretty good, but most of the characters are horrible (mostly Guybrush though). It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t use stiff 3D models for some animations, and would it really be that hard for them to put in some facial expressions like those found in the second and third Monkey Island, or even like those found in Tales?
Also, why is he blond? He first became a blond in the third one, which is fine, but why would they remake the first one and make him blond?
I can only hope that if they remake the second one, they ditch this new art style, have the old version, and include the old version with rescanned high res backgrounds (they must have those paintings somewhere). The third on could also probably be re-released in HD.
Also, Simon the Sorcerer, Flight of the Amazon Queen, and Loom, could use some love (after all, even Beneath a Steel Sky is getting a remake).
Bob - 07.31.09 3:02 pm
Also, Kyrandia.
Bob - 07.31.09 6:50 pm