In The Secret of Monkey Island, you play as Guybrush Threepwood, a callow youth who dreams of one day being a mighty pirate. His travels take him to Mêlée Island, where piracy is at a lull thanks to the evil ghost pirate LeChuck haunting the local waters. Desperate to increase their ranks, the pirate leaders charge Guybrush with learning the essential skills of piracy before he can join their ranks. During his adventures, he also meets and falls for Mêlée Island's governor, Elaine Marley - who is kidnapped by a deceased would-be paramour, the evil ghost pirate LeChuck. Guybrush sets off to rescue the governor, defeat LeChuck, and uncover the secrets of LeChuck's base of operations...the infamous Monkey Island.
Ye lubbers may be able ta talk like a pirate...but in this classic video game, ye can plunder, treasure hunt, an' insult sword fight like one too! The Secret of Monkey Island is one of LucasArts's point-and-click graphic adventure games, nearly all of which racked up glowing reviews from players. For those of you not familiar with this kind of game, it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. You click on the screen to get your character to move around, and there's a provided list of verb commands you can use to make your character interact with their environment - examine or pick something up, open or close a window or door, talk to other people in the room, that kind of thing. When talking with other characters in the game, you'll have available dialogue to select from, and you get different results depending on what you select. These games are primarily puzzle-based in nature, requiring you to find an item or perform a series of actions in the right sequence in order to progress further in the story. However, there were a few, like the Indiana Jones games, that had a combat element to them. LucasArts was founded by George Lucas in 1982 and originally known as LucasFilm Games until 1990. The company's first foray into graphical adventure games was Labyrinth: The Computer Game (1986), loosely based on the Jim Henson film (although LucasArts didn't publish it directly - that would be Activision). Next came Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick's Maniac Mansion (1987), which marked the debut of LucasArts's SCUMM game engine. In fact, SCUMM literally stands for "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion," although it was used for its subsequent adventure games as well. Maniac Mansion was a huge success and set the stage for the graphical adventure games to come. In 1989, LucasGames adapted Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to the adventure game format, and they followed up with an original story, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis in 1992, which was immensely popular with Indy fans - many were hoping it would be adapted to a live-action film. This style of adventure game as a whole petered out a while back, but it still has a fanbase. Maniac Mansion (1987) Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992) Gilbert came up with an idea for a pirate-themed game as early as 1988, drawing from Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean ride as well as classic Hollywood swashbucklers. The supernatural elements were inspired by On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers (which the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film was loosely adapted from). Gilbert wanted players to be focused more on exploration and the story rather than not dying, so he made it impossible for the main character to die (an infamous hallmark of Sierra On-line adventure games) or get stuck, while also simplifying the gameplay. Gilbert collaborated with Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer, each of whom brought a different kind of humor to the story. To avoid Monkey Island's humor feeling too disjointed as a result, they each were assigned to specific characters or story moments, depending on what kind of comedy was needed. WARNING: Here be spoilers! Read further at your own risk! (Also, this review is based on the game's original release, not the 2009 remake.) In The Secret of Monkey Island, you play as Guybrush Threepwood, a callow youth who dreams of one day being a mighty pirate. His travels take him to Mêlée Island, where piracy is at a lull thanks to the evil ghost pirate LeChuck haunting the local waters. Desperate to increase their ranks, the pirate leaders charge Guybrush with learning the essential skills of piracy before he can join their ranks. During his adventures, he also meets and falls for Mêlée Island's governor, Elaine Marley - who is kidnapped by a deceased would-be paramour, the evil ghost pirate LeChuck. Guybrush sets off to rescue the governor, defeat LeChuck, and uncover the secrets of LeChuck's base of operations...the infamous Monkey Island. Puzzle-based games aren't exactly my strong suit, and when I first played The Secret of Monkey Island at my cousin's house as a kid, I frequently got stuck because I didn't know what I was supposed to do next. This is not a reflection on the game, but a shot at myself for being too thickheaded to figure this out. Once I got more experience (as well as a copy of the game for the Sega CD) and was able to intuit how to proceed, I finally played it all the way through, although not without some help. More experienced gamers and rookies will probably need less hand-holding than I did, but I think the puzzles in Secret of Monkey Island can still pose a substantial challenge without being TOO hard to figure out to the point that the game's not fun anymore. One of the reasons I kept coming back to The Secret of Monkey Island, no matter how frustrating I initially found it, was because of how much fun it was. Even now that I've completed it a bunch of times and know all the puzzles, Monkey Island's wit and humor make it worth replaying, especially since there are multiple dialogue options available, giving you the option in some cases to either be nice and courteous to all, or a complete and total jackass. (None of these will change the outcome of anything, so it's all about your personal preference.) Even the only way to die in Monkey Island is played for laughs. You can have a conversation with a dog all in dog talk, get tongue-tied when meeting Governor Marley, and break the fourth wall a few times. Mastering insult sword fighting basically entails encountering other pirates on your travels, picking fights with them, and learning new insults (some of which were authored by Orson Scott Card - yeah, I know) and their comebacks. This can take a long time, and admittedly, it can get a bit tedious when replaying the game, especially if you already know all of the insults. However, the insults themselves are still good for some chuckles. Content aside, The Secret of Monkey Island is gorgeous to look at, with beautiful graphics. I don't recall if this is the case for the original PC ports, but the Sega CD version I had included various background sound effects that did a lot for the game's atmosphere, as did Michael Land's catchy musical score. Even though the puzzle element was a challenge for me, the controls didn't take too long to figure out, and it's not that long of a game - maybe four or five hours for a newcomer, three for a replay. The story and characterization is solid, giving you a sense of investment in what's going on beyond the game being a mere vehicle for pirate-themed comedy. Despite rave reviews from critics, The Secret of Monkey Island wasn't much of a moneymaker - not in the United States, anyway. (It had much better success in Europe.) That didn't stop LucasArts from releasing three sequels - Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (1991), The Curse of Monkey Island (1997, which radically changed the character designs and added voice acting), and Escape from Monkey Island (2000). In 2009, TellTale Games released Tales of Monkey Island, a new adventure released in five episodes. That same year, LucasArts released a special edition of The Secret of Monkey Island, with more modern graphics and voice acting provided by the same cast as the sequels, with the second game getting the same treatment in 2010. (You can toggle back and forth between the modern and original look.) A film adaptation of the games was in development in the early 2000s that obviously nothing ever came of. However, one of the screenwriters was Ted Elliott, who later went on to co-create the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise, which has more than a few similarities to the Monkey Island games. The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (2009) The Secret of Monkey Island, and the Monkey Island franchise in general, still has a pretty sizable fanbase (so much so that I actually wondered if it was too popular to qualify for an INCspotlight review). YouTube reviewer PushingUpRoses has covered the Monkey Island extensively, including an in-depth look at some of the supposedly controversial elements of the sequels' story decisions, and her insight is worth checking out, as is her live-play of the original game. As for me, I've replayed The Secret of Monkey Island a number of times, including during my immersion in all things piratical when I was really trying to get The Brotherhood of the Black Flag off the ground, and I'll hopefully be able to revisit the sequels, all of which I've played at least once, at some point. (Readers may have noticed several references to the games throughout the book, including the character of Sergeant Gilbert, and there would have been even more had I been able to work them in.) If you want to snag them for yourselves, the whole series is available for purchase and download from GOG.com, and you won't need anything extra to play them. The Secret of Monkey Island is a true gaming classic that still holds up thirty years and many replays later, with a lot to offer newbies and veteran gamers alike. Grab your nearest bottle of grog and give it a go!
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