The New Flesh

I can’t shake the feeling that this is big. The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is more than just a game, more than just a port of an old game onto modern computers, a paradigm for the future of video game preservation, that LucasArts has made the move to produce this game may ultimately prove as important as the Abandonware movement, Good Old Games or DOSbox. Right now it’s an amusement but culturally this is a big step forward. Also as a game it freakin’ rocks.

What LucasArts have done, in case you haven’t heard is update their classic 1990 point and click adventure ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ and release it over Steam and XBLA for a very reasonable £6.99 and 800 MSP respectively. The special edition contains the original version and the that has updated version that has new high resolution graphics and voice acting (the original being text only of course). What’s more you can hot-swap between the two versions at any time by pressing the F10 key so you can take a peek at how it used to be while playing the game with the new graphical prettiness.

I can almost agree with that.

I’ll get to the review of the game in a minute, in fact look for a subheading a little further down if you aren’t interested in reading me wax lyrical on video game culture and the preservation of old games. The thing is that apart for just being a good game ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ is also an important game, a true classic that defines a whole period in the early development of interactive storytelling and thus storytelling in general, that makes it of historical importance. In my view the point and click adventures of the 80s and 90s are at least as important in the history of storytelling as the plays of William Shakespeare, after all Shakespeare was basically just a good entertaining playwright, he didn’t revolutionise storytelling to anywhere near the same extent as the creators of the point and click adventures did when they were playing their part in the invention of interactive storytelling. I also agree with Peter Molyneux, I believe that the greatest story ever will be told through the medium of a computer game. This seems obviously true to me because computer games, unlike every other medium, don’t just show you or tell you the story, they let you live it! Computer games are at the moment in their infancy as a medium but the potential is enormous. I’m sure I’m preaching to the converted here but still it deserves to be said because it’s said surprisingly rarely, in fact I can’t think of anyone except Peter Molyneux who really talks about the true potential of the genre rather than just the next few steps.

A historic moment. No really.

Yet for all it’s historical importance for about half it’s short life it’s been out of print and without the work of dedicated people behind ScummVM it would have been almost impossible for most people to play. Now to my mind the work of people like Sarinee Achavanuntakul (who incidentally has just given a really good interview) who are willing to break the law for the sake of abandonware is undoubtedly crucial to keeping 95% of old games alive but since they do operate outside the law it only gives then an uncertain future, if a commercial future can be found for some of these title then their future is assured. Now short to medium term Good Old Games have proved this is actually the case for, well good old games. However long term I have my doubts, I very much doubt whether many people who grow up with graphics at the level they are now will ever want to pay to play games with graphics like this: -

It looks worse close up. Click for the full size version.

It’s just ugly and ugly is off putting. Back in the day we were either used to or impressed by this level of graphics but now, now it’s jarringly ugly even to some of us that grew up with it. But this: -

I wish I had a giant lemon on my head

Now we’re talking! That’s a fairly pretty picture, 100 years from now that’ll still be a fairly pretty picture and our great grand children will hopefully still be able to appreciate it. Basically since the original 1990 release we’ve got to the stage now where mainstream computer graphics are at that base level that painting has been at for the last 500 years or so where for 2D works it’s not about really increasing technical wizardry, it’s simply about beauty. This means that for ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ the ugly barrier has now been removed and in 100 years time (assuming they can find a machine that can run it) people will be able to look past the graphics and connect with it’s core gameplay while at the same time having the opportunity to press F10 to remove the make-up and see it as it was, hopefully some of them will find it and fun and interesting bit of history. What’s more LucasArts have also released non-updated versions of couple of their less iconic point and click adventures so it’s a fair guess that LucasArts held back from re-releasing their other iconic titles like ‘Full Throttle’ and ‘Day of the Tentacle’ in order to give similar special edition treatment if this one was a success and since it’s been sitting firmly in the Steam top 10 sellers list ever since it was released just over two weeks ago it’s a fair bet that it’s gone pretty well and we’ll be seeing more of these graphical overhauls in the future and of course that will prove it as a business model that other companies could use. It’s another important step forward in games preservation.

Another historic moment. Yes, I really mean that.

Ok enough general rambling. Now for the review rambling.

The Review

Somehow I never got round to playing ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ in it’s original format, pretty shameful considering I just spent 500 odd words comparing it to Hamlet but there you have it. This put me in the good position of being able to look at it completely fresh, no warm fuzzy memories of this particular title, no half-remembered solutions to protect me form the more diabolical puzzles so I’m perhaps in a better position that most of the professional gaming press to judge whether this holds up to 2009 standards. The short answer is it does, particularly at the £6.99 price point. It’s about 10 hours long so it ain’t the longest game in the world but it more than makes up for that in quality terms. The story is simple and goofy but effective at driving the game and the lovable eccentric cast remove any possibility of boredom. The plot is basically wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood come to Mêlée Island seeking his fortune and while trying to become accepted as a pirate falls in love with the beautiful Elaine Marley who just happens to be the Governor of Mêlée Island and when she’s kidnapped by the undead pirate Le Chuck he must travel to Monkey Island to defeat Le Chuck and rescue Elaine (Sound familiar ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ fans?), simple, goofy and exacly what the game needs. I found the comedy to be consistently funny, perhaps not laugh out loud funny but I was smiling from start to finish and I can’t ask any more than that. The voice acting is great (although if you slow down the text speed then the intonation becomes odd as I discovered because I bound the key that game uses to slow down text to take screenshots) and they wisely got back a lot of the actors who did voice work for the later games in the series so if you go on to play the other games the voices will be consistant.

Governor Elaine Marley, still at least twice as beautiful as Keira Knightley

The puzzles, the gameplay heart of any point and click adventure,  are just about the best I’ve ever encountered. I’d say there are maybe three that aren’t top notch, once I felt the solution was a bit silly and twice I felt that the solution boiled down to a little too much like pixel hunting but generally they were all very good. Good enough to render the hint system, that’s also been added as part of the Special Edition, almost as useless as it should ideally be.

I find myself comparing it to Braid. Sure there are a lot of differences: one it a platformer and the other a point and click adventure; one is a deep commentary on the nature of human relationships and the other is about saving the girl you love from a ghost pirate; one takes itself far too seriously and the other is one of the funniest games ever made. But they’re also both beautiful, story driven, low cost, 2D puzzle games. How does ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ compare? I think favourably because where they can really be compared is on the quality of their puzzling gameplay and on this point although Monkey Island isn’t as varied or innovative as Braid the execution is just so much better and where as Monkey Island has humour to carry it through the bits where the puzzles are failing to amuse Braid has… yeah.

The in game interface is unfortunately quite poor and lets the rest of the game down quite badly. Gone are the functional but extremely clunky looking verb and inventory lists at the bottom of the screen from the original, replaced by stylish minimalism with far to little emphasis on functionality. The only permanent feature of the new interface on the screen is the cursor and unfortunately even that doesn’t work particularly well under vista without changing the properties of the game executable and that really isn’t good enough. Also if you’re playing full screen on a multi-monitor system (okay I know that won’t be that many of you but a significant few) then the cursor will move outside the game and I found it all too easy to accidentally minimise the game by clicking on my desktop when trying to get Guybrush to walk to the right edge of the screen in order to make the camera pan. The new verb system is just about ok if you learn the hotkeys (U for ‘use’, P for ‘pick up’, G for ‘give’ etc) but the inventory system is really pretty rubbish, to access the inventory you have to press the I key, fair enough but that’ll just show you the first twelve icons so if you’ve got more than twelve items (and you’ll have about 36 later in then game) then you have to scroll around to find them. It’s just a niggle and your never more than one key press and two clicks away from the item you need but considering the fact that at some point you will run out of ideas and you will end up trying every item to see what happens, it’ll already be the lowest point in your game experience and then trying to do it with a poor inventory system is adding insult to injury.

The interface problems are never much more than a minor annoyance, it’s just a shame that this one area is lacking in polish considering the brilliance of the core game and the rest of the work that’s gone into this port is brilliant, I mean apart from the obvious things like the new art and the voice work, it’s the little things they’ve done that really shine like how seamless then version switch process is and how when you start a new game the first screen you’re presented with is this: -

Something old

which then seamlessly fades into this: -

Something new

It’s a perfect moment. A perfect nod to the original game that from that point on you never have to see again. The game is full of little touches that make it really the perfect respectful update except for the interface. I’d recommend this game to pretty much anyone who doesn’t definitely know that they hate all point and click adventures. That includes non-gamers by the way, if you want to introduce a non-gamer to gaming I think this might be a very good choice since pretty much none of it’s timed, it’s almost impossible actually lose and the story and humour should appeal to anyone with a soul. Even if like me you also own the original then it’s still worth it just to see it for yourself, relive the memories (assuming unlike me you actually played it) and support what they’ve done.

9/10