- Platform:
- Xbox 360.
- Designers:
- Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman.
- Cast:
- Dominic Armato, Alexandra Boyd, Earl Boen, Leilani Jones.
A comparison of the new and the classic interfaces.
It’s hard to believe now, when they’re known mostly for rushing out one half-finished Star Wars game after another (for one Christmas season after another), but in the late eighties and early nineties, LucasArtsi were, along with Sierra On-Line, the première adventure game company in the businessii. For a period of some fifteen years, beginning with Maniac Mansioniii, they released some of the best-regarded point-and-click adventures of the era. In 1990, at the peak of their powers, they released The Secret of Monkey Island. For a generation of gamers, Monkey Island‘s combination of fourth-wall-breaking comedy and clever puzzles became the standard against which all later adventure games were measurediv.
In 2009, to coincide with the release of the new episodic Tales of Monkey Island developed by Telltale Games (a group of former LucasArts designers that also develops the episodic Sam & Max games), released a new, remastered edition of The Secret of Monkey Island for PC and Xbox Live Arcade (the version I played). This version has all new graphics and they’ve had voice actors record all the game’s dialogue.
The story follows a young man with the improbable name Guybrush Threepwood, who arrives on Mêlée Island™ hoping to become a mighty pirate (though he looks more like a flooring inspector). He finds Mêlée Island is full of pirates scared away from pirating by the Ghost Pirate LeChuck, and learns of the three trials (Three Trials! Three Trials!) he must complete to become a pirate: fencing, thievery, and treasure huntery. Guybrush, being a video game hero, of course completes the trials, but things are complicated by the kidnapping of Mêlée Island™’s governor, Elaine, by LeChuck. Guybrush, now a mighty pirate, must set out to find the legendary Monkey Island™ and rescue Elaine.
But Monkey Island isn’t really about the story; the plot is just a structure on which Gilbert, Schafer, and Grossman hang a never-ending stream of jokes, puns, and slapstick. If you come into the game expecting Captain Blood, you’ll be sorely disappointed. In the grand tradition of Infocom, LucasArts sticks to what had by then become the three golden rules for adventure games: make the puzzles clever, do anything for a laugh, and the fourth wall is there to be brokenv. This new Special Edition (I almost want to put a ™ after “Special Edition”, but I crib enough jokes from old games as it is) does the right thing and keeps all the old jokes, including the dated ones, which keeps all the strengths of the original and adds a new one: nostalgia. This is a game for people who remember Loom, and who will find an obvious shill for a twenty-year-old game funny.
The Special Edition lets you switch between the classic and the new full-colour graphics at any time, meaning I spent a lot of my time comparing sprites. It’s more fun than you’d think, and the new cartoony graphics are quite good (the water is especially pretty), if a little on the generic side. It might just be that the old visuals have the benefit of nostalgia. The voice actors, too, are good, but to facilitate seamless switching between new and old, the dialogue is played back to match the tempo of the old dialogue titles, which leads to any conversation being full of long, awkwardly-positioned pauses. It’s not quite Cave Dwellers, but it’s not far off. Any long conversation had me pressing “Back” to to get the classic interface, because while the voice actors really are excellent, the poor pacing hurts the timing of the jokes, which you would think was anathema to a Monkey Island designer.
The interface in the special edition has been streamlined, so there’s a default action on A (“Walk” more often than not) and a context-sensitive action on B (e.g. “Talk to”), and you can switch the default action using the D-pad or by bringing up an action menu using the left shoulder button (though I found no way of reaching “Look at” using the D-pad). Unfortunately, while this works fairly well most of the time, I found myself switching to the classic interface whenever I had to do anything time-sensitive — e.g. Carrying the grog in “Part One”(show spoiler).
The great strength of The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition is that underneath the fancy new exterior it’s still the same old game, with all the old puzzles and jokes I loved in the original. At the same time, this is also its greatest weakness: because it’s the same core (I think it’s probably even still SCUMM-driven), they’ve had to compromise with how the new exterior is applied, which lessens the value of all the new stuff. It’s pretty, yes, but it doesn’t work as well as the old interface did. Which leaves me with a dilemma, score-wise. Because the old game is still there, good as ever, I could grade it just on that and give it four and a half stars, or I could grade it just on the new parts and give it a three-and-a-half. Compromise being the mother of contention, let’s just split the differencevi:
- Known as Lucasfilm Games until 1990, when Lucasfilm reorganised its various divisions. ↩
- A mantle handed down from the première company of the text adventure era, the legendary Infocom, whose brand of oddball humour and fiendishly clever puzzles are an obvious influence on LucasArts’ adventures. ↩
- From which LucasArts’ game engine, SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion), takes its name ↩
- Though Swedish Amiga magazine Datormagazin created a storm of controversy when they gave it a mere 79% in their review, equivalent to four stars in my scale. Just goes to show that video game review scores have always been a strange black art. I even seem to recall the reviewer later apologising for his “low” score. ↩
- So prevalent was this anything-for-a-laugh tradition at the time that a more serious game like Delphine’s Cruise for a Corpse (a classic in its own right) was something of a novelty. ↩
- Reaching, ironically, near-as-makes-no-difference the same score as Datormagazin did 18 years ago ↩
