The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition
July 23rd 2009 09:56
- Paul Frew
Every review for this game seems to begin with some sort of childhood-like memory that feels like you should have a Celine Dion song playing in the background to emphasize how much of an impact the game had on everyone’s life. Well, you won’t read that here. Yes I did play The Secret of Monkey Island when I was a wee lad but I never finished it. Why? I don’t know. I was a kid – I probably found something shinier.
The Secret of Monkey Island was a game I always started but then I got to the piranha poodles out the front of the Governor’s Mansion and just gave up. Maybe it’s the new HD graphics, maybe it’s the voice acting but whatever it is I’ve stuck with it this time.
These two aspects are probably the biggest difference over the original version. The new visual style is amazing to look at – it’s animated yet illustrative but not to point of the new Prince of Persia. The best to describe it would be it’s like a moving painting. If you don’t like it then you can always hit a key that will send it back to the original look but I don’t know why you would want to do that.
The voice-acting matches the animations perfectly and brings the game to life. You wouldn’t expect anything less from Lucasarts but it’s what makes an already great game into a better game. There are still some games out there that don’t have voice acting and require you to read the same amount of text as a Stephen King novel so it’s great to see the effort put in here to get quality voice acting.
One of the new features the game brings is a hint system. Hitting H will bring some text on screen advising you of what to do next. Hitting it again will give you a more detailed description and if you continually hit it then arrows will appear and it will be blatantly obvious what you have to do. This is very handy as The Secret of Monkey Island was made in the day when adventure games featured puzzles that required you to think outside the box.
Those of you who remember these types of puzzles will be pleased that The Secret of Monkey Island keeps these puzzles in tact. In order to complete tasks and puzzles you’re required to search out items, interact with the locals and use a variety of pre-selected verbs to complete the game. Hitting V will bring up the verbs that can be selected and hitting I will show you your inventory. It’s not rocket science so after a little playing around anyone get the hang of it.
The Secret of Monkey Island is a great game that anyone can enjoy. It doesn’t require you to have previously been a fan of point-and-click adventure games and this was the first game in the series so you don’t need to know the back story as this is the back story for the rest of the series. The humour is fantastic and the characters memorable. You can’t really fault this game for any reason.
The Secret of Monkey Island is available on Steam for $US9.99, XBLA for 800 MS Points and the iPhone/iPod Touch for $9.99.
| 46 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
