Game Reviews

For the record, I'm not like Joe. I don't mean that in the sense that my facial hair isn't fluffy like a kitten, but more that I'm not a big Monkey Island fan-boy. I never played the game growing up, nor any of the other LucasArts adventure games. Instead, I preferred mutilating things in Doom and, heaven forbid, playing outside. It's not that I dislike the genre though - I actually loved the Broken Sword games, for example. It's just that I could never be bothered with all that reading and Monkey Island pre-dated most of the 'talkie' adventure games by a few years.

This is where the remake, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, comes in and it falls to me to see if Monkey Island is still a good game by today's standards. Remakes are often regarded as being the spawn of Satan of course, as they bastardise the original to conform to new trends in gameplay. Fortunately, you don't have to grab a Wiimote and dance around like an idiot, or spend obscene amounts of cash on a new graphics card for this. Monkey Island: Special Edition offers an optional graphical overhaul and interface (plus a few other bits, like spoken dialogue), but the actual content is the same as before - to the point where it clearly references the original even as you load the game. You simply could not get a more faithful rendition.Diving in for the first time is great - it starts off showing the old school loading image, then gently overlays and replaces it with the new graphics. A sort of "look how far we've come" combined with "look how faithful we've been to the original". It's like they do on CSI - magically increasing the resolution and adding pixel fidelity on an image - zoom and enhance!

The plot of the game is based around a lanky lad with pale skin and long blonde hair who looks like he could be a sterotypical viking if only he wasn't so scrawny. His name is Guybrush Threepwood and at the start of the game all we know about him is that he has come to Melee Island, deep in the Carribbean, because he wants to be a pirate. Guybrush, which I also imagine is a name for a masculinised loo-cleaning tool, drops into the local pirate bar and sets about talking to the local drunkards/pirate overlords. After chatting to the three commodores, Guybrush gets sent on three quests of pirate-esque calibre - dig up some loot, steal some loot and learn how to sword fight - or, well, insult sword fight.