The Secret of Monkey Island - Just Point and Click
My introduction to point-and-click adventures was when I borrowed Quest for Glory 2 from a friend. At the time, it was the only game my computer could run. At the time I did not find the game to be as fun as my friend seemed to think so. The emulators were just starting to take off and there was a glut of previously untried games I had access to. The adventure games quickly ended up on a dusty back shelf of my memory.
Guybrush used to have a better haircut
When I became interested in retro games, the name of Lucas Arts kept coming up. Multiple podcasts talked of them being the developer that made the best adventure games. More recently TellTale Games led the revival of Point-and-Click adventure genre. After playing Life is Strange, I had newfound appreciation for these types of games. For those of us who value story above mechanics in games, these can be vehicles for some of the most immersive storytelling.
At the time of its release, Secret of Monkey Island was lauded for its humor and clever puzzles. It was also not unnecessarily punishing the way Sierra adventures tended to be. Ron Gilbert, the man behind Monkey Island wanted to make adventure games which were fun to play. He certainly did not appreciate the game becoming unbeatable without telling the player, the way some Sierra games of the time did. He wrote a piece on requirements on making a fun puzzle game. It is still an extremely relevant piece of writing. (https://grumpygamer.com/why_adventure_games_suck it is still a great read).
Gilbert enumerates the Rules of Thumb that are needed to make a good adventure game. These include:
The End Goal should be clear.
The game needs to be broken up into sub-goals. All of these need to be obvious.
Menu fills the bottom fourth of the screen. No need to cycle through verbs
The player should not have to die and restart to make progress.
The solution of the puzzle should not be found before the player encounters the puzzle itself. This also gets rid of one of the worst aspects of Sierra games. No puzzle should become unsolvable because the player did not pick something up in the past. This made many of the Sierra adventure games unfinishable.
Puzzles should only be in service of the story. Each puzzle should be moving the plot of the game along. If not, then it should be contributing to the story of the game. There should not be a disconnect between the puzzle and the story itself.
There are more rules (the piece itself is quite exhaustive) but these are the ones that have stuck to me. Whenever I feel I’m not having fun with a game, regardless of genre, I tend to examine it in the light of these rules. More often than not, One of Gilbert’s rules are not being followed.
For a while the only way to play the Monkey Island games wasa through dubious means. The good news is Secret of the Monkey Island is no longer abandonware. The new enhanced version is now available on Steam, among other platforms. This new version has voice acting and graphics have been redone from ground up. While I certainly appreciate being able to play it without jumping through hoops, I am not really a fan of the new look. There is still a way to emulate it online. Maybe not for the entirety of the game, but for at least the introduction, I want to play both versions side by side comparison.
The graphics hold up well.
We play as an affable loser named Guybrush Threepwood who aspires to be a pirate. He shows up to a bar for guidance where he is told to complete three tasks and drink grog with them to complete his initiation into the brotherhood of pirates. While at the bar Guybrush finds out the story of fearsome pirate Le Chuck. He was invited to dinner with the governor and fell in love with her right away. He refused to leave the governor’s mansion, and she was annoyed enough to tell him to drop dead. He promptly did so and then started haunting the seas around Melee Island.
All of this meant none of the pirates could go out to the sea and resume their pirating ways. Now they are about to run out of grog. In walks Threepwood with his dream to be a pirate. And maybe he can be manipulated into going up against Le Chuck.
Le Chuck has his ship anchored in what looks to be the depths of hell. A skeletal member of his crew comes in to let him know of the new development at the Melee Island. Namely there is a new and upcoming pirate who may be a hindrance in their plans. Chuck decides to take care of this problem himself.
The humor of Monkey Island is on display on get go. Guybrush walks up to the Melee Island Watch, and immediately realizes the watch guard is blind. He reminded me of Blinkin being on watch for the Men in Tights. Later on, Guy has to wrest a fish away from a sea gull, which turns out to be a literal red herring. The whole game is supposed to be about 6 to 8 hours long. That is an ideal length to finish the adventure in one or two sittings. I am looking forward to experiencing this game for the first time.
01-02-2021
Too much blue in Le Chuck’s ship though.
