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Comment by jaimebuelta | Hacker News Reader

They are available quite cheaply on gog.com

https://www.gog.com/en/games?query=monkey%20island&developer...

They are very good! Obviously the style is out of fashion and some puzzles can be a bit frustrating (though not as much as old Sierra adventures), but they are amazing games...

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These are the special editions with updated graphics and voice acting. Although you can always switch back to the original style at any time.

Honestly, I have the special edition and after about ten minutes of playing I switched to the original graphics and music and didn't really look back. They really have aged quite well, even though of course they look much blockier on a 24" TFT compared to the original 15"ish CRT experience...

Which is kinda strange because the "pixel" art of those days was never intended to be rendered as blocky pixels, but designed to make use of the CRT's softness.

I mean, it was still clearly low-res. CRTs and smaller screen sized helped, but you could still see the pixels.

Indeed, you could see the pixels, but that was all it was. Advanced games used antialiasing to lessen the blocky effect. You only could dream of a future where graphics are "paper like" without pixels. At that moment, it didn't fill like low-res, at all. 320x200 256 colors was the bleeding edge of computer graphics. Later on, some games started appearing with 640x480.

That's also why I can't stand some of the modern pixel-games. They are too blocky and doesn't work well on modern screens. Using blocky graphics is not "retro" at all. It's more an artistic impression of how they think old games looked like.

The pixels were very obvious at 320x200 on most late 80s CRTs with RGB input! (Standard for PC, very common on Amiga and ST.)

Arguably true for the EGA versions (when played on real EGA hardware), but the VGA versions used a 320x200 resolution, which was line-doubled to 320x400, and displayed on monitors sharp enough to be usable at 640x480. The pixels were obviously blocky.

I felt the "updated" graphics were quite good too, although it showed in some places that the budget wasn't as big as for the original game...

I bought the special editions of 1 and 2 over the weekend with the sole intent of extracting the original game files and playing them via scummvm. Didn’t even try to play the special editions. And getting them working in scummvm was as much fun as getting to play the original games themselves!

Reminded me of the whole 14"/15" options for cant-even-remember which system. Vaguely recall a 17" choice too.

worth mentioning the music is. ot great in the remastered editions

they give you 2 options and neither of them are the incredible adlib version of the original

Same. I find the minimal graphics and animation leave more to your imagination.

Similarly, I prefer my non-talkie adventure games. YMMV.

Can you switch back to the original UI (without the verbs menu) as well?

The Verbs menu taking a third of the screen is the original SCUMM UI. The "verb coin" idea didn't come along until Full Throttle/Curse of Monkey Island years after Secret of Monkey Island and LeChuck's Revenge.

The only tiny "original UI" subtlety in play with Secret of Monkey Island was that the floppy version used a text inventory menu and the CD version added the inventory icons. I can't say I've met anyone that prefers the text inventory over the icons.

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