The Curse of Monkey Island
filfre.net
filfre.net
For some reason I never quite understood, it wasn’t that well received when it came out. My stance on this one hasn’t changed in 27 years and I firmly believe it is the pinnacle of the genre : incredible art, hilarious, crazy but somehow logical puzzles, great music, and above all extraordinarily well written. Very very few games had me laugh in front of my computer. And don’t forget the brilliant voice acting.
I’ve just bought the latest title in the series but haven’t played it yet - I somehow fear it won’t be able to match COMI. I will also be introducing my kids to this incredible work of art - they will never hear about this from their friends at school, and I feel this is typically the kind of thing I can and probably should share as a parent.
Lucas folks, thanks for making this game.
As for the latest MI... it is my hot take that I would have been better off not playing it. It's competently made and has some good innovations for the point-and-click genre, but not even the characters seem like they want to be there. Then again, it has good ratings so other opinions exist.
It's a true shame as it could have been a cute finale, just ended up being rubbish for me.
> During the latter 1990s, when most computers games were still made by and for a fairly homogeneous cohort of young men, too much ludic humor tried to get by on transgression rather than wit; this was a time of in-groups punching — usually punching down — on out-groups. I’m happy to say that The Curse of Monkey Island‘s humor is nothing like that.
Well said. Game has aged beautifully.
Elaine in particular is brave, smart, skillful, a leader, but also loving, kind. The character is not flattened to a single characteristic or narrative function. Even when she needs to be saved, when you get there, she already saved herself (in MI 1 or 2, I don’t remember).
Wait a second, why is that surprising? As if to you, something being male dominated must usually mean women being portrayed negatively by men, and if they're not then it's a surprise.
Sorry, but your comment just reeks of sexism by assuming mens' default is to not have a positive portrayal on women.
In general, society has moved to be less and less tolerant of bigotry over time. Given that, you should expect that older media will be more bigoted than we currently tolerate.
Correction: Only the white males.
I suppose the contemporaneous comparison there would be Leisure Suit Larry? [0]
Monkey Island is an absolute classic, of course, but this particular point feels almost like a retcon of present-day cultural assumptions into a specific context in the past where the objects of this criticism weren't really quite so present.
I'd like to mention Samantha Fox Strip Poker as well, though it's a bit more subtle than "punching".
I can think of the occasional bad-taste joke in an adventure game, but I don't think it was ever as pervasive as is implied.
I have nothing but praise for this game. It’s a standout example of how great art transcends its medium. Despite the technical limitations of the mid-90s, it’s still a beautifully drawn, beautifully scored joyful experience.
A Pirate I Was Meant To Be is on our family playlist for long car journeys with the kids.
Also, I’m not sure if this can ever be proven, but I’m convinced the chain of influence from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Ride to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Movie goes at least partly via Monkey Island.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Stranger_Tides#Influence_on...
It's a great novel (if you excuse some minor flaws, like the protagonist's lightning-fast mastering of sailing after he becomes a pirate) which deserves a proper adaptation, but now that Disney owns the rights, that will likely never happen.
Without getting into (almost any specific) spoilers of the last 10 seconds of the game... this claim is completely untrue. The hint at a sequel is right there in the open, as the ending implies LeChuck is still at large.
My older brother loved the Myst series, DoTT, Sam & Max and as a younger brother who used to sit and watch him play games, I got bored. His way of shoving me out the room because I would then hear him play GTA and not be allowed back in...
It's the same with any of those games. Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max. -- You need that logical and forward thinking mindset and an attention span greater than 3 seconds. It's an niche genre and not for everyone and now it's a genre that's lost with time just because how the world is nowadays. Who has four hours to point and click around a realm?
I meanwhile just wanted to frag folk and jump around a CTF map on Quake 3.
Not only that but you do need a lot of free time as well. As a kid I had the patience and time to push through point and click games, now as an adult with responsibilities I don't. If I only have 30 minutes per day to spend on gaming it's gonna be too short to invest in those kinds of games but just enough time for a few rounds of Q3 arena or such.
I don't do a ton of adventure gaming, but I have gone through most of the episodic Sam & Max games. I estimate about 1 walkthrough consult per 2 games overall, and about a 50/50 split between "oh crap I should have gotten that myself" and "oh, I was never going to get that" results (with the occasional "oh I was right and I just didn't click on the right thing or notice the tiny little widget" that really makes me glad I just looked).
Day of the Tentacle was probably the largest game I've done with 0 consults, though I was probably stuck enough to justify it a couple of times. One of the heights of the genre, there.
The absolute worst puzzle for me remains the infamous Broken Sword/Circle of Blood Irish goat scene:
On the other hand, modern Games like Baldur's Gate 3, while not really an adventure game, gives you so many different ways of solving each puzzle or encounter. It's never pre scripted to only one solution, but you can really use your imagination.
Relevant tropes:
I wasn't arguing that BG3 is a puzzle/adventure game (sorry if that was unclear), but that it doesn't suffer from that "only one esoteric and preposterous solution" that 90s-era adventure games often had (looking at you, Sierra Entertainment especially, with puzzles like needing to stick a banana into a jetpack to stop a killer robot: https://spacequest.fandom.com/wiki/W-D40#Game_Involvement... and that was the only way to proceed).
By contrast, in BG3 you can beat the game in many different ways, leading to completely different outcomes (and playtimes). I did a physics-based playthrough that mostly just shoved and threw people around and off cliffs, with no idea who they were or what they wanted from me, but the game gave me the freedom to do that. It's also possible to do a mostly peaceful playthrough with a lot of talking (yawn).
The Owlbear cave is a good example (no spoilers... but there's a lot of different outcomes for the mother and child owlbear, depending on your party makeup and actions etc.)
Games these days are a lot better at giving you different ways to solve a situation (or the entire game), not just following a strictly linear puzzle/narrative/questline. It's like the opposite of the "Moon Logic Puzzle" trope.
We definitely agree. I thoroughly enjoyed bg3, and remember feeling no resistance because things would play out the way I wanted them to happen.
Apart from the occasional fighting parts, I’ve wondered quite a bit about what makes bg3 a challenge - and I still don’t have the answer, probably because there’s little to no challenge in bg3. I’ve decided though that the game is not about the technical challenge ( or any challenge for that matter ) but about the fact that you can freely bend the story to your wishes , and do things the way you want, and the problems you solve are the ones that, to some extent, you choose to create / address - what you call ‘problems’ and I agree with you.
This makes the game structurally different from COMI ( which is about solving puzzles so about meeting some kind of challenge ), but neither more nor less enjoyable- they’re just different games.
Not at all just like you don't need to save scum in action games. Both are soft cheats used when you are unable to complete the game properly - but that's on you not the game.
Game design was still in its adolescence back then, and EGA/VGA resolutions didn't easily allow for clearly noticeable graphics for every item on the screen, especially in cluttered scenes (like in Fate of Atlantis: https://i0.wp.com/presentperfectgaming.com/wp-content/upload..., what item is or isn't clickable?)
Later games even included hotspot revealers on purpose so you wouldn't have to go pixel hunting: https://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=5220
Don't get me wrong, I loved those games, but some of those early puzzles were just silly.
Broken Age was actually interesting for me, because it's the game I got closest to finishing without a walkthrough. I only needed to consult one once, for the last puzzle that you encounter in the game.
Consulting a walkthrough generally ruins the game for me so once I use one once, my patience threshold for using it again drops significantly. At that point how much I enjoy a game depends on how much I like the characters, story, etc. Grim Fandango is one of those I still look back fondly for that reason, even though it lost me WAY earlier than halfway.
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Somewhat of a tangent, but I've always wondered if this genre of games is good for development of mathematical thinking. Like, in an adventure game you usually know the broad strokes of what you need to do, but you need to solve lots of puzzles to get there. Something I've always struggled with in math is the ability to think laterally, think of analogues, lemmas, auxiliary problems, etc. that can help prove a theorem. It's always felt to me like the two struggles are different forms of the same issue with my cognition.
The exaggerated art style didn't mesh with that of the first two games. The art style of the first two is of course whimsical, but it's within the realm of photorealism. MI3, however, leans heavily into the Chuck Jones style of cartoons, with huge heads and spindly bodies, against super-exaggerated backgrounds where not a single straight corner can be seen.
It's not just that Guybrush looks completely different in MI3 — he's certainly not a tall, lanky fellow in MI1-2 (though in the "remastered" versions LucasArts retconned his look) — he feels like an entirely new and different character. The world also feels like a different universe entirely. It's a different island, sure, but it just doesn't feel like the dark and atmospheric environment of the first two games.
There's overall a weird lack of continuity here, and the heritage of Day of the Tentacle is apparent. DotT is of course about as Chunk Jones-y as you can get, with a huge dab of the wacky art style of Ren & Stimpy and Animaniacs. MI3 feels designed by people who wanted to do their own thing.
What's really weird and off-putting is the art style of MI6. I don't know what they were thinking. I guess they didn't think Guybrush was thin enough in the previous iterations?
Claiming a sequel that aligned more with the look and feel of the original couldn't have worked is neither here nor there, because it was never attempted, and so it can't be dismissed as the wrong way to go.
He was in everything from The Wonder Years and Seinfeld to the Terminator movies. Game-wise, his resume included entries from series like Baldurs Gate, Krondor, Zork, Star Trek, Metal Gear Solid, and as the narrator of World of Warcraft.
Yes, the Pirates of the Caribbean movie originally started as a Monkey Island screenplay. But that franchise is basically dead now, and with the popularity of sassy, fourth-wall breaking sendup movies I think it would do gangbusters.
The lore and the humor and the characters are already there - it's a shame they are locked to this increasingly small audience of people who have patience for point and click adventure games.
Monkey Island 1 was also good. But 2 was too complicated and the puzzles too contrived. And it was soooo slow on Amiga. But 3, wow. I love the art style, the way the characters are drawn, the jokes etc. The goodsoup family. It was a really great game.
In contrast, 4 was really ugly with its primitive 3D graphics, stupid Starbucks jokes etc.
Wasn't that the one with 10 floppy disks or something?
"please swap disc"
load load load
Largo comes in, talks for a bit, swishes spit in his mouth, leans back
"please swap disc"
load load load
A closeup of a big green gobbet of spit flying across the screen
"please swap disc"
load load load
And at that moment I knew I needed to get a hard drive.
On the basic 68000 based models it was kinda slow. And without a hard disk nor over 1mb memory, it was a lot of floppy swapping.
I still played through it to the end, and enjoyed it.
Some really incredible adventure games came out of that era. Loom and Grim Fandango spring to mind.
This is a weird perspective; The Secret of Monkey Island already uses photorealistic graphics. Curse is much cartoonier.
I wouldn't shower more praise on this game than folks have already done. Great article. Great HN thread. A happy day.
I remember getting my first PC at thirteen and have some pirated games on it, Quake 2, Descent Freespace, Moto Racer (Enter your name!), and The Curse of Monkey Island was something different, so wholesome and funny, I was in love with Elaine, it also make me interested on storytelling, I guess because of that game I started to watch more movies and read more books.
And this game have the option to hear all the voices on Spanish, it wasn't something common, so me knowing no English at all, it was a new gaming experience and the connection was deeper.
"Nerdcore Dub versions from 'The Secret of Monkey Island I & II' adventure game soundtracks (1990/91), the forgotten Voodoo-Reggae classics from the floppy disc age."
And let's not forget it introduced Murray the Skull to the world!
But why? Just play with a mild CRT shader in ScummVM and it looks fine.
Also considering the art style of the MI1/2 remasters as well as whatever the art in Return is supposed to be I really don't want to find out how they would butcher MI3.
I ended up shelving it for the time being. Maybe it takes off after a while? Could always give another shot.
It was my first encounter with the series and even after the remastered versions I couldn't go back and get into the first 2 because they simply felt less developed, less funny, and less interesting. I know those that have started with them would think that's a travesty, but here we are.