The Secret of Monkey Island

The Secret of Monkey Island was not expected to make a big splash in the gaming scene. Lets face it: Back a long time ago when garage programmers made video games, there was only one game that was worth of mention on the PC: King's Quest. PC Gaming was, in the early 90s, really dominated by adventure gamers only, and this game was a simple foray by Lucasarts into the gaming field. Or so everyone thought.



Monkey Island is pure genius. I'm not kidding here. This game is one of the few games that I couldn't go without when it comes to PC gaming. The story starts of with Guybrush Threepwood (A joke, the creators just named him "Guy" and it went from there), who wants to be a pirate. The first good portion of this game is trying to become a pirate. I'm not kidding: This is one of the few games that doesnt throw you into the role of someone, but kinda sticks you into that guy who's somewhat a loser.

The game runs in a bastardized version of a text parser engine, except you don't type commands. Instead, its very simple: You can select things on the screen, select things in your inventory, and then choose what to do with it. Simplistically, it can be like "Open: Door", but then it gets into things such as "Pick up: Rubber chicken with a pulley on it's neck" (Again, not kidding). I personally hate typing in commands, and this is nice, because it blends in that sparse interactivity and points which make you go "Oh crap, what do I do..." without the "WHY THE HELL CAN'T IT PARSE "GRAB"????".



The graphics are very VGA and the like, but they get the point across well. You have to remember that this game was ported into approximately 10 different systems (PC, as well as some Amiga systems and the like), so naturally it's not the greatest, depending on which version you play. I can vouch for the fact that the PC version is great and deserves meggido credit, but that's all I can vouch for. All the animations are nice, and I personally hold the art style to be very easy on the eyes. Of course, it's hard to make your character look dignified when he puts a pot on his head.

The shining part of this game is the humor. If this is the first time, or hell, even the 30th time you've played this, it will probably get a laugh out of you. Unlike corny games like King's Quest, this game actually makes you think beyond "Well, the rope can tie things..." into "Well, the rope can serve as a sort of whip..." kinda thinking. I never actually got stuck and frustrated with this game, and the jokes came even if I was doing idle things like messing around with my inventory. Unlike many humor-based games, this game doesnt get lame at the end, and a lot of the jokes, even now, are referenced by people. Thankfully, a lot of the jokes are not era-dependent or depend a lot of outside knowledge, so playing a 1990 game won't mean you'll be facing jokes about Bill Clinton's first term.



As for those of you in the Abandonware and/or Shareware community who know the pain of using DosBox for every god d*** game, I can assure you this game exempts itself as being easy to run on any system. Currently, you can buy this and its subsequent sequels on the Lucasarts website for pennies, and I guarantee you (Unless you're running Mac or Linux or something) that this game even runs on Windows XP. Mainly because the creators have constantly gone back and fixed things- they revamped it a little bit to run better in a re-release CD.

Honestly, I cannot come up with a single thing I do not like about this game. This might fall under fandom, but I have played this game since I was 5 years old (Ironically, my first PC game). Why? Because this game is great, even when I don't get half the jokes and don't make it past the first puzzle. Every so often, I whip out this game and play it, and I'm never dissapointed. Go get this game, or at least the demo, just so you can experience this gaming nirvana.

5 star(s) out of 5

Discuss More PC Games More Adventure Games