What's old is new again -- Monkey Island edition
The last few weeks have been exciting ones for fans of old-school adventure games. Last week, LucasArts brought several of their classic adventure games to Steam (as well as some of their other games, which I am less excited about) in a move I am going to tentatively call "genius." I've been wondering when they were going to do something with their old catalog, which had been languishing for years despite some legacy CDs published a while ago. The LucasArts adventures were the pinnacle of the adventure gaming genre, and it's disappointing that the genre has sort of faded into obscurity since the late 90s (much like space sims, sadly).
The four they've released so far -- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Loom, and The Dig, were all SCUMM games, which was one of the best adventure game systems of its time, and those games continued to stay alive thanks to ScummVM. However, they are hard to find these days, at least legally -- and now I can buy it through Steam and have access to them from anywhere, which is nice.
Of those four, Fate of Atlantis is probably my favorite -- it feels far more like an Indy game than the last movie felt like an Indy movie. But my favorites of the SCUMM games were the Monkey Island games; and tomorrow, LucasArts will be releasing The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, which updates the classic first game in that series with new graphics, sound, and a UI overhaul.
The best part is the price -- $10! It's a steal, especially if you never played the game when it came out. I admit I don't know how I feel about the new graphics; I think my favorite look for the game, artistically, is the cartoon-style art from the Curse of Monkey Island (Monkey Island 3). Still, this is something that people have been asking for from a lot of classic games for a long time -- X-Com, for instance, which has seen a lot of "remakes" but none that quite capture the feel of the original.
Last week also brought the first of a new series of Monkey Island games from Telltale Games, a team that includes many of the original Monkey Island developers. I have played through the first episode, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.
As I said, I preferred the art style of CMI, and the new games have one much more like Escape from Monkey Island (albeit much better looking), which I just feels....wrong to me somehow. I know it's much easier to publish for, but it just feels like something is "off" about the look. There is also a new voice actor for LeChuck, I believe, and at least in this first episode, he doesn't seem as good as the original -- to be honest, a lot of the voice acting in the new one seems a little lackluster, though I know some of that is because it has a much lower budget than the original games.
Overall, though, the first episode, while short, has some good moments and the puzzles are not bad. The one complaint I have is about a series of auditory puzzles that mean it's pretty much impossible for one of my friends, who is hearing-impaired, to play the game. This was disappointing, since she was a big fan of the first four, and I hope Telltale thinks about this sort of thing in the future. It wouldn't be so bad if there was a way to turn on some sort of subtitles -- maybe that's something that can be retrofitted later.
The writing is not bad, but, sadly, I don't think it's quite up to the level of the originals (though I think my problems with the voice acting and perhaps a little of the character design are influencing my thoughts in this regard). There were a few laugh-out-loud moments, but not nearly as many as in the first 2-3 hours of the other Monkey Island games. It's probably hard to catch the lightning in a bottle of Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer, but I really hope they get better in the next four episodes. It has been done before, after all:
Overall, I'd say it's worth the roughly seven bucks (5 episodes for 35 dollars), but honestly, for your gaming dollar, if you haven't played them, get the classics first!
The four they've released so far -- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Loom, and The Dig, were all SCUMM games, which was one of the best adventure game systems of its time, and those games continued to stay alive thanks to ScummVM. However, they are hard to find these days, at least legally -- and now I can buy it through Steam and have access to them from anywhere, which is nice.
Of those four, Fate of Atlantis is probably my favorite -- it feels far more like an Indy game than the last movie felt like an Indy movie. But my favorites of the SCUMM games were the Monkey Island games; and tomorrow, LucasArts will be releasing The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, which updates the classic first game in that series with new graphics, sound, and a UI overhaul.
The best part is the price -- $10! It's a steal, especially if you never played the game when it came out. I admit I don't know how I feel about the new graphics; I think my favorite look for the game, artistically, is the cartoon-style art from the Curse of Monkey Island (Monkey Island 3). Still, this is something that people have been asking for from a lot of classic games for a long time -- X-Com, for instance, which has seen a lot of "remakes" but none that quite capture the feel of the original.
Last week also brought the first of a new series of Monkey Island games from Telltale Games, a team that includes many of the original Monkey Island developers. I have played through the first episode, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.
As I said, I preferred the art style of CMI, and the new games have one much more like Escape from Monkey Island (albeit much better looking), which I just feels....wrong to me somehow. I know it's much easier to publish for, but it just feels like something is "off" about the look. There is also a new voice actor for LeChuck, I believe, and at least in this first episode, he doesn't seem as good as the original -- to be honest, a lot of the voice acting in the new one seems a little lackluster, though I know some of that is because it has a much lower budget than the original games.
Overall, though, the first episode, while short, has some good moments and the puzzles are not bad. The one complaint I have is about a series of auditory puzzles that mean it's pretty much impossible for one of my friends, who is hearing-impaired, to play the game. This was disappointing, since she was a big fan of the first four, and I hope Telltale thinks about this sort of thing in the future. It wouldn't be so bad if there was a way to turn on some sort of subtitles -- maybe that's something that can be retrofitted later.
The writing is not bad, but, sadly, I don't think it's quite up to the level of the originals (though I think my problems with the voice acting and perhaps a little of the character design are influencing my thoughts in this regard). There were a few laugh-out-loud moments, but not nearly as many as in the first 2-3 hours of the other Monkey Island games. It's probably hard to catch the lightning in a bottle of Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer, but I really hope they get better in the next four episodes. It has been done before, after all:
Overall, I'd say it's worth the roughly seven bucks (5 episodes for 35 dollars), but honestly, for your gaming dollar, if you haven't played them, get the classics first!
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I loved Fate of Atlantis back in the day. I may have to check that out. This Steam thing sounds pretty cool; is it Windows-only?
From my memory, LucasArts and Sierra were the two heavyweights in the classic adventure game category. They had their own niches, but it seemed like they kept leapfrogging each other with every new release. It'd be cool if Sierra did something along these lines as well.
Steam is Windows-only, though I've heard of people actually getting it to work through Wine. I'm not sure how well that works though.
I was thinking about the Sierra games too -- they had a lot of good ones, but I think they were far too prone to the "oh, you solved this puzzle with the wrong item 3 hours ago, and now you're fucked!" or "oh, you chose the wrong path, you're dead!" problem, which was largely avoided in the LucasArts games -- though there's a few points in Last Crusade and Fate of Atlantis where similar things can happen, by the time you get to Monkey Island and Grim Fandango, that's impossible.
I loved the Space Quest and Hero's Quest games back in Ye Guid Auld Dayeſ, but once I got used to LucasArts games it was almost impossible to go back. The "LucasArts philosophy of game design" generally forbade character death or unwinnable; once you're accustomed to LucasArts games, most of those eighties adventure games seem arbitrary and unfair.
(Also, I hope Full Throttle is on their short list for game releases.)