Classic Review - The Curse of Monkey Island

oh my sweet Elaine am I cursed to starve here on this ocean without seeing your face just one more time and like hope you didn't mind me indulging nostalgia there welcome to my review of the curse of Monkey Island for PC this is a point-and-click adventure game and the sequel to Monkey Island 2 lechuck's revenge it was developed by LucasArts and released in October of 1997 and obviously from the get-go you can tell that this thing boasts a radically different art style from the previous games in the series as well as it boasts voice acting among other things it also has the distinction of being the last game that LucasArts produced that used the scum engine its replacement was just around the corner with the upcoming release of grim fandango in 1998 using the grim engine which also would go on to power escape from monkey island but i'll of course talk more about that once i get to the review of escape from Monkey Island II the curse of Monkey Island is also interesting in that it did change up a couple of mechanics from the previous games in the series and it also does not feature the triumvirate of the Monkey Island writing system it's no longer a collaborative effort between Ron Gilbert Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman in fact none of them worked on this one at all instead the project leaders were two of the developers of full throttle and you'll actually be able to see that in the curse of Monkey Island gameplay if you are familiar with full throttle they actually play very similarly in terms of their interface and everything and while I don't really see a lot of people acting like the changes were outright horrible or anything but the reception of this one was a bit more lukewarm than the reception of the previous two games of course it is a very tough act to follow when one of the previous games is one of the best games ever made so the question ultimately comes how they handled this and there is something you had to keep in mind with this review this is the first Monkey Island game I played as I mentioned in my Secret of Monkey Island review I had to go back and play the first two games in the series long after their release with the release of the special editions and as far as this thing goes I played the first chapter or so back in 1998 I think and I never really got past that until more recently so while I do have some pretty strong nostalgia at least for the opening bits of the game I don't really have as much nostalgia for the rest of it and it's kind of a weird instance for me so while I am somewhat affected by a nostalgia on this one it's not quite to the same degree of the Secret of Monkey Island even though I played that far more recently but I have to admit that intro bit when The Monkey Island theme just bursts into frame is just wonderful so let's go ahead and get right into this thing how is the curse of Monkey Island do the changes benefit it and is it worth playing to this day or did the change in developers really just give it the kiss of death or whatever well as far as the presentation goes you do have to keep in mind that the technology was infinitely better than anything that Monkey Island 1 & 2 could have achieved back in the very early 90s with the releases of those being 1990 and 1991 respectively this was released in 97 and was PC exclusive specifically Windows and so while it does run on the scum engine it is a radically different version than the version that powered the older Monkey Island games this is basically like playing full throttle which means that you've got a lot of really nice animation just straight-up cartoon animation in fact and it works really well for the game because it does have that kind of comical theme to it where you're not supposed to take this all that seriously it's supposed to be wacky and ridiculous and that cartoony wacky art style does fit the game very well it did not sit well with some people and there was a complaint around the time as just something has been lost but nobody was really sure what and while I can see where people are coming from on that frankly this thing is better with the cartoon art style it fits the theme better it was something that was always kind of odd about the older games in the series where they had this sort of realistic art style going for them even though they were still obviously cartoony and pixelated and everything but this one just decides you know what screw it we're being cartoony and ridiculous let's just go for it and they never look back so it's just something you kind of have to get used to and really it's up to you whether or not you're going to actually get anything out of the art style but one thing you can't deny is that the animation is far smoother far more detailed just straight-up better than anything in the prior Monkey Island games even if it doesn't have that same kind of really old-school charm to it so there is that and this also brings up the addition of full-on cutscenes that are all just pre animated and they just play at various moments in the game instead of face but being in engine and just scripted sequences in the engine so while the charm of the old games isn't quite there in terms of art style it supplants it with its own style of charm and it just ends up working rather well and then there's the sound design which is about what you would expect after having played the older games in the series it's very very good stuff the sound effects are great they work really well for what they are some of them are suitably wacky some of them just are sound effects that are just good enough to work and nothing more nothing less and the music is by the same guy who did the soundtracks for the previous two games in the series Michael land so it actually does sound very much in keeping with the previous games in the series with the Monkey Island theme that is played in this one I feel being the best rendition of it in the entire series but again your mileage may vary on that that's a very subjective thing but regardless it's got a very nice charm soundtrack that is very much that kind of Caribbean reggae feel that the older games did just in a much higher quality because it's CD we can do that now and speaking of CD there is one thing that was introduced in this game that was not in either of the previous ones and that is voice acting some people really like it some people really don't I personally really like the voice acting it's very nice it works really well for the game it's suitably cheesy but not too cheesy to the point where it just becomes annoying and every single one of the characters is just voiced really well obviously LucasArts did a great job of selecting voice actors for this and of course several of the voice actors would go on to play these various characters in later games in the series as well on up through escape from account and Tales of Monkey Island and of course the special edition re-releases of the first two games so but again some people really didn't like that I don't know why you pretty much should expect voice acting in a later 90s adventure game it was a standard feature of the genre by the mid 90s anyway so once he got to this thing it was pretty much expected to have voice acting and luckily they did a very good job selecting cast for that so the presentation is basically leaps and bounds ahead of the previous games but ultimately what really matter here are the story and the gameplay and this is where I can see people really getting bothered by it and that's because once again the main guys who worked on the previous two Monkey Island games were not present for the curse of Monkey Island instead it was being spearheaded by guys who worked on full throttle which if you're not familiar is another LucasArts adventure game mostly done by Tim Schafer and it's become something of a cult classic so it's not really that surprising if you haven't heard of it but people who know their adventure games would know what that is and basically how it plays and the curse of Monkey Island is structured a lot like it in terms of its gameplay but I will get to that in a moment the idea behind the curse of Monkey Islands plot is that you are once again Guybrush Threepwood the mighty pirate who has defeated lechuck time and time again only now he is adrift in the sea after the rather wacky weird events of the ending of Monkey Island 2 and he is basically still stricken by Alain Marley and wants to go off and find her and as luck would have it he floats right into the middle of a battle between Lane in a fort and lechuck who is now a zombie pirate who intends to kill Elaine and force her to become his bride because that's how he thinks that works I guess it's actually kind of played for laughs just how inept he is in this particular endeavor but despite his ineptitude you do have to stop him from doing his evil deeds and trying to kill Elaine so she can become his bride and in the process Guybrush manages to screw up and uses a big diamond ring that he finds in lechuck's treasure hold as an engagement ring for Elaine which then turns her into a gold statue so now he has to lift the curse and stop look Chuck from doing his evil deeds at the same time it's a fairly simple but also very silly premise and you learned very very quickly that this thing is not meant to be taken remotely seriously it actually does a lot of callbacks to the previous games in the series where several characters make their return and there's tons and tons of references back to both the previous Monkey Island games as well as other LucasArts adventure games and it's still very much a funny game it has a very good sense of humor the weakest part of it really is its plot which is really cliche to begin with and then the more you get into it the more out there it gets and it just kind of sputters out toward the end but the thing about that is as weak as the plot is it doesn't really matter as much because you're probably going to be laughing the entire you're playing this game there is a lot of really great humor in this thing and even though the plot itself is rather weak and not particularly complex or anything like that you've got some very likeable characters in of course guy brush Lane even what chuck is somewhat likable just because he is hilariously evil and clearly enjoys being evil and if nothing else you can just enjoy the ridiculous cheese that's in this thing so while the plot is weak it more than makes up for this with not only the fun characters that you're gonna be running into over the course of the game but also just the sheer amount of wacky stupid fun that you're gonna be having from all the ridiculous jokes and everything including plenty of fourth wall breaking jokes and throw backs to the older games although this does backfire on the game a bit because even though it's some callbacks to the original Secret of Monkey Island as well as monkey Alan - they feel slightly cheap and by that I mean it feels like it's just kind of relying on an old gag and not really trying something new and fresh but at the same time it works because those moments are fairly brief for the most part and it just kind of feels like okay we're gonna throw in this nice little joke here you can laugh at it it's a throwback to the old games I mean for example they throw in a bit about asking me about grim fandago and that's a reference to Cobb in the first game if you're not familiar and then there's other times where it just gets meta and starts talking about how the actual game plays out we're at one point the characters are openly questioning wait a minute I thought you couldn't die in LucasArts adventure games or making fun of the video game format itself and all sorts of things like that it's very self-aware and that lends it a ton of charm and that is very much a good thing both because it makes the game a lot more endearing and much more like the old-school games in terms of just much charm it has as well as compensating a bit for its gameplay the gameplay is patterned more after full throttle than it is after the older LucasArts adventure games which means that you now have a verb coin where when you go to interact with something you actually need to hold the left mouse button down while hovering over the thing and it will bring up a verb coin where you have one icon for a hand interaction whether it be pushing picking up the item whatever might will be you have an icon for looking at it and you have an icon for speaking or tasting or whatever and you just select those icons and you'll interact with the thing it takes some getting used to but it's pretty intuitive and very easy to pick up the part of me does miss that old verb system that the old scum engine games had where you had to select the verb pick up or push or pull or something like that and then pick the item that you wanted to interact with so the game does end up feeling a lot more simplified and this is interesting because they introduce a variable difficulty setting where you can just play it normally or you can play mega monkey mode which introduces additional puzzles to make the game more challenging they're not horribly challenging but they're more challenge than the base game so there's not really too much of a point to play this thing on regular unless for some reason you don't really want additional gameplay I mean this game isn't particularly long so it's not like the gameplay is going to be a huge hindrance on you or anything unless you just can't figure out the puzzles but that's part of the problem because a lot of the puzzles in this game are really easy and the ones that aren't take some fairly weird leaps of logic I mean usually they're not horrible leaps of logic but they're enough that you'd have to think on it for a fair bit before it would even remotely come to mind things like well I need a compass okay maybe I should go look for a compass except you have to make one and it's like well crap what do I make it out of oh oh yeah I have all these different items that would make a compass if I did this this isn't this so it does take a bit more of a page from the Ciara book in that some of the puzzle solutions are a bit out there but luckily enough it's not so much of the Ciara playbook that you're just going what's going on what am i doing because I'm well aware that a lot of people who played Ciara adventure games have that problem I didn't because I've just been playing them for so long but when you get to something like this and it's meant to be a relatively easy to get into game I can see where people wouldn't necessarily want to go through the more complex puzzles and such like that so it is nice to have variable difficulty but really the puzzles aren't gonna set you back all that much and do provide some adequate goofiness and challenge to the game as far as figuring out what you need to do next the one thing that did kind of bother me though was that they reuse the insult sword fighting gag only they expanded upon it a bit in this one they have you sailing around the seeds instead of roaming around melee Island and not only do you have to relearn the insults because they have different insults now and they follow a pattern of actually having to rhyme at the end in addition to being witty comebacks to whatever they're saying they are weaker insults and less funny than the original game and they tack on this ship battle mechanic where you just kind of drift around the sea and you shoot at the enemy ships with your cannons and it's not only incredibly easy to do but it's actually kind of tedious now that segment of the game doesn't last particularly long but what ends up happening is you go out to the sea you find a pirate ship you attack the pirate ship you just run up to it and you hit it with the cannons really easy to do you have your insult sword fight and if you win then you get treasure from the defeated pirates and you can take that back to the port in order to upgrade your cannons and as you upgrade your cannons you get access to more difficult pirates and eventually you get to the final boss of the Pirates which is Captain rottingham and you fight him and if you win you get to progress the story if you don't then well try again later I guess it's just kind of tedious it's not horrible or anything but the insults are kind of stale and just again not as funny as they were in the original game and the rhyming mechanic doesn't really add anything to it it's just kind of a rehash and it feels like a rehash it's really the only bit of the game I feel is really notable as a rehash the rest of the game however is pretty solid stuff this is a very very good adventure game overall apart from just reusing the sword fighting bit and I outright enjoy it more than I did Monkey Island 2 Monkey Island 2 was just kind of disappointing to me when I get to curse of Monkey Island it's just less disappointing it's kind of hard to describe really even though it doesn't feel quite the same even though it's very obvious that these same guys were not working on this thing it still exudes a huge amount of charm it's very funny it's just a wacky fun adventure game that tries to take the series in a slightly different direction succeeds for the most part and still tries to remain true to the originals and it accomplishes that balancing act very well for the most part so if you can find a copy of the curse of Monkey Island I very highly recommend it it's not quite as good as the original that's just kind of goes without saying but I prefer it to Monkey Island 2 even though Monkey Island 2 is still a fantastic adventure game and well worth playing I just frankly had more fun with the curse of Monkey Island and ultimately with Monkey Island I feel like that's what matters thanks for watching

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Views: 6,380

Rating: 4.7916665 out of 5

Keywords: dwterminator, gaming, DWTerminator Gaming, Classic Review, Classic, Review, The Curse of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 3, LucasArts, PC

Id: OfqdrUE0o4U

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2015