the secret of monkey island special edition

#The secret of monkey island special edition software#
#The secret of monkey island special edition trial#

I guess the best way to describe it would be to have coffee with an old friend you haven’t seen in years, only to realize that he was the same old friend just drastically older. This was a pleasant surprise to say the least, though I could not shake this strange feeling. What is left is what Melee Island looked in my memories. Though before I could admire the 256 colored version of Melee Island, a swipe effect takes place on screen as if a window washer has squeegeed my computer screen to fit graphical styles of this generation. While I will admit part of that charm was nostalgia, though still the design even today looks solid. Even though the graphics where very pixilated, there was a certain charm to them. As the title screen loaded you immediately saw the old 256 colored version and honestly it looked good. So as the game loaded, there was definite trepidation. So to me playing this game could just as easily, and unnecessarily, bury another piece of childhood nostalgia that I cherished. By the end of the whole ordeal, I was worried that I would have just sullied a perfectly pleasant memory that was better off if you had never revisited it in the first place. From my experiences in the past when you revisit nostalgia (especially in humor), you get burned. With that said, my biggest fear was not the fact the writing would not be any good, but the fact that it would not be as good as I remembered it. What The Secret of Monkey Island showcased was the potential that videogames had, in showing that the medium could convey an actual story in which you cared about what happened to the characters.

Back then, story was never a big part of the game’s experience. I mostly at the time grew up in an era where most of my gaming was done from a console. Up until then, I never figured games to actually be a medium for competent story telling. It was one of those games that changes the way you look at games. To me, The Secret of Monkey Island is one of those seminal games of my later childhood. My biggest fear of revisiting the original Monkey Island was the fact that it was not going to be as funny as a remembered it. Moments like “the mansion gag” or being shot out of a canon were great moments to me as a kid. Back then it never occurred to me that these games could be legitimately funny. After all for better or worse, I remembered the game’s writing to be both funny and interesting.Īs I said earlier, until The Secret of Monkey Island my only experience with adventure games was through the King’s Quest series. However when it came to the game’s writing, I was not as confident. So I figured that the game mechanics would hold up even today. Adventure games for the most part have not changed in the last twenty years. I appreciated that fact, even to this day.įor that reason alone I was not that concerned about revisiting The Secret of Monkey Island’s core gameplay mechanics.

#The secret of monkey island special edition trial#

Instead of having trial and error sections which you would be constantly reloading after every botched encounter, the LucasArts games wanted you to just sit back and enjoy the ride. At the same time though, there was a simplistic beauty to those games, in which that you could never die.

So the interface in the LucasArts games of pushing, pulling, or combining items was a bit foreign to me and took a while to grasp completely. To say the least, it was conceptually very different.įor one, I was taught to play graphic adventure games from the “Sierra School of Hard Knocks”. The Secret of Monkey Island was my first foray into the LucasArts graphical adventures.

#The secret of monkey island special edition software#

One of these pieces of software happened to be The Secret of Monkey Island.Įven though I had never played any of the LucasArts graphical adventures to that point, I had been very familiar with point-and-click adventure games through the likes of the King’s Quest series. With it, also came a miscellaneous stack of software with every purchase of a machine. It was 1993 and I was about eleven years old, we had purchased a new computer, a one with a CD-ROM and VGA graphics card. The first was when I played the first re-release of the game on the mind blowing medium, the CD-ROM.