The Secret Of Monkey Island

Developer: Lucas Arts
Release year: 1990
Genre: Adventure, third person point and click

I love adventure games. I have never played a game from Monkey Island series. I never had the opportunity until this year when I got THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND - THE COMPLETE SAGA DVD.

It was kind of scary, you can understand that. I mean we are in 2009, and I want to play a game from 1990. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't born in a virtual 3D world, the first video games I have played were games created for video consoles like Mario, then I played games like Prince of Persia (the one from 1989)... you got the idea. But still, it is not that easy to play such an old game. Or at least that was what I thought. Although the DVD contained enhanced version of the game I chose to play the original EGA version in 16 colors and PC speaker sound.

You are playing the role of Guybrush Threepwood whose intentions are clear from the beginning of the game when he arrives on the Caribbean island of Mêlée: "My name is Guybrush Threepwood, and I want to be a pirate". For that he has to resolve three challenges to prove himself. Along the way he meets beautiful Governor Elaine Marley who is abducted by the ghost pirate LeChuck. Guybrush gathers a crew and goes to find her.

The game graphics are great, even more then great. I couldn't believe my eyes. With only 16 colors and 320x240 resolution, the characters, the places are very well drawn. Just look at the picture where the light from the windows is lighting the street in the night. The animations are great too, and sometimes I can see a bit of realism in the game, for instance the light from the windows in the town are turning on and off randomly.

Dialogs are well written, adorned with jokes, some of them being quite unusual like the one from the forest with the disks which looked like a technical error, or that pirate which advertise Loom game. The game interface uses 12 verbs written on the bottom part of the screen. The items from your inventory are also written on the screen. Using these you can create actions like 'Use x on y' or 'Talk to Z'. The CD-ROM version from 1992 contained graphical inventory items.

The game contains interesting puzzles that are quite logical. I don't remember to get stuck in the game just because I missed an object. Puzzles vary from opening a safe, finding a path through a forest to well known pirate sword-swear fighting.


I enjoyed playing The secret of the Monkey Island. I think I had a dumb smile on my face while playing like my little sister has it when she plays Zuma online. Although The secret of the Monkey Island is an old game it still hasn't lost it's charm.


System requirements:

• MS-DOS 5.0 or higher
• 386/33 DX (486 recommended)
• 1 Mb EMS required (2 Mb EMS recommended)
• 256 color VGA/MCGA
• SoundBlaster and 100% compatibles, Adlib, Roland MT 32
• Mouse 
  

You will probably go: "what the heck ?". I tell you, without a mouse you were doomed :P.  Ok,  if you really want to play the original game you should use some dos emulators, like DOSBox. I use it on XP SP2