The Curse of Monkey Island

April 30, 2002

Price: $10 (Jewel case)

"Oh, there's a monkey in my pocket,
And he's stealing all my change,
His stare is blank and glassy,
I suspect that he's deranged..."

When I was younger, I thought Sierra games were kind of funny. Ok, lots and lots of funny. Not that I could play them, as Roberta Williams and Co. thought they were too good to port their games over to the lowly Commodore 64. By the time that I actually acquired a PC, my sense of humor had matured to the point where most Sierra games no longer appealed to me. Of course, said maturation does not happen to everyone, and I am sure there are those who still mourn the loss of Leisure Suit Larry, Sierra's lowbrow sexploitation series of the mid eighties--though I doubt anyone who claimed that he played the game for the humor and not titillation still does so today, the low-resolution graphics outpaced in an age of internet porn (indeed, will men still read Playboy "for the articles" when virtual-reality sex is finally available?). But fortunately, for the rest of us (and Star Wars junkies), LucasArts entered the adventure game arena.

Spanning four games, the world of Monkey Island follows the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood, a pirate of no-repute, as well as Elaine Marley (the mayor of Melee Island) and the Ghost Pirate, LeChuck. While in-jokes abound in The Curse of Monkey Island, the third in the series, most of the dialogue options in the game allow for those new to the series to gain expository information (such as by having Guybrush feign ignorance and ask another character "do I know you?") to fill in the blanks.

The Curse of Monkey Island (Curse) is an adventure game. For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, it means that you navigate a series of environments, interact with various items and characters, and solve puzzles using items and characters to advance to the next area. Back in the old days, when graphics were rudimentary at best, adventure games still used text parsers (borrowed from the first adventure games, now known as "text adventures") players would have to type "Look under table. Pick up sword. Use sword to slay goblin." all before the player got eaten by said goblin or the parser decided that they were not specific enough in their instructions ("Which table? Which sword? Which goblin? What does "slay" mean?"). The first Monkey Island changed all that by including a menu at the bottom of the screen that put all the necessary verbs and nouns at the player's disposal. Most other adventure games over the years have followed in its footsteps, which had a tendency to make games easier for players to complete--so puzzles have been becoming increasingly unintuitive and illogical to restore the difficulty level, which is regrettable.

Curse refined this interface even further, where there is typically none onscreen at all, which would hide or obscure the great cartoon-like visuals of the game (co-project leader Jonathan Ackley is reported to have said, "If people say it looks like Disney, we have failed"). Instead, a player must right-mouse click on an object and a decorative coin appears, containing icons for "look," "use," and "talk." These are context sensitive, so Gubrush will usually do the most logical thing in response to your input.

Although the fourth game in the series, Escape from Monkey Island, took the series into the world of 3D, one would be hard pressed to say that it was an improvement over the hand drawn visuals of Curse. Although the animations are stored in a compressed format that often leads to block-like artifacts appearing, as opposed to being perfectly smooth like in a Macromedia Flash ad, they do have a certain charm that most internet pop-up ads tend to lack.

There are two difficulty levels on Curse, standard and "Mega-Monkey" which evidently has more and less forgiving puzzles. I have only played the latter, though from some research, the two modes do not seem to be all that different (unlike some other Lucas Arts games where the difficulty modes can alter central plotlines).

While the art on the Jewel case proudly proclaimed "For Windows 95" I have had few problems with Curse on Windows XP. Coming on two CDs, I was shocked to learn upon installing it, that it would only require a little over a megabyte of hard disk space for game data and save game files. Unfortunately, it was not made for modern CDROM drives (or perhaps Windows XP, though this issue seems different than those facing Windows 2000 users) as when one uses the space-bar to pause during a cut scene, upon pressing space again unpause it, the game will launch into hyper-speed, playing the animation at nearly twenty times normal speed, de-syncing the sound (and in one cases, it crashed my system to desktop with a sound error).

But as long as you remain patient throughout the cut scenes (there is no way to skip most of them, so keep your hands off the space and escape keys) this does not seem to be a problem. Indeed, patience is the one thing players must possess for Curse--not just in solving puzzles, but for conversing with characters. There is much that is said and they are often long winded, and as the text is spoken, it does take a greater amount of time than games that display new text as fast as one can read it.

Though it can be had for $10 in a Jewel case in many bargain bin racks it is also available for $15 (plus shipping and handling) directly from Lucas Arts. This nets you a DVD sized case, and the inclusion of the first two Monkey Island games as well--perfect for collectors.

Curse is a great game. I could prove how great it is by appropriating jokes, but why spoil it? It is an especially great gift as the genre appeals to those who are not necessarily gamers, but is a far more lively game than the likes of Myst and its clones; not to mention that it has very low system requirements (90mhz CPU) and requires little more than a megabyte in disk space. With perhaps the best cartoon graphics ever in a game, a memorable soundtrack, and the LucasArts brand of humor--it is a must buy for $10.

by Richard Leader

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