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Sneak Preview: The Curse of Monkey Island (Part 1)© Dan Finkelstein
Aug 26, 1997
Ask almost any gamer, anywhere, what his or her favorite adventure game is, and no doubt you will hear "The Secret of Monkey Island" or "Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge". In the field of adventure gaming, these two classics by LucasArts (actually, it was called LucasFilm Games back then), are no doubtedly the best. The monkey island series is to adventure gaming as Quake is to action gaming. They're awesome, and it's gonna be very hard to beat them.
Monkey Island followed the adventures of the hero, Guybrush Threepwood, on his quest to become a pirate, and later in MI2, recover a mystical treasure called "Big Whoop". It was also the first (and really only) computer game ever to make me laugh out loud. The weird pirate-yet-modernized humor was in itself funny, as were the dozens upon
dozens of gags, puns, and (sometimes) bad jokes: "My name's Guybrush Threepwood" / "Guybrush Threepwood? HAHAHA! That's the stupidest name I ever heard!" / "Well, what's yours?" / "Mancomb Seepgood." The Monkey Island series has always spoofed the computer games industry -- Back in the 80's when games got larger and started to come on more and more disks, it was hilarious when Monkey Island 1 asked me to "Insert Disk 83" when trying to go into a mysterious hole in the ground. The series is also famous for the amazingly long conversations you can have with any character, be it human or not. (A parrot in Monkey Island 2 comes to mind). The animation is awesome, the music was awesome (I still listen to some Monkey Island midi files), the graphics was awesome -- how can LucasArts do any better than these two games?!?
Well, they can try. When I first heard about Monkey Island 3, I was skeptical -- most the original writers of the first two games are no longer with LucasArts, and while the MI3 team was going to be headed by the same people who worked on "The Dig" and "Full Throttle" (two excellent LucasArts graphic adventures), could they capture the subtle humor and gameplay of the first two games?
While the short demo I played doesn't answer that question entirely, my guess is that "The Curse of Monkey Island" is going to be very good. The story revolves around our hero, Guybrush Threepwood, and his quest to save his girlfriend, Elaine from the evil ghost pirate LeChuck, who I could have sworn I killed in the last game... Anyway, the demo is pretty funny in that Monkey Island way, with you meeting up with a character from the second game, Wally. Wally has turned to the "dark side" and joined LeChuck's pirate army after listening to motivational "Speeches on Parrot".
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