The Curse of Monkey Island

https://www.filfre.net/2024/04/the-curse-of-monkey-island/

by cybersoyuz • 2 years ago

228 112 2 years ago

filfre.net

hiddencost• 2 years ago

Probably the single most impactful game I played growing up.

Some really incredible adventure games came out of that era. Loom and Grim Fandango spring to mind.

thefaux• 2 years ago

The concept and feel of Loom were wonderful. I wish it had been longer, but probably my personal favorite of the group.

wsc981• 2 years ago

On the Mac it was a quite beautiful game. Later on I tried different (Windows / DOS) versions with ScummVM but they're a disappointment. Same with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I am not sure if the Mac versions are playable in ScummVM.

atribecalledqst2• 2 years ago

It was such a shame we didn't get the other 2 Loom games that were planned. (and iirc there's an easter egg that you can find, that directly hints at the content for the next game)

el_benhameen• 2 years ago

Impactful indeed. I remember a lot of games for being fun, having impressive graphics, etc. But the MI series instilled in me a sense of nostalgia and longing for a time and a place that I’ve never been and that never really existed, and it’s a feeling that I still get when I think about the games or hear the music from them.

tetrisgm2• 2 years ago

Reminder that this game, and all the DOS era titles, are neatly documented and ready to play via eXoDOS 6 or eXoSCUMMVM.

Gormo4• 2 years ago

Or just directly available on archive.org.

billwashere• 2 years ago

Never heard of exoscummvm but https://www.scummvm.org/ is the original site. I spent a lot of time playing Monkey Island the ds version of scummvm.

criddell• 2 years ago

I wonder if Curse of Monkey Island would translate well to the iPad?

tetrisgm2• 2 years ago

You can try it for yourself via Scummvm!

YakBizzarro• 2 years ago

Just a masterpiece. The graphics and musical are just wonderful and inspiring. Enigms are good and the story solid. Plus I played it when I was young, so it's special to me

pshc• 2 years ago

It nails that mixture of whimsy, cleverness, and sweetness that has made The Secret of Monkey Island arguably the most beloved point-and-click adventure game of all time.
During the latter 1990s, when most computers games were still made by and for a fairly homogeneous cohort of young men, too much ludic humor tried to get by on transgression rather than wit; this was a time of in-groups punching — usually punching down — on out-groups. I’m happy to say that The Curse of Monkey Island‘s humor is nothing like that.

Well said. Game has aged beautifully.

soneca3• 2 years ago

For such a male-dominated industry creating a game for a largely male audience, it is impressive how well and positively women were portrayed in the MI games.

Elaine in particular is brave, smart, skillful, a leader, but also loving, kind. The character is not flattened to a single characteristic or narrative function. Even when she needs to be saved, when you get there, she already saved herself (in MI 1 or 2, I don’t remember).

turbosepp• 2 years ago

This is one of the things I really really liked in the original two MIs. The characters ...and especially the relation between tough Elaine and Guybrush ("you're so helpless and cute"). I think they did not get this "right" in the newest part and it's my main problem with it.

Rinzler893• 2 years ago

For such a male-dominated industry creating a game for a largely male audience, it is impressive how well and positively women were portrayed in the MI games.

Wait a second, why is that surprising? As if to you, something being male dominated must usually mean women being portrayed negatively by men, and if they're not then it's a surprise.

Sorry, but your comment just reeks of sexism by assuming mens' default is to not have a positive portrayal on women.

dylan-m• 2 years ago

I adored this in Return to Monkey Island, as well. Elaine and Guybrush just have a … functional relationship. They love and support each other and they get along well. It's an important part of them as characters, but it's just there, and you don't have to worry, and the plot doesn't revolve around it. I found it refreshing.

raverbashing• 2 years ago

Definitely way better than a guy who was given a name based on a generic file name and type!

Gormo4• 2 years ago

The adventure game market wasn't quite so male-dominated, especially where Sierra was concerned, with a large number of female game designers, and multiple influential games with well-developed female protagonists 1-2 years before even the original Monkey Island came out.

Terr_• 2 years ago

too much ludic humor tried to get by on transgression rather than wit

I suppose the contemporaneous comparison there would be Leisure Suit Larry? [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry

Gormo4• 2 years ago

Is that really true, though? I can't think of any significant examples of games from the '80s or '90s that involved "in-groups punching... on out-groups", unless the out-groups in question were space aliens, nazis, fantasy monsters, hostile AIs, or the like.

Monkey Island is an absolute classic, of course, but this particular point feels almost like a retcon of present-day cultural assumptions into a specific context in the past where the objects of this criticism weren't really quite so present.

cess113• 2 years ago

Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior would be pretty obvious examples. Someone else mentioned Leisure Suit Larry.

I'd like to mention Samantha Fox Strip Poker as well, though it's a bit more subtle than "punching".

bdowling• 2 years ago

We can't truly exalt our enlightened present and future without denigrating the past.

redeeman• 2 years ago

its almost as if most men are not crazily sexist pigs, that only cares about scantily clad female characters in video games. Its ALMOST as if there is much much to it than that

teksimian• 2 years ago

which groups do you see as beneath you, therefor punched down upon?

soneca3• 2 years ago

Great article for a great game. I loved every Monkey Island game (maybe just “liked” the 4th). I even loved the ending of this last one, that was, again, controversial.

manbash• 2 years ago

What a great game. The "mega monkey" difficulty had me attempting every possible combination with my inventory items.

sentrysapper• 2 years ago

I loved this game growing up, but never got around to finishing it. I've been going back and playing point & click adventures like Grim Fandango and Broke Age. IMO that genre didn't age well. So many interactions are counterintuitive and I inevitably feel like I have to read a guide in order to proceed with the narrative.

doublerabbit2• 2 years ago

You had to have the patience.

My older brother loved the Myst series, DoTT, Sam & Max and as a younger brother who used to sit and watch him play games, I got bored. His way of shoving me out the room because I would then hear him play GTA and not be allowed back in...

It's the same with any of those games. Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max. -- You need that logical and forward thinking mindset and an attention span greater than 3 seconds. It's an niche genre and not for everyone and now it's a genre that's lost with time just because how the world is nowadays. Who has four hours to point and click around a realm?

I meanwhile just wanted to frag folk and jump around a CTF map on Quake 3.

Rinzler893• 2 years ago

You need that logical and forward thinking mindset and an attention span greater than 3 seconds

Not only that but you do need a lot of free time as well. As a kid I had the patience and time to push through point and click games, now as an adult with responsibilities I don't. If I only have 30 minutes per day to spend on gaming it's gonna be too short to invest in those kinds of games but just enough time for a few rounds of Q3 arena or such.

jerf• 2 years ago

On the plus side, in the modern era, you can easily find a walkthrough to help you through whatever. Though many are not well-structured to avoid spoilers when you drop into the middle of them.

I don't do a ton of adventure gaming, but I have gone through most of the episodic Sam & Max games. I estimate about 1 walkthrough consult per 2 games overall, and about a 50/50 split between "oh crap I should have gotten that myself" and "oh, I was never going to get that" results (with the occasional "oh I was right and I just didn't click on the right thing or notice the tiny little widget" that really makes me glad I just looked).

Day of the Tentacle was probably the largest game I've done with 0 consults, though I was probably stuck enough to justify it a couple of times. One of the heights of the genre, there.

solardev3• 2 years ago

Even back then, excessive "pixel hunting" was a frequent complaint of the genre. You basically just had to click around randomly and try different inventory item permutations by trial and error until something happens.

On the other hand, modern Games like Baldur's Gate 3, while not really an adventure game, gives you so many different ways of solving each puzzle or encounter. It's never pre scripted to only one solution, but you can really use your imagination.

Relevant tropes:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PixelHunt

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoonLogicPuzzle

Agingcoder3• 2 years ago

I was a huge adventure game fan back in the 90s, and I also completed BG3 a few months ago ( it took me a solid 6 months to finish the game ). Quite frankly, I truly think there are no puzzles whatsoever in bg3. Very very very occasionally you need object X to satisfy character Y, but that’s about it. I think this is partly due to the game changing directions based on what you do ( so you can’t get stuck and therefore there’s no puzzle solving !) , but I never had the same feeling I had with monkey island, fate of Atlantis etc.

account424• 2 years ago

You basically just had to click around randomly and try different inventory item permutations by trial and error until something happens.

Not at all just like you don't need to save scum in action games. Both are soft cheats used when you are unable to complete the game properly - but that's on you not the game.

t_mann• 2 years ago

I think the mistake here was using guides. I used guides when I first played them and I remember feeling similar about them. I replayed some games again over the years, without guides, after enough time had passed so that I couldn't remember much anymore - it was a completely different experience, and much more enjoyable. Sure, sometimes you have to basically brute-force your way forward, but often enough you do figure stuff out and it's rewarding, you feel like you're starting to 'get' the humor.

atribecalledqst2• 2 years ago

Point and click games (and puzzle-based interactive fiction games while we're at it) tend to lose me right around the halfway point. The puzzles start to get more difficult and I just can't figure out how to solve them. Could just be a matter of patience, I tend to give up after 1-2 hours at most if I just find myself rotating between locations not knowing what to do next. But I think the genre's reputation for being obtuse is pretty well-deserved.

Broken Age was actually interesting for me, because it's the game I got closest to finishing without a walkthrough. I only needed to consult one once, for the last puzzle that you encounter in the game.

Consulting a walkthrough generally ruins the game for me so once I use one once, my patience threshold for using it again drops significantly. At that point how much I enjoy a game depends on how much I like the characters, story, etc. Grim Fandango is one of those I still look back fondly for that reason, even though it lost me WAY earlier than halfway.

-----

Somewhat of a tangent, but I've always wondered if this genre of games is good for development of mathematical thinking. Like, in an adventure game you usually know the broad strokes of what you need to do, but you need to solve lots of puzzles to get there. Something I've always struggled with in math is the ability to think laterally, think of analogues, lemmas, auxiliary problems, etc. that can help prove a theorem. It's always felt to me like the two struggles are different forms of the same issue with my cognition.

account424• 2 years ago

Most P&C adventures can be reasonably completed on your own if you have the right mindset. But if you do get stuck and don't have the patience to figure things out then consider UHS [0] first before resorting to a full-on walkthrough.

[0] https://www.uhs-hints.com/

guy4261• 2 years ago

In more practical terms, however, it steered the burgeoning Monkey Island franchise straight into a cul de sac with no obvious escape.

Without getting into (almost any specific) spoilers of the last 10 seconds of the game... this claim is completely untrue. The hint at a sequel is right there in the open, as the ending implies LeChuck is still at large.

COGlory• 2 years ago

#2, not #3

mrob• 2 years ago

At the end of MI2, "Chuckie" looks at the screen and his eyes flash, implying he's still really LeChuck. Additionally, there's scene of Elaine speculating about a voodoo curse. Ron Gilbert never "sequel-proofed" the game; the route that MI3 takes was deliberately left open.

asicsarecool• 2 years ago

The greatest adventure game of all time. Larry Ahern is a genius

forrestthewoods• 2 years ago

Such an underrated game. I wish they would remaster it in high res. The art style is stunning and holds up.

And let's not forget it introduced Murray the Skull to the world!

account424• 2 years ago

I wish they would remaster it in high res.

But why? Just play with a mild CRT shader in ScummVM and it looks fine.

Also considering the art style of the MI1/2 remasters as well as whatever the art in Return is supposed to be I really don't want to find out how they would butcher MI3.

wkat42422• 2 years ago

I was always a, huge fan of this one. It's my favourite in the series.

Monkey Island 1 was also good. But 2 was too complicated and the puzzles too contrived. And it was soooo slow on Amiga. But 3, wow. I love the art style, the way the characters are drawn, the jokes etc. The goodsoup family. It was a really great game.

In contrast, 4 was really ugly with its primitive 3D graphics, stupid Starbucks jokes etc.

77pt77• 2 years ago

And it was soooo slow on Amiga

Wasn't that the one with 10 floppy disks or something?

egypturnash2• 2 years ago

walk into bar

"please swap disc"

load load load

Largo comes in, talks for a bit, swishes spit in his mouth, leans back

"please swap disc"

load load load

A closeup of a big green gobbet of spit flying across the screen

"please swap disc"

load load load

And at that moment I knew I needed to get a hard drive.

snvzz• 2 years ago

mi2 was 11 floppies (plus another to hold saves).

On the basic 68000 based models it was kinda slow. And without a hard disk nor over 1mb memory, it was a lot of floppy swapping.

I still played through it to the end, and enjoyed it.

zizee• 2 years ago

Monkey wrench anyone?

thaumasiotes• 2 years ago

The danger of increased resolution and color count was always that the finished results could veer into a sort of photo-realism, losing the ramshackle charm that had always been such a big part of Monkey Island's appeal.

This is a weird perspective; The Secret of Monkey Island already uses photorealistic graphics. Curse is much cartoonier.

doublerabbit2• 2 years ago

This song, and that you could choose the lyrics. Ingenious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XUtvLzUSB0

runeb• 2 years ago

An excellent write up on this great game! One particularly striking element of Curse to me is the soundtrack. Michael Lands compositions for the series is absolutely perfect in this high fidelity form. The familiar themes from the earlier games take on a whole new dimension and the music has its own narrative which perfectly complements the visuals and gameplay. A masterpiece in its own right. I still find myself loading it up on YouTube and playing it in the background while working or doing house chores.

FpUser• 2 years ago

Music from The Secret of Monkey Island is in my favorites

jl6• 2 years ago

A great retrospective.

I have nothing but praise for this game. It’s a standout example of how great art transcends its medium. Despite the technical limitations of the mid-90s, it’s still a beautifully drawn, beautifully scored joyful experience.

A Pirate I Was Meant To Be is on our family playlist for long car journeys with the kids.

Also, I’m not sure if this can ever be proven, but I’m convinced the chain of influence from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Ride to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Movie goes at least partly via Monkey Island.

egypturnash2• 2 years ago

Tim Powers' pirate fantasy book On Stranger Tides is a very important link in this chain. Gilbert's said it was a major influence, and the first Pirates movie had a lot of Tides' vibes. Pirates 4 was a straight-up adaptation of the book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Stranger_Tides#Influence_on...

atombender4• 2 years ago

...An adaptation which kept nearly nothing about the book, sadly.

It's a great novel (if you excuse some minor flaws, like the protagonist's lightning-fast mastering of sailing after he becomes a pirate) which deserves a proper adaptation, but now that Disney owns the rights, that will likely never happen.

Tarsul2• 2 years ago

I replayed 3 and 4 a few years ago. And I have to say that the jokes in 4 were better. Who is with me? ;)

nidnogg• 2 years ago

I dunno, I recently came off of a couple of Monkey Island 1 - 2 playthroughs and after starting this one, I couldn't help but feel that it was very laborious to talk to a few NPCs - some conversations would last way longer than I remember. It's funny because this is what I treasured the most about the previous games.

I ended up shelving it for the time being. Maybe it takes off after a while? Could always give another shot.

legitster• 2 years ago

I'm really surprised a Monkey Island movie hasn't been made yet.

Yes, the Pirates of the Caribbean movie originally started as a Monkey Island screenplay. But that franchise is basically dead now, and with the popularity of sassy, fourth-wall breaking sendup movies I think it would do gangbusters.

The lore and the humor and the characters are already there - it's a shame they are locked to this increasingly small audience of people who have patience for point and click adventure games.

xandrius2• 2 years ago

Given the streak videogame movies have, I'd rather not: I'm still recovering from the latest MI game...

Agingcoder3• 2 years ago

I love that game, along with Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle - but this has to be my favorite one.

For some reason I never quite understood, it wasn’t that well received when it came out. My stance on this one hasn’t changed in 27 years and I firmly believe it is the pinnacle of the genre : incredible art, hilarious, crazy but somehow logical puzzles, great music, and above all extraordinarily well written. Very very few games had me laugh in front of my computer. And don’t forget the brilliant voice acting.

I’ve just bought the latest title in the series but haven’t played it yet - I somehow fear it won’t be able to match COMI. I will also be introducing my kids to this incredible work of art - they will never hear about this from their friends at school, and I feel this is typically the kind of thing I can and probably should share as a parent.

Lucas folks, thanks for making this game.

probably_wrong• 2 years ago

I think the reason CoMI wasn't well received was a combination of adventure games being on the way out (so not a great sale for casual gamers) and Ron Gilbert not being involved in it (so not a great pitch for fans either). But I have to agree that some of my favorite Monkey Island jokes came from this game, and I appreciate their attempt at "straightening" the ending of MI2.

As for the latest MI... it is my hot take that I would have been better off not playing it. It's competently made and has some good innovations for the point-and-click genre, but not even the characters seem like they want to be there. Then again, it has good ratings so other opinions exist.

endgame• 2 years ago

CoMI felt to me like a game made by Monkey Island fans, rather than coming from an original place. I don't mean that it's a fangame, but that SoMI 1 and 2 had been out long enough that people had played them, gone into the industry, and worked on CoMI with an idea of "what a Monkey Island game 'should' be like". When I played it I felt there were a lot of structural similarities to previous games (let's do insult swordfighting again) and obligatory call-outs (like Stan).

xandrius2• 2 years ago

Yeah, the latest MI is one of the few games I wished I never played: it managed to somewhat taint my childhood experiences, as it wrapped up the story in such a bad way to be retroactive (past self / reader: if you don't know, please don't look it up, it's not worth it).

It's a true shame as it could have been a cute finale, just ended up being rubbish for me.

vrighter• 2 years ago

the papapishu joke is still engrained in my head to this day. I still use it sometimes

taeric• 2 years ago

I don't remember it being poorly received. Just a lot more excitement over 3d games, at the time. Also multiplayer games were on the rise.

atombender4• 2 years ago

As someone who grew up with these games, I played through and liked MI3 when it came out it, but the graphics style always felt off to me.

The exaggerated art style didn't mesh with that of the first two games. The art style of the first two is of course whimsical, but it's within the realm of photorealism. MI3, however, leans heavily into the Chuck Jones style of cartoons, with huge heads and spindly bodies, against super-exaggerated backgrounds where not a single straight corner can be seen.

It's not just that Guybrush looks completely different in MI3 — he's certainly not a tall, lanky fellow in MI1-2 (though in the "remastered" versions LucasArts retconned his look) — he feels like an entirely new and different character. The world also feels like a different universe entirely. It's a different island, sure, but it just doesn't feel like the dark and atmospheric environment of the first two games.

There's overall a weird lack of continuity here, and the heritage of Day of the Tentacle is apparent. DotT is of course about as Chunk Jones-y as you can get, with a huge dab of the wacky art style of Ren & Stimpy and Animaniacs. MI3 feels designed by people who wanted to do their own thing.

What's really weird and off-putting is the art style of MI6. I don't know what they were thinking. I guess they didn't think Guybrush was thin enough in the previous iterations?

wzdd• 2 years ago

Going full wacky-pirate-adventure and changing the graphical style is arguably better, though, than trying more closely to imitate Gilbert and inevitably coming up short.

atombender4• 2 years ago

MI1-2 were already plenty wacky, though.

Claiming a sequel that aligned more with the look and feel of the original couldn't have worked is neither here nor there, because it was never attempted, and so it can't be dismissed as the wrong way to go.

ttepasse• 2 years ago

I remember particularly adoring the art style at the time, possibly because it was so different from the other games at the time. Especially the clouds.

atombender4• 2 years ago

The art style wasn't so different, though. Discworld II, Broken Sword, and Toonstruck (all of which came out around the time CoMI was announced) all had similarly hand-painted, high-resolution art.

astlouis44• 2 years ago

And not to mention that you can play a demo of it in your browser, thanks to this WebAssembly port!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092627

https://personal-1094.web.app/scummvm.html

deanCommie• 2 years ago

I absolutely adored The Curse of Monkey Island, and still do, having gone back and finished it 3 or 4 times.

It was my first encounter with the series and even after the remastered versions I couldn't go back and get into the first 2 because they simply felt less developed, less funny, and less interesting. I know those that have started with them would think that's a travesty, but here we are.

aidenn03• 2 years ago

The second is my least favorite. Maybe sour grapes because I was stuck on one puzzle for about 6 months, and when I finally got past it, that ending was a major letdown.

pentagrama• 2 years ago

This was the first Monkey Island game I played.

I remember getting my first PC at thirteen and have some pirated games on it, Quake 2, Descent Freespace, Moto Racer (Enter your name!), and The Curse of Monkey Island was something different, so wholesome and funny, I was in love with Elaine, it also make me interested on storytelling, I guess because of that game I started to watch more movies and read more books.

And this game have the option to hear all the voices on Spanish, it wasn't something common, so me knowing no English at all, it was a new gaming experience and the connection was deeper.

crtified• 2 years ago

Earl Boen, the late actor who voiced LeChuck in this game, would be recognised by many from his profilic career across the past several decades of television, movies and video games.

He was in everything from The Wonder Years and Seinfeld to the Terminator movies. Game-wise, his resume included entries from series like Baldurs Gate, Krondor, Zork, Star Trek, Metal Gear Solid, and as the narrator of World of Warcraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Boen

pbj1968• 2 years ago

I liked this one until that stupid puzzle with the gold tooth and the balloon.

guybrushT• 2 years ago

I waited for this thread for 10 years (check my username) and then didn't log into hacker news on the day it was posted :)

I wouldn't shower more praise on this game than folks have already done. Great article. Great HN thread. A happy day.

ilvez• 2 years ago

If anyone enjoys dub music & Monkey Island tunes then "Meanwhile Deep Beneath the Island" compilation from Jahtari label could work for you: https://jahtari.bandcamp.com/album/meanwhile-deep-beneath-th...

"Nerdcore Dub versions from 'The Secret of Monkey Island I & II' adventure game soundtracks (1990/91), the forgotten Voodoo-Reggae classics from the floppy disc age."

elorant• 2 years ago

Ah those were the days. We’d buy the game, go home, play for hours end, get stuck, then call our friends the next day to exchange information and see if someone has progressed further. It created a form of belonging and exploration that’s long gone.

roygbiv2• 2 years ago

It's not long gown you're just older and no longer apart of it.

account424• 2 years ago

No, resorting to walkthroughs is the most common approach these days.

rallyforthesun• 2 years ago

I used to work for a company where playing The Curse of Monkey Island was part of the recruitment test.

The Curse of Monkey Island

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