This was a game that had both Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer on board. In a sense, the lack of death meant that the writing team had to be on their A-Game in making a compelling story, getting you to feel joy, laughter, and even fear without the usual lethal stakes being involved. Monkey Island even played with you on that at one point by having a fake “Sierra-esque” death pop-up after your protagonist falls out of sight, only for it to disappear shortly as he pops right back onto the path and explains what a fortunate coincidence that rubber tree below was. Now by not getting stuck, I don’t mean there was no frustration, particularly with some of the harder puzzles… but you’d never again have to worry about having to reload because some crucial item was forever out of reach or some misstep sent you tumbling over a cliff. With one exception (which I personally never experienced), you absolutely could not die or get stuck while playing the game, which greatly encouraged exploring all possible options. In the greater evolution of LucasArts adventures, Monkey Island may not have represented anything as wildly innovative as Maniac Mansion or as wildly experimental as Loom, but along with Loom it did solidify the new and revolutionary LucasArts philosophy of the “non-lethal” adventure game. Monkey Island still had that much power over me. And you know what? It worked like a charm, because I bought the damn thing. Lest you think this move wasn’t aimed at nostalgic nerds like myself, this “Special Edition” contained the unique feature that, at any time, you could hit a button on the Xbox controller to toggle between the fancy new graphics and sound, and the blocky, silent 1990 version. The games are coming back, as well, and such is certainly the case with this week’s recollection, The Secret of Monkey Island, which was re-released in 2009 with all updated graphics for such platforms as Xbox Live. Also, let’s put it this way in terms of being topical: it isn’t just the movies from the 80s and 90s getting remakes. Well, self, if you were that worried about people caring about what you wrote, you probably wouldn’t be blogging. Sometimes I think to myself, “Self… is all this dredging up of decades old games worthwhile? This is about as far from new hotness as it gets.
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