My love for witty banter and adventure traces back to my early gaming years spent gleefully applying verbs to gun-toting lagomorphs, sass-talking pirates, grizzled bikers, and time traveling tentacles. There will always be a special place in my heart for the old Lucas Arts adventure games.
When Telltale came out with Sam & Max I was ecstatic. I had long been a fan of Steve Purcell’s work. Like a wolf-child I had been raised in the warm rays the Saturday morning cartoon show and swaddled in the pages of old Sam & Max comic books, and as a result grew to have a penchant for comic violence, snarky commentary, renegade inventory based crime-solving, and unfortunate role models. I was thrilled to get my hands on more. Telltale set the stage for proving that point-and click adventure games could still be a successful format, and introduced the episodic release scheme that revolutionized the way adventure games were marketed. Sam & Max is now going strong on its second season, picking up distribution through the Wii and Xbox 360 systems, and has been joined by a host of other franchise titles including Homestar Runner, Bone, Wallace & Grommet and, much to my delight, their most recent addition- Monkey Island.
The Monkey Island franchise makes a welcome return. Touting some of the original voice actors and a similar art style, fans will find much to be giddy and nostalgic about. Those of you who have been waiting for monkey/pirate related mayhem and an excuse to use your dairy cow references can breathe a sigh of relief. The game makers however have made a few bold changes, like a new control scheme and 3-D rendering. After all this time waiting, people will be excited to also find that the game finally brings the focus to what fans have undoubtedly all been dying to explore- Threepwood’s emasculating relationship with his wife. I have to say, I was pretty disappointed when I discovered that the main plotline of the story was going to be centralized around Guybrush’s feelings of inadequacy and a mysterious plague that makes people cranky. I want to be exploring the high seas, not passing notes in class and waiting for naptime.
The puzzles, while ok, seemed to lack a bit of the clever charm of the other games in the series, at times making it feel like you are on a vague scavenger hunt rather than an adventure. One of the things that made the older Monkey Island games so endearing was that the solution to solving a puzzle or predicament was usually an amusing exercise in lateral thinking and was just as likely to feed into a pun or the punch-line to a joke as it was to be something functional and logical.
The newer puzzles seem a bit awkward and forced, and don’t have the same sort of sparkle and cheeky wit. I groaned at the clunky reference when I picked up a “U-tube”, and was further disappointed when the reference failed to pay off by being related to solving the puzzle the item gets used with.
The main character Guybrush Threepwood, the self-proclaimed mighty pirate, also has undergone a bit of a downgraded makeover. Rather than the experienced fine leather jacket salesman you might expect, Guybrush seems to have regressed into a bumbling toddler this time around. There is little of the sly playfulness and mischief, which to me was such a part of his appeal. Guybrush is not really so much an inept clod as he is guilty of being over-ambitious, and his inadvertent destructive clumsiness is more due to the whimsical disregard for others and their property that seems to be the corner-stone fueling any great point-and-click adventure. Whenever someone tells you, “Whatever you do, don’t touch that button!”, you know you shouldn’t but you just have to push it. Messing things up should be the catalyst to turning on a Rube-Goldberg machine of misadventures, not an embarrassing party foul.
Even with these draw-backs the game shows promise and I’m glad to see the return of an old friend. There is always a bit of an awkward period when a game has to change formats and come back after such a long gap in time. There is a feeling of responsibility to please old fans while still trying to shape out a place for itself with new players in a market that is very different than the one it had enjoyed before. I expect that once the game gets into the swing of things with a few episodes we will see it hit stride and begin to hold its own with a bit more elegance. I look forward to seeing more and have high hopes for future episodes.
–Laura Gaddy