E3 09: The Secret Of Monkey Island: Special Edition
SCUMM fans, get ready to junk your old-school trunks: The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition builds a brand new modern look on top of the game you remember so fondly. And I do mean on top of: each screen in this updated Monkey Island can be played in the original VGA, verb+noun format of yesteryear. Flipping back and forth between the sexy HD remake and the original screen of, say, the Scumm Bar, is easily as entertaining as the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood himself. Many a gamer has fantasized about being able to do just that - see their favorites from yesterday remade with utter fidelity using modern-day production values.
The score has been remastered, the over 100 character and background artwork portraits have been beautifully redone, and the new interface defaults to the appropriate noun and verb combination when the cursor hovers over, say, the door to the Scumm Bar. That's a forgivable bit of glibness, since mucking around with objects and verbs was never really the heart of Monkey Island - you're not going to pick up that door, after all.
Back in 1990, there were some technical limitations that we wouldn't even dream of today, some of which resulted in content omissions that have now been corrected. For instance, the original box art featured a close-up shot of Spiffy the dog, while the screen itself was cut from the actual game because they needed the extra microbyte of disc space, or whatever miniscule denomination of file size we used back then. But in the Special Edition, Spiffy returns for the close-up he's deserved for 19 years. (That's 133 dog years!)
Monkey Island also gets some more thoughtful additions, like a fleet of pirate ships docked behind, say, the Scumm Bar - whereas the original port was incongruously empty.
Monkey fans should look for The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition sometime midsummer on XBLA and PC download. Yarr!
tiny dancer
Posted to E3, Hot Stuff, Video Games on 4 June 2009
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: lucasarts, pc, scumm, secret of monkey island, spiffy the dog, xbla
This is awesome news! I've had this weird craving to play the old-school Monkey Island games for a while now but didn't have the first clue as to how to find them. I'll absolutely pick this up when it comes out.
uh-oh, I think I just squee-ed my pants
I miss being a mighty pirate in training.