Replayed Monkey Island 1 & 2, I guess due to @daphaknee bringing up that the protagonist in Alien Logic (impressions still forthcoming, I swear…) looks a bit like Guybrush, as well as me obsessing over old adlib/soundblaster music recently. Seemed like the right call to revisit them, I guess!
This time around I played the EGA version of 1, which honestly looks amazing! I love how the limited palette makes for some really striking colour choices. Lots of caustic greens, pinks and blues like the world itself was drenched in Grog™. All the dithering too manages to imply so much added texture. Also, that sunset… I never even knew it existed!
The CD-ROM version that I’m more familiar with almost looks boring in comparison with its more mellow vibe and clean lines. I like how the scanned backgrounds of 2 manage to give that game an interesting character of its own that doesn’t just read as a sleeker take on 1, despite the move to VGA. Even with the general bump in fidelity, there’s still a lot of grime and muddiness to the world that lends it some intrigue. It almost makes me want to experiment myself with digitising some paintings down to a lower resolution…
Last I remember playing these was after the release of the special editions which, at the time, made me question whether they had ever actually been funny or was it just me looking back at them with rose-tinted glasses… but no, it turns out experiencing the writing as text really does make the dry humour sing a lot more than when it’s being hammed up by cartoonish voice actors and made to feel extra stilted by the weird pauses between lines that, otherwise, go unnoticed when reading it for yourself.
It still bugs me that the versions of these games most readily available to the general public feel like such a compromise. It was especially nice hearing the original soundtrack in all its dinky, squelchy glory (the MT-32 and remastered versions just don’t have that same funk to them, y’know?):
Was surprised how many of the solutions I remembered for 1. Some of those puzzles in 2 are painful though, I kinda regretted not playing it on easy mode but I guess I was just too curious to remind myself how bad it truly got. I heard it actually changes entire puzzles too, which sounds like it could be neat to check out at some point in the future… I’m probably overselling the difficulty a bit, honestly.
Despite some of the occasional expected moon logic, both of these still feel relatively breezy when compared to later lucasarts stuff. Thinking of some of the utterly deranged puzzle design in Grim Fandango in particular. Happy to say that at no point are you required to rip a boat in half via a complex series of pulleys and levers just to get to the next plot point… There’s much more of a willingness here to cut to the chase, which I appreciated. Especially when it’s often done in service to some joke, which feels extra rewarding!
I was surprised by how clunky the insult swordfighting in 1 felt given that it’s probably the most heavily referenced thing from the series overall. It felt the closest the game got to like… grinding for xp in an rpg or something… only here you’re running all these jokes into the ground by repeating the same openers again and again while fishing for a new punchline. Funnier on paper than in practice, I guess…
I’m a bit curious about trying Return, even if it looks like it probably shares a lot of qualities with the later entries that I don’t like as much. Maybe that’s just a superficial reading on my part though… Anyone here played it? Seeing Spy Fox a few posts up made me realise I never did properly check out Gilbert’s Humongous stuff (uh…) so maybe that should be my next port of call (hehe…)