Escape From Monkey Island

So I had to continue the series, but how to do it without using ScummVM? Well, thankfully a sister project was the ResidualVM project that are focused on the 3d point and click adventure games, like Myst 3, Grim Fandango and of course Escape from Monkey Island (hopefully they supports Gabriel Knight 3 so I somewhere in the future can play that series as well).  At the moment it isn't 100 %, but it is playable and I could finish it, although some small bugs here and there, but I have a faint memory that they are in the code itself. Also irritating is a bug in the Lua bar on your second visit to Melee Island. If you run across the steps inside while someone else is crossing you risk getting stuck and have to restore. When it happened this time a faint memory emerged when I played this game as a kid and I stupidly had to replay the game up to that point since I saved over my game while stuck in hope of a restore would fix the problem. It doesn't. So save before entering and pray that you don't get stuck. Lucky me I just had to play 10 minutes again to get back to the bar.

So what to say about this follow up to in my eyes one of the best adventure games ever? It looks ugly as hell. 3D graphics in 2000 wasn't the best although I must give credit for at least making some of the characters look like there earlier form while other suffered from it.

Stan, what did they do to you?

Musically I can't complain, the tunes are there and harkens back to the original which is a nice touch. The dialog on the other hand... feels less fun. At times there are a funny line here and there, but not like the other games. Somehow they kiddied it down since the word Hell has been replaced with Heck and it gets a bit grating since it's obviously a censor thing. Earlier games had no problems with the word hell, so way this? And the voice acting isn't as top notch as before, together with a graphical let down that takes away the charm of the reaction in Curse of Monkey Island. Speaking of voice actors, they mostly make a decent job, but they changed Elaine Marley voice actor (although she came back for the special editions and Tales of Monkey Island) and while she sounds a bit like her it throws me of at certain times and then Stan, also another voice actor. This one sounds like how he looks, speaking through his teeth I would guess.

Stan, what do you sound like?

Gameplay wise is also a let down since it's no longer a point and click game, instead being played with keyboard or joystick, which make me guess it was intended for a console release primarily. This possess a problem since you don't know what you can interact with since Guybrush has to see it and at certain angles the command doesn't come up or you must stand exactly right for it to trigger. Reading through The Adventure Gamer I can't but help thinking that this was the reason the Scumm engine was created. 

Storywise, Guybrush and Elaine returns to Melee Island after a 3 month long honeymoon finding out that the Carrabien is being bought out by a Australisn tycoon, a politician named Charles L. Charles is grabbing Elaine's governor title and her mansion is being wrecked. This will lead Guybrush across the Carrabien to search for a legal contract to stop the demolition and then the discovery of an Ultimate Insult and the true secret of Monkey Island all the while LeChuck rears his ugly head again. The secret by the way is that the giant monkey head is in actuality the head of a gigantic monkey robot! How that worked since it is clearly shown in the original being the skeleton of a real giant monkey is beyond me.

Where's the steampunk stuff to make it work?

Is it hard? No not really, but to many puzzles for my taste are based on timing in where you set something in action and has to pull of the right move before the time passes. Sadly one of them is in the Lua bar which makes the glitch kick in. And as a kid I was stumped at this point since you need to stop a moving tray with a flaming ship under a painting and when the chef leaves the kitchen you sneak in, and empties a can of grog in a container causing the ship, for some reason beyond me, to be warm enough to melt a wax painting revealing a map. And they say Gabriel Knight 3 killed the genre. Replaying it I noticed another such puzzle I had forgotten, but I found this one rather fun. You have three trenches in a cliff and a pile of rocks. Three exit at the bottom. Two exit is just putting the rock in respective trench, the third is the puzzle. So you have to time the rocks so that they push one of them into the last exit. Now, the earlier timed puzzle had no fixed clue when to stop it, you had to try and memories the best position to stand and when to execute the action. This one on the other hand had branches where the rocks passed by alerting you to perform an action. A visual clue which made it rewarding to observe and try out until you solved. It might also be enjoyable since the bug wasn't present here.

Overall I'm rather mixed about this game. Still the lingering memories about the let down it was to play this after years of anticipating, how ugly it was, the irritating controls and the less than stellar writing. And yet there is moments when I can't but smile at certain jokes or allusions to the older games. To see a 3d version of Melee and Monkey Island trying for a complete copy of the settings from the first game (almost, several important places are gone or shuffled around, but they at least tried).  To see Carla, Otis and Meathook again, the return of Herman Toothrot and Murry, the evil demonic skull. It's all rather nostalgic still.

I maybe didn't need to see Stan sgsin