The Secret of Monkey Island™: Special Edition

The game is great, the new art, though different, is still great, and you can still play with the old graphics if you want. Win/win, just buy it.

I did not play this when it first came out so everything I write is based on this particular version. I understand that some people think it did a terrible job. As far as I can tell the experience that this offered when the original came out is completely intact; you just press F10 and that is what you receive. This is incredibly funny and it's one of those comedy games that appreciates that in addition to delivering jokes it can also have the player do something that is inherently comedic. Two minutes into this I knew that I was going to love it when I was able to attempt a conversation with a dog. Not one that speaks English mind you it barks and growls and so can you. It features basically every single type of comedy that it at all is able to with a lot of verbal wit similar to Blackadder. As someone who finds it too limiting these days I greatly appreciate the multi-part puzzles in this where you have to go to a bunch of different locations like over half a dozen on at least one occasion, many with characters for you to engage with etc. There are definitely some times where you're stuck with moon logic. Overall I do prefer the ones where you can figure stuff out without that sort of thing but I do respect that this was something that was true of a number of these from back then. From what I understand, basically the idea was that a friend group could cooperate on solving it. You'd split up and attempt different things and then compare notes in order to get all the way through it. The user interface here is not as smooth as that of the Curse of Monkey Island which came out 12 years before this did. I realized that it came out seven years after the original version of this but this is a Special Edition. They changed some things in a major way. I would say that one is the Goldilock Zone. A perfect mix of streamlining for accessibility and letting you actually solve stuff rather than just having you click on things until eventually it works out.

And Playing it again with my little ones is just as great (and better graphics too!!)

Played it with my son and he loved every bit of it, just like I remember I loved it when I first played it. He did complain though how the first part was much better than the subsequent parts.

COOL