The Curse of Monkey Island™

I have always loved the Monkey Island game series. From the first to the last it has been one of the most clever, witty, and amazingly written games I've played. The humor is incredible and consistent throughout game play, dialogue, puzzle solving, and items collected. The characters and stories seemlessly tie to each other from game to game and remain true to their introduction in game 1. All of that is reason alone to play Curse of Monkey Island. However, specifically - the graphics of this game are amazing! The storyline is unpredictable! It's just a great overall game and will have you wanting to try the others.

Awesome classic! Not much more to say.

The first with "modern" graphics, this one is packed with clever silliness everywhere you look. My criticism of some series in the adventure genre (Syberia comes to mind) is that the only things you can interact with are those necessary to the plot plus a few like perpetually locked doors. This is the opposite---you can choose to breeze straight through, but you can also honor the brilliance of the writers by interacting with everything or taking the long route through conversations and laugh yourself silly. Great puzzles, many requiring some thought, a little like a funnier version of The Longest Journey. If I could give it a 6, I would.

This is one of my favourite games of the saga, full of humor, great puzzles and the usually wonderful sound track.

This was the first time that the UI was incredibly smooth and easy to use in this series. I'm not saying they could have done it sooner; I’m praising them for doing it this well the first time they were able to. Basically you hold down a mouse button over what you want to interact with three options will pop up you choose one of them by moving the onto it and letting go of the key. No more having to click the verbs on the screen. This also introduces voice acting. I honestly can't even imagine this series without these voices; I played this one before the others and have now played the remaster and special edition of the first two. Without Earl bowens raspy tones it's simply is not the same pirate LeChuck. This has a lot of my favorite characters of these three. I cannot get enough of Murray The Living skull who is still convinced that he and his kind will win despite the fact that he no longer has a body. This was also the first time that I felt emotionally engaged with one of these. I like to think of it as the first two feeling like they were made by the Monty Python crew and this one was more Edgar Wright think of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz: Funny right from the start but now there's character arcs and we actually care if someone succeeds at what they're setting out to do or not. I'm not saying the former is inherently worse but I do think that this way hits much harder and encourages more replayability and going over stuff in your head afterwards and such. There's finally actually consequence to Threepwood’s incessant incompetence and now the way you’re relating to Elaine is actually trying to make things better fixing your own screw up because you have always been the biggest problem in her life. This brings back the insult sword fighting and adds that you now have to board other pirate ships from yours in order to engage in it and you're not just doing it for an ego boost like everything you did in the first two - you're doing it to save your love.