When it was released, Ankh didn't have it easy. point&click adventures were almost dead, and loyal point & click players had bad memories of previous attempts to bring point & click adventures to 3d environments. It didn't leave much of a an impact, but it was Deck13's first step into a larger world - so to say. Still it found its fans, enough for two sequels to be made. Hopefulyl we'll see those on GoG as well. But who knows who holds the copyrights ... Anyway, the game is a solid adventure, it doesn't reinvent the genre in any way, but it also has only a few flaws in design. The humor is well placed, the characters fit, the scripts are nicely written, the puzzles solvable. The german version features some well known voice actors, like Oliver Rohrbeck, who is the german voice of Ben Stiller (among others) and Thomas Danneberg, who the german voice of John Cleese. Both are used to give life to different types of characters and do a very good job in this game.
Retro is in and makes a lot of money currently, but really ... without the 66% discount for owners of the old version I would not even have thought about buying this. And even for ~8€ I had to think about buying the games. I think we all can agree, this collection is overpriced. The games are classics nonetheless and as good as ever. You get the Sega version of Aladdin, a revamped "Final Cut", the Demo and the japanese version. Lion King is avaiable in Nintendo and Sega version, also in a japanese version (I still have to check out what the difference to the japanese version is). The different game versions are a nice touch, the soundtracks are selectable in the main menu. The new rewind features make the games a bit easier. Let's face it: Those of us who were able to play the games back then have become older and slower. Also in included are the soundtracks avaiable through a ingame menu and several making of videos for each game (that's what the 3 GB are for, someone was asking), also a full length game play video in case you are just a too bad player to finish the games. The whole thing obviously was designed for game consoles like XBox or PS4, the port works good however. The controls are as smooth as on the best emulators. Overpriced? Definitly, if you are only interested in one version of each game and give a sh** about making ofs. This collection is a nice hommage for older fans who want to relive their memories.
LSW1's biggest "flaw" was it's release date. It was designed for oldschool gamepads with flight stick style thumb stick and no analog triggers. Modern controllers just won't work well with it. LSW2 was a much better game than LSW1 and corrected most of it's flaws. Yes, they messed up the installer by giving the DVD the wrong name. You had to download a fix in order to install the game. But the game itself was great. I love it's slap stick humor. LSWTCS combines these 2 great games into a game and you could say, by doing so it added support for modern controllers and wide screen resolution to LSW1. The complete package is a great game which should not be missed. The one thing I miss are the HUBs from the old games, they were nicely done. It still has some tecnical issues however. Some people claim that it has no controller support, which is not true. I DID have the problem that a controller was not working, but after a Windows restart it worked again. Could be caused by the changes Microsoft did to directinput.dll between Windows 8 and 10. Also, on my PC with an i5 4670 and a GTX1070 it is unplayable from time to time, mostly when many many studs (character studs, anyone?) are on the screen, keeps crashing sometimes. That was WAY better on my old PC 10 when the game first came out. The best chance to play it unintrrupted is to start it after system boot and not open any other programs like web browsers. I still haven't figured out what causes the crashes. This might also be an issue with Windows, giving the game a too low priority, dunno. Once it crashes, it blocks the screen completely, can't change focus to the task manager.That's some old style DirectX programming we see here. I solved that problem by using dgVoodoo2 which now supports DX9 and play in windowed mode. I was thinking of only giving 3 stars because of the tecnical issues, but then again I found myself having a lot of fun playing the game, so 4 points it is.
I bought this game back when it came out and also played it back then, so my memories might not be all too fresh. I think Pendulo released it in the same year as Runaway - A Twist of Fate. It definitly was a smaller production. The game is not all too long, can be completed in about 4-5 hours, probably less if you are an experienced point & click adventure player. The story is well written, the characters well elaborated. I had a lot of fun playing it when it came out and I'm looking forward to play it again.
... and it still isn't. It's not the worst of the worst, but when I played the disc version it was just no fun. I was not alone with my opinion, 15 years ago I payed for the disc version as much as it costs now and it wasn't a good investment back then either. If you are curious, wait for a sale.
Well, it's difficult to choose, but I think, Monkey Island is the one I love most. Sure, Monkey Island 2 and 3 are much longer and Monkey Island 2 ist much more polished (Monkey Island 3 can't be compared), but the Secret of Monkey Island had this ... innocence. "I wanna be a pirate!" - and that was all there was to say about the game's story at the beginning. Sure, later we have ghost pirates and cannibals, but they all fit in. And the riddles ... (spoiler) Can't get out of the water? Well, pick up the weight that's holding you down, you dummy! This game's setting was the best one. When I play it, time seems to stand still, it's always 11 o'clock. Yes, Guybrush looks somewhat awkward in this remake, but a) you can set the graphics and interface back to the CD version of the game (sadly not the original floppy disc interface) or you can use a mod to change his hair. The remake was well done, but they did a better job with Monkey Island 2. It would have been nice if they re-release the remake with similar bonus content as MI2SE has.
... that was the thought when I saw the intro for the first time. The trailer and the demo already made sure, I counted the days to it's release and when the music started ... wow. Monkey Island 3 was a bit of a culture shock after a decade of low resolution point & click adventures. Not all people liked the new look of Guybrush, but his voiceover made up for any downsides. Monkey Island is - simply put - one of the best point & click adventures of all time. There are aspects I like more in the previous games (like the duelling and what the heck are the sea battles for?), but there is hardly any game out there that can compete against this games's wit, humor and riddle design. Of course there are harder games, but in my opinion this game got the balance just right. As a sidenote: The german verion of the game misses the pirate song, it seems they were not able to translate it properly, what a loss.
... to give this game 5 stars, the dialog writing was top notch, the design, the slap stick sequences were great. But then I remembered how I felt when I played this game for the first time (I have finished it at least 4 times). There was a lot of frustration involved. It's not one of the best adventures out there. There hardly is any guidance how to achieve anything, you just try to combine this with that over and over and over again. That you can visit so many scenes from the beginning does not help either. It also hardly has any story, just some random pieces stuck together - or at least that's what it feels like. Then again, every time you actually manage to solve a puzzle you get rewarded with these great dialogs. If you didn't play this game back then, be sure to have a walkthrough ready or you probably will get very frustrated at times.
