Tech Olive

This month’s retro review for me was hardly a choice. I grew up with this game, playing it quite a bit. Granted, this is surely not the first game I played, but this is the game that would make the biggest impact on my gaming future. Before I laid eyes upon Wolf3D, I had only really played basic platformers and random console games. Wolf3D is really the game that gave me the push and showed me not only that PCs where awesome gaming machines, but also that this “first-person shooter” game and genre was unlike anything I had ever played before.

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It’s the end of the month and you know what that means. If you don’t know what I mean, please read our first retro review.

The Super Nintendo; the best gaming system ever made in my opinion. It hosted so many of the greatest games and it’s where my first gaming experiences came to life. I remember when my sister and I opened up the Super Nintendo during Christmas. Our faces lit up like light bulbs  and we high-fived each other like we just won a competitive game of Kemps. We both knew that the Super Nintendo would change our lives forever.

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Hello, and welcome to the first Tech Olive Retro Review. Here’s the plan: Once a month we will write up one of our favorite old games we think everyone should take a poke at. Please keep in mind that we use the word “Retro” very loosely. Here is the first entry in our own personal cannon of game history, obviously biased and unapologetic. Please hold your “heck yeah” or “Donkey Kong is better” until the end. One last item; since these are reviews, you would think there would be an olive score at the end, but that will not be the case for retro reviews. Deal with it.

I have been a fan of adventure games for a long time, even before my Amiga replaced the Commodore 64, and The Secret of Monkey Island (TSoMI) is one of those games that stands out in my mind. This is my tribute to one of the most amusing games I played during my youth, and after a second playing, I am very happy to confirm that it is as good as I remembered. Jolly, jolly good fun. Allow me to elaborate on why.

TSoMI (1990) is the first in a series of four Monkey Island adventure games produced by Lucasarts. You can probably imagine the basics without me going into great detail: point and click third person adventure, lovable 8-bit graphics, and a GUI with clickable prompts taken right out its text-based predecessors (see image above). But there are a handful of things that make it an epic escapade rather than a “meh” meandering. To begin with, the protagonist is a would-be pirate. Raise your right hook if that isn’t a great start. I thought not. Guybrush Threepwood is your name, and in your quest to become a real pirate, you go up against the dread ghost pirate LeChuck, attempt to save a beautiful Governor, learn to swear (because how else are swordfights won?), and collect T-shirts proving your deeds to the Important Looking Pirates (“I defeated the Swordmaster”). That was a glimpse of only the first chapter of the game.

What really makes the game fun is the mixture of humor, memorable characters, and puzzles that are fun to work through. In contrast to many adventure games (including most games that came before it) dying or making the game unwinable through player actions are near impossibilities. The items you collect along the way make for interesting experimentation. It isn’t uncommon in an adventure game to tire of trying your Brass Key in every freaking locked door. But trying to use a Rubber Chicken or Used Wax Moose Lips keeps things amusing, even when they too only have a single use. The game focuses on giving you fun people to talk to, plenty of quirky locales to explore, and enough mystery, difficulty, and randomness to keep you guessing. And, when you are finished, there are three more Monkey Island games, plus many more offerings from members of the same creative team.

Pleasant sailing, and check out the links below for more. Fans of the series are still very much alive, and for good reason.

The World of Monkey Island
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