Sunken Treasures Games

This 4th of July weekend, Sarah and I had the opportunity to watch some fireworks… just not the typical kind — you know, outdoors on a warm summer night. Nope, the fireworks we saw preceded the ending credits of LucasArts’ amazing remake of the Secret of Monkey Isand.

My first introduction to the Monkey Island series was roughly 13 years ago, when I played the demo for the 3rd game, the Curse of Monkey Island. I was really blown away by the beautiful hand drawn art style, and surprised to learn that it was a genuinely funny game. I’d always been a fan of the point and click adventure genre, but for whatever reason I missed the boat on a few of the classics. So last year, when LucasArts announced that they’d be remaking the first Monkey Island game as an HD download I was pretty ecstatic!

Sarah and I played through the PS3 version of the game, and while a lot of people have complained that the reason point and click adventure games never took off on consoles was due to the absence of the mouse, the game controls just fine. Instead of selecting “Push”, “Open”, and “Talk” from the bottom of the screen, you now tap L1 to bring up a small menu of commands to choose from. This gives the visuals a little more room to breath than in the original, and allows you to fully soak in the gorgeous high definition 2D art.

Things seem nearly 100% faithful to the original, and they even allow you to switch between the two versions at the push of a button. It’s really cool to see how much detail they put into the new visuals.

The gameplay itself is very similar to others in the series. The player controls Guybrush Threepwood, a clueless pirate wannabee who’s one claim to fame is his ability to hold his breath for 10 minutes. There are dozens of challenging puzzles to solve along the way, a few which were too much for my weak brain to handle. In one case though, it seemed like the HD graphics actually made it harder to figure out than it would’ve been in the original. Since the new graphics flow so well into eachother, objects that you can interact with don’t always stand out as much as they should.

Regardless, the game is a blast on the whole, and will make you laugh out loud on more than one occassion (oh Stan…). Voice actors from the other games reprise their roles here and as usual the results are fantastic. Definitely check it out!