primeideal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
primeideal) wrote2022-01-23 01:04 pm
primeideal) wrote2022-01-23 01:04 pm
Entry tags:
The Secret of Monkey Island
From the time I was six or so, we lived very close to my mom's parents, so we saw them a lot. My dad's parents lived halfway across the country, so we didn't see them often except for short trips. (My grandfather had had a debilitating stroke before I was born, so he wasn't very mobile and they couldn't fly out here often.) They were old-school; they had a old typewriter up in their study, and a rotary dial phone, but no computers. So when we needed a fix, which as a young nerdy kid I often did, we would walk a couple blocks over to my aunt and uncle's place. My uncle is very much a nerd--we're not biologically related, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was some degree of autistic. He has walls of books and VHSs and also multiple computers, so my brother and I would play stuff like pinball and Civilization II and "Monkey Island," which was originally released in 1990 and is sort of an old-school adventure game (point and click), requires about the same non-level of hand-eye coordination as Myst but humor-wise bridges the gap between Monty Python and the early days of YouTube.
Anyway, a while back I figured "hey, it's on Steam and there are sequels, let's get them when they're on sale for nostalgia's sake!"
For a game that's allegedly about Monkey Island, surprisingly little of the plot takes place there--like, based on the "percentage complete" in autosave versus the divisions into "chapters," I get the sense that the designers put a lot of time and effort into the early phases and then were like, "whoops, gotta rush to fit in everything else." One of the famous mechanics is having to train your wit and repartee at swordplay to fight the Sword Master, and then match witty one-liners you've learned in alternate contexts. (For example, in "practice" you learn to match the line "There are no words for how stupid you are" to the response "Sure there are, you just haven't learned them." And then when the Sword Master taunts "There are no clever moves that can help you now" you say the same thing.) Orson Scott Card wrote this part when he was younger/less bizarre.
I remembered that from before, and also there's this tricky part where you have to deal with a foul grog so intense that it melts any cup that contains it. But the later levels were new to me, and some of them (old and new) I got stuck on and resorted to looking at walkthroughs :( which is a bit frustrating but I told myself it was mostly for nostalgia's sake. So some of it holds up well, and some of it doesn't (there are puzzly parts where the "trick" is basically "just do the same thing over and over" that are kind of dumb). But it was a fun flashback. Not sure if/when I'll try the sequels.
Anyway, a while back I figured "hey, it's on Steam and there are sequels, let's get them when they're on sale for nostalgia's sake!"
For a game that's allegedly about Monkey Island, surprisingly little of the plot takes place there--like, based on the "percentage complete" in autosave versus the divisions into "chapters," I get the sense that the designers put a lot of time and effort into the early phases and then were like, "whoops, gotta rush to fit in everything else." One of the famous mechanics is having to train your wit and repartee at swordplay to fight the Sword Master, and then match witty one-liners you've learned in alternate contexts. (For example, in "practice" you learn to match the line "There are no words for how stupid you are" to the response "Sure there are, you just haven't learned them." And then when the Sword Master taunts "There are no clever moves that can help you now" you say the same thing.) Orson Scott Card wrote this part when he was younger/less bizarre.
I remembered that from before, and also there's this tricky part where you have to deal with a foul grog so intense that it melts any cup that contains it. But the later levels were new to me, and some of them (old and new) I got stuck on and resorted to looking at walkthroughs :( which is a bit frustrating but I told myself it was mostly for nostalgia's sake. So some of it holds up well, and some of it doesn't (there are puzzly parts where the "trick" is basically "just do the same thing over and over" that are kind of dumb). But it was a fun flashback. Not sure if/when I'll try the sequels.