This is a review that requires I put on a Kevlar jacket; beware that
I am about to commit adventure game heresy.

The Secret of Monkey Island,
released by LucasFilm Games in 1990, is one of the most beloved games in the
entire adventure game canon. It regularly appears near or at the top of players’
best lists and is used as a standard by which other adventure games (especially
third-person quest games) are measured.

In SOMI, you play Guybrush
Threepwood, a young pirate wannabe. He comes to Melee Island in search of a band
of pirates to join. Unfortunately, a pirate ghost named LeChuck has been terrorizing
this part of the Caribbean, turning all of the local pirates into wimpy slackers.
The first thing Guybrush has to do is fulfill three challenges in order to qualify
for pirate status. These include thievery, treasure hunting, and sword fighting.
After these things are accomplished, the plot finally kicks in, with evil LeChuck
kidnaping the pretty governor of Melee Island and spiriting her off to Monkey
Island. Guess who has to rescue her.

SOMI uses the famous LucasArts
SCUMM engine, and the interface is an efficient DOS-era standard, with a collection
of verbs you use to create simple commands (“Use the rubber chicken on the
cable”).

The game is actually quite well-written, with terrific jokes
and humor throughout. A particularly amusing highlight is a group of nutrition-minded
cannibals on Monkey Island. “Let’s eat him!” “But think of your
arteries!”

The conversations are pretty good as well, though they do
get repetitive sometimes, and you can’t click through them (I hate that).

By the way, the sword fighting is not action-oriented at all. I won’t give
away what skill is needed, but it’s a perfectly pure adventure sequence.

SOMI
is long, rich, and involved. So why didn’t I like it more? Perhaps it’s my
innate bias against third-person inventory fests. Perhaps it’s the exhausting
amount of to-ing and fro-ing in the game’s final third. Perhaps it’s the fairly
juvenile humor level.

Mostly, however, it’s just that this game lacked that
ineffable “you must play me” quality that the best games have. Throughout
my 20 hours playing the game, I never really cared one way or another what happened.
It all seemed terribly trivial.

This, of course, is just my take on it.
Don’t forget, I didn’t like Sam and Max for some of the same reasons (though
I greatly admire Full Throttle). If you’re a third-person fan, if you love
other LucasArts titles, or if you’re pirate crazy, you’ll probably enjoy The
Secret of Monkey Island much more than I did.

A few technical notes.
I could never get the floppy disk version of this game to run. I played the game
from the more recent Monkey Island Madness CD, which includes both Monkey
Island 1 and 2, as well as a demo of MI3. The game has no audible
dialog, but it does have sound effects and some lovely music.

Final Grade:
C

If you liked The Secret of Monkey Island:
Watch:
Romper Room
Play: Candy Land
Read: The Cat
in the Hat

System Requirements:
10 MHz 80286 and higher
256-color VGA/MCGA
640K memory
Keyboard, mouse,
or joystick
Soundblaster, Adlib, or PC Speaker