A brand new tale in the
world of Monkey Island is coming out, and I’m hoping for a fun old
style adventure game in the vein of the classic genre. I went ahead
and pre-purchased all five episodes, and can’t wait to delve in. But,
before starting to play episode one, I decided to refresh my memory
on that which came before. This is a review of my experiences with
The Curse of Monkey Island.

Get the Game Running

Unlike
Monkey Island 1 or 2, I have Monkey Island 3 on a CD. The game is
supported on Windows 95 and I was hoping I could get it to work ‘as
is’ without resorting to SCUMMVM or some other utility. It went
through the install easy enough, but unfortunately I got stuck there.
The game loaded, but immediately had a sound issue in the opening
screens. I gave up and reverted to the ScummVM path.

This time I discovered
the SCUMMVM wiki. It tells me the data files that are needed to run
the game. I was able to grab those data files direct from the CD without
needing to install the game. That is good info to have and made the
setup process a bit easier. With SCUMMVM, I had no issues.

http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/The_Curse_of_Monkey_Island

Elaine Marley,
will you marry me?

The Curse of Monkey Island
is a big change from the previous two games. First, the games visuals
are done in a cartoony style. I have to say I quite like it. Second,
they added voices, something that would not have been practical back
in the floppy disk days. It is also worth nothing that Ron Gilbert
was not on board as the designer for this third entry. Despite these
changes, the game goes out of its way to pay homage to the Monkey
Island theology.

The
game starts out shortly after the strange Monkey Island 2 ending.
Guybrush Threepwood, our pirate hero, is floating through the sea
on a bumper car. He is pining for his lost Elaine and fears for his
death from hunger and thirst. He obliviously floats between a sea
battle between Zombie Pirate LeChuck and Elaine Marley on Plunder
Island. Elaine declares her true love for Guybrush, LeChuck is defeated,
and Guybrush pops the question. Placing LeChuck’s cursed diamond
ring on Elaine’s finger, she promptly turns into solid gold.

The voices are hit or miss.
Guybrush sounds great and I couldn’t have picked a better choice
myself. LeChuck’s is good enough. Elaine’s voice is not
what I would have imagined, though. Other characters from the past
are back such as Wally the mapmaker, and Stan the salesman. Murray
the Talking Demonic Skull is introduced in this game, and I must say
he is my favorite character from the ‘later’ Monkey Island
games.

Solving Puzzles
and The Mega Monkey Mode

Defeating the curse and
turning Elaine back into a human makes up the bulk of the game’s plot.
Guybrush must get a bigger, better, uncursed diamond ring to offset
the cursed ring. The ring should be found on Blood Island, and to
get there Guybrush needs a ship, a crew, and a map. That is standard
fare for these games. The interface of this game is different than
the previous two. You click on an item and a “Do stuff”
window pops up. You can either use the mouth to talk to or eat something;
the hand to use something; or the eyes to examine something. The interface
is simple and you’ll get used it to quickly. Unfortunately things
go downhill after that.

The
game’s puzzles were tedious and there are so many items that the game
is often one big click fest, trying to figure out what you combine
with what. There are so many “useless” hotspots it is
almost impossible to figure out what should be clicked where. I’m
not sure if it is better for a game to have lots of hotspots for the
sake of exploration and fun, or only hotspots that move the game forward.
I suppose a balance could be reached, but this game does not reach
it. The endless clicking was just frustrating and detracted from enjoyment
of the game. Behind every locked door was another locked door, and
any progress was slow.

As with the previous entry
in the series, this game offers an easy path and a mega monkey mode.
I played through both. The easy path bypasses a few of the more obscure
puzzles, which actually makes the game a lot more enjoyable to play.

What Next?

Monkey Island 2 had the
weirdest ending of all video games. Unfortunately, Monkey Island 3
tries to make sense of that ending with little success. I have no
idea what Ron Gilbert originally intended, but I’m sure this
was not it. The design of this game was probably constrained by what
came before.

Next up, I’m going
to try to install and play Escape from Monkey Island, the fourth in
the series. This game is not supported by SCUMMVM, so I’m not
sure what to expect in terms of installation woes. After that, I tackle
the new Tales of Monkey Island.

System Requirements

• Windows 95
• Pentium 90 MHz
• 16MB RAM
• DirectX 5
• PCI Graphics Card
• 4X CD-ROM drive
• 2 MB Hard Disk space
• 20MB Hard Disk space
  for swap file
• Keyboard, mouse