The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (2009) - Review

You've probably had the experience of watching a movie and realizing half-way through that you've already seen that movie and just completely forgot about it. Have you ever had the opposite though? Where you are certain you've already played a game and realize you definitely haven't, half-way through? No? Just me then I guess.

The original The Secret of Monkey Island was released all the way back in 1990, and while I am old now I was too young then to play it at launch. No matter, I definitely got around to playing it at some point while growing up. I remember the bar with all the pirates, the word-fencing, the annoying boat salesman. Yeah I pretty much remember finishing The Secret of Monkey Island.

So when I decided to introduce my kids (6 and 11 yo) to this little gem I thought I basically knew most of the puzzles and we would breeze through. I felt like I remembered all of the game even though many years had passed since I last properly played it, though my memory of the actual ending was a bit hazy. True enough, we got through all the way to Stan without much trouble - sneaking through the forest, getting shot through a cannon and feeding rabid poodles rancid meat (don't worry, they're not dead, just sleeping).

The game puts you in the shoes of Guybrush Threepwood, an up-and-coming wannabe pirate. As he goes around trying to prove to the real pirates that he has what is needed to be one of them, the bad guy LeChuck (the meanest pirate and also a ghost) kidnaps Threepwood's newfound love Governor Marley. The story might be whacky (in all the good ways!), but the gameplay is straightforward. While this wasn't the first game to use Lucasarts famous SCUMM system (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) it works great here. Maybe some young-uns don't like the idea of having to choose a verb with an item to solve puzzles (which was a novelty then, before this you had to type the verb yourself which was a guesswork in and of itself), I personally quite enjoy this system. Newer P&C games will automatically choose the right verb, but that is making things a bit too easy I find.

You can't beat the original. Can you?

Ok, it's probably more of a time consuming gimmick nowadays, but I like it, ok? Unfortunately the version we were playing was the Special Edition, which means they added voice acting and completely revamped graphics. Unfortunately because, old trout that I am, I also definitely prefer the original graphics. My kids did not however, and two against one the revamped graphics won out. 

They're ok and in some parts, in all honesty, they make it easier to make out which things you can interact with. But they're just... ugly... compared to the lovely pixels of the original. The Special Edition also provides background music, which was quite nice, I must admit. While the voice acting was perfectly serviceable, a character like Stan works best as a silent antagonist if you ask me. He really grates after 10 seconds. The Special Edition also keeps the verbs, but hides them and your inventory behind buttons ("I" for things in your inventory and "Ctrl" for using verbs), clearing out your screen. I actually found this less user-friendly, but maybe that is just me.

The revamped graphics adds quite a touch.

After we had dealt with Stan and Guybrush leaves the island with his ragtag team I slowly start to realize something. As he sets foot on the beach of Monkey Island it hits home. I don't recognize any of this! I am having a proper Berenstain Moment as we start to make our way through the jungle and make friends with Bob and the Cannibals. 

I knew that the game takes place on Mêlée Island and never thought to question why the game was called Monkey Island. But half the game actually takes place on Monkey Island, a half that I don't have any memory of playing. The memory I have of playing and finishing the game, is actually of me playing the first half over and over. I never actually made it to Monkey Island as a kid!

So while the first half of the game went swimmingly and I still knew most of the puzzles, I had no clue what to do once we got to Monkey Island. Me and the kids managed to figure out quite a lot of the puzzles on our own, otherwise we resorted to a walkthrough for some of the trickier ones (both the boat sections for example).

Actually getting to Monkey Island felt... wrong. It felt out of place. It felt like it was tacked on and didn't fit the atmosphere of the rest of the game. While Mêlée Island is dusky, moody and piratey, Monkey Island is its polar opposite with sunny beaches and literal monkeys running around eating bananas. I always loved the perpetual night time of Mêlée Island and didn't feel comfortable running around getting a sun tan on Monkey Island. Most importantly, it didn't fit the internal feeling I had of the game. An image I now have had to severely revise.

This doesn't mean I think The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is a bad game. I still think it is one of the best P&C experiences I've had and probably one of the best P&C games there is. The writing is just superb, Lucasarts at its height of funny and whacky. There are many memorably characters, scenes and puzzles in this game and I thoroughly recommend it.

But the Secret of Monkey Island from my childhood memory is gone. And that stings a bit.

The Whispered World (2009)

There is a game genre I keep coming back to even though my success rate is abysmally low, and that is the point-and-click puzzle genre. The amount of PoC games I have legitimately cleared compared to the amount of games I have tried is a pretty sad read, but I just can't let it be. A good PoC adventure will stay with you for a long time and a good PoC adventure is one I am the most likely to want to replay. I've replayed Broken Sword and The Dig several times and I am currently replaying Secret of Monkey Island.

The Whispered World was released in 2009 by German company Daedalic who are now probably mostly (in)famous for their terrible Gollum game which was released last year (2023), which in fact was so poorly received Daedalic decided not to develop any games anymore and instead focus entirely on being publishers. Before that they made games like the Deponia series, which I've only tried for a bit, and The Pillars of the Earth, which I completed.

The Whispered World was one of the very first games Daedalic released and maybe it was a sign of what was to come. It seems like Daedalic was always stronger in ideas than they were in programming and realization of those ideas.

The game centers around the circus clown Sadwick. He tours the world with his brother and grandpa, and a larva named Spot which is also used as a tool for some puzzles in the game in a Deus Ex Machina way. True to his name, Sadwick is ironic and some times cynical about himself and the world around him and quite likable. The writing is decent, I especially enjoyed the fact that most combinations you end up clicking seemed to have its own unique line of dialogue attached to it, which is a nice change from the umpteen "I can't do that" you often get to hear in PoC games. I couldn't stand the voice acting however and it's a blessing that the option to turn it off existed. 

The game is almost exclusively controlled with the mouse, with which you move Sadwick around and make him interact with the world. This works fine and I don't particularly miss the old verb-boards where you had to guess your way through "pull", "push" and "pick up". Though I guess you could argue it added to the puzzle element. Either way, I always find that I am bad judge for the quality of puzzle designs, since even the simplest puzzles can stump me. In Whispered World there are certainly a few head scratchers that feel like the way to get there is to start combining a bit of everything. There is a point where you have to scare your brother, and to do that you have to build a scary figurine from odd things you've picked up. I doubt anyone would figure out exactly what pieces fit together, this is a matter of trying everything with everything. There is also a few points where you have to give the correct dialogue options to NPC's and I never could get the hints as to what was the right thing to say. 

The story of Whispered World starts with Sadwick having a bad dream. The animation is very of its time, I got instant flashbacks to homebrew flash animations that were floating around the internet around then. The world is going to end somehow, and Sadwick involuntarily ends up being both the only way to save it and the possible cause of it. It never bothered me that it doesn't make much sense, the world is a cozy fantasy world full of odd creatures and is fun to explore. Things are random, but they make sense within the setting of The Whispered World.

The game was good enough to keep me interested and when I was about to give up because I got stuck I enlisted my kids to help me out. It became something for us to try to solve together, and progress was a lot easier with three heads (albeit some young ones) at it than just my own. Too bad then about the programming.

It started already pretty early in the game, where something that was required to happen to progress just didn't. Fortunately a restart of the game solved it then, but about half way through it happened again. I needed a certain object (hay from a pile of hay) to continue the game, but trying to pick it up Sadwick just kept telling us he already had it. Googling around it seems that game breaking bugs were not uncommon in this game and after having tried for a while without success we decided to give up. Even though the game was ok, none of us were interested in replaying two hours to get to where we were, only to perhaps end up getting the same bug again.

If you're starved for some PoC gaming and haven't come across this one yet I would say it could be worth checking out. Unfortunately this game requires you to be careful for the wrong reasons so don't repeat our mistake and make sure to keep several save spots going.

Borderlands (PC) - Review

In the Borderlands of fun.

I've been on a streak of completing games that have been high on my "to-play"-list for many years, and I must say it feels good. Borderlands is no different, I've been meaning to play it ever since I first saw my now-ex bf play it back when it was released in 2009. Back then I was neck-deep into WoW though and had little time for any other game, something I've mentioned many times before and basically what I've been trying to rectify since.

Watching over the shoulder of my ex, I liked the way Borderlands looked. While I thought the intro gavethe impression of the game being a bit try-hard, it looked like it had some fun shooting and looting going for it. Having tried it now though, nine years later, I can say that whether you have any fun in Borderlands really depends on how you play it.

Borderlands is essentially the simplest kind of shooter. Ever heard of Space Invaders? Yeah, it's actually not many steps removed from that. You can pick from four different classes - Soldier, Sniper, Siren and Berserker. Note that I've only played the game as a Soldier so obviously this review is limited to that viewpoint. I have a tendency to choose what many say to be the most "boring" class, so maybe I should reroll and give it another go. Unfortunately what I experienced as a soldier gives me no desire to do so.

Graphics have changed a bit though.

Not that Borderlands is an awful game, even if I am really making it sound that way right now. It's just very... meh. It was difficult not to compare it to Fallout 3 and New Vegas, because they both take place in a post-apocalyptic setting with a lot of different gear, wonky characters to meet and zany enemies to fight. While Fallout 3 and New Vegas definitely also has its flaws, that's a whole 'nother post, suffice to say that a lot of the things they have got in common mostly work in Fallout and not so much in Borderlands.

What kind of things for instance?

Well, Borderlands is loot-heavy. A lot revolves around gathering or purchasing new gear and comparing it to already existing gear. Unfortunately you rarely get excited about any of it because they all feel pretty same-y. Maybe this is where the different classes come in? As a soldier I was pretty much limited to just using arms (not the ones you flail with, the ones you shoot with) but as I understood it it's not much different with the other classes, just which weapons you choose to use. In Fallout, I often use pretty much every weapon I come across at some point, giving me a lot of variety in how I choose to tackle an enemy. Here, I found that there was really only two types worth using - one spray and pray for close combat and one sniper gun for far away. The only time I swapped was because I ran out of ammo.

It's raining guns.

There are skills to put points in, but they don't feel like they make much of a difference really. Some of them are even specifically for multiplayer, and therefore pointless (pun intended) if you're playing at it alone. This says a lot about the game actually, and I will get back to this.

You'll meet NPC's, most notably probably the Claptraps (who along with the guy who seems to threaten to kill himself, because that's cool, are the faces of the game), and fight a lot of monsters, but the game is really struggling to make me care. There are also little details that just doesn't make me feel like the world is real (which is obviously a tricky word to use with something that is technically not actually real). While some things I do have a permanent effect on the surrounding, they are few and far between. Most locations are only available through teleports and so feel more like stages than actual sites. Most places in Fallout are seamlessly connected, you open a door to the subways or a vault and you are there without a loading screen in between that teleports you to a new location. It makes a world of difference for immersion, at least for me. Borderlands is just a whole bunch of disconnected areas for you to do quests in and that makes everything you meet and fight in them feel disconnected as well.

Not only that, you interact with the areas in the exact same way every time you return. Enemies come charging at you in the exact same way every time you turn the same corner. If you play this game often enough I am sure you could play it blind-folded, because there will be literally no surprises.

The DLC I tried were just more of the same.

And the quests themselves are never particularly inspired, at least not the lot I came across during my total of 14 hours played. While in Fallout you can find some really weird and memorable quest chains, in the eight hours I managed to get myself to play singleplayer of Borderlands I can't recall a single quest I did except for "kill named supermob X". It really wasn't much different in multiplayer either. Also, something I sort of have mentioned already, the quests seem to have little effect on the surroundings. Killing off a tribe of bandits or the beforementioned supermob doesn't mean the tribe or the moblings will be gone or changed in any meaningful way. They will still be there the next time you pass through, as if you hadn't done anything to them.

Even if I might be exaggerating reality a bit, this is exactly how it feels when you play the game - as if everything is just a giant Sisyphos project and you are struggling without a purpose. What is the goal of the game anyway? I have no idea actually. If there was a main quest chain in there somewhere, it completely failed to catch my interest.

Graphically I was happy to see what felt like a fresh take with the cel-shading, and I am sure the game would've only felt even more dull without it. While it only emphasizes the promise that Borderlands makes and can never deliver, because the game definitely looks like it could be a lot of fun, it's still one of the better components of the game. I mostly enjoyed the enemy designs as well, both gameplay wise and aesthethically. It's interesting then that combat still manages to be overall quite boring, but that wasn't down to the enemies or how they acted as such. Instead I put it down to the beforementioned issue of repetitiveness. While a fight with a group of enemies could be fun the first and second time, when you ran into them the tenth time and knew exactly what was coming, the fun had definitely worn off. And to show that the circle always is complete, I read reviews of Fallout 76 and find that a lot of the critique of that game reminds me of the problems with this game, at least regarding world-building.

Overall Borderlands left me with a feeling of almost wanting to be mindless. And maybe this isn't trying to be a memorable or awe-inspiring experience, it's supposed to just be some thoughtless run and gun fun! In many ways that takes me back to my comment about Space Invaders. You'll see and fight the same enemies over and over and maybe that is supposed to be the fun - you're simply not supposed to have to think much about what you do. And I would never have realized that might be the case if it wasn't for a funny coincidence.

The graphics are pretty much the only thing that makes the world come alive, at least a little bit.

After having played Borderlands for eight hours on my own, I decided to give it another couple of hours to wow me before I uninstalled it and moved on. As I was playing that final push, one of my oldest and best friends asked me on Steam if he could join me. Sure thing, I thought, it can only make the game better, surely.

And I was correct. The multiplayer skills in singleplayer mode had already given me the hint that this game didn't seem designed for singleplayer experiences at all. Running around with someone you enjoy playing with, allowing you to heroically save each other from gunfire or death and discuss which loot should go to which person really made all the difference. Most games are made better when played with a friend but that doesn't necessarily mean a game can't have a fun singleplayer mode, like Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and 3. Here I'd say the difference between singleplayer and multiplayer fun is almost as profound as in a Mario Party game.

But in the end Borderlands still suffers from a great lack of depth. It seems to try to mask this by showering you in loot like some sort of Diablo-clone and let you talk to wonky characters that still manage to leave no impression. Throughout my game time with Borderlands I never once thought "oh I just need to do this" or "I wonder what happens next" or even "huh, that's cool". When I play a game like Pokémon I'll look at the time and wonder what happened to the last two hours. With this I look at the time and wonder how it's only been twenty minutes.

In before someone chimes in "you should use this and that mod though"; firstly I am against a game needing mods to even be fun and secondly I really don't think mods could've fixed the issues that made the game tedious in the first place.

If you happen to have a buddy and you're looking for a game you haven't played together yet and you can find this cheap, then sure, I think it could provide you with a decent amount of fun for a decent amount of time. Otherwise, there is a lot better things you can do with your time. Play Borderlands 2 maybe?

Man Up or Manual - Comparing Diablo-clones

As I've been on a streak of playing Diablo-clones, purely coincidentally as I often install games on random, I've also come to think of the subtle differences that make or break a game. What makes a good game? It's a question almost as difficult to answer as the big one about the meaning of life, especially since it often comes down to subjective ideas of fun. It just really popped into my head when playing these Diablo-clones specifically because they're somehow so comparable. Often the core mechanics are pretty much the same and the differences are too subtle to explain in a good way.

I never played Diablo or Diablo 2 much when they were released, but once I got around to it I loved them. I never beat Diablo, but went through Diablo 2 a couple of times. I was quite thrilled when Diablo 3 was announced but got bored with it after some months, I gave it another chance a while after but never could get into it. I've filed it under the list of "unsuccessful Diablo-clones" (although technically not a Diablo-clone), along with a whole bunch of others. Din's Curse (2010), Torchlight (2009) and FATE: The Cursed King (2011) joined that list pretty quickly. Eventhough I had fun with all of those games initially, since I am quite a fan of the core mechanic, I ended up losing interest fairly quickly. I even bought Torchlight 2, having heard it was better than the first one, over two years ago. I still haven't played it.

FATE is pretty much Torchlight - amazon.com

Then I started playing Darkstone (released 1999) and something changed. The interesting thing was that all of the abovementioned boring games were simple to get the hang of. They either had tutorials that explained what you needed to know, or game mechanics easy enough to figure out on the run. But they lacked something that made it fun to stick around in the world. To me, Din's Curse, FATE and Torchlight all suffered from the same feeling of meaninglessness, the way all that killing never felt like it was leading anywhere or at least nowhere I wanted to go. Diablo 3 had the same problem of repetitiveness and sense that I was bashing my head against a wall even when I was making progress. But I had so much trouble figuring out how it differed from Diablo 2. What made the one fun and the other one not?

Torchlight - gamespot.com

Darkstone did things differently than the other games. It has a tutorial, if you can call it that - a dude tells you where the vendors are and you get to test some different weapons and that's it. Quests are given to you by random people walking up and telling you "good luck finding the Holy Shield! You're going to need it!". I am paraphrasing, but that is literally all the information you get. Not a word about where the item is, which seems like pretty essential information. It took me 2 hours to figure out how to make my companion use spells. Or how to lock spells into my spellbar. Or what the different skills you can buy actually do. All thanks to me digging up the actual manual of the game. Apparently you have to hold in shift while clicking a spell to make it stick to your spellbar. Apparently you have to tell your companion how much mana they can use by marking their mana bar before they start using skills. Apparently the Language skill is completely useless in single player.

Needless to say I was frustrated as hell the first couple of hours of playing, which wasn't the case with the other Diablo-clones. Diablo was released several years before this game so I was desperately trying to find the key that would show me all the loot at my feet, but alas. You have to use your eyes and try to see that tiny ass pixelated ring somewhere among all the cracked urn pieces. Trying to open a chest I often end up circling it because targeting is wonky as hell. There is no pet to conveniently run off and vendor your things. Eventhough you're a team your characters control as two different people, which means if you want to sell or buy stuff from the vendor you have to do it individually. Swapping between characters is also unintuitive (especially since there is no key for it) so I've already died a couple of times from freaking out when in the wrong character, using the wrong skills. But somehow, rather than making me angry, it made me all the happier when I got it right.

Closer to the style of Diablo - megagames.com

But it was fun. I kept trying, I kept playing - eventhough all the game mechanics told me I should've given up long ago. I kept thinking "what the hell is wrong with this game" but I didn't close it down. When I finally ended up reading the manual to be able to actually do simple stuff, I even got a bit sentimental. I can't explain it. I don't think it's a bad thing at all that games nowadays come with tooltips and explain basic game mechanics from the start. There are even old games that do this without it feeling like the game is holding your hand, like Geneforge or Planescape: Torment. And I don't think it's the handholding alone that makes a game more or less fun, Darkstone also has a more interesting world and manages to make dungeon crawling feel like an adventure and not a chore, just like the original Diablo did. I passed a lake and a fairy in it told me to "blow the reeds from the smallest to the biggest". "What reeds?" I thought. There were no reeds anywhere and she didn't tell me where to find them or why (to play the song of snakes, whatever that was good for). After some clicking around I decided to just leave it. Venturing into the next dungeon, I happen to find some reeds in various locations. Now I am curious.

Worst graphics, best game? - gamersinfinite.com

There was just something about the ruthlessness of getting thrown in at the deep end, the feeling of the game developers thinking "they'll get this, they're not stupid" (although clearly I was) that felt refreshing. If done right, and that's obviously easier said than done, saying "we don't need to tell you, you'll figure it out" really adds to the sense of achievement. You need a lot of faith in your game to think people will stick around for it. A lot of upcoming games will add this as an optional feature (like the new Hitman, and I believe the new Thief had this as well) where you can choose to get more or less information. I think that is a brilliant idea. If the popularity of Dark Souls is anything to go by, people enjoy good trial & error. And for the rest of us, there is always the manual.