Did anyone like Monkey Kombat?
It was very annoying to figure out. It's been so long, I cannot remember if I cheated or won it by chance. Should I give it another try? I'd like to play it again, but I am not sure if it's worth the bother of MK. I may get headaches.
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I won't say that I liked it, but it was certainly not the game "killer" that some people had led me to believe.
That's enough Monkey Kombat for one day.
...Yeah, I think I liked it, thinking back. It helps that I was just watching somebody else play the game, though.
LucasArts did eventually include an in-game Monkey Kombat move chart in the PS2 version, but for PC gamers that's cold comfort.
(Yes, I'm still sore about it. Why do you ask?)
Did the same thing, pentagram and all. It wasn't too bad, even enjoyable, kind of old school with the paper and the pen.
As for the filing system... Now, that was the one that I REALLY hated.
^ GHAHAHA... Oh, wait. Shii-.
Well, I think Monkey Kombat is a great puzzle precisely because it "kills the game". It's not as straightforward as many of the other puzzles (and the whole ToMI series for example...), and that's why I liked it. You had to have pen and paper for it and track many things down, i.e. which move beats which and how to change from one form to the others. It's also one of the most epic battling formats known to mankind... :rolleyes: The stances were great. The equality what Guybrush felt to monkeys because of it was great. And the victory dance...
Good idea about the pentagram, I've always drawn a grid so far, which means I write the insults twice each. But I also include a column about which stance beats which.
My girlfriend loved it however.
She did all by memory ...
Taken from http://www.worldofmi.com/thegames/monkey4/index.php
The PS2 version was blessed with an in-game chart that were automatically filled in as you got the right combos, so that was an improvement over the PC version though.
"You fight like a dairy farmer!"
"How appropriate, you fight like a cow!"
vs
"Eek, oop, ack"
"Opp, chi, eek"
Well, at least ONE of them is funny... and makes sense. Yeah, maybe not for the 20th time, but then neither is any other joke ever made.
Except that insult swordfighting was in English, didn't require you to keep track of anything, didn't require you to have all the responses in order to finish, and if you were missing a response, you just had to repeat the insult until you got it. Monkey Kombat does nothing to add any humor, requires you to make a chart, requires you to collect all of the "insults" to finish, and if you're missing a specific one, good luck getting it.
Haven't you driven this argument into the ground already? Anyway, at least Curse didn't send the series into hiatus for nine years.
You're not being fair to the game at all. Escape received positive reviews and sold quite well for an adventure game at that time. There probably would have been another sequel within a couple of years or so if not for the internal changes that started to take place at LucasArts around the time.
And LeChuck's Revenge was so terrible that it drove the series into hiatus for six years? That's simply not how these things work. If Curse was made at the same time as Escape, it would have faced the same "business realities" that cancelled the Freelance Police game. Escape was financially successful and had a generally favorable critical reception in its time.
Monkey Kombat did force you to write down the "insults," at least in the PC version. And you had to combine several monkey words--nonsense gibberish, which IS harder to remember--in the correct order to create a complete "insult," a wrinkle not found in Insult Swordfighting.
And, again unlike in Monkey Kombat, you could actually stand a chance of defeating the Sword Master with only half the insults collected or so. (Not a great one, but it's possible--I've done it.) You only need to out-insult her five times to win the fight, and you won't lose unless you fail several times to reply correctly to her insults.
Also, while I myself like Curse much better than Escape, I do agree with you that Escape didn't "drive the series into hiatus" at all. LucasArts management was simply becoming less receptive to adventure games in general. It was the company's changing culture, and not the quality of the last MI sequel, that ended the adventure era there.
@Edurado: Thanks for the pentagram. I was wondering what you were all talking about.
Recently opened the box for my EMI and countless pieces of paper fell out containing notes I'd made for it every time I played through it.
Didn't realise how many times I actually played it! Might have to revisit soon...
I do prefer insult-based battles though.
Pssst... if your name is Mike Stemmle, you might not want to read the following paragraph.
Escape is easily, by far, the worst game of the entire series, in every imaginable way. Poor puzzle design, annoying controls, ugly art style, most of the new/different voice cast was dreadful, storyline was terrible, the jokes were almost non-existent, and the game was just generally a bad experience overall. Meanwhile, Curse has great puzzles, possibly the best point and click controls of all time, amazing art style, perfect voice casting, decent storyline, incredible amount of hilarious jokes, and easily one of the top 10 best adventure games of all time.
Yep, Curse was more damaging. :rolleyes:
EDIT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-m38KVmOUk
proof its funny as hell
Only MI I never finished. Should say something...
...You guys realize I wasn't serious, right? I was making fun of Dashing's post. If I really wanted to tear down Escape, I have plenty of better ways to do it.
That is not what I meant. I meant that the game actually remembers which insults and responses you've heard and displays them in a list, rather than Monkey Kombat's system of basically generating a random three digit code using the numbers 1-4 to do your "insults".
Also, I played through Secret last night and managed to beat Carla on my first try with only 8/16 responses.
The only character I thought was slightly off was the perfume salesman played by Neil Ross, but I let him off because of his performance as Wally in Curse. But aside from that, every actor/character gave a great performance.
Anyway, Monkey Kombat. On my first play, it confused the heck outta me, when I beat it, I was like YYYYEEEEAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! Next few playthroughs, since I knew what to do, I progressed without too much problems. One potential game-halting moment relating to puzzle design though (the game as a whole had a problem with puzzle design), is that if you throw away the notes you took after beating Jojo Jr, you'd have no way of defeating LeChuck at the end.
And Pat Fraley as Stan. God, that was awful.
Also, I think Gavin Hammon did a great job in Tales, but that's something else entirely.
With EMI being a Monkey Island game,my pride forbid me to do so though and I worked my way through, was kinda proud when I finally understood how the Monkey Kombat system worked but got terribly annoyed during my first replay, when I found that all of the combinations change with every game.
So for me, it's definitely a hold up in the game's flow.