Thoughts on Escape from Monkey Island
was wondering what everybody thinks of the fourth monkey island game. What is your overall opinion on the last game of monkey island?
is everybody hating it or is split?
is everybody hating it or is split?
Sign in to comment in this discussion.
Comments
But even with all that.. I really liked the game.. it was funny, it had all the characters I would want it to... some of the backgrounds where pretty cool and when it was done I found myself wishing it wasn't. But it is easily my least favorite of the three.
My final thoughts on this one is that its not really a game for a broad audience... I think only die hard MI fans will play it more than once.
Other than that, it's better than I remember. I wasn't keen on the property developer at first, but now that I come back to it, it's really pretty creative.
One thing I detested, was how they threw all continuity map-wise out of the window.
Which three?
I started playing it a few days ago for the first time (I've completed the other three several times) and it's a pretty fun game once you get used to the controls.
Some of the puzzles are a bit difficult but overall, I think that the Monkey Island "spirit" is present.
Then again, I have yet to see what Monkey Combat actually is (I've barely started the second act)...
I've had a few problems of the game getting stuck (most recently in the Lua Bar when I try to sit on a stool), so I save the game quite often.
Of the 4 games, it is at the bottom, but I don't consider it HORRIBLE, etc. Just so-so with some enjoyable bits and puzzles.
It happens all the times to me. You just have to wait for five-ten minutes (or maybe more, I don't remember).
By the way, as I've written elsewhere in all this monkey-frenzy, I believe that EfMI still lacks its due recognition as a classic. It's so hated among fans simply because it tried to be a monument to the legacy of the series and, at the same time, its most disrespectful mockery: by doing this it accomplished an hysterical energy which may hardly be found elsewhere. EfMI is the homage paid by two iconoclasts: it follows the structure of the first episode of the series, and it twists it by adding australian capitalists and giant kung fu robots. Played in this way (unacceptable for a devoted fan) it becomes a really fine piece of entertainment, perhaps sharper than its immediate, orthodox predecessor: it has very clever puzzles, good dialogues and an engaging story.
Whoops I meant four LOL
...Not a bad game, but it seems unrefined.
Monkey4 took our corporate Western World and took it to the Caribbean. Whereas in previous games, at least the first two, there were anachronisms to make you laugh, Monkey4 is Ronald McDonald meets Captain Blood. And that was a little hard to swallow for some. Personally I didn't care, as I had always seen this serie as a rather light-hearted attemt at pirat-ey comedy rather than anything else - albeit with compelling characters to work with.
There's also a point where an idea has just run out of steam. There's only this much jokes you can get out of anything before it's getting old and repeating itself ad nauseum. Just sayin' the kind of negativity directed toward this game is pretty much absurd. At its core it is as much of a classic Lucas Arts adventure game as they had ever come. But then it had to live up to its classic prequels.
I also didn't realise that so many people had a problem with the controls for this one, or Grim Fandango, for that matter. (I think I played GF after MI4, but the controls took me a little longer to get the hang of. A few minutes longer, it's not the kind of thing that got me screaming at the monitor for days).
As for the graphics... Well, I suppose a lot of games had better graphics back in 2000 but I don't really remember thinking they were that bat at the time. I do remember that most games trying to look 'cartoony' often failed, (at least Cell Shading has moved in leaps and bounds since then). Sometimes a bad idea becomes a good one after circumstances change. In any of the previous game Monkey Kombat would have been difficult to implement but if it had been then the idea of having a call back to that puzzle would have been funny (and it was
Monkey Combat ate up so much time, though. So if you didn't want to play rock paper scissors it was going to be a major issue.
As for controls, personally I loved both MI3 and MI4 controls. I liked the point & click idea, but I also loved being able to just use the keyboard for everything in MI4, which becomes even more of a bonus nine years in the future when many of us have touchpads and not mice.
Graphics-wise, I think it was alright for the era, but I just detest 3d games of this kind because it tends to look surreal in a bad way. I think the major problem people had (though i'm not sure) is the realistic art which was excellent for the time in MI2, the absolutely beautiful art in MI3 and then the following 3d gormless Guybrush.
One of the biggest problems I had with it was the sound quality. I seemed to be the only one to notice or care when the game was released, but the sound and music seemed flat and mono-channel and just not very good. For example listen to the CMI intro music here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKWT5wW4gdY
and the EMI intro music here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtjNixXbe3E
The CMI one sounds way better - EMI seems to be mono-channel and just doesn't sound as crisp. This extends to all sound in the game. This may be trivial to some people, but I guess sound and music quality is important to me because it really really bothered me.
Besides that, it just didn't have the right feel to me. The settings were too bright and too clean. They made Guybrush famous with even a restaurant named after him which is so wrong and goes against his traditional bumbling, unknown, forgettable, every-man pirate wannabe character -- I really hope TT ignored that whole fame development in TMI. They recast Elaine with a (IMO) much less-appealing actress (cheers to TT for bringing sexy back). They ruined the ScummBar. Monkey Kombat was lame. Insult-everything was lame, it should only be sword fighting (they are PIRATES). Wasting Murray by making him the greeter for "Planet Threepwood" was lame. The "steer-with-arrow-keys-as-if-guybrush-was-a-racecar" controls were lame.
Some of the characters were good, and I actually liked the "Herman Toothrot is grandpa Marley" twist, even if it does stretch credulity a bit. But I didn't like much else.
I think the problem I had with it is "Is this really the last Monkey Island game?" The ending - which I didn't even dislike like that much, actually was fine to me and I even liked the Monkey Head thing and Toothrot. I'm not a huge fan of the graphics as they look more out of place than MI and MI2, but that's fixable.
Really, when I look at it I see a game that's not quite as epic or beautiful but a pretty good and approaching great game. I think out of all the LucasArts games more than even MI:SE, Escape would benefit from a SE. You could alter up Monkey Combat a bit to either shorten it or replace it with something else - fix the graphics and a new soundtrack. The ending could be reworked a bit but not a ton - keep canon the same, just make it a more rewarding experience. Add ins would be great. I think you have a game just screaming for special edition that will still be a good game if it doesn't get it.
So I guess I jumped on the haterade until I actually saw one of it's developers post - which made feel bad for trashing their work - so I gave it another chance. It's a good game, and one of my favorites. But. It shouldn't be the last Monkey Island game and it was for 9 years. But that problem has been fixed.
I second that at least as far as the German version is concerned. No idea why they did that, but the entire voice-overs were of notiecably worse sound quality than their original peers. I wouldn't go as far as comparing it to Capcom's haphazard 1997 Resident Evil PC conversion - literally all the sounds were saved as really low quality wav files on the disc in that one, there was noise in all of those, horrible. But yeah, compared to CMI and Grim before this hit me hard right when I started the game.
I hope everybody remembers that in 'Curse' there were 2 settings; 'Regular' and 'Mega Monkey'. These were supposed to be difficulty settings, however I only played Mega Monkey so I never found out if the 2 versions were different.
It could be worked so that, if there was an "Escape from Monkey Island: Special Edition" there could be 2 settings; one where certain puzzles, such as the swamp, monkey combat, the one where you had to throw boulders at carefully timed intervals (my person favourites) and any others like those are left out and one where they're left in. And possibly a third one, with more extreme versions of these puzzles, or more encounters with very similar puzzles (ie, more reasons to fling boulders, insult monkeys and navigate crazy swamps).
I really do love some of the screens though, especially the forests one (trees are amazing ^^), and some humor in places too (Starbuck's mockup for example). But the overall game experience was so cold... compared to Grim Fandango (with also some big gameplay problems), or simply CoMI, it was totally lifeless. Like most of adventure gamers, I love 2D games, and 2D style (Bill Tiller
Wow I forgot about that! I loved that there was a free-wheeling instrumental solo during Stan's theme in EMI. That was great stuff.
Monkey kombat was a clever addition and was no more of a chore than insult sword fighting. By the time you have discovered every move the challenge is just beginning to outstay its welcome; having said that I enjoyed the switch from all the puzzle hunting.
Speaking of insult sword fighting, I also liked the way that in CMI it was interwoven with the 'booty' rewards and the need to upgrade ones cannons, it gave a purpose to the fights instead of just the monotonous learning of moves for a key storyline extension.
Back on topic, I never noticed any difference in sound quality and certainly nothing I could point a finger in horror at. Now I'll have to install it again and have a listen...
Monkey Kombat seemed like a game lengthening device. Especially when you have to keep training until Jo Jo says that you've done enough.
I'm pretty sure they were trying to mimic Insult Swordfighting from the first game in that regard. Carla the Swordmaster will refuse to fight you unless you've defeated enough lesser pirates first. Of course, I think as an attempt to follow-up Insult Swordfighting, Monkey Kombat is a complete failure (under the hood they might be conceptually the same thing but the whole point of Insult Swordfighting is that it was actually fun instead of a series of Oops and Chees), but you can at least see what they were going for.
I quite like impossibly hard puzzles, actually, because you tend to have something to sharpen your mind with. I found the Monkey Combat tedious and over-long, but I wasn't particularly stuck on it: I just had to write all the combinations down. For me, though, that's not the sign of a great puzzle.
You've got a good point with people's experiences turning them off specific features, though. I remember in Monkey Island 2, being particularly vexed by the different skeleton-doors at LeChucks fortress; but then this actually added to the foreboding and helped empathise with what was happening to Guybrush.
PariahKing's idea of an MI4:SE is one i'd probably subscribe to. I played MI4 again just recently and some of what I hadn't initially liked actually became quite fun to me. I still had a problem with the layout of Melee Island, etc. but then you can't get everything right. Simple things like the gormless, Hillary-Clinton-twin-brother-looking Guybrush were what made it really hard to set a mood. This is something an SE would fix and something i'm immensely grateful to the developers at Telltale for having fixed for ToMI
I'm not sure MI4 could ever be as good as the first two, even with an SE, but MI3 is definitely a level I think it could reach with an overhaul of the music and graphics, but also with some relatively large gameplay-tweaks. The game is a great game, but the entire overtone is a happy touristy world invading Guybrush's surreal and weird world. Well, that's good as a game, but meant that the seriousness and atmosphere which had been captured in the others was lacking slightly. People point to Blood Island a lot for CMI as being the best with the best atmosphere in that game, and I think one island captured just right is all it really takes.
I didn't like the end fight and Monkey village, because Monkey Kombat took IMO too much time and didn't offer anything else besides writing the correct moves on paper. In insult swordfighting of the earlier games you also had to collect the moves, but there was humour in that. "Chee ack eek!" didn't make me laugh in similar manner like "You're as repulsive as a monkey in a negligee!" - "I look THAT much like your fiancée?"
Mêlée Island, Lucre Island, Knuttin Atoll and most of Monkey Island were all right, but I didn't like Jambalaya Island. Starbucks and Planet Hollywood parodies just didn't amuse me. Also I didn't like that LeChuck was servant of Ozzie Mandrill. IMO LeChuck is better as main villain and not that good henchman.
Controls of EfMI weren't as horrible as controls of Grim Fandango, but compared to mouse control of previous games playing from keyboard was a lot more annoying. They should have kept traditional mouse controls. It would have made EfMI more playable. I have seen 3D games with good mouse control, so it wouldn't be impossible to made good controls to 3D adventure game. Mouse + keyboard controls of Sierra's last adventure game "Gabriel Knight 3" were 10 times better than controls of last LucasArts adventures. Which is bit ironic, because generally LucasArts games had better controls than Sierra games.
That's my lasting memory of the game.
Also, weren't about 1/2 the puzzles in the game solved with the assistance picker? Lazy.
If they remade the game with new character models, in higher def and with point'n'click it would be an instant classic.
1. Controls. Why should I control an adventure character like a roleplay character? The old way was perfect. I still played Monkey Island 4 through, but in Grim Fandango that was the reason for me to quit. It is the only LA advanture I have not finished, and after MI4 I never bought another one.
2. Monkey Combat. It's not funny and it's not a puzzle. It just takes time.
3. Hermann Toothrot is H.T.Marley? They killed two characters with that. I hope Telltales will not include H.T. in the future episodes.
Still the jokes were funny and I also liked the atmosphere. Of course it was way brighter than the earlier games, but it played in a holiday paradise, so it makes sense.
I would have preferred it if the gate to the sword master's house was locked by a juicy slider puzzle too. I mean.... following the shop keeper for what felt like two hours through woods that looked all the same wherever you went? And what about this crap about getting past the sword master
Just lazy!
I like the Grim Fandango look but the controls were awkward, particularly on the raft in the swamp puzzle. I liked some of the new islands. The parts on Monkey Island itself were okay but could have been much better. Wasn't a massive fan of the Herman Toothrot twist but I guess it worked and it was quite surprising. I think Tales will have more of an old school feel to it and be closer to the first three games rather than Escape.
the other is while walking on map, where is Guybrush is making illogical turns, especially if you are running at the same
HaHa good luck with that:p I played it for a second time a few months ago and the controls and monkey combat were far more annoyning than I remembered, I think I was far to excited about having a new monkey Isalnd game the first time round to even notice. Yeah you do get over the controls but that monkey combat ruins the end of the game, I'd still play it again though!!