Monkey Island 5 and 1 Special Edition Out Soon, Life Officially Good

Considering we're named after it I think we're officially obliged to talk about the Monkey Island games here, but as much as we love the games we never thought in a million years would LucasArts:-

a) give the licence to ex-LucasArts adventure game and Sam & Max developer Telltale to make an episodic Monkey Island 5
b) re-release a Special Edition of The Secret of Monkey Island with full voice acting, new improved graphics, and an orchestral soundtrack
c) have Monkey Island as their only internally developed game
d) have Monkey Island as the main game on their website
e) produce an adventure game again after cancelling both Full Throttle: Hell On Wheels and Sam & Max: Freelance Police six years ago and going down the Dark Side of almost pure Star Wars development.



Yesterday they did all of these things.




I heard all the rumours, but I dismissed them as pointless wish-fulfilment. Then they all turned out to be true, and I spontaneously combusted. All I can say is it's lucky I had to change my trousers anyway.


Dominic Armato's still Guybrush! Michael Land's doing the music (his first composing job since helping out with EFMI)! While the consoles get screwed over in some fashion (Wii gets new, 360 gets old, Sony gets nothing) the PC gets everything! And it starts NEXT MONTH!


Gentlemen, start your quotations!

The Legend of Monkey Island

I don't know if my picture of me and Dave as JC and Paul Denton got him thinking about Deus Ex, but the retitling of our Blog to something more Insulting got me thinking about the Monkey Island games.

A long time ago now, I was playing The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for the first time (I'm going somewhere with this anecdote, believe me). I'd gotten to the second island and found myself (or rather puny protagonist Link) stranded on the strange pirate town on Windfall Island. He had a ship, but needed to buy a sail from the merchant in town. After going to the correct merchant's window, he found that luckily a sail was available, but the merchant wanted something in return.

Sounding very adventure gamish, right? Well, for some reason I couldn't work out how to get the sail and presumed it would come up naturally during my exploration of the island. I discovered many puzzles to solve, many locals to talk to, many strange little minigames to play (completion of which undoubtedly would get me an item someone else wanted), and lots to do even though I couldn't swim more than a few yards out to sea and didn't have a sword. Oh, and there was plenty of humour too.

How Monkey Island-like was that? That's what I want adventure games to be like now. It's all very well getting such brilliant titles as Sam & Max and A Vampyre Story, but the genre hasn't really evolved since Maniac Mansion 20 years ago.

Forget Quicktime Event Extravaganzas like Fahrenheit/The Indigo Prophecy, I want adventure games to be third-person, move with normal movement keys, not have static screens, with everything you can interact with being nice and obvious, and have natural barriers like the sea. No loading screens, no transitions, all natural. That's what I want Monkey Island 5 to be like.

(Not that's it's going to happen what with LucasArts being... what they are. Oh well)

- Chris Capel