Just watched the opening and got to the first room. This still looks and sounds gorgeous. There's no getting around the smudginess of the era's low resolution in the FMVs, but the in-game visuals, despite not being as crisp as they would be today, are beautiful and all tie together really well. It's got that extra 20% polish that the Broken Swords are missing; it's awesome to see Lucasarts coming out of the 640x480 gates running. It's a damn shame that everything moved to 3D before we could get anything else in this format from the studio (or even any later 2D adventures with higher resolution and number of colours, though even the 3D ones didn't get any further than this).
(One crap thing is the THX sound system riff right at the top, not very funny, just kind of slapped in there and immediately threatens the immersion. Thankfully the bad taste immediately gets blasted away by the opening FMV.)
Finished the Puerto Pollo chapter. Generally excellent, lots of fun and interesting puzzles, fun characters, and even some little breather sections like the snake/quicksand one-room puzzles, or the interactive musical number. The voice-acting is great, there are some characters who are seared into my brain still, like Blondebeard and Mr Fossey. "Welll, just get lost then." Tons of little details, too; it's incredible how much stuff they pack in here without it feeling overloaded. Just stuff like how when you go to Danjer Cove there are three circling shark fins there and from that point on they follow you around the island, so in every screen with a body of water they now show up. There is one very tough puzzle - the gold tooth one - and one utterly unfair one - get rid of the cabana boy by whipping him with a wet towel. Just no hints toward that last one at all. I think when I first played through I solved it by accident, when in desperation I tried to hand the cabana boy a wet towel to give him a distracting task to do.
Now I'm on the one crappy bit of the game - the insult swordfighting. The basic mechanic works fine - it's the excellent design lifted wholesale from the first game after all - but just because they put the rhyming aspect in there doesn't make it feel any more original, so it's a bit galling to be doing the exact same thing again as in the first game. It was cheeky enough starting with a 'get a map, ship and crew' section again, but at least that had all new puzzles. The worst thing is, though, that it's all wrapped up in this dreadful, clunky, ugly ship combat. It's all simple 3D models on a plain blue background, so it looks like a cheap Sid Meier knock-off, and it's really fiddly and dull even when you choose easy combat mode. Just a terrible decision and I have no idea why they put this whole section in here.
Almost done with Blood Island, but embarrassingly I'm stuck despite having completed this game like 15 times. Am going to have to use a hint guide. Hoping I've just missed a hotspot...
Ooooh, GODDAMMIT. Instead of opening a corked bottle with my hands, I had to use my mouth on it. I'm not sure if that's unfair or just a cheeky use of non-moon logic and something I should have considered.
Finished Blood Island. Again, lots of fun, inventive puzzles, great characters etc. Lovely storytelling with the undead couple that you have to reunite, it comes together so perfectly. And they've even got Kathleen Freeman doing a little role, brilliant as always.
Started the final chapter. Man, that whole bit with LeChuck dumping a load of exposition to explain away any plotholes and connect every possible dot through all the games really is bad storytelling. Not only is it such an inert way of getting all this information across, they chose the most mundane, literal way to interpret and progress the ending of MI2. Guybrush was physically turned into a child and in an actual evil theme park. Big Whoop is actually on Monkey Island not Dinky Island and is basically the giant monkey head, and also what made LeChuck undead, and also LeChuck was behind all the mapholders' deaths. It's that Star Wars problem of tying everything together and making the universe feel smaller. I appreciate they had a tough starting point but they really lost some of the rich, mysterious atmosphere of the first two games, especially 2. I do love this one too, but it feels more like a great cartoon than a dusty old storybook. There's still some of that in here, though. All the Goodsoup family history and how it ties in with that undead romance, standing in that little clearing with the abandoned lighthouse in the background and the little cloud of fireflies zipping around in the night air, the way the feral chickens slowly spread and take over Puerto Pollo as you spend more time there (and you piece together the story about how they got free in the first place).
Finished. Pretty crappy ending as well. They do the whole 'LeChuck appears and zaps you occasionally while you run around a handful of rooms trying to put a defence together' thing from MI2 again, except here it's an extremely simple puzzle, and then the game ends very abruptly. Apparently they were going to have a big end cutscene here with a battle sequence, a musical number etc, but they decided to spend the budget on the crash cutscene instead because they liked the kilt joke so much. Biiiig mistake. Oh well, overall still a fantastic game!
Rating: Excellent.
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