Monkey Island Special Edition: your opinions
 

So, today we finally saw the release of the remake of Monkey Island: Monkey Island Special Edition.

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/arti...17251_640w.jpg

I thought it would be nice to have a poll about it to see what people thought about it. I'll write my own opinion after this one.

As promised, here's my 2 cents:

I bought Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition this morning. $10 is not a bad price for a classic, especially a full remake with speech! I had already seen screenshots (but I tend to avoid previews) so it was all rather new for me.

It only took me 5 minutes of playing to decide I was disappointed, though. While the speech was excellent, the graphics weren't. In fact, I switched over to classic view (F10 -> at least they were so smart as to include it) but then you lose the speech as well!

So what bugged me about the graphics? They just didn't work for me. Curse Monkey Island had great graphics because it was a completely different style and while it never felt "monkey islandy" to me (while the new Tales of Monkey Island DOES for some odd reason) it looked great on its own. This however ... well, everything feels wrong about it. Some parts look great but many just hit the mark.

The worst of all, is the character design, though. Guybrush looks terrible. TERRIBLE. I first thought he was a 3D character but he's actually a sprite and a badly animated one at that (but you need to see moving images to see that). His face looks NOTHING like the old Guybrush and while this is not the first time, it IS the first time that he looks completely wrong. His hair gives me shivers, his eyes look like he's on dope and whole manner is that of a corpse. For a character you'll be looking at for 10 hours, this is a very poor show, LucasArts.

For $10 you still get the original (although I think it sucks they don't give you the choice of speech) but the remake is not really for me. Graphics are so vital in an adventure game - to create a believably immersive world - and the original vibe is just lost in this remake. Well, this game WAS a cheap remake, but still ...

Can you get it for PC yet? or just XBLA?

Over here in the UK we usually lag behind with things like this.

Disappointed to hear the negatives, I had my hopes up for this.

It's been sold on Steam already. But yeah, a lot of people seem to be complaining about the quality of the graphics. Seems some scenes are even undone and parts of the old VGA scene are still visible underneath. They seem to have drawn on top of the old scenes and very hastily so.

So it's a subpar remake, the only plus being the speech, and for god knows why, the size of it is 1,5 Gb? Great... kthnx LucasArts

i marked all the checkboxes just for the hell of it

I have not voted yet since I'm going to buy this game in the future, but somehow I know that I won't like the graphics because Guybrush looks like a cartoon.
The VGA Version had a very pixelated face but at least it didn't try to look funny at all costs. And hey, pixelated means you can invoke your own fantasy and imagine how he looks like in reality.

I personally don't like the characters or the voice acting with the exception of guybrush. I haven't completed it yet but the majority of the people on the first island just don't sound right. Some of the background art looks nice but thats the only praise I can give the game from a graphical standpoint.

I do like the fact lucas arts are rereleasing their older games now, the fact you actually have the choice to play the remake or original with the click of a button is fantastic. Overall it's not a great remake but it could of been alot worse.

This remake it's a mixed bag, but overall I liked it. I agree that there are some unfortunate design choices that can be VERY ANNOYING, but I tried to look past them and in the end I enjoyed playing this remake.

What I hated:
- Guybrush's hair is so wrong it makes me wanna puke. His overall character design isn't any good either which is a VERY bad thing seeing as he is the main character.
- Le Chuck's design. He doesn't look like a ghost at all! He's like a random mishmash of parts: living human head and legs, skeleton ribcage, ghost hands, plus a spectral fog thrown in the mix in the hopes to add a convincing ghost effect, but it fails miserably. He has mostly living colors and it's not transparent anymore. He should have been the same bluish hue as the rest of the ghosts but for some odd reason it's not.

What I just didn't like:
- The more cartoonish style in the close-up face scenes. I liked better the more realistic style of the originals. However I can see how it's easier to get away with that realistic style with the old low resolution sprites. It wouldn't have fit completely with the faces of the new high resolution sprites. I just don't get why they didn't animate the character's mouths when they are talking in close-up scenes. That's just lazy.
- Some of the voice acting ruined what I had imagined for some characters. For instance, Stan sounds way too relaxed which doesn't match with all of his arm waving. I always thought he would speak more frantically like a locutor from an infomercial. Also, the cannibals sounded like very educated people (or was that intentional as a joke?) not what I imagined at all.
- Guybrush walking animation is not very well done. It gives the impression that his feet are sliding on the ground, however after a while I stopped noticing this.

What I liked:
- The background art is gorgeous and the water effects look great, specially during the bird's eye view of the islands. Personally I liked that Lucasarts just decided to pimp up the original 2D graphics instead of remaking them into a completely different style (like 3D or COMI style). It still feels like the first Monkey Island.
- The sound effects and music are good, for the most part they remain faithful to the original. However there's some improvement as well, like the added ambient sounds in the jungle that add a lot of mood.
- The ability to switch between the classic and remake versions on-the-fly is plain genius! But they screwed up in not allowing speech in the classic version. That would have been a great intermediate point to those people who can't stand the new graphics.
- Probably many people won't agree with me here, but I liked how they kept some of the skippy animations (like in Stan's arms or when opening/closing doors). IMO they give the same retro feeling of the original.
- I'm still undecided in regards to the new commands and inventory interface. It's a good thing that the game window now takes up the whole screen but I miss having all of my commands and items at hand on the bottom of the screen. At least they kept all of the original commands and offer plenty of choices for invoking them (hotkeys, pop up menu, and mouse wheel), as opposed to the Tales of Monkey Island interface which I frankly didn't like.

I really hope that MI2 gets the same treatment with hopefully better character design.

I had a little go with this one and it's really good, blessed be the F10 button. :)