Well imagine my joy then when I discovered last week that the developers had actually made it to the finishing line and the game was available for download on the App Store – a serious feat in and of itself. And in terms of the quality of the game itself, it did not disappoint.

In my opinion, this game is in a league of its own as far as Bible-based games go, so it justifies a pretty substantial review. I’m going to tackle it as a game in its own right first – looking at the gameplay & graphics and so on – and then afterwards I’ll talk about how it handles the Bible. I’ll then wrap up with a bit of a conclusion.

Gameplay

I should be upfront and say that I’m not exactly the primary target audience of this game – it’s probably more geared towards 10 year old children than 31 year old men – so you should take what I say with a little pinch of salt, but I thought it was a genuinely fun game that I really enjoyed playing. If you’ve seen many other Bible-based games then you will know that this is high praise indeed – I didn’t even need to caveat that by saying “a genuinely fun game considering it was based on the Bible” – I can genuinely imagine that if I were a little younger then there’d be plenty to keep bringing me back to this again and again. When my son is a little older I’m sure we’ll have fun playing it together.

The main gameplay style is a bit of a hybrid between a hidden object game and a very simplified graphic adventure game. In any given scene there’s one particular character or object that will be highlighted that you tap to move the story on, but then there’s all sorts of hidden elements that you can tap on to unlock certain achievements – including the recurring character Spike, the loveable sheep who thinks he’s a dog who briefly pops his head up in various scenes throughout the game. These extra hidden items transform what might otherwise become a fairly dull gameplay mechanic into a really interesting experience, since there were plenty of scenes that I might want to replay again in the future to find the extra achievements that I didn’t manage to track down the first time through. That said, the story itself is told in a very engaging way, with plenty of humour to keep you hooked, so even people who aren’t interested in the extra achievements will still enjoy playing through it.

The basic story is then interspersed with a number of mini games that tie in seamlessly with the plot. There’s a musical round where you have to copy the tune on David’s lyre to send the sheep to sleep. There’s a sideways scrolling round where David is chasing after a lion and you have to tilt the iPad backwards and forwards to dodge various obstacles. Once you’ve caught up with the lion there’s then a fight with the lion where you have to tap at the right time. And, inevitably, there’s various rounds of firing David’s slingshot at different targets, including the ugly giant Goliath.

Each of these mini games were good fun: challenging enough to be interesting, but with adjustable difficulty levels (and an option to skip altogether if you get stuck) so that they don’t get in your way if you just want to see where the story leads. I particularly enjoyed the lion chase – and knowing that there were some extra achievements to unlock if only I were a little more practised at it might just be enough to encourage me to go back to it again in the future.

Graphics, Animation & Music

One of the standout features of this game is the sheer quality of the graphics and animation. The game looks gorgeous. The animation is beautifully done and really adds to the humour of the story. I don’t know a lot about the team behind the game, but they clearly know what they are doing.

The music & sound production also deserve a mention. These work together with the animation flawlessly to really set the mood of the game. You can palpably feel the tension in the more dramatic moments of the story, particularly when the Philistines are first introduced, and as David marches out to meet his great foe.

The voice acting is also top notch and supports the humour of the script well.

Bible stuff – what I loved

So it’s clear that there’s much about this game that is brilliantly done – and not just “considering it was based on the Bible”. But of course, this game is based on the Bible – so how does it do on that front? On many levels, Righteous Tales does an awesome job of communicating the Bible story, so I’ll start by focussing on the best bits.

The game does a fantastic job of getting beneath the skin of the story, and really helping to communicate the emotions of it all. An absolutely standout scene for me is when we meet the prophet Samuel, seeing how depressed he is thinking about all the ways that King Saul has failed to live up to the great hopes that Samuel had for him. The folks at Righteous Tales have clearly worked hard at grappling with this story and understanding what’s going on in each of the characters, and that hard work has really paid off.

As players we really get the principle of “man looks at outward appearances, but God looks at the heart”. This is communicated brilliantly through a talent show that each of David’s brothers fail in turn – for all their impressive appearances, they’re not the ones that God has chosen. Later in the game, you really get a sense for how terrifying the giant Goliath must have been, making the Israelites quake in their boots – and prompting Saul to offer all kinds of incentives to encourage somebody to fight Goliath so that he won’t have to. What’s especially brilliant is how the game makes it super clear that when Goliath taunts the Israelites, by doing so he is actually defying God himself – something which many treatments of this story seem to miss.

Goliath’s shield bearer is worth a mention – I love this character. He’s one example of the fantastic attention to detail shown throughout the game. Most people gloss over the shield bearer when reading the Biblical account of David & Goliath, but the fact that Righteous Tales have included him is clear evidence that they have been reading their Bibles extremely carefully. The result is a really fun and unique character that is incredibly memorable.

One thing that I’ve often grappled with when thinking about Bible-based computer games is whether or not to have a narrator. David vs Goliath does have a narrator, and I have to say, I think it really works. It makes it so much easier to communicate the meta-narrative when you have somebody who is outside of the story speaking into it, giving their commentary on how the characters feel and, more importantly, what God makes of the situation. It’s done with good humour, with David himself often interacting with the narrator, and helps put across the bigger picture rather than just the events themselves.

Bible stuff – what I wish were different

The story of David & Goliath is a bit of a litmus test for how people read the Old Testament. I think one of the most unhelpful ways of reading this passage is to make it entirely about me and whatever struggle I’m happening to face at the moment – “have enough faith and you can defeat the giants in your life too!” Personally, I think a much more helpful way to read it is to recognise who David is: God’s anointed future king who the Lord has raised up to deliver his people. We’re much more akin to the quaking Israelites who are completely unable to rescue themselves (something, by the way, which this game illustrates FANTASTICALLY well). Handily, Adam Ford has drawn a brilliant cartoon to communicate this much better than I ever could.

One commentator who I respect greatly, Dale Ralph Davis, writes this:

“If we don’t listen to this text, then we’ll end up bringing in all the junk about being courageous in the face of ‘your Goliaths,’ whether the bully down the street (for primary Sunday-school kids) or— everyone’s preoccupation— one’s poor self-image. We must protect ourselves from such deafness to the text.”

When I read on the Righteous Tales website “Walk with David as he demonstrates how to combine courage and preparation with God’s destiny for our lives to overcome all odds – even when no one believes in us!” I immediately leapt to the conclusion that this game had fallen into exactly the same trap that so many other treatments of David & Goliath have made over the years. However, after playing it I realise that they’re not actually applying it quite the way I thought they were going to. In fact, they take very much the same line as Dale Ralph Davis himself takes in his commentary: “Goliath is not merely the big goon from Philistia; Goliath’s blabbering dishonors Israel’s God… Hence in this chapter David essentially says to Israel and us: ‘Yahweh’s reputation is at stake; that matters to me; that matters enough to risk my life for it’” So it’s not taught in terms of David as a type of Christ, but rather as a faithful believer standing up for God’s honour in spite of his apparent weakness, when everybody around him is telling him that outward strength is all that matters and that the enemy is too great to stand up to.

I asked Gerald Hinson, one of the key figures behind Righteous Tales, about this. He said they made the decision not to major on the “David as a type of Christ” approach, knowing that just because it’s one way to read the passage doesn’t mean it’s the only valid way to read the passage. They did this partly because of the age of the target audience they had in mind and wanting to keep it simple for them, and partly out of a desire to try and tell the story as the Bible does in 1 Samuel, not as a modern commentator thinks it should be taught, trying not to improve on the Biblical account or make statements beyond those made in the text.

Personally, after my own work on 1 Samuel as part of my Bible-based game, I feel that the Old Testament context itself pushes us pretty hard to see David as teaching us about the deliverer we need, in anticipation of Jesus. Back in the very earliest chapters of the book, in Hannah’s prayer, we read “The Lord raises up the poor from the dust…to make them sit with princes” and “The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces” whilst “The Lord will give strength to his king” – in other words, the whole book is really about the kind of king God is going to raise up and how God is going to use him. In the original Jewish scriptures it was organised quite differently, so that 1 & 2 Samuel were combined together with 1 & 2 Kings to form 1, 2, 3 & 4 Kingdoms – a hint at Samuel’s role as “the King-Maker”. What’s more, I think passages like 1 Peter 1:10-12 would lead us to recognise that the Old Testament writers didn’t necessarily understand the full significance of everything they were writing, and that now the Spirit has come of course we should be reading the Old Testament through Jesus-tinted lenses.

So I would have loved to have seen us teed up a little more for some lessons about the kind of rescuer that Jesus was going to be. Done well, there’s really no reason this can’t be made accessible for kids – they get that “we need a king who trusts God, not like Saul who trusted in armour”. In the end I would say this is very much a “Bible-based game” rather than an explicitly Christian game, and I suspect that a Jewish player would enjoy David vs Goliath just as much as a Christian player. I can understand why they chose to do it this way, but I definitely found this rather disappointing.

Another more minor quibble I had with the game is one I’ve talked about previously, which is the inherent challenge of translating a Bible story into a video game, where you tend to control the hero of the story. The final boss battle against Goliath is necessarily quite a tricky one – that’s what people expect from a video game, after all. When you finally succeed in killing Goliath you get a great big “You win!” celebration trumpeting your terrific skill in victory. This seems so at odds with the rest of the game that has worked so hard to make it clear that it’s not about us and our ability, and that David is fighting Goliath in God’s strength not his own. What’s so striking about the Biblical account of these events is that the battle doesn’t feel hard at all – in just a sentence or two David confronts Goliath, throws a single stone with his pathetic little sling, and – bam – the giant falls to the ground, dead. The focus in the Biblical account is entirely on God and very little on David.

Conclusion

In “David vs Goliath”, Righteous Tales have really set the standard that all subsequent Bible-based games are going to have to live up to. It’s a genuinely fun game that really gets you beneath the surface of the Bible account and communicates the drama of the story wonderfully, including some truly memorable characters along the way. But ultimately, it leaves the story in the Old Testament with no reference to Jesus, making it more of a Jewish game rather than a Christian game.

It’s clear that Gerald and his team should be encouraged to keep making more games – and the best way we can do that is by buying this one (the basic game is free, although the full story is only unlocked through an in-app purchase) and by telling everybody you know to buy it too. But I hope and pray that as they do so, they will grow in their desire to point us forwards to Jesus.

One of the great advantages of developing Ebenezer, my Old Testament adventure game, is the excuse it gives me to periodically “do research” by playing other adventure games that are out there and seeing some of the different approaches that people take. For a while now I’ve been eager to play Machinarium, a game I’ve only ever heard good things spoken of, and the perfect opportunity presented itself just before Christmas when it was available as part of the Humble Indie Bundle #2. Here are my vague musings after playing it through.

Machinarium is set in some kind of dystopian city populated entirely by robots and robotic vermin. It is at once haunting and adorable, fearsome and yet whimsical. The whole game proceeds without any dialogue, but the story is gradually revealed through a series of memories represented by scribbled animations. It’s brilliantly done and all leaves you with a smile on your face. You can’t really help but fall in love with the main character, a little robot apparently called Josef, as he goes about his business.

Everything about Machinarium is gorgeous to look at. The background art is painstakingly detailed and a real treat to behold, and all of the characters and animation are excellent too. The soundtrack is top notch too, and really serves to set the atmosphere at key moments in the story – it’s almost a character in its own right.

The puzzles in Machinarium are a combination of classic adventure game fare and various minigames that suit the robotic theme – such as when you have to play on various old arcade games like space invaders. The twist on the usual adventure game puzzles is that you can only interact with items within immediate reach of your character, and exactly what results you will get depends on when you are standing. This adds a new dimension to things, although at times it makes the classic problem of pixel-hunting even worse as you physically need to move around the scene to discover what you’re able to interact with. A sign of the times is the fact that built into the game itself is a hint system and also a full-on step-by-step walkthrough for each room, which you unlock by playing another silly little minigame (wisely, they make you play the game again each time you want to consult it, helping you to avoid the temptation to give up too easily on attempting to solve the puzzles yourself). In my experience it seemed to strike the right balance between making the game too easy on the one hand and risking me giving up in frustration on the other, but I’m sure there are some purists out there who’d object to the fact that I had to use the hints.

All in all Machinarium probably lasted me about a day of sporadic gameplay during my holidays, making it a little on the short side. On the other hand, it was as long as it needed to be, and it’s so perfectly crafted that I think to make it any longer would have spoiled it. It was a real joy to play through, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys adventure games. If I could come anywhere close to creating an experience as delightful as Machinarium when developing Ebenezer, I’d be very satisfied indeed.

Well, if you haven’t heard the news already, LucasArts are releasing a special edition remastered version of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. Originally released in 1991, it is regarded by many fans as the greatest of the Monkey Island games, and perhaps even one of the best video games ever made. But what was so special about this classic game? I’ve done a lot of thinking about this question as I’ve worked on my own Point & Click adventure game, and here are my thoughts.

Building on a Strong Foundation

In many ways, LeChuck’s Revenge is the big-budget elder brother of the original Secret of Monkey Island (see my analysis of that here). Whether it’s the artwork, the music, the scope of the story, the intrigue – LeChuck’s Revenge takes everything that’s great about the original and pushes it to another level, made possible by the extra resources and the advance of computer technology. Where SoMI was charming in its simplicity, MI2 is a true epic, reaching the dizzy heights of storytelling that show a development team on top of their game.

A Feast for the Senses

Initially I had intended to comment separately on the different aspects of the game: its stunningly beautiful background images, its intricately woven musical score, its razor-sharp script. But the truth is that you can’t separate one from another – they all work together perfectly to create one of the most atmospheric experiences of my childhood. It’s a feast for the senses, and it rocks!

Much of this was enabled by the technological advances going on. The increased resolution and colour depth, combined with the advent of scanners, meant that Peter Chan and Steve Purcell were able to hand-draw and colour their backgrounds before scanning them in, making them look absolutely gorgeous. Michael Land and Peter McConnell were able to use spare processor cycles to develop their cutting-edge iMUSE technology to power the music: it is this that makes the seamless musical transitions possible, synchronising the score with the action as it takes place.

As an example of how it all works together, take one of the scariest moments from the game: when you first enter the swamp on Scabb Island to visit the Voodoo Lady. Standing on the river bank, you just get the eerie chords of a hammond organ. As you step inside a make-shift boat fashioned from an old coffin, a simple drum beat is added in. Then as you sail your way deeper into the swamp, you begin to hear the haunting bass line. And so it continues to build as you enter the Voodoo Lady’s house – combined with the background art it works to create what is perhaps one of the most atmospheric experiences gamers had ever known at the time.

Mystery and Intrigue

I believe it was one of the Monkey Island developers who said that people love questions more than they enjoy hearing the answers. LeChuck’s Revenge pushed this philosophy to the extreme – it is full of mystery and intrigue that still has people discussing it today. It is full of clues as to a deeper truth regarding Guybrush’s identity and family history, yet it never provides a clear answer. Done badly, this would just be frustrating, but Monkey Island somehow manages to pull it off in a way that leaves you clamouring for more.

The key to this is the sense of depth to the game. There is more to these characters and the world they inhabit than simply meets the eye – you get the distinct impression that these are real people with a real history. Somehow they exist beyond the brief window into their lives that we’re given during the events of the game itself. I guess that this is why people find the conspiracy theory that suggests the whole game takes place in Guybrush’s imagination so deeply unsatisfying.

The Special Edition

So what does all this mean for the new Special Edition, due out this summer? Fans all over the net seem to be rejoicing that the art style of the original backgrounds appear to have been kept, whilst being updated to be nice and shiny and high-res. There is some concern that updating the music to feature a full orchestral score will allow the magic of iMuse to continue to function – but personally I’m cautiously optimistic on this front. I long to hear some of those classic tunes in all their digital glory! And perhaps the addition of developer commentaries from the likes of Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer will finally offer some closure to that greatest of all mysteries: what IS the Secret of Monkey Island?

Roll on the summer!

It was with some excitement that I came across the website for Iceberg Interactive’s new game Adam’s Venture Episode 1: The Search for the Lost Garden. As I’ve shared previously, the landscape of the Christian video game market is littered with less-than-stellar experiences, and though not explicitly Christian, Adam’s Ventures’ “biblical overtones” clearly signal the developers’ intentions to make a fresh start in this difficult genre. It can’t go without mention that the whole product comes across as thoroughly professional, from their website through to the packaging and the game itself – this is nothing like those hacked Nintendo cartridges of early Christian gaming efforts. There’s clearly some proper financial backing behind the project which bodes well!

The game details the story of a character called Adam Venture on his hunt to track down the lost garden of Eden, helped by a couple of other characters who remain at base camp whilst you’re out exploring, and forms the first episode in what is intended as a series of three (according to this interview with the developers).

Graphics

Playing the game, the first thing that strikes you is the graphics. They’ve made an excellent choice in basing the game upon the much-hyped Unreal 3 engine, and that’s supported with high quality 3D content to really make the most of it. I had to knock down some of the detail levels to get a full framerate on my slightly aged desktop, but it still looked great and they make it very straightforward to tweak the settings accordingly. There are some really nice little graphical effects throughout the game, such as when you burn your way through some overgrown plantlife, and the game world’s most mysterious inhabitant (which I won’t spoil for you!) There are one or two moments where a slightly odd camera angle makes the gameplay quite difficult, but overall the whole thing is very well done and is a delight to the eyes.

Gameplay

Having set themselves a very high quality bar with the graphics, it was always going to be a challenge for the gameplay to live up to that. Overall it makes for a fun experience, with a lot of similarities to games like Tombraider, though thoroughly non-violent. Ten “secrets” hidden throughout the game also add a nice bit of replay value, each one adding a little something to the backstory or sharing some pertinent Bible verse. I found about four on my first play through the game, which gives me a little incentive to give it another go at some point if I were so inclined.

As well as the usual jumping and climbing and generally having to navigate your way through the game world, there are also various puzzles that you encounter on your journey. More accurately, it’s really a single puzzle mechanic that is repeated numerous times with only the content varying: several times you come across a spindle featuring three identical discs, each containing three fragments of a Bible verse or a line from a well known Christian hymn. Either by knowing the verse already, or just by using your English grammar skills, the player has to rotate the discs until the verse reads in order. I have to confess that I didn’t find it to be a particularly compelling experience: either you know the verse or you don’t, and except in a few cases the verse isn’t especially explained or integrated into the rest of the game. It does add a bit of interest though, and makes for a change of pace every once in a while.

The other thing that people are likely to call the developers out on is the brevity of the game, but this requires a bit of explanation. I managed to play the game through in a couple of hours – though I was not trying especially hard to find all of the secrets. Personally, I think that compares fairly favourably with other episodic games, such as the new Monkey Island series from Telltale Games, although perhaps still slightly on the short side. For me it was basically one evening’s entertainment, with perhaps another couple at some point in the future if I went back for all of the secrets. Where it falls short, in my view, compared to Telltale’s offering, is in not making it crystal clear what the timeline and pricing structure for the other episodes will be. Take a look at Telltale’s website and you instantly know up front how much you’ll be paying in total (indeed, I paid a single flat fee for the whole series) and what the schedule for future episodes will be (roughly I get one episode of Tales of Monkey Island every month for six months). I imagine that Iceberg Interactive where limited by financial constraints at this point – they may not even know if a second episode will ever happen until they see how Episode 1 performs – but £15 just felt a little pricey for one evening. Prior to purchase, their website also left me a little unsure of whether “Episode 1” meant I was only going to be playing a fraction of a story, or whether it would be a complete experience in itself. I’m happy to report that it was a self-contained story (though with clear room for future expansion) so I wasn’t let down there. But I suspect that they’d be able to sell a lot more copies if they made that kind of detail clearer in their publicity material.

Christian Content

I’ll just briefly close by commenting on the Christian content of this game. Adam’s Venture is definitely not attempting to do anything like what I’m talking about in my Expository Coding series: they don’t set out to explain anything about the meaning or relevance of any Bible texts, but rather they use the geography and events of the Bible as a setting for their own story, much like Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Various Bible verses appear throughout the game, which will appeal to Christian parents wondering if this game is suitable for their children, but they form a context rather than the focus of the gameplay.

Summary

All in all, I was very pleased with Adam’s Venture Episode 1: The Search for the Lost Gardens. It didn’t disappoint, and was a genuinely good game (unlike a few other Bible-based games I could mention!) I’d definitely recommend this to Christian parents wanting to buy their kids a Christmas present, and I think those who wouldn’t call themselves Christians should enjoy this game too. There’s definitely room for improvement in future episodes, but I suggest giving these guys a chance for a second outing by buying Adam’s Venture now!

After hearing about the upcoming rerelease of Beneath a Steel Sky for the iPhone later this year, I’ve been replaying this old classic using ScummVM. Beneath a Steel Sky was one of my favourite games as a kid, with its haunting dystopian vision of the future firmly entrenched in my memory, clearly taking much inspiration from films such as Blade Runner. It combines an incredibly poignant story with artwork from one of the authors of Watchmen, Dave Gibbons, and it’s fantastic news to hear that modern gamers will get a chance to experience this piece of gaming history.

But what about the game itself? Sadly, playing it again made me realise that it has some serious flaws in the gameplay department, and is something of a frustrating experience. The story is so compelling that I couldn’t help but plough on to reach the dramatic conclusion, but there were a number of occasions where I was very aware that I was mostly definitely not having fun. Here are just a few examples of the types of issues I came across (Edit: I’m mostly just recording these for my own benefit as I go about writing my own adventure game, not purely for the sake of griping about what is at the end of the day an incredible game):

• Solutions involving obscure conversation items – on a number of occasions, making progress required discussing a rather unlikely-looking conversation topic with a particular character, for which there was no clue that it would lead to the breakthrough you were looking for. I quickly learnt that there was no short-cutting the somewhat tedious process of exhaustively discussing every single possible topic with every single character (and to keep trying it at regular intervals in case some other action of yours opened up new avenues of conversation). This was only exacerbated by a tendency for the NPCs to break off conversation with you, leading you to assume there was nothing more to be said even when there was still plenty more your could (and needed to) talk about.
• Puzzles requiring little thought but split-second timing – this happened especially within the “Virtual Reality” section of the game, where you would fairly quickly work out what the solution to a puzzle was, but pulling it off required milli-second precision in the clicking of your mouse. Granted, I wouldn’t have been so bothered by this if I weren’t playing the game on my mobile phone where moving the cursor around was a somewhat arduous process in the first place, but I can assure you that this was not fun. Especially when I died and had to repeat the whole fastidious process all over again.
• Unexpected death – yes, you read that last point correctly: I died, and had to go right back to my previous save point, something I hadn’t bothered to do for several hours. You see, there are no clues in the game itself that you might die, and you can go about 70% of the way through the game without incident, lulling you into a false sense of security. But then, for absolutely no reason whatsoever (certainly not because it would make the game more fun!) you get eaten by a giant spider, and the only options you are presented with are “Restart Game” and “Restore Game”.

Such flaws are a real shame, because deep down I love this game, and I definitely don’t want to put anybody off giving it a try who might have been thinking of buying the upcoming iPhone version. Given that it’s described as a “Remastered” version of the game, I’m hopeful that they might even make some improvements to the game to make for a more enjoyable experience: as Charles Cecile, the developer, said recently, they’re coming at it now “armed with 25 years of game development experience”, after all. Regardless, the story is so great that it’s probably worth your while putting up with these flaws just for the thrill of it all.

Edit: Check out this awesome fan-made trailer:

Nineteen years ago, in 1990, Lucasfilm Games released the first instalment in what would become one their most beloved series of games ever: The Secret of Monkey Island. Almost two decades later, LucasArts will today be releasing a “reimagined” Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, with modern graphics and full voice recordings. However successful this new venture turns out to be, what’s clear is that fans are still as much in love with the swashbuckling tales of Guybrush Threepwood and his arch-nemesis LeChuck as they were all those years ago.

So what made the Monkey Island games so special? Monkey Island holds a very dear place in my heart as one of the first of their games that I really got hooked on. I played it all through with a friend who was lucky enough to own a PC back in those days, and I can remember countless evenings together, scratching our heads and wondering what on earth to do next, followed by those glorious “ah ha!” moments when it all suddenly made sense. Though I’ve previously waxed lyrical about how Day of the Tentacle is my favourite LucasArts adventure game, there’s a certain charm to the original Monkey Island games that’s hard to beat. I could cite the beautiful artwork, the hilarious script, the ingenious puzzles, the loveable cast of pirates and cannibals and Voodoo priestesses, or LeChuck’s incredible display of facial hair. But for me, the thing that really brings me back time and time again is the simple yet poignant story of a boy who dreams of being a pirate. As Dave Grossman, one of the writers on the series put it:

“Something that I always thought was true about the Monkey series was that, while moment-by-moment it’s quite silly and there’s lots of slapstick, verbal humor, and ironic pointing out of social dysfunctions, the broad strokes of the story there are actually quite serious.

The first one is about this young man who’s come to this island to realize his life’s dream, and in the quest of doing that, he falls in love and he finds out, “This is more important to me than my life’s dream.”

It’s actually quite a serious story, despite being a pretty silly experience overall.”

Look! A Three-Headed Monkey!

One of the brilliant things about the first two Monkey Island games (the only ones considered “true canon” by the die-hard Ron Gilbert fans) is the air of mystery that pervades the whole thing. The background art works together in perfect harmony with the music to create this incredible atmosphere, such that you can almost feel the hot winds of hell in your face when you first behold the Ghost Pirate LeChuck standing on the deck of his Ghost Ship. There are profound and hidden things beneath the surface of this seemingly charming tale, which still get people talking about them decades later.

I for one will never forget the first moment I laid eyes on Monkey Island itself. Its sunny shores stand in stark contrast to the physical darkness of the first two acts, and yet there’s a palpable aura of mystery about the place. The player is given a distant overhead view of the island, which gives you this fantastic sense of exploring this vast unknown territory. The judicious use of humour in the form of the castaway Herman Toothrot keeps the initial part of the island section from being an entirely isolating experience for Guybrush, and yet that feeling of remoteness is all part of the wonder of the place. For a young boy playing these incredible games when they were brand new, it was all so magical!

Personally, I’m really hoping that the release of the Special Edition today will be a roaring success, and that it will introduce a whole new generation of gamers to the wonder of Monkey Island. And that’s not just because what’s good for adventure gaming is good for me! Go out and buy it today!