i’m so glad LucasArts continued on from their successful remake of the first Monkey Island game to re-make Monkey Island 2. i had even fonder memories of this game from my childhood. and i thought their last re-make was near-perfect. well this re-make is even nearer-perfect!

you can still switch to the classic version at ANY point in the game, which is fully awesome, there’s outstanding voice acting and brilliantly re-recorded music and awesome new hi-res art, but this time around they’ve added the ability to keep the new voices when you switch to classic mode and also the new version has a stylish hotspot soft-highlight function so that you don’t miss any interactive areas. the new 2D backgrounds are gorgeous! and the characters are all done in 2D animation also, which is rare these days, but they look GREAT and basically copy the classic movements from the original game

As a direct remake, it does suffer from the less-developed game design of the time, like having its share of illogical puzzles and an oversized inventory (which you can fill even further with items that are never used for anything, making already tricky puzzle-solving even more frustrating). but LucasArts have largely offset these problems by including a mostly-sturdy hint system so that you won’t be frustrated for long.

In terms of pure fun-ness to play, it didn’t quite match up to my childhood memories, and i did prefer the recent addition to the series “Tales of Monkey Island” which i only just finished before playing this, but as an updated trip down memory lane, this was all class. i wonder what LucasArts will re-make next…

Guybrush. Mighty Pirate is back. Bragging about his conquest of LeChuck to everyone who can stand to hear it. Unforunatly he’s stuck on Scabb Island due to the Largo Embargo. His trouble is soon to worsen as LeChuck is back and looking for revenge.

The starting island is a great way to get back into the swing of adventuring. Once you get off Scabb the area opens up to two other items and a quest for four map pieces that will help you find the treasure of Big Whoop. These puzzles can be tackled in any order making for a fairly open world missle section of the game.

There are some classic multi layered puzzles in here (Spitting contest) and one infamous one (Monkey Wrench) that mount up to a superb and hilarious challenge all the way though.

Most of the characters from the first game make a welcome return making for a familiar and varied cast of pirates.

Played it on my iPad. The updated graphics are great, the audio commentary is hilarious and the option to instantly switch from the new to old game is fantastic.

A classic no doubt, and for a lot of people a brilliant introduction to adventure games. They could have done much worse as this is solid, classic point and click with great graphics (notice I am not specifying: “for its time”) and the self-aware humor SoMI players loved at first sight in 1988.

It’s clever, it’s funny, and for a game you could fit on a few 1.4MB disks the MI universe you get to explore is more memorable than most of today’s 60-hour RPG epics.

Some decried the ending but this type of self aware, meta shenanigans had been a staple of the series from the start. Get a sense of humor, and if you already do, this is one adventure you won’t want to miss.