Review of The Curse of Monkey Island by Jaremaing

I love Monkey Island. I played the original at a friend’s house at a young age and thought it was really funny, but I didn’t really play it for myself until the Special Edition games came out. As there was no special edition, I bought an original copy of CMI off of amazon and loaded up ScummVM.

Right off the bat, the first thing you’ll notice are the graphics. Even though this game was made in 1997, it hasn’t aged a day, as the cartoony style really is timeless. The SCUMM interface has been simplified (apparently taken from Full Throttle, which I haven’t played yet), and it works perfectly. The humor is great, the puzzles are fiendishly clever, and it keeps you interest the entire time.
The sound is a mixed bag, but it’s mostly perfect. The music is amazing and never gets annoying, and the voice acting is great and wonderfully delivered. But what’s mixed? The dialogue repeats a little too much. I really got sick of “Hmmm…no” whenever something didn’t work. Also, when I was stuck and trying to use every inventory, the lines really got annoying. But these are only small gripes.

Almost everything in this game is perfect. I took off a half of a star because of the abrupt ending, repeating dialogue, and the fact that the best character EVAR!!! was not in the game enough, that being Murray. Murray was sweet. I would buy ten copies of Murray Island and give them to my friends. He’s that cool. Great game! Recommended to just about everyone.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours