Yesterday was talk like a pirate day, so I decided to play some pirate-centric games. Steam has a special offer this weekend for the remade "Secret Of Monkey Island" special edition point and click adventure for only £3.49, so I bought it, and Telltale Games had a special on their new Monkey Island spin off games, where you could have the first episode of Tales Of Monkey Island for free. So I grabbed that too. I also decided to play some Sid Meier's Pirates! because it's my all time favourite pirate game.
So, here are my thoughts:
* Tales Of Monkey Island pt 1
It runs pretty badly on my computer, I know my PC is a bit old but lowering the graphical quality didn't seem to help that much and is it really necessary for this kind of game? The game is no longer 2D and I don't like the movement /looking round / item using interfaces - I didn't like having to drag the mouse to navigate a 3D plane, and I didn't like the way that objects would move on a boat so that you'd end up clicking on the wrong thing and have to go through a dialogue scene again.
I think, at least from what I've seen at the start of the game, the script could really use some tidying up. i.e. it could do with them removing all the jokes that aren't funny, even if that means cutting the jokes down to one per paragraph. It's no good trying rapid-fire comedy if most of your jokes miss the target.
Also, I could tell that in some places they were just being self-referential in place of there being a joke - so lines are delivered like they're funny but it's really just repetition out of context of something that was amusing elsewhere. It just fell flat, reminding me of the recent Red Dwarf "Back To Earth" special I watched an episode of (and didn't go back for more).
I didn't play very far into the game though. I think I should replay an earlier game and return to this later.
* Sid Meier's Pirates!
Did you know that if you play this game on Talk Like A Pirate day, all the menus and stuff are displayed in pirate speak? :D
I have loved this game since the C64 version; this game and Elite both gave the player a sense of having a huge amount of space to explore, traverse and profit from. I also played the PC version from around 15 years ago. The version I played yesterday was a newer version for PC (it's still a few years old now!), which I bought in a bundle on Steam a few weeks ago. A lot of games really suffer when it comes to remakes or spin-offs; someone who doesn't quite underatand certain aspects of the original game decide to "improve" it by tweaking things... [sighs at the Katamari games, and some game franchises with large numbers at the end of the titles...] This remake is spot on though, and the new features and enhancements do work really well. I really got back into this game!
* Secret Of Monkey Island Special Edition
For some reason, this game is over 1GB to download! (Compared with under 200MB for the episode of the new spinoff game) So, I haven't played this yet. I'm hoping I've forgotten enough of it so that I don't whiz through the game! :D
As an aside:
The game One Piece Unlimited Cruise (PAL version) for Wii is the rarest Wii game I know of. It's a multi-part adventure based on the pirate anime/manga series. As far as I know it's available as subtitled Japanese only (which I see as a good thing!). The first part came out in June and I have not seen a single copy in shops. It is sold out / out of stock everywhere, and copies are selling for very high prices on ebay - roughly twice the original price, sometimes more. The second part is due out now or in the near future, and I placed an order for it at £17.99 on Amazon (I thought I might as well), but they say it's now out of stock and aren't sure if they'll get it - though this was a preorder! Copies of the 2nd part are on ebay for £30 already, which is about £20 less than the 1st part. It's stupid, the fact that they have totally underestimated the demand for these games, and aren't observing the market to see that they need to get more copies made!
Much as I prefer to have a solid copy of the games that I own, I have to admit, at least they can never run out of copies to sell!
So, there you go, my games-about-pirates day is done.
