Initial reaction: Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition

[Ryudo Lee]

So I grabbed SoMI:SE on Steam tonight (for a whole $10).  I'm having some mixed reactions to it.

First and foremost, the backgrounds, and environments.  They are beautiful, and are everything that was advertised.  Everything has a "hand painted" feel to it, which sets it apart from all the other games in the series.  All of the environments as a whole make this entire game feel like a work of art.  I particularly enjoyed the opening sequence.  They start it off with the original shot of the island, in all it's pixelated glory, and then seamlessly fade in the newly rendered version.  It's a thing of beauty.

The music is simply superb.  It's all the same tunes that I remember from the original CD (VGA) version, but brought up to date from their humble MIDI beginnings.  Even the sound effects are of high quality.  As an example, when you enter the SCUMM Bar, you not only hear the bar's music, but also the droning noise of several background conversations, giving it a much more natural feel.

The new character designs, is where I start to get mixed feelings.  I feel like they tried too hard with Guybrush.  I just feel like there's something... off about him.  Maybe it's just that they made this version of him to be the "young" Guybrush.  I don't know.  It doesn't sit right with me.  Along with that, the character animations are not smooth.  They are choppy, just as it was in the original versions.  This goes along with how it was advertised, that they just updated the graphics and sounds, and didn't mess with the engine.  But still, it looks a little odd, looking at these better rendered sprites and see them being animated the same way they were in their pixelated forms.  It seems ugly to me, IMO.

And the voiceovers.  Dear gawd, the voiceovers.  Some are good.  Some are BAD.  The bad parts makes old kung fu dubs sound professional, by today's standards.  One example of a bad voiceover is LeChuck.  Yes, it's the same voice actor.  Problem is, he sounds too... jaunty.  He looks badass, but sounds all too happy when Bob delivers the news of a wannabe pirate on the island.  An example of a damn good voiceover is Meathook.  When he goes on a tirade about his failed tourist attraction, it was simply perfect, exactly how I thought it would be in my mind when reading it in the original version.  I haven't gotten to Stan yet, but for some reason, I'm dreading it.

The control scheme takes a little getting used to.  There is no mouse menu, like in Curse, or Escape.  Instead, you tap one key on your keyboard to get the "verbs" (CTRL by default) and another key to get your items (ALT).  Thankfully, they seemed to have increased the time on those little timed sequences so you can bring up the windows you need, such as the red herring, and showing the helmet to the circus guys.  Small learning curve there.

So those are my initial reactions to this game.  Anyone else grabbed this yet?

[Janus Whitefurr]

Given I stopped playing after Monkey Island 2 and thus never got to hear the voiceacting in the later games, the voices in Special Edition caught me pleasantly by surprise. The better rendering of the characters (even with the slight choppiness) and the voices all made the game just -more- hammy than it used to be. And ham is a glorious thing in Monkey Island.

Stan's jacket frightens me. As for his voice, he sounds just like you'd expect a sleazy salesman to sound like. My only problem is I always imagined he talked really fast to go with his gesticulating, but he doesn't. Ah well.

[Ryudo Lee]

Well my problem with the voice acting is that I own and have played to death Curse and Escape.  I find that the voice acting on those two games are far more consistent in quality than in this offering.  Of course, this can also be attributed to the old "it's never as good as the original" attitude that some gamers have.  Still, I think they could have done better with some of the voice acting.

[Tapewolf]

Ooh, I forgot about this.  I'll have to see about getting it.  Did they rerecord the organ prelude in the empty church?  I used to fire the game up just to listen to that sometimes  

[Janus Whitefurr]

Did they rerecord the organ prelude in the empty church?  I used to fire the game up just to listen to that sometimes  

After booting it up for a quick link and hotswapping (seamlessly) between classic and 'special' graphics, all I can tell you is that the organ prelude sounds classier in the new mode than the old mode.

[bill]

Yeah, I can't be the only one who thinks the old graphics are more attractive than the new high-def ones.

It's nice to get rid of the whole "is this abandonware" thing, though; Monkey Island is on Steam, and that is all that matters