Let's talk about Escape From Monkey Island!

[Queen Michael]

Remember it? Back when it came out, Super PLAY magazine gave it 8/10, and I liked it a lot too once I got it for Christmas. The humour was just my thing.

Now, admittedly it wasn't perfect. First of all, the story about pirating being eradicated inevitably took away some of the piratey feeling from the earlier trilogy. The puzzles were difficult, too. And while that's not necessarily a bad thing, the difficulty was less of the kind where you have to think really hard, and more of the kind where you randomly try things until something works. And let's not get into Monkey Kombat...! I like the graohics well enough, but some said the step to 3D graphics didn't end well.

So! How'd you like it?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I had a tough time getting used to the controls at first (were they tank?), especially since I grew up on the perfectly functional Curse of Monkey Island mechanic (hold cursor over thing to open up a three-part action wheel, drag over. Boom. No nonsense of mashing verbs and subjects together one at a time). The inventory system was also kind of a pain to navigate. Some of the puzzles were insanely difficult to figure out, especially the whole Pegnose Pete part of the game. I remember Jambalaya was a breeze next to that.

I didn't like all the retconning that went into the story as well. Or that the game finally lost that vague air of the macabre that previous games had (even the third one). Guybrush struck me as particularly stupid/inept, too. Not a bad game overall, just the weaker of the four. Haven't played Tales of Monkey Island yet.

 

[CaitSeith]

It's my least favorite of the 4 original games. The tank controls made moving from place to place a little tedious, the 3D character models looked more rudimentary than the 2D models from the previous game, their movements looked too stiff and unnatural, and LeChuck's zombie form looked like crap (seriously, who had the big idea of removing his beard!?). Although I enjoyed learning the Monkey Kombat (it was just an over-complicated rock-paper-scissor mechanic, so I understand that people hate it).