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Curse of Monkey Island

Curse offers you a choice or playing in Monkey or Mega-Monkey mode, the difference being the difficulty of the puzzles. Now, if you've read my reviews you know that I wind up cheating at least a couple of times every time I play a game, so you'd think I would have chosen Monkey mode, but no, afraid to miss a single puzzle, I started out in Mega-Monkey, a decision I came to regret in time. In fact, when I got stuck, I started over and played in Monkey mode until I got to the same point, and playing the simple way showed me how to solve the Mega-Monkey version, and I did this a couple of times, then went to a uhs file, thought, man, these are hard, and gave up on Mega-Monkey altogether (strangely enough, one of the puzzles in Mega-Monkey was pretty easy -- go figure).

Now I suppose you think that playing in Monkey mode I would have managed to get through Curse without cheating, but alas, such was not the case. While Monkey mode removes a layer of complexity from many puzzles, there are still some that are quite difficult, although these are the type of puzzles that, if you cheat you hit your head and say, I should have got that (except for one puzzle involving the cabana boy that I think was pretty much out of left field).

But I always like a game that pushes my mind about as far as it will go, but not too much further, and Monkey mode did that admirably. The puzzles were generally clever and ingenious, with the sort of comic logic that made Day of the Tentacle such a standout. I had to think hard in Curse, so when I solved something I got to think, wow, I'm smart, and that's a feeling that I love.

But Curse is as interested in working out your funny bone as your brain, and much of the game involves going through long amusing conversations with a variety of shady characters. There is a wealth of dialogue in the game, and there's no way to hear all of it in one play, because often you get a choice of several phrases that will each give an answer that is in substance the same but has a different joke attached. On the other hand, sometimes you will get a variety of dialogue choices and it won't matter which you choose, as when you can choose between things like "I don't trust scum like you" and "you don't even know the meaning of the word honesty" and what comes out of Guybrush's mouth either way is "Of course I trust you." It's all really, really funny.

The voice acting is consistently excellent, the steel drum-infused score by Michael Land is so good that you might as well just let it keep playing even when you're not playing the game, the graphics and animation are quite pretty and detailed, the story and design by Larry Ahern and Jonathan Ackley are, well, as good as it gets.

And one day, when I've grown just a little bit smarter, I'm going to play Mega-Monkey mode.

-- Charles Herold -2000

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