The Curse of Monkey Island (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of LucasArts 1997 graphic adventure game for PCs running Windows 95, The Curse of Monkey Island.

I played the game in the Mega Monkey (read: hard) mode, so the video shows all of the puzzles. I also tried to show the great majority of the game's dialogue and scenes here. I know the game can be finished in about half the time I took here, but I feel like skipping so much dialogue largely misses the point of playing one of these games. The writing is just way too good to ignore.

I remember being so excited for this game to come out! I had it pre-ordered well in advance of its release, and virtually camped at my computer for a good few days following its arrival. The magazine preview screenshots looked too good to be true. Games just didn't look like that (yet)!

It's an amazing adventure game, and in my mind, sits among the best classical point-and-click games ever made. The sheer quality of the writing and actor's performances was second-to-none, the puzzles still had the teeth of the older games, there's an endless amount of fan-service at every turn. It also features my absolute favorite character of the entire series - Murray the talking skull. I'll be damned if I didn't end up with soda up my nose from laughing at least twice playing this when he had lines.

The game also looks like an animated feature film. I don't mean that as hyperbole - this is what King's Quest VII was trying to be three years earlier, only MI3 had the advantage of more being designed for PC hardware available in 1997 over the (at the time high-end) 1994 PC that KQ7 was targeting - KQ7 ran acceptably well on an 12meg 486/66, whereas CoMI needed a solid 24meg Pentium 133 (with a then-modern PCI graphics card) to really show its stuff. The voice cast really sold their roles here - Guybrush's voice is exactly what you'd imagine it to be, and it even features Alan Young (yeah, Scrooge McDuck) as the voice of a musically-inclined ex-pirate barber and Gary Coleman as Kenny Falmouth, the town brat and gun-runner who had his mom do the deliveries. The humor is grade A. Just watch the impromptu pirate singalong shanty - comic gold!

It's a real marvel how little this game has aged, as well. It's 20 years old this year, but how many modern attempts at 2D hold a candle to this? It could pass for a modern release if the resolution wasn't locked at 640x480, and even still, it's amazing what they did with what they had. You don't see that too often.

I really can't say enough good for the third and final tradition 2D adventure in the Monkey Island series. If you want to play true Monkey Island - this is the final true stop. The series never hits this high point again. I guess that makes sense, since this is the last time the Scumm engine was used before they canned it for 3D graphics.

Oh, and before I forget, there's about 30 seconds missing in the intro. Sorry about that! One of my discs had a gouge out of it, and it caused some pretty ugly problems during the opening FMV if I didn't stop it before a certain point (freezes, screeching sound) - so the last bit of the video isn't there. The damage on the disc didn't seem to affect anything else, and the rest of the video shows the game just as it originally was meant to be.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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