The Secret of Monkey Island and Time Bandit game reviews (Commodore Amiga)

The Secret of Monkey Island - Review / Feature

(Lucasfilm Games, Commodore Amiga Game, 1991)

I have played adventure games for as long as I have been a gamer. Back in the early 1980s I would spend many a long evening testing the old grey matter against the challenges posed by the classic Scott Adams adventure games on the Commodore Vic 20, including: Adventure Land, Voodoo Castle, Mission Impossible Adventure, Pirate Cove and The Count. Each was an interactive text story; you would guide your character through the unfolding drama by telling them where to go, who to talk to and what to do, simply by typing a series of two word commands. Each time you input a command the on-screen text would tell you what had happened, where you were and what you could see. If you solved a puzzle the next part of the game would open up.

They suited me perfectly as you needed no great skill to complete one, just the stubborn persistence to go everywhere, talk to everyone, look at everything and use everything on everything. Even a player with an utter lack of common sense and a total inability to solve logic puzzles could complete one if they stuck at it, purely through trial and error. In the time before the internet and the safety net that is Mr Google, with no walkthroughs available you could be stuck for weeks or even months, but you would still plug away as at the time they were a great challenge and lots of fun; a wonderful voyage for the imagination.

To help negotiate the game you would frequently find yourself creating elaborate and ever-growing sketched maps to enable you to visualise both the various scenes and the often complicated labyrinth of routes between the different locations you had discovered. The games were particularly satisfying when you were successful though, even now I can remember the pure elation experienced when, after being stuck going nowhere in Voodoo Castle for a very long time indeed (about eight months), I finally typed: “wave bag” to successfully open up the final part of the game (that eight months clearly scarred me!)

Because the Vic 20 was operating on slightly less memory than the average doorbell, a text adventure was very much the limit of its capabilities, even played from a game cartridge plugged into its rear expansion slot. But the subsequent generations of home computers (such as the Commodore 64 and then personal computers, the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST) had increased memory and processing power, meaning that adventure games started to come alive. They featured graphics, music and sound effects. There was real identity and atmosphere and a far bigger play area to explore. As games developed you also no longer had to type commands; you simply pointed and clicked with the mouse, earning this type of game the cunning name, the ‘point and click adventure’. The Secret of Monkey Island remains one of the very best known examples of its type and with good reason.

The title was released by LucasFilm Games in 1991 after being conceived in 1988 by Ron Gilbert, a LucasFilm employee, who designed it along with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, both of whom he had hired to work for LucasFilm. The Secret of Monkey Island was the fifth game built using the ‘SCUMM’ engine (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion). This was a game engine used by LucasFilm Games to underpin their graphic adventure games, the first being Maniac Mansion, released for the Commodore 64 and Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987. Subsequent offerings: Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Loom all made it to the Amiga and all were enjoyable games in their own right. However, for The Secret of Monkey Island the SCUMM engine was updated significantly, specifically to make the game more accessible. Using the mouse and the on-screen pointer enabled easy identification of those items on-screen that were relevant, and instead of typing instructions there are a selection of action buttons to choose from, offering one click commands such as ‘walk-to’, ‘look-at’, ‘pick-up’, ‘push’, ‘pull’ and ‘talk-to’. Simply selecting one of these followed by an item or character on screen would achieve the desired result. In fact the ‘walk-to’ and ‘talk-to’ buttons became largely redundant, since you can navigate easily by clicking on the play area and instigate a conversation with a character just by selecting them. It is a straightforward and enormously intuitive interface that set the standard for many years to come.

When you engage a character in conversation you are presented with a selection of questions or responses to pick from, each one directing the exchange in a particular direction. This presents an illusion that the player can take multiple routes through the game. Some conversation paths allow the fleshing out of the back story while others are irrelevant or are just there for comedic purposes, but over time you realise that no matter what order the options are chosen, the player will always eventually return to those questions that elicit important and necessary information if they persevere.

The game was strongly influenced by the Disneyland

How did Guybrush Threepwood get his name?

Guybrush’s name causes much mirth during the game; indeed it is a running joke throughout that no one can get it right. But how did he come by it? It is reported that the character art for the game was created in Deluxe Paint, which saves files as “filename.brush”.

Accordingly during development the main character was known as “Guy” and his artwork was frequently saved as “guy.brush” and the name stuck. The surname was chosen as a result of an internal competition. So now we know!

‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ ride, and also the Tim Powers novel ‘On Stranger Tides’ (which became the basis for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film in 2011) and probably provided the inspiration for the voodoo elements of the game. You play a young Guybrush Threepwood finding himself on Melee Island, setting out with a wish to become a fully-fledged pirate. You meet with the pirate leaders in Scumm Bar (Ed - “Ah - SCUMM - do you see what they did there?”) who challenge you to complete a series of three trials if you are to realise your dream. In order to meet their approval you are required to cross swords and beat the all powerful Sword Master, locate and recover some buried treasure, and steal an idol from the Governor’s mansion. In exploring the island and completing the trials you encounter Governor Elaine Marley and you fall in love. Elaine is subsequently kidnapped by the ghost pirate ‘LeChuck’ and his un-dead crew, and, surprise surprise, it falls to you to set about rescuing her.

In the course of your adventure, you meet a series of bizarre and amusing characters, including a prisoner named Otis, whom you break out of jail to join your crew, Stan the used boat salesman, who speaks at a hundred miles an hour and eventually sells you a boat (after haggling for what seems like hours!) and Carla the Sword Master, who also joins your crew once your sword fighting skills have been proven to her satisfaction.

The game is easy to pick up and play. For the Commodore Amiga it comes on four disks but bonus points are earned for recognising a second (and indeed a third) external disk drive. The point-and-click interface works brilliantly and it is hard to go wrong. Many early adventure games were limited in size and would play subtle tricks on the player so that they would appear much larger than they really were. Placing items required to solve puzzles at the opposite ends of the available playing area was one, so you would end up retracing your steps many times - indeed this method was still being used in adventure games made much later, such as Resident Evil - which was basically an adventure game but with added guns and zombies! Another way other titles used to extend the game’s play time was to make the puzzles unnecessarily obtuse. More than once I have wasted hours before stumbling on the required obscure and totally random combination such as: “use cheese-grater on slippery chaffinch” or: “give polonium to inflatable ocelot”. The consequence of a title challenging a player in this way is that the game can become bogged down too often, with the player hitting frequent brick walls while they search for the unlikely but magic combinations that allow progression. It may prolong the game time but doesn’t add to the enjoyment of playing. Some players might persevere but those that are more easily frustrated will switch off and look to explore more rewarding pastures.

“How appropriate – you fight like a cow!”

The sword-fighting combat system is brilliantly conceived and implemented. Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman have said that the idea was born while watching Errol Flynn ‘swashbuckling’ films, wherein an insult would often be directed at an opponent before blades were crossed. In The Secret of Monkey Island Guybrush has to fight a series of pirates; during each fight he has to use (and respond to) a variety of insults before each sword attack. If Guybrush provides the correct witty response to an insult then he gains control of the fight and can insult his opponent next. If the adversary fails to respond correctly Guybrush retains the ability to insult them again. Three incorrectly answered insults in a row will usually ensure victory.

When you start out you don’t have the necessary number of responses to succeed, but each time an opponent correctly answers an insult the reply is added to Guybrush’s stock of potential responses. As he completes more fights he gains an ever increasing repartee of smart retorts and, once his vocabulary is sufficiently well stocked (normally after about ten fights or so) he can take on and beat the Sword Master.

Sheer genius.

The Secret of Monkey Island doesn’t do any of this. The beauty of the game is that the experience is perfect. It doesn’t set out to annoy or frustrate you, only delight you. The play areas are relatively compact, with the story being set within four defined chapters: ‘The Three Trials’, ‘The Journey’, ‘Under Monkey Island’ and ‘Guybrush Kicks Butt’, so each section never feels too unmanageable and navigation is generally quick and easy. As an example, when you are on Melee Island, once you have found your way to a destination and want to re-visit you can simply click the point that you want to travel to on the map and you are transported there in seconds. The puzzles are all logical too. Some may take a bit of working out, but ultimately they all make sense. Most importantly, you can’t play yourself into a dead end (unless you put all your ‘pieces of eight’ into the Grog machine – this is such an unlikely scenario that it is far more likely that the programmers simply didn’t consider it a possibility rather than it being a deliberate trap to thwart the player) and it is also virtually impossible to die. You have to work quite hard if you want to send Guybrush to meet his maker as it is effectively an Easter-egg; the only possible death in the entire game occurs if you force our hero to stay underwater for more than ten minutes. If you are to do this, after Guybrush’s passing, his possible action choices are replaced by the words: "Float," "Bloat," and "Order Hint Book!" This softening of the difficulty made a huge difference though. The fact that unexpected death was not a constant threat was

a welcome change from virtually all other adventure games of the time, which could be particularly brutal; causing the player to save constantly for fear of making an unforeseen terminal mistake. You can save your progress when you like in The Secret of Monkey Island too, but on an ‘as and when’ basis is more than sufficient.

The game looks fantastic, with impressively drawn characters and locations, and a great use of colour to add real atmosphere to the various areas you are required to explore. The music is notable too; with a ‘piratey’ reggae (is that a music genre? Hang it, it is now...) soundtrack that captures the mood perfectly. But while the game looks and sounds fabulous, the true stars are the story and the humour. The game is a beautifully constructed enjoyable jaunt, with plenty of memorable characters to interact with, each with a distinct and individual personality. The humour is genuine, ranging from moments that make you smile, to those that will cause a chortle and a few which genuinely had me roaring with laughter. The sword-fighting game mechanics are nothing short of a work of genius, with encounters being won by the protagonist with the sharpest wit in a battle of insults. It is very clever, extremely funny and works brilliantly.

At times the ‘fourth wall’ is deliberately broken with fantastic comedic effect. There is one standout cut-scene that runs for several minutes when you first explore the Governor’s Mansion, whereby we are treated to a running commentary of some extraordinary action apparently taking place out of sight, with the accompanying text and sound effects poking more than a little fun at the frequent absurd difficulty level and obtuseness of other adventure games. Some completely ridiculous and very funny commands appear on screen, including: “hypnotise quarrelsome rhinoceros” and “use staple remover on tremendously dangerous looking yak” with predictable results! It is reported that this whole section was proposed by Dave Grossman as a joke instead of including a more complicated puzzle. However Ron Gilbert liked the randomness of the idea so much that it not only found its way into the gameplay but it became one of the most striking and amusing passages in the entire game.

A classic example of a ‘joke gone wrong’ occurs in the forest when Guybrush examines a tree stump and proclaims that it leads to “a massive system of underground catacombs.” The player is then prompted to “insert disk 22 and press any key”, then “insert disk 36 and press any key” and finally to “insert disk 114 and press any key”. After a short pause, Guybrush exclaims: “I guess I can’t go down there, we’ll have to skip that part of the game!” It is reported that this seemingly harmless joke actually caused problems for the LucasFilm games hint-line which was overwhelmed by callers who were convinced that their copy of the game was missing disks. Such was the confusion caused; both the joke and the reference to it in the game’s ending credits were removed from the later CD versions of the game. The incident was referenced in later games though!

The game gave rise to four sequels released for a variety of platforms: Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, The Curse of Monkey Island, Escape from Monkey Island and Tales of Monkey Island. A special edition of the original game was released in 2009 for the PC, Xbox 360, PS3 and on iOS to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the game. The reworked version featured high definition graphics and new sound, including speech recorded by the actors that had been used in the follow up games.

Adventure games in general have developed hugely too. While the traditional type can still be found, they have become less popular and have been replaced by the likes of “The Last of Us” and the “Uncharted” series. While these titles are still regarded as adventure games, in reality they are actually ‘action-adventure’ games with the gameplay emphasis moving strongly in favour of action over exploration and puzzle solving. The Uncharted games for example are almost on rails and lack the freedom of exploration which is a fundamental ingredient of a true adventure game.

For me, The Secret of Monkey Island title will always be special. It is an utterly fantastic game, a landmark title which has rightly cemented its place in gaming history. It wasn’t just an evolution in adventure gaming, it completely broke the mould and set the standards by which similar games would be judged for decades to come. It is impressively slick, completely charming, genuinely funny and thoroughly enjoyable to play. It has regularly been voted the best Amiga game ever made and I certainly would not be one to dispute that standing. It has also been voted the best P.C. adventure game ever.

I am not the most skilled gamer and I don’t have the longest attention span. In almost fifty years of gaming I can count the number of titles that I have played properly to their conclusion on the fingers of one hand. But I finished The Secret of Monkey Island. There was no way you wouldn’t finish it, it is too good, too much fun and the story hooks you, so that you absolutely have to find out how things turn out.

It is hard to imagine that if you are reading this as an Amiga (or even another classic computer) owner, you have never played The Secret of Monkey Island but if this is the case, you really do need to put that right as soon as conceivably possible. I can pretty much guarantee that it will challenge and delight you in equal measure and, more importantly, at no point will you be required to use a cheese-grater on a slippery chaffinch.

I’ll raise a mug of Grog to that!

Graphics - 93%

The Secret of Monkey Island is an unfolding story and the graphics do a great job of telling that story. The locations within the play area are beautiful, well designed and convincing.

Sounds - 92%

Terrific music and sound effects; atmospheric and perfect for the game.

Grab-Factor - 95%

From the very start you are hooked. The simple point and click interface makes everything very straightforward.

Playability - 96%

The Secret of Monkey Island is a brilliant story, with intrigue and genuine humour that completely draws you in. The game mechanics work perfectly. Once you start you won't stop.

Verdict - 94%

AG 20/03/2022

Featured in A miga Addict magazine, issue 15.

Time Bandit

Time Bandit - Review

(MichTron, Commodore Amiga Game, 1988)

Has time been kind to this Gauntlet wannabe?

As 2023 drew to a close, Retro Games announced that the firmware of the A500 Mini had been upgraded to v1.2.1. This addressed a number of bugs, including potential USB memory stick corruption, and problems using a second controller to play added ADF games. It also fixed some issues with the speed of some games played from WHDLoad. And as a bonus, another incorporated game has been added – Time Bandit.

Origins

Time Bandit was originally released in 1983 for the TRS-80 Model I, and was subsequently ported to other systems, including a 1988 release for the Amiga. At the time it was highly rated, with the ST version in particular attracting praise.

It has a distinctly old-school feel, providing inspiration to Gauntlet and other similar titles, with the player embarking on a quest to explore and escape areas called Timegates, and shoot a healthy selection of bad guys along the way. From the main play area there are 16 separate Timegates that can be accessed, each of which offers a different challenge.

Yesterday’s clothes

First impressions aren’t great unfortunately. Let’s not forget that this is a game from 1983, and it does look like it. The audio is even less impressive - with no music at all and, for sound effects, we are treated to just a few odd beeps. It definitely has the feel of being a second generation game rather than a third, and that's mainly because that’s exactly what it is.

Saving graces

However, let’s not judge the book by its cover, it’s the gameplay that makes or breaks a title, and in this area it fares much better. The Timegates can be accessed in any order, each up to 16 times, and with every repeated visit the difficulty level increases. Some are maze-like, with enemies to shoot and a key to find to enable a return to the main level, but others draw inspiration from classic arcade titles such as Pac-Man. There are also RPG and text adventure sections to be navigated; the variety on offer is really quite impressive.

There is also a fun simultaneous split-screen two-player option. Control, while only being in four directions (and with your character moving in quite large blocks at a time), is still sharp and responsive.

Choices, choices

But while it remains a playable, albeit initially unimpressive game, I would question why it has been selected for the A500 Mini while so many of the Amiga’s big hitters are still not included.

While the Mini does offer some fine games, the likes of Cannon Fodder, Sensible Soccer, Lemmings, The Settlers, Turrican 2, Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 and The Secret of Monkey Island (1 or 2) are all conspicuous by their absence.

Many of these titles represent the very soul of the Amiga, yet none of them feature. Perhaps licensing issues are in play here, but it does feel like a slightly diluted selection; though of course the user can add additional ADF files (Ed – “Providing they own the originals, cough, cough..!”).

Fair’s fair

However, it isn’t Time Bandit’s fault that it has now been chosen to sit at the top table, and in judging the game in isolation I should emphasise that it is still an enjoyable retro blast. There is plenty to do and, as the Timegates can be accessed in any order, it offers great longevity and variety.

It does look and sound very simplistic, but the gameplay balances this out somewhat. You just need to temper your expectations and pretend that it’s 1983 again. So dig out your shoulder pads, stick some Michael Jackson on your boombox and get stuck into Time Bandit.

You’ll be pleased you did...

Graphics - 53%

Very old school - certainly not pushing the Amiga in any way, but this is a port of a much older game.

Sound - 35%

No music and few sound effects, bar a few beeps.

Grab Factor - 90%

The game is very easy to pick up and play, providing the simplistic presentation can be forgiven.

Playability - 87%

Plenty to keep the player occupied. The verdict score is skewed significantly downwards by the basic graphics and sound, but the game remains very playable.

Verdict - 66%

AG - February 2024

Featured in Amiga Addict magazine, issue 28