365 Game To Play Before You Die - #1: The Secret of Monkey Island
by mracoon
365 Games To Play Before You Die Well GB has reached the 1 year milestone so I thought it was finally time to do a proper, continual blog. I'm not the kind of guy to write in-depth blog posts about what's happening in my life or trends in the game industry or anything like that but I wanted something that a feature where I could talk about games I like and keep it going. As there's 365 days in...
365 Games To Play Before You Die
Well GB has reached the 1 year milestone so I thought it was finally time to do a proper, continual blog. I'm not the kind of guy to write in-depth blog posts about what's happening in my life or trends in the game industry or anything like that but I wanted something that a feature where I could talk about games I like and keep it going. As there's 365 days in the year (and as far as I'm aware next year isn't a leap year) I thought that was a good number to keep me occupied for a while.
Anyway about this blog itself. As the title says I'm going to run down the 365 game I think that everybody should have at least tried once in their life. The games aren't in any particular order and they're not all neccessisarily good game, I just think that they're something that everybody should have experienced.
On to the first game...
#1: The Secret of Monkey Island
Platform(s): PC, XBLA, Mac and several othersRelease: 1990
Developer(s): LucasArts
Best Quote: 'That's the second biggest monkey head I've ever seen'
GB Wiki Page
As the updated Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition was just released it made sense to start with this game. Back in the 90's I was young and hadn't experienced many adventure games. So when my older brother told me to play this knew game he just bought I was blown away. This game wasn't just fun it was funny. The characters were memorable, the setting was novel, the dialogue was witty and the puzzles were just the right difficulty. From the first moment you find out your character's name is Guybrush Threepwood you know this game is going to make you laugh.
The game continued LucasArts' trend of not punishing players for getting things wrong like Sierra adventure games. Guybrush can never die but if you try to do something that won't work out he'll just say 'I don't think that's a great idea' or something of the sort.
The game was also the writing debut for one of the best game writers ever: Tim Schafer. Together with Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman they crafted a story about a naive wannabe-pirate who must save the love of his life, Elaine, from the evil ghost pirate LeChuck. His adventure takes him around the where he must use his ingenuity and insult sword fighting skills to defeat LeChuck.
I'm really lucky that this was the first adventure game I'd played because it got me into a genre which has many great games and is recently seeing a resurgence with developers like Telltale and even LucasArts themselves after the release of some of their back catalogue on Steam. With the SE just coming out on XBLA and Steam you have no excuse to not play one gaming's masterpieces.