Game of the Month #19 (August) - The Secret of Monkey Island

From Wikipedia:

The Secret of Monkey Island is a 1990 point-and-click graphic adventure game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games. It takes place in a fantastic version of the Caribbean during the age of piracy. The player assumes the role of Guybrush Threepwood, a young man who dreams of becoming a pirate and explores fictional islands while solving puzzles.

The game was conceived in 1988 by Lucasfilm employee Ron Gilbert, who designed it with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. Gilbert's frustrations with contemporary adventure titles led him to make the player character's death almost impossible, which meant that gameplay focused the game on exploration. The atmosphere was based on that of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride. The Secret of Monkey Island was the fifth game built with the SCUMM engine, which was heavily modified to include a more user-friendly interface.

Critics praised The Secret of Monkey Island for its humor, audiovisuals, and gameplay. The game spawned a number of sequels, collectively known as the Monkey Island series. Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman also led the development of the sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. LucasArts released a remake of the original in 2009, which was also well received by the gaming press.

Since the poll only said "Monkey Island" and didn't really specify one individual title, I suppose you can pick whichever one you want or go ham and play all of them. The series consists of:

The Secret of Monkey Island
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
The Curse of Monkey Island
Escape from Monkey Island
Tales of Monkey Island

Have fun!

I've played the first two (Secret being slightly better than the sequel), but I'd really like to play Curse. Where can I get it?

Curse and Escape unfortunately haven't seen re-releases like 1 or 2, so your options are pretty much limited to ordering them online or using alternative means I won't describe here. Curse functions on the SCUMM interface like 1 and 2 if you can nab a copy of it, whereas Escape might be a little trickier to get running on a modern PC (haven't tested it). Escape was also released on PS2 if you can track it down.

I played through this game recently so I will pass this month. I'm actually playing this series for the first time this year and as mentioned above trying to get Escape to work on my Win 10 machine. No success yet, worst case I guess Youtube is an option but it doesn't feel the same. Too bad they didn't release the Curse and Escape in remasters.

Just finished the first one. The Special Edition on Steam.
Some of my thoughts:

Stuff I liked
The remake lets you hotswap between the original and remade versions just by pressing a key. It was fun to see and compare both versions, and It is the best way to keep fans of both versions happy at the same time.
The humor was not laugh out loud at any point, but it maintained perfectly a very lighthearted atmosphere for the duration of the game. Definitely had fun listening to the characters.
Visually both versions are very nice and the music was pleasant.

Hall of shame
The UI was terrible. You have to be opening menus constantly for everything. For example, if you wanted to combine two objects you'll have to: open the comands, click on "use", open the inventory, click on "object 1", the inventory closes so open it again, click on "object 2". This was better with the classic UI.
Identifying stuff in the background was harder than it should have, I constantly found myself changing from version to version to check if I was missing something, as in some cases it was easyer to spot in one of them. The worst offender: the map of Monkey island. The first map fits in one screen and has very clearly marked were you can go. The Monkey island one is several screens big, doesn´t scroll and everything blends with the background. Not only was hard to find spots to visit, but traversing it was tedious. Exploring the first island of the game was fun, I can't say the same for the second one.
Some of the puzzles felt not at all intuitive. I'm looking at you red herring. But this might be because I suck at point and click games.

Overall I enjoyed the game a lot, and I'll definitelly be going to play the rest of the series at some point.

This game is magical.

But I must say, I have a sword? why can't I use that to scare away a bird? Or the shovel? Or anything other than walk randomly to the lower left corner to step on a loose board to knock it off the dock??

The insults are easily my favorite part.

I've already played the first 2 games and also don't own the next 2. So I played Tales of Monkey Island.

I'd have to say i enjoyed the game but feel that my experience was ruined by the fact i played Tales from the Borderlands just before that. So my enjoyment was infringed by understanding how far Telltale has come since they released this game. In terms of the other games in the series i think this was the weakest but still worth a play.

Highlights:
Teaching leChuck how to solve a puzzle
The courtroom scenario in episode 4
Double insult fight where you have insult on person while encouraging another at the same time.

Finished up Secret this morning after procrastinating through the whole month. Overall I think the first half of the game is much stronger than the second, mostly because I thought the puzzle design on Monkey Island became a little too obtuse, falling into the trappings of pixel hunting, guesswork, and too much backtracking. The banana fetch quest and ghost feather sections were the most annoying, but other than that I had no issue. Fun game, top notch writing.

I have Monkey Island 2 and Curse (with Escape sitting in my GameFly Q), so I won't get through them all before the month's up, but I'll keep chugging away at them, maybe at least get through MI2 before August's out.

Got through Monkey Island 2 over the past couple of days. Have to agree that it's weaker than Secret, but still a very solid game. I thought overall the puzzle design was more obtuse, to the point of being eyeroll-worthy. The whole "juggle four objectives at once" thing became pretty frustrating, especially since the inventory you can carry in the game is so bloated. And the card catalog was way more trouble than it was worth.

Still a good game, but I felt less guilty about using UHS on this one.

So I cheated and watched a Let's play of this because yesterday was the last day of August. I did get through part 1 and it was awesome to see the 3 trials again on the LP.

This game is pretty magical and the characters are great. The interface for the remastered edition is garbage but the voice acting is really well-done.

Also, I love the Let's player so in case you want to check her out (full disclousure: I support her on patreon) She does a TON of coverage for point-and-click adventures on old DOS and whatnot.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCTNXqhWPba9Xh8gx0EKOtQ

Did I mention I love her?