Tuesday 13 March, 2012

Just finished Monkey Island 2. It was pretty much the same as the first one, but a little more polished. I feel like I played one longer game the last couple weeks. Actually MI2 WAS long. The first one with all my getting stuck and playing a bunch of it on an airplane and everything took me a little over 7 hours. The second one with my extravagant use of the Hint button still took me 9 hours. 9 hours of pretty much any other type of game wouldn't feel long. This one felt long because you spend most of your time just walking back and forth to places you've already been clicking on things to see if something will happen. This is more fun now than it was at the beginning of MI1 a couple weeks ago, but still, I can think of other things I'd rather be doing. Given that it was made in 1990-something, good job. And I do appreciate the overhauled graphics and voiceovers. Some other weird copyright things -- Every time it says Monkey Island, there's a TM sign next to it. LucasArts did the remake in-house I thought. It's just weird to see Monkey Island TM on a Monkey Island game developed by the same company. Also they place little ads for other LucasArts games. I'm glad the ads were left alone only for other 90s games like Loom and Indiana Jones. I would not be surprised to see ads for newer games thrown into the remake of Monkey Island. I wonder what the earliest in-game ads were? Besides the old adver-games. I'm playing through Xenosaga at home right now and Namco actually emails you with the in-game email system advertisements for their games that were out at the time. It's really annoying, virtual spam!

So MI2 has slightly better graphics, some new character designs, a couple voice actor changes, and a vastly improved interface. I'm really grateful for the interface changes. You can do everything easily with the mouse now, and the menus don't lock up on you, and the mouse doesn't eat the edge of the screen, and Guybrush moves nice and smooth across the maps now. I'm assuming the two remakes weren't done at the same time. If they were, I wonder why MI2 was so much better done than MI1. I mean, I bought them at the same time, so I have no idea if they were re-done by different teams or what. Since so much of the remakes were the same, I can't see how it could have been that different a team, and thus that different qualities of interface. But really, who cares. The games are fun pirate tales and the first one carries over nicely to the second one. There are some recurring characters, some carryover jokes, etc.

My favorite part of MI2 was when you fall from dangling on the rope with Big Whoop into utter darkness. This happened once before sometime and you light a candle or something, but this time I was out of matches in my inventory. I'm mousing around and I just see treasure box debris and can't figure out what to do. I'm looking and I'm looking around and through my inventory. Finally I decide to slowly mouse the room over. I find...a light switch. I lolled.

Finally, Steam incorporated achievements for MI2. It's nice to struggle through some difficult situations and get rewarded with an achievement. There are only 12, so it's not like Gears of War or something where you get an achievement for every little thing. 12 are spread out over 9 hours, and I only got 7 anyway. The others are various forms of not using hints and doing a speedrun, which are not in the stars for me. But this is interesting. I was looking at the global achievements on Steam and I see that only 59.2% of players completed part one (of four). That's weird. Not even 1/3 of people who bought the game have gone past the first part. Granted, I have lots of Steam games in my account that I haven't touched, but...am I like 40% of Steam account-holders? Maybe. Seems like a lot of people. Only 39.2% finished part 2, and just over 1/3 beat it! Even with all those hints! The crazy thing is how many people beat it without hints, or with fewer than 10 hints, or by only using object highlight fewer than 5 times...16.1%, 18.2%, and 24.9%. So like half the people who beat it used 0 hints. That's a lot of replays man! Or like one reaaaally long play through for a lot of people. If it took me 9 hours with lots of hints...I mean...it could take me 100 without using any. And that's probably a huge underestimate. And I'd probably kill myself before then. So. Cheers to those people who can do that.

It's been fun. I'm going to pretend that in the end it was all kids' imagination in a carnival ride.

I had forgotten about the in-game ads. But weren't they kind of "jokey"/toungue-in-cheek? MI1 even poked fun at other (competitor) games that were out at the time...

Regarding the achievements, I suspect a lot of people use hints, but just not the ones in-game!

Yeah, the ads were wrapped in humor. Actually, I wouldn't have known they were games if not for the TM next to the name. But still, I feel advertised to!

And the achievements, good point, I didn't think of that! If I didn't know about the H button I would have gotten more achievements!