Monkey Island: Play It

Did you know that once upon a time games actually made you think?  That's right, gaming hasn't always been stuffed full of titles featuring of super-steroided men taking on zombies/Nazis/terrorists/whatever bad guy's popular that month.  A long time ago the most popular and prominent game genre was something called the adventure game.  These games had little to no action in them, and were instead about the player using logic to complete puzzles.  For a time, this was quite literally the only type of game that was made for the PC.  Companies like Sierra and LucasArts (contrary to popular belief, LucasArts hasn't always been the enormous Star Wars whore it is today) designed adventure games almost exclusively.  While Sierra did produce some classics such as the King's Quest and Space Quest series (Sierra had a thing for Quests), LucasArts defined the genre with titles such as Loom, Full Throttle, and most famously, Monkey Island.

Monkey Island was released back in 1990, when adventure games were just starting to come into their own.  It's a goofy comedy featuring a young man named Guybrush Threepwood, and his efforts to become a swashbuckling pirate.  It's wacky and zany and filled with anachronisms, and it has a wonderful script written by a man named Tim Schafer, who's pretty much the Joss Whedon of gaming.  Every script he's written is golden, from the off-the-wall humor of Day of the Tentacle to the bleaker and more dystopian Full Throttle.  Most recently he released a game called Brutal Legend, about a roadie who gets sucked into a medieval world inspired by heavy metal cover-art.

But I digress; I'm not here to gush about the people who made the game, I'm here to tell you about why you should play it.  First of all, it's a narrative game, which means there's a focus on story rather than on gameplay.  And the story is fantastic.  Like I said, it's goofy and funny, and Guybrush is a genuinely likable guy.  It's relatively simple: Guybrush arrives at Melee Island to become a pirate.  While in the process of becoming a pirate, he meets and falls in love with the governor of the island, who then gets captured by an evil ghost pirate named LeChuck.  From that point, the game is a rescue mission which takes you all around Melee, across the sea, and eventually to the mysterious Monkey Island.

Absolutely anyone can pick it up and play it as it requires no skill to play.  You control Guybrush by clicking on the screen where you want to go.  Every so often there'll be an item you can interact with, and you can choose what you want to do with it: pick it up, talk to it if it's a person, open it, close it, look at it, push it, pull it, the list goes on and on. 

The story is progressed by the solving of puzzles.  At the beginning of the game, you are assigned three tasks by a group of pirates to prove yourself worthy of a life of piracy.  From there, it's completely up to you to figure out how to complete the tasks.  You'll need to talk to people, pick up everything that isn't nailed down, and explore everywhere.  Anyone who's ever complained that games deaden your brain needs to play this one, and be proven wrong.

Seriously, you owe it to yourself to play this piece of gaming history.  And if you're worried you can't find it because it's too old, don't; LucasArts released a special edition a couple years ago with updated graphics and interface.  Here it is.  Play it now.