Well, several problems, actually, not least of which is being lumbered with a stupid name that no-one can remember. But biggest among Guybrush’s problems is his career anxiety. Like many a young man just out of puberty, he doesn’t really know what to do with his life. Working in McDonalds doesn’t really appeal, he’s too thick for university, and a life down t’pit seems to have a limited future. There is one thing he’d like, though and that’s to be a pirate. Now that might seem like a slightly pie-in-the-sky dream to most of you, but Guybrush is lucky. Y’see, he just happens to live in the middle of an island that’s simply heaving with the scurvy seafaring knaves, so one fine evening he takes himself down to the local boozer and presents himself to the most important-looking pirate dudes he can find. ‘Gissa job’, he says...

Sadly, as most of us already know, life isn’t that simple. ‘You don’t become a pirate just by asking’, says one of the pirates mockingly to the eager young would-be apprentice, but his laughter is interrupted by a couple of pirate chums pointing out something of a manpower shortage in the Department Of Skullduggery, and it’s at this point that Guybrush finds himself on a kind of piracy YTS. The three pirates set him three tasks, the successful completion of which will prove him fit for a life in a three-cornered hat and a suspect beard, and fired with burning ambition and an overpowering sense of purpose, Guybrush strides manfully out of the tavern and into the biggest adventure of his young life.

So, enough waffle already. Let’s talk game. Fairly clearly, there are two sorts of people reading this review, those of you with Amigas or Amiga-owning chums who’ve seen this before and Monkey Island virgins. We’ll deal with the first group first. If you’ve seen Monkey Island before, this is exactly the same game, but with better music, and without all of the horrible faffing around with different floppy disks and eternity-long gaps for them to load in bits of code.

Mind you, it is slightly slower in play, and the accessing gaps are actually still present, it’s just that they’re from CD instead of floppy, and they’re not as long. Make no mistake, though, as someone used to Mega Drive software, you’re still going to have a little bit of an uncomfortable time getting the hang of waiting around twiddling your thumbs for ages while the game amuses itself with clever technical stuff. But hey, this is the bit of the review for people who know Monkey Island already, so let’s forget about disk accessing for now. The upshot of everything is, for Monkey Island fans this is a dream come true. You can skip straight to the percentage box now, thanks. Bye. Okay, who’s next?

Oh yeah, that big gang of Monkey Island Virgins. Right, well, first off, why don’t all you MIVvies (as I’m playfully going to call you) go and take a look at the big box elsewhere on these pages containing a brief history of the Adventure Game As A Concept, then come back? I’ll just kill some time while you’re away, you won’t miss anything.

(Tum te tum, whistle, etc). Ah, you’re back. Right. Monkey Island is an Adventure Game. However, it’s not like most other adventure games. Most other adventure games have ridiculous crap plots about dwarves and elves and magical kingdoms and sorcerors and stuff, but Monkey Island is different. Monkey Island is funny. Not just occasionally funny or incidentally funny, but repeatedly and extremely funny, all the way through. In fact, it wouldn’t be far off the mark to suggest that Monkey Island’s entire raison d’etre is funniness – much of the time, the whole plot seems to be nothing more than an elaborate run-up to a punchline, and it’s all the better for it.

Y’see, it makes it feel almost like you’re taking part in a film, except that you get the chance to choose your own lines. Lots of times playing Monkey Island, you’ll get a choice of several lines of dialogue to use when talking to other characters, and even although you more or less know which is the right one to get you through the game, you find yourself deliberately saying the wrong ones just to see what kind of responses you get. The urge to go for the laugh line is an illustration of just how involved you get when you play this, and how strong the characterisation is. You can really identify with Guybrush, and that’s something that, much of the time, even Sonic or John Madden can’t lay claim to. Many computer magazines have called this the greatest computer game of all time, and it’s just about possible they were right. What it certainly is, is the best use anyone’s yet made of the Mega CD, and if you’re one of the machine’s much-abused owners, it’s all but unmissable.

Now, fact of the matter is, many of you won’t ever have seen a game like this before in your lives. In all our times on various Sega mags, none of us have ever reviewed one before (although we’ve played some on other formats), so let’s just take a minute and explain to you just what an ‘adventure’ game is, anyway.

Adventure games were among the very first computer games. The earliest ones were written on huge mainframe computers, and consisted entirely of text. You wandered through the game land by typing things like ‘Go North’, ‘Open Door’, ‘Kill Goblin’ and all that kind of stuff on a keyboard, and the object was to solve riddles, negotiate mazes and work out puzzles. Later, as home computers became fashionable, adventures grew up a bit and started to feature graphics. They were almost always static shots, though, used simply to illustrate chosen locations throughout the game, and the actual gameplay was still all about typing and puzzle solving.

Fairly recently, adventures changed again. Games on the ST and Amiga like Future Wars and Operation Stealth ushered in an era of adventures with no typing at all – the whole thing operated by way of a ‘point-and-click’ interface, where simply aiming a cursor at something on screen would make your character walk up to it, or clicking on a ‘pick up’ icon on a menu bar and then pointing at an object would pick it up for you without any of that boring old keyboardy stuff. While the actual games were more or less identical, they were a lot friendlier to play, and you didn’t have to spend all your time working out which words the computer understood – you just chose options from the ones the computer presented to you.

Of course, some purists complained that this took half the fun out of things and turned adventures into simple multiple-choice guessing games, but the user-friendly style caught on and soon spawned a game from Lucasfilm called The Secret Of Monkey Island. Which is, more or less, where we come in...

ON THE OTHER HAND

Hmm, well, yes, it’s all very funny and everything, but I don’t actually see all that much game in here. You spend a vast amount of time watching the game go through set, interminable, uninterruptable (well, you CAN interrupt them, but then you won’t have a clue what’s going on) dialogue sequences, a moderately vast amount of time waiting for it to load data in off the CD, and a comparatively tiny amount of time actually bringing any influence to bear on the proceedings. Even when you do get to play the game, it’s a lot of guessing between set responses, and I for one never feel all that involved. But it IS funny, and everyone else disagrees with me anyway, so never mind, eh? Just thought I’d mention it.

GRAPHICS: 8

SOUND: 9

GAMEPLAY: 6

GAME SIZE: 8

ADDICTION: 8

Possibly THE most popular computer game of all time, and now you can play it on your Mega Drive with none of that tedious crappy disk-swapping malarkey. A triumph, or what?

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