High expectations usually lead to disappointment. LucasArts is not a company that is unfamiliar with this...(*cough* Force Commander *cough* Rogue Squadron *cough* Super Bombad Racing *cough*) LucasArts has a long line of titles behind a few select franchises, and for the most part, their titles are hit or miss. The company is well known for its classics such as Dark Forces, Maniac Mansion, and Sam and Max Hit the Road. In fact, it can be safely said that LucasArts is solely responsible for both bringing adventure games to fruition, and keeping them alive today.

Guybrush, ever the helpful husband...

After the introduction and overlooking of 1998's sleeper hit Grim Fandango, many of the pundits had forecast the death of the adventure game. Indeed, as the game itself was excellent, it drew little interest from buyers, and was quickly spotted on the discount shelves in department stores as retailers tried to garner one last bit of profit from it. Grim Fandango was a brave game, the first SCUMM-based (Story Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) game LucasArts took into the wide world of 3D. The last game LucasArts produced in glorious 2D was actually Curse of Monkey Island, which also failed to bring in the sales.

Can LucasArts change this trend with the newest barrel of monkeys they've proceeded to open?

Only time will tell the sales figures on this one, but gamers shouldn't pass it up. You owe it to yourself to buy this game. You may not have to exercise your trigger finger much (It doesn't support the mouse), but you'll definitely laugh yourself to death playing.

Escape from Monkey Island is the fourth in a quietly-held series based on the mishaps of one Guybrush Threepwood (Mighty Pirate). If you're unfamiliar with the series, Guybrush is your average yuppie that suddenly wakes up one day and says "I want to be a mighty pirate!" and with that note, embarks on a series of journeys to prove his foulness, ruthlessness, and general pirateyness. In the first series, Guybrush battled the evil ghost pirate LeChuck to save the fate of Melee Island(TM) and to win the heart of the governor, Elaine Marley. In the second game, cleverly titled The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, Guybrush is waylaid by LeChuck in his demonic amusement park, Big Whoop. After being set adrift, Guybrush finds his way to Plunder Island(TM) in Curse of Monkey Island, where he accidentally casts a voodoo curse on Elaine and must find a way to return her to normal, while again saving the Tri-Island area from the general meanness of LeChuck.

That had to hurt...

Anyone who's a fan of the series will be happy to know that the game's general humor is preserved. One of the best parts of the game is getting to see a whole host of familiar characters from the previous games, such as Carla the Swordmaster, Otis the Pickpocket, Meathook, Herman Toothrot, and the voodoo lady (Who has yet to give a name to herself). In fact, this game is chock full of nostalgic bits from the previous games, such as the occasional rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-it.

Without revealing much about the plot, Guybrush and Elaine have just returned to Melee Island(TM) from their honeymoon, only to find it being ravaged and turned into a ghost town. A mysterious individual by the name of Ozzie Mandrill is attempting to remake the face of the Tri-Island area by removing its piratey image and turning it into a tourist trap. Furthermore, Elaine returns to find herself declared dead and her mansion under a demolition order! Being dead isn't too bad, though, and Guybrush knows it (He's been there). However, with the drastic population shift in the islands, and the "death" of the governor, Elaine finds herself having to challenge Mr. Charles L. Charles for her own governor's seat.

Murray, everyone's favorite all-powerful talking demonic skull returns...

This leads Guybrush on a trumped-up quest to try to regain control of the islands and thwart the schemes of the two newcomers, starting with trying to negotiate with the catapult lackey to leave Elaine's mansion without destroying it. The lackey is very dedicated of course, and doesn't want to violate the terms of his contract. How would you solve this puzzle without killing anyone? Easy - Get some food for the man, since he says he has fairly liberal contract terms for his snack breaks, and while he's distracted, play with the catapult. Of course, getting food isn't that easy...nor is disabling the catapult. Most of Guybrush's tasks will break down into smaller tasks...some with well-defined steps, others that are about as foggy as the mists inside Mr. Threepwood's skull. I thanked the maker that LucasArts inserted a full (yet terse) walkthrough of the game into my box, as I was able to play for about ONLY five or six hours without encountering any real mental blocks.

Then one hit me.

Having oddball solutions to problems is nothing new for a LucasArts game, let alone the Monkey Island series. Some of the solutions were just a little bit TOO out there, however. For example, a certain puzzle can be solved by reading the inscription written on the back of a manhole cover. Who ever takes the time to examine manhole covers? I kept going around town trying to see if I could use it to clobber someone over the head with. Eventually I broke down and clipped the seal on the walkthrough...and it got worse from there. Certain solutions would just not have presented themselves obviously, and I felt that a few of them would've taken me hours to figure out. I like the puzzles in Monkey Island, but I don't think this is a good way of expanding gameplay. And I don't know if the retail copies come with the full-walkthrough, but I do recommend that in the interests of preserving the integrity of your gaming ego - Don't open the book until you absolutely HAVE to.

There is plenty of gameplay to go around, of course. I was a bit disappointed to find out that while the island-view map displays eight or nine islands, only three of them can actually be visited, and not under your control. (What kind of pirate captain is Guybrush anyway?) Still, with what I was given with the game, there was little to be disappointed over. I just had false perceptions regarding the size of the game.

I agree.

While the solutions may have been hard to figure out, they always resulted in something tremendously funny. Seeing Marco de Pollo being attacked by seagulls is just outrageous, and flunking out of Pirate Transmogrification School was equally funny. And if you think that you'll just play this game once and then put it away...well, you may be right, but give it another chance sometime in a few weeks. Quite a bit of the dialogue is randomized, and so you'll find yourself laughing at the old quips and the new lines together.

Something new to the Monkey Island series was the use of voice actors, starting with Curse of Monkey Island. With the first two games released on both CD-ROM and floppy, making use of vocals wasn't feasible. The primary voice actors from Curse of Monkey Island return for the new installation, casting Dominic Armato (Guybrush) and Earl Boen (Charles), and introducing Alexandra Boyd (Elaine). If one thing is totally impeccable about this game, it's definitely the voice acting. The characterizations are perfect, and the actors really fit their roles. There seems to be some unnecessary nationalization in places, such as a priest voiced with a Russian accent, but I didn't mind. It adds to the general feeling of overwhelming variety in the game. Very few of the characters sound similar, and so you'll never really get tired of hearing from one particular person. Of the main features of the game, I definitely say that this scores the highest.

Another fire? How many have you had today?

The music and sound effects were fitting and in most cases appropriate, but I found several logistic problems. Throughout the game, I noticed the background music almost "skipping". The best comparison I can make is a "blurp" often found in poorly-coded MP3s. It was quiet, so it wasn't very distracting, and it could very well have been part of the original music, but it happened too often for me to write it off as such.

The sound effects, on the other hand...

I encountered an issue throughout the first disc where audio events would be randomly skipped. If I were to turn the voices off and turn the subtitling on, then all the lines of text would be displayed, but whenever the voice was on, independently of the subtitles, lines of dialogue and sound effects would just be totally skipped. I checked the troubleshooting FAQ and set all the "Gee whiz!" factors to their lowest in an attempt to fix the issue, but it still presented itself. I consulted with LucasArts support, who gave me what seemed to be a fix at the time. I was using Detonator 7.17, and I downgraded to the latest Microsoft-certified drivers, 6.34. By the time I received this recommendation, though, I was already into Disc Two. Going back to play the game again on Disc One revealed to me later that the problem still stands. For LucasArts' benefit, though, they did ship me a copy version-dated vQA12, meaning that I probably got a release-candidate, and not a final copy. Interestingly enough, hough, this problem was only restricted to Disc One, and in playing the game on an eMachines running Windows 98, the problem didn't show there. This was probably an isolated incident, therefore, and you shouldn't see it happen. But if you do, be sure to let LucasArts know. They'll go out of their way to make sure you're enjoying your game! Thanks, Jay!

Dagobah system...Must find Yoda...

Having only played the demo of Grim Fandango, I didn't have much to compare with for the progress LucasArts made with the 3D rendering, but I was greatly impressed by what I saw. The movements were very lifelike, with Guybrush's funny "heroic"-walk, and characters which would periodically shift weight from one leg to the other, or otherwise subtly move around. The only bad point I really found with some of the models is that doors never seem to look right when they shut (They're usually not rectangular), and people's mouths tend to foul up while talking. This is nothing new in most 3D engines, though, so I'll overlook it.

Holy Giant Mecha Monkey, Batman!

The game can be rendered in either OpenGL or Direct3D, but you wouldn't know that unless you had a problem with the game. LucasArts hid the API selection option in some troubleshooting controls in the game launcher, so you might just be using OpenGL and not even knowing it. I'm glad I was though, because using Detonator 7.17, the game crashed to the desktop if I tried to run it via Direct3D. Other game controls were similarly hidden or cryptic. Under the "Gee Whiz!" settings, you can adjust the movie quality, the music quality, the shadow quality, and other options, including the (lack of) multiplayer support. Just try to select that and you'll see what I mean. Incidentally, in Curse of Monkey Island, there was a similar option for enabling 3D rendering...makes me wonder if Monkey Island 5 will be multiplayer...

Back to the quality settings...They have two settings - Minimal and Maximal. That is really vague. I was rather disappointed that I couldn't try to force the resolution to 1600x1200 and try to play it that way...I felt like I didn't really have control over the game's options...or whenever I DID have control, it was only because I had stumbled upon a "secret" control panel. Granted, the game was never intended to push hardware to the next level, and the game is rendered is rendered in 640x480...but they did a really good job of packing in detail in 640x480.

The control was rather good too. I still felt confused - I wasn't playing a LucasArts game with a mouse anymore! I got used to the keyboard controls eventually though...and soon enough, I felt like I was playing Resident Evil Monkey...The character-based controls operate just like Resident Evil, where left and right turn your character while up and down move you forward and backward. Sometimes the character-based movement was just REALLY hard to manage though. When Guybrush hit a wall, he'd just *figure* out which way he was going to turn and head there almost as if he hadn't stopped. Needless to say, this would cause me some unnecessary load times if I accidentally went out a door instead of stopping by it. Frustrating, but it didn't happen very often...

All in all, the game is great. I loved it, despite its flaws. There were quite a few of them too, which made me wonder just how good/bad Grim Fandango was, for this to be LucasArts' second attempt at a 3D adventure game. The humor is hilarious, although I questioned whether or not it surpassed the other titles. I definitely believe this one to be funny in its own right, but I think Curse of Monkey Island still holds the humor throne...Or I did think that until I got to the end of the game...The circumstances of the last few puzzles just TOTALLY offset me. While I won't spoil the details, the last set of puzzles was very ingenious, very unique, and REALLY funny...especially the introduction to the final showdown. The ending was also really well done too, and the story was great. That alone made the price of admission well worth it.

Hadoken!

The game had a couple of bugs which may have just been present in my pre-release copy, but also other nuances which just keep nagging my mind. I doubt you'll see those on your side, though...so with that in mind, I definitely recommend getting your grubby hands on this game. And if you're new to the series, try to find Curse of Monkey Island as well - It comes with the original two DOS games, Secret of Monkey Island and Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. You'll not be sorry.

Story: 9
Graphics & Sound: 8
Gameplay: 8
Fun Factor: 10
Lasting Appeal: 9
Final Score: 9

Rating: 9/10 SystemLogistics