Monkey Island 2 Special Edition Review

16 Jul 2010 at 11:15:01 by Peter Parrish
Systems used to review this title: (360)

It pains me to say it, but Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge Special Edition is not the definitive version of Monkey Island 2.

It's close. Oh man, is it ever close. But too many sloppy design decisions and niggling bugs spoil what could have been the perfect presentation of Guybrush Threepwood's greatest adventure.

Of course it still is Guybrush Threepwood's greatest adventure, and for the price of £6.99 GBP/$9.99 USD it's absolutely worth it. If you've never played MI2 before, or fancy hearing it with the tremendous cast from Curse of Monkey Island and the first Special Edition, then do not hesitate. It's one of LucasArts' best point-and-click adventure games; well written, full of memorable characters, often funny (though occasionally quite bleak) and with an ending that will screw up your mind. The issues I'm going to mention here range from quite annoying to very minor. They unashamedly represent the picking of nits - but as this package must be judged on its presentation and special-ness, these are the sorts of problems that need to be highlighted.

Good things first though. The aforementioned voice acting is absolutely splendid, with a smattering of exceptions. Whether you enjoy the new background art and character design is always going to be a matter of personal taste, but there are far fewer moments of accidental pixilation than in the first special edition. Some scenes (such as Woodtick) appear a little washed out, but in general LucasArts' mysterious team of outsourced Singaporean artists has done a fine job. 'Classic' graphics can once again be reached at any moment by the touch of a gamepad button. This time, excellently, there is the option to hear the new voice acting in this mode. At various points in the game there's a chance to listen to snippets of a half insightful, half amusing and fully rambling commentary track featuring the key Monkey Island players of Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer. This is welcome too, and something that will hopefully make a reappearance in any other special editions LucasArts chooses to release.

The controls, which were something of a blundering mess in the first special edition, have been refined and somewhat improved this time. A new 'manual control' method allows players to walk Guybrush around with the left thumbstick, while the right pops up a cursor to move over points of interest. The right trigger brings up a wheel of options (talk to, push, look at) for objects and people and the left gives access to the inventory. When manual control is not being used, pointing the cursor somewhere and pressing A will make Guybrush head over there. It doesn't best the old SCUMM system of control, but this time around it doesn't actively hamper any puzzles either.

Jesse Harlin has done an outstanding job translating the game's score to modern instrumentation. The MI2 theme would probably still sound iconic played on a kazoo by someone with no lips, but Harlin also recreates many of the other tracks - short, background pieces of music from places like Phatt and Dinky Island - with a mixture of reverence and originality.

However, this just makes it even more of a shame that the Xbox 360 version of MI2: SE is completely missing the title's innovative iMuse system. This was LucasArts' audio system that allowed smooth, subtle transitions between musical themes and is talked about fondly on the new commentary track. Each different location (the individual houses in Woodtick, for example) has its own music and when Guybrush enters these places, the audio should merge into the new tune. On the 360, sadly, each location simply starts up a brand new, jarring tune. You can hear the difference between 360, PC and PS3 versions in this handy video, which shows what Xbox users are missing out on. It seems that the 360 is simply missing a crucial audio file, so this could hopefully be fixed in a later patch. To release it without this file in the first place, though, is an embarrassing oversight.

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