The Secret of Monkey Island (Sega CD) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
120A playthrough of JVC's 1992 point-and-click graphic adventure for the Sega CD, The Secret of Monkey Island.
Guybrush Threepwood's first adventure - what a classic! With an insane sense of humor, the infamous insult-driven pirate duels, and a pair of yak-slobber covered wax lips as an inventory item, how can you go wrong?
The Secret of Monkey Island was an incredibly start to an amazing series, setting the stage for 1991's Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge and 1997's The Curse of Monkey Island.
The Sega CD version of it is a fairly good rendition, too. It's based on the VGA Dos version, but uses the updated interface from Monkey Island 2, replacing the text-based inventory lists with graphical icons and simplifying the verb panel. Just about all of the original's content is here, with the only notable omissions being the ability to kill Guybrush by staying underwater for more than ten minutes and the Sierra Online death scene gag on Monkey Island. I show both of these changes in the video. The graphics, though cut from the PC's 256-color VGA graphics to fit the Genesis's much more limited color palette, are all faithfully reproduced and look good - I dont understand why the game is so dark though. It certainly wasn't this muted looking on a computer. The music sounds fantastic, as always - this version plays Redbook tracks recorded from the Roland MT-32 soundtrack of the computer game, and despite the way they cut out when the game loads, the tracks all suit the game perfectly. Too bad so much of it is played in silence!
Unfortunately, Monkey Island does suffer some of the same issues that other PC-to-Sega CD ports did. The biggest offender is the loading time, which nearly ruins the experience. If you've played Willy Beamish on the Sega CD, you know what I mean. Everytime you move to a new screen, expect to wait 10-30 seconds before you can do anything. There is also considerable slowdown in many scenes (the Scumm Bar, the birds flying overhead on Monkey Island), but the most glaring issue that this causes is in the swordfighting duels. The longer dialogue trees slow the game down enough that the menu controls become almost entirely unresponsive. Considering how many times you have to engage in these battles, their performance really leaves an ugly aftertaste.
For what it's worth, the game did support the Sega Mouse!
Still, at its core, this is The Secret of Monkey Island. It's not the ideal way to play it, but it did provide a viable alternative for anyone that didn't have a PC in the early 90s, and it's still an interesting footnote for the series since it was the only console port of any game in the series until MI4 made an appearance on PS2 and Xbox a decade later.
If you want a more solid LucasArts port on an early 90s console, though, I'd go with Loom on the TurboGrafx CD. It's a much smoother experience overall.
But really, if you don't like The Secret of Monkey Island, all I can say to you is "[h]ow appropriate. You fight like a cow."
____________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
Visit for the latest updates!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NintendoComplete/540091756006560
https://twitter.com/nes_complete