The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition Part 7. Preparing for a voyage. (New Game Blind)
1Welcome to my The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition let's play. My name is digidv85 but please call me dig for short. This is a blind let's play, although I take constant advantage of the hint system since the puzzles can be bizarrely difficult. It will feature a new game to completion. Gameplay shown on Xbox 360.
About Game: The Secret of Monkey Island is a 1990 point-and-click graphic adventure game developed and published by Lucasfilm Games. It takes place in a fictional version of the Caribbean during the age of piracy. The player assumes the role of Guybrush Threepwood, a young man who dreams of becoming a pirate and explores fictional islands while solving puzzles.
The game was conceived in 1988 by Lucasfilm employee Ron Gilbert, who designed it with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. Gilbert's frustrations with contemporary adventure titles led him to make the player character's death almost impossible, which meant that gameplay focused the game on exploration. The atmosphere was based on that of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride. The Secret of Monkey Island was the fifth game built with the SCUMM engine, which was heavily modified to include a more user-friendly interface.
Critics praised The Secret of Monkey Island for its humor, audiovisuals, and gameplay. The game spawned a number of sequels, collectively known as the Monkey Island series. Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman also led the development of the sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. LucasArts released a remake of the original in 2009, which was also well received by the gaming press.
Gameplay: The Secret of Monkey Island is a 2D adventure game played from a third-person perspective. Via a point-and-click interface, the player guides protagonist Guybrush Threepwood through the game's world and interacts with the environment by selecting from twelve verb commands (nine in newer versions) such as "talk to" for communicating with characters and "pick up" for collecting items between commands and the world's objects in order to successfully solve puzzles and thus progress in the game. While conversing with other characters, the player may choose between topics for discussion that are listed in a dialog tree; the game is one of the first to incorporate such a system. The in-game action is frequently interrupted by cutscenes. Like other LucasArts adventure games, The Secret of Monkey Island features a design philosophy that makes the player character's death nearly impossible.
Development: Ron Gilbert conceived the idea of a pirate adventure game in 1988, after completing Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. He first wrote story ideas about pirates while spending the weekend at a friend's house. Gilbert experimented with introductory paragraphs to find a satisfactory idea. His initial story featured unnamed villains that would eventually become LeChuck and Elaine; Guybrush was absent at this point. He pitched it to Lucasfilm Games's staff as a series of short stories. Gilbert's idea was warmly received, but production was postponed because Lucasfilm Games assigned its designers, including Gilbert, to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure. Development of The Last Crusade was finished in 1989, which allowed Gilbert to begin production of The Secret of Monkey Island, then known internally under the working title Mutiny on Monkey Island.
Special Edition: LucasArts released a remake with updated audiovisuals titled The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition in July 2009 for iPhone, Microsoft Windows, and Xbox 360 exclusively via digital distribution. LucasArts confirmed the game's development on June 1, 2009; rumors appeared several days earlier when the Xbox 360 version of the game received an USK rating. The game was first displayed to the public at the 2009 E3 in June. The remake features hand-drawn visuals with more detail, a remastered musical score, voice work for characters, and a hint system. The developers included the function to switch between 2009 and original audiovisuals at will.
LucasArts's game producer Craig Derrick and his team conceived the idea of the remake in 2008. After researching the Monkey Island series' history, they decided to make "something fresh and new while staying true to the original", which resulted in the idea of The Secret of Monkey Island's remake. The developers tried to leave much of the original design unchanged. Any changes were intended to achieve the level of immersion desired for the original. To that end, they added details like a pirate ship or pirates talking in the background of scenes. While the team considered the SCUMM interface revolutionary at the time, LucasArts community manager Brooks Brown noted that it is incompatible with an analog stick, which most consoles use. The designers made the cursor contextual to the game objects as the primary interface.
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