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Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge  What is it about the totally subjective nature of existence that so petrifies mankind? Why is it that we all have to continually obsess about the true and objective nature of the infinite? Can't we just accept the inescapably vague nature of our existential crisis? If the pop-philosophy lessons of The Matrix have taught us anything, haven't they taught us that we should just live with the fact that our absurdly non-specific and internally justified conception of reality is merely one of many infinite possibilities?
I have, and look how happy I am! It's what allows me to choose my own preferred reality, which is periodically living life for fifteen to twenty-three hours at a stretch as a wise-cracking pirate called Guybrush Threepwood, solving voodoo puzzles throughout the Caribbean in Lucasarts' classic game Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge.
Massive existential questions aside, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge is simply an awesome, awesome, awesome game. To me it's a fantastic illustration of why people hate change; when something works well it shouldn't change, it should stay the exactly the same yet still somehow manage to stay totally new and fresh by continually producing improved versions of itself.
This plainly irrational desire comes from the reality that Monkey Island 2 is a fictional creation of such calibre that just makes people plain irrational. It's so good that it proves that a certain mythical level of excellence is attainable and, as such, it makes you feel like demanding that its producers provide you with the identical level of excellence every single time they even think of attaching the same name to any product.
So why is something like this so good? The problem with answering this question is that it isn't just about the game elements that we habitually we ask about today, the graphics, the sound, the gameplay; it's about us and how we view quality fiction as entertainment. The emergence of contemporary technological standards hasn't totally changed everything, we don't all just automatically like stories with massive explosions and amazing special effects and dislike things without them, these elements might enhance an experience but they don't make the experience.
The really good stuff is simple; it's the stuff with a really good story. The reason Monkey Island 2 is so good is also simple: it's in the writing, it's because every single element of the game screams of the talent and passion and commitment of its creators. It belongs to an elite cadre of games that have truly, truly excellent writers with a common vision behind them, something that many more modern games lack in a big way.
In Monkey 2, Guybrush's arch-nemesis LeChuck has returned and it's up to Guybrush to put things to rights through a mixture of treasure hunting and riotous voodoo idolatry. Humour-wise, the effect is like if Jerry Seinfeld had created a Point and Click RPG or if Charlie Kaufman decided to write one-liners for Lucasarts, Monkey Island has a genuinely coherent, desperately funny and completely absorbing story line with in-jokes-a-plenty and moments of true hilarity that make you proud to be affiliated with the human race.
The graphics are an example of the height of a style particular to Lucasarts' point and click adventures of the time, cartoony yet beautifully stylised they perfectly illustrate the great character of the storyline. The delightfully drawn and eclectic game art ranges from hilarious renditions of a Pirate Weenie Shack to a Pirate Dry-Cleaners perfectly illustrating the world of Piratey jingoism that the creators were going for. It's funny; for a fifteen year old game you'd expect the graphics to seem dated, that you'd continually have to make tired accommodations for the fact that it's an older game and that the graphics aren't as good as we're used to today, but because the graphics have that cartoonesque flavour they're effectively timeless. They're great because even by modern standards - cartoons are still cartoons; it means that you can play the game even today and it still looks beautiful.
The sound was another arena in which Monkey Island 2 truly stands out from the crowd. While the sound effects were pretty regular and there is an absence of speech—which I quite like—it was the music that really went a long way to defining the game. The Monkey 2 theme music makes you want to throw it all in and just become a stand-up comedian slash pirate because it epitomises everything that is funny about pirates.
The in-game interaction within the game world is one of the things that made it so incredibly playable and made the puzzles so simplistically confounding. The point and click interface means that you have a list of actions such as "Pick up" or "Talk to" and when you held your cursor over a character or object you could "Talk to Largo LeGrand' or "Use crazy straw on yellow drink". But to be fair and balanced I could see how these sort of (partially) trial and error puzzles wouldn't appeal to everyone. The vast amount of possible combinations makes for some bizarre possibilities and some infuriatingly oblique solutions to puzzles. While I for one love the trial and error of trying different approaches, the many sleepless nights, the hours of walking around one room in the game desperately trying every conceivable possibility to solve a puzzle, I realise it's not everyone's cup of tea.
It's important to realise that at the time, these sorts of adventure puzzle games were the best-selling games around. Nothing surpassed them in terms of sales and now hardly any of these games are released because today, things have changed.
Why is this? Because at the time, it took me about four years to complete Monkey Island 2. Back in the hey-day of the adventure game, the no-effort answers to the questions that were driving you insane weren't always five seconds and a Google search away. I finished Monkey Island 2 through painstaking work and trial and error, every single thing in the game, and as such, sad or not, I felt an amazing feeling of accomplishment for doing so. I also got to know the character of the game in a way that I wouldn't if I just strolled through it with the solution. Even though you can choose to play an easier version of the game at the beginning with more simplistic puzzles, it's still hard to resist the lure of the quick and easy answer.
So, unless you possess the iron will required to ignore the Internet's siren song, you're not going to enjoy this game on the level that I did when I played it, because at some stage you'll get sick and tired of trying to figure out how to get the last part of your LeChuck voodoo doll and just look it up on the Net. I don't see this as a limitation - while the puzzles are genuinely difficult and at many times the answers are seemingly random, the internet isn't Lucasarts fault. It's a pity though, Monkey Island 2 is a truly great game but in a way it's kinda like Playboy magazine, a paradigm example of a great genre the Internet left behind.
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