I’m back from holiday, while the parents went out running I stayed in the Youth Hostel and played Secret of Monkey Island. I clocked up over 6 hours of play time and finished it. I think it’s the first point-and-click adventure game I’ve ever completed, the story is engaging and brilliantly simple. The characters are believable and easy to relate to. And there are some genuinely bizarre but funny moments which take the player by surprise.
The gameplay revolves mainly around exploring places, talking to people and hoarding items in your inventory then using those items to complete puzzles or challenges to continue the story. If it weren’t for the story I would have stopped playing after about an hour because after that point my main motivation for playing was to see what happens next. The ending was predictable from about halfway through (Guybrush Threepwood falls in love with Elaine Marley and he rescues her from the throes of LeChuck the ghost pirate) but I carried on because I wanted to see how the narrative played out.
The art style is beautiful, see these two examples, the original:
And the special edition artwork:
But this post isn’t just to wax lyrical about how fine Secret of Monkey Island is, the Steam Holiday Sale thing is happening at the moment and I bought Day of Defeat: Source for £1.50. I wasn’t really buying the game, more just the game models to use in Gmod. The maps (I haven’t explored all of them yet) all seem to be constricted to endless European streets in various degrees of ruin. I did my best to pose some German Army models in Dod_donner:
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