Retrospective: Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge

Sure, the denouement may have been coughed and spluttered over by the time Monkey Island 3 rolled around, with Guybrush appearing on the Caribbean seas floating in a funfair bumper car, but it was still a rug that a modern developer wouldn't dare to pull from beneath current audiences.

Then and now, the writing remains razor-sharp - with sequences like the voodoo doll banishing of Largo LaGrande, the spitting competition and asking for a coffin demonstration from Stan and nailing him in hilarious in both words and actions. In fact, something that the new graphics can't quite hold up is the sheer wonderment of the old-style character animation. Watching Stan's whirligig hands, or the way he'll suddenly measure up Guybrush for a coffin when he's not looking, is instantly funny in a way that adventures developed outside of LucasArts could never really manage.

The sheer number of in-jokes, nods and references remains undimmed by the passage of time too - at least for the increasingly pudgy and increasingly thirty-something gamers that the re-release is presumably squarely aimed at. Star Wars and Indiana Jones gags proliferate alongside nods to the first Monkey Island game, and it's hard not feel your inner self drift back to the long-lost times when the Lucas badge was a mark of undisputed quality. Tell that to kids nowadays and they'd laugh in your face before slashing your tyres.

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It's also interesting to play the game with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise in mind. A sequence in the game sees Guybrush imprisoned and attempting to lure a dog (called Walt) over to the bars, a set of keys dangling from his doggy mouth. This is in itself a reference to the Disneyland Pirates of the Caribbean ride, which explains why the same sequence also appears within the first movie when Captain Jack is incarcerated.

Throughout though, the Monkey Island games (with their ghost pirates, uptight governors and general nautical chaos) genuinely do feel like Pirates of the Caribbean forerunners when played with hindsight. You can't help feel that for the first movie (the decent one) Monkey Island was as far up the inspiration ladder as Disney's slightly shonky water-ride. Game and movie share the same DNA - and you wonder what might have happened had Lucas pumped some cash into a Monkey Island flick before Bruckheimer got his claws in. On paper, it sounds better. In reality, it's almost certainly a dream best left undreamt.

For a genre that has reportedly had a more protracted death than the UK postal services and print media combined, there's little doubt that the point and click is alive and well, pointing and clicking. The works of Telltale, Zombie Cow et al. have shown that there is still an appetite for using objects with other objects even if, I'd argue, most of their clientele are gentlemen of a certain age who witnessed the Lucas/Sierra adventure renaissance at first hand.

A more relevant question is whether we'll ever see an adventure game produced that is even half as good as Monkey Island 2. Thankfully the answer is a resounding yes. Not a new one of course, though - I'm referring to when LucasArts gets round to producing Special Editions of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max: Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle.

When nostalgia is correctly placed, it really is a marvellous thing.