The Secret of Monkey Island

(The following piece was originally published on bostonphoenix.com on November 19, 2004. With news of an HD remake for Xbox Live Arcade and PC, it seemed appropriate to revisit it. Reading it now, I'm pretty sure the game continues to be more popular than I gave it credit for.)

Above: The start of it all.

The only problem with The Secret of Monkey Island was that it arrived about 10 years too early. As Pirates of the Caribbean proved, America loves comic buccaneers. I'm not sure whether Monkey Island lacked marketing muscle, whether audiences weren't happy with its dialogue-heavy gameplay, or if the nascent PC market in 1990 simply didn't have the sort of mass-market appeal it does today, but it seems tragically few people have played this game. The name of its hero, Guybrush Threepwood, should be as ingrained in the American consciousness as Mario and Sonic.

Monkey Island's greatness lay in its writing. While most games of the era were simple shoot-'em-ups and platform games, Monkey Island presaged the advent of software that was more about story and character than about high scores. And it was funny as hell.

At the beginning of the game, you arrive on Melee Island and track down the pirate bar to declare your intentions. "My name is Guybrush Threepwood, and I want to be a pirate," you say.

The pirate you're speaking to starts laughing. "That's the most ridiculous name I've ever heard!"

"Well, what's YOUR name?"

He adopts a grim expression. "My name is Mancomb Seepgood."

Guybrush wants to be a pirate for no reason other than that it sure sounds neat, but as he proceeds through the three trials necessary to becoming a pirate, he quickly becomes involved in a love triangle between Melee Governor Elaine Marley and the ghost pirate LeChuck, and eventually finds himself on the mythical Monkey Island. Along the way, he hobnobs with a menagerie of ne'er-do-wells and malcontents, gets shot out of not one, but two cannons, and discovers the uses of a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle. And these are some of the less bizarre things that happen.

Much of the game progresses through dialogue trees. When speaking to a new character, you're given the choice of about five statements, each one resulting in an often-hilarious response. Usually the majority of the conversation has nothing to do with progressing through the game, but who cares? Pleasures like these are rare to find in video games.

Even swordfights proceed through dialogue rather than action. As your swordfighting instructor informs you, "Swordfighting is a little like making love. It's not always what you do, but what you say." And he's right. The only way to win is to out-insult your opponent, and it's a shame that Monkey Island's witty repartee has never caught on. Finding someone who knows the correct retort to "You fight like a dairy farmer!" is one of life's little pleasures.

The puzzles are just as unique. The door to LeChuck's underground headquarters is – what else? – a giant monkey head, and the key is a six-foot Q-tip. I'm sure you can figure out how that one works. But how, exactly, does one get "a head" in navigating?

Add to this a quirky Caribbean score and you have something that's never been duplicated – hell, no one's even tried. And though LucasArts has released three Monkey Island sequels, all of which have been pretty good, none has disproved the lesson Guybrush learns by the end of The Secret of Monkey Island: "Never spend more than 20 bucks on a computer game."

A fond farewell

Above: It's so hard to say goodbye.

I carried them with me for years, through cramped dorm rooms and ratty apartments. Whenever I packed up to move again, along came the dog-eared New Balance shoebox, whose ragged corners I'd reinforced with electrical tape. Its contents were the best of the 16-bit era. A Link to the Past. Mega Man X. Super Castlevania IV. Donkey Kong Contry. Contra III. Super Mario World. F-Zero. And more and more.

Problem was, they weren't mine.

In my freshman year of college, I made friends with a guy whose passion for video games dwarfed that of anyone else I'd known. The man was an encyclopedia of game knowledge. No detail escaped his attention. He had a penchant for launching into impassioned monologues at the mention of almost any game. When he found out I had never played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, he all but forced me to go buy it. (He was right about it -- it's now one of my top-10 favorite games.) He extolled the virtues of Tenchu: Stealth Assasins. I picked that one up too, and when I said it seemed merely pretty good, he said, "Don't even talk to me until you've got 100% clearance on the first board." He seemed to mean it.*

Shortly before spring break, we found ourselves reminiscing about Super Metroid, and hatched a plan to play through it in one sitting. I'd bring the game and the system to school after the break. For his part, he brought that box full of classic games, most of which I had never played before. I hadn't even bought a SNES until well into the 32-bit era, and it was exclusively to get my hands on a copy of Super Metroid.

Beating Super Metroid took only a short evening -- it's easy to remember it as this massive game, but even if you're not doing a speed run you can polish it off in about 4 hours if you know what you're doing -- but we spent the rest of the semester, along with our neighbors, polishing off the rest of what he'd brought. Nothing unified the residents of that floor like the Super Nintendo. I have a memory of leaving the common room while one kid was deep into Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels, only return hours later to find him in the same spot. He eventually beat it, somehow.

People have a habit of simply vanishing when the school year ends, which is how I found myself with custody of the games over the summer. Suddenly, no one was left in the dorm but me and the box of games. That was a tough summer -- I'd run out of money over the course of my freshman year, and my few attempts to find a summer job came up short. Sporadic temp work doing data entry was the best I found, so I had plenty of time to plow through that SNES library. It was like compressing the first half of the 1990s into three months.

I brought the games with me the next year, figuring I'd return them whenever I saw him. But somehow I just never reconnected with my friend. He was a senior by then, and spent half the year in L.A. I was dealing with my own problems, the usual post-adolescent stuff, too focused on my own gloom to look outward. He graduated and moved on, and I scraped through the next few years, always with the SNES games in tow. Over time, I started to think of them as mine, although I never forgot that they weren't.

Which is why, when my friend emailed me out of the blue a couple weeks ago, my first thought was: "Damn, I'm going to have to give those games back." Not that I would seriously consider keeping them -- there's no grandfather clause here. And the advent of services like the Virtual Console means that playing perfectly emulated versions of those games is always an option (not to mention that I'd actually be able to save my game if I downloaded A Link to the Past). Nor was he getting in touch just to get the games back -- he didn't even remember that I had them in the first place.

I met him for dinner, with the tattered New Balance box in tow. Letting go of the games was actually easier than I thought it would be. We tend to get attached to these physical objects, but they're really only symbols. I carted them around with me for eight years, even though I stopped playing them after one year. They were a reminder of what had seemed like a short-lived friendship, and the brightest spots in an otherwise dark period. And as we sat there last week, trading meticulous tales of our exploits in BioShock, Fallout 3, Resident Evil 4, Far Cry 2, and on and on, I was happy to realize I didn't need to carry those games with me anymore.

*Not that I ever pulled it off! Tenchu is impossible.

That old-time rock 'n' roll

Above: The ending screen from Bucky O'Hare. It was totally worth the effort.

I often suspect, but don't want to admit, that many of my fondest gaming memories have less to do with the games themselves, and more to do with the circumstances in which I played them. Our neighbors down the street had an NES long before we did, and my first memories of playing Super Mario Bros. are at their house on a summer day, after splashing around in their pool all afternoon. I spent every day of February vacation in sixth grade trying to beat Sonic the Hedgehog 2 with two other kids in my neighborhood, and I was the first to succeed. Playing Quake 2 for hundreds of hours in high school wouldn't have mattered nearly as much if I hadn't formed a clan with some of my best friends.

It's hard to evalute old games fairly. Have you ever gotten your hands on a decades-old classic for the first time and wondered what all the fuss was about? Maybe you have warm and fuzzy feelings toward an 8-bit game nobody else liked, simply because it was the only one you owned and you had mastered it. Old games stir up all kinds of associations, prejudices, and emotions that we just can't separate from the gameplay as it is.

I had a chance to relive the childhood experience recently, at my friend Mike's bachelor party. We hooked up a Wii in one room and an NES in the other.* We had loads of classic games, including Mega Man 2, River City Ransom, a couple of Double Dragons, and so on. But for some reason, as the night wore on, a group of us found ourselves committed to playing Bucky O'Hare. Apparently, it was based on a short-lived cartoon show from the early 1990s, of which I have no memory. But this was probably around the time that any hope of high-quality licensed games was starting to die.

It's not that Bucky O'Hare was bereft of good ideas. Although you start the game playing only as the title character, as you progress you gain the ability to switch between Bucky and his crew members on the fly. Each one has a unique power that comes in handy at different times. One of them can hover, one can climb walls, one has a super-powered weapon, and so on. It's a neat mechanic, and the levels -- particularly near the end -- are designed to force you to switch characters often.

The problem, though, was that the game was brutally difficult in the classic 8-bit sense. Every boss battle was based on identifying fast-moving and constantly shifting attack patterns. Levels involving moving mine carts and shifting platforms required memorization in addition to quick reflexes. One-hit deaths were everywhere. The saving grace was that Bucky granted infinite continues, not just from the start of each world, but from the beginning of each substage. That's the only thing that kept us going.

So we pressed on, through the night and into the early morning. We traded off continues. Those not holding the controller looked for patterns and advised the player what hazards were coming next. At boss encounters, we analyzed attacks and suggested possible weaknessse. When things got really rough, my long-ago childhood friend Ryan -- the gaming savant whom I've mentioned before -- came into to slam the door. He bailed us out of so many seemingly impossible boss battles that we started referring to him as our closer.

We didn't beat Bucky O'Hare that night. Fortunately, the game had a password system, so we brought it to Mike's house the night before the wedding and got right back to work. Our group was smaller now, but no less dedicated. Only the groomsmen remained. Two days before, we had been strangers. Now, we worked together like a commando unit. We penetrated ever deeper into the endless final castle. We ascended shifting blocks tipped with insta-kill spikes. We swerved through speeder bike levels, and and dueled a massive airship. Ryan took pity on us and obliterated a Mother Brain-like boss. We kept going past midnight. Eventually, I could take no more, and fell asleep on the couch.

When I woke up shortly thereafter, no one was playing anymore, and I saw the screen that graces the top of this post. "Did we do it?" I asked, although the answer was clear. "We did it," they said. Victory.

Bucky O'Hare is not a great game. I would not recommend that anybody download the ROM, or petition Nintendo to release it on Virtual Console. But it's worth remembering, as we binge on one fall release after another, what pleasures can be found in playing one game, any game, in the right circumstances. It's satisfying to beat a game. It's fun to play with others. And it's gratifying to meet people who care about the same silly things you do. This is why I started playing video games.

*Isn't this what you do at a bachelor party?

Man and Megaman

Above: There are places I remember / All my life, though some have changed / Some forever, not for better

I've been playing Mega Man 9, and enjoying it -- mostly. But there's an unintended consequence of my playing this game: It's causing me to re-evaluate my relationship with Mega Man 2.

Along with Contra, Mega Man 2 is my favorite NES game. Both are considered among the most difficult 8-bit games, but I can beat each one without breaking a sweat. That's not thanks to any particular skill on my part. It's because I played these games until I knew every screen by heart. Playing them isn't a matter of reacting to what's happening onscreen. It's all muscle memory. I know every move my enemies make before they make it. I know what hazards will appear onscreen at each moment. I can leap with confidence to platforms that haven't even appeared yet. I can fire at the exact location my offscreen foes will be seconds from now.

I can tell you everything you need to know about Mega Man 2 more easily than I can remember my family members' birthdays. Beat Metal Man first, then use the Metal Blade to defeat Flash Man, Bubble Man, and Wood Man. The Wood Shield takes down Air Man, whose Air Shooter makes short work of Crash Man (hang onto those Crash Missiles; you'll need them in Dr. Wily's Castle). Use Flash Stop against Quick Man and Bubble Lead against Heat Man.

In Dr. Wily's castle, the Quick Boomerangs will dispatch both the flying dragon and the Gutsdozer with ease. Use Metal Blades to knock off the second stage boss, and Crash Missiles against the fourth stage boss (hot tip: to avoid getting hit by the converging fire from the latter boss, pause and un-pause the game as quickly as you can until the rounds have passed through you). To destroy Dr. Wily's ship, first use a charged Atomic Fire to blast away the hull, and then go at the cockpit with Metal Blades. To defeat the final boss, Bubble Lead is your way to go.

And, of course, if you want to skip straight to Dr. Wily's castle at start-up, the code is A1 B2 B4 C1 C5 D1 D3 E3 E5.

I say all this not because you need to know it -- you probably knew it already -- but to demonstrate how reflexive one's knowledge of an NES game had to be. For me, that was partly a result of simply playing the same games over and over for weeks or months at a time. But it's also what was required to beat these games. You had to know them inside out. They were littered with traps that would be unavoidable unless you already knew they were coming. Unless you could traverse the levels with your eyes closed, you couldn't do it at all. With minimal extra lives, and a frequent "game over" screen, getting through a Mega Man game was a matter of attrition.

This is still the case with Mega Man 9.

As others have noted, and as I will note in my review, Mega Man 9 is a perfect emulation of a Nintendo game. From the graphics, to the sound, to the level design, you could have told me this game was originally released in 1988 and I'd believe you. That's the argument in the game's favor. It's also a stark reminder of how games have changed since then -- for the better, I'd argue.

There is a feeling of accomplishment in getting through a tough game, sure. And the platforming challenges and boss battles I've encountered so far in Mega Man 9 aren't all that difficult from a purely mechanical standpoint. They just require a little planning and practice. (An early example: In Splash Woman's stage, you drop from one screen to the next. If you are not already pressing left or right on the d-pad when the screen scrolls, you will not have enough time to avoid hitting insta-kill spikes.) But this method of level design feels cheap to my 2008 self. Why shouldn't I be able to hang back and regroup? I've seen the "game over" screen more after three levels of Mega Man 9 than I did in the entirety of BioShock.

Still, my enjoyment of Mega Man 9 increased when I decided to hit up GameFaqs for the optimal stage order. For a minute I felt like I was cheating somehow, but then I realized: I never figured anything out in Mega Man 2 on my own. Not a thing. Not only was I told which weapon to use on what boss, I even watched my friend Ryan go through all the levels before I ever completed any of them myself.

There's the basic truth of this: In all my warm and fuzzy memories of Mega Man 2, I cannot remember a time when I didn't know all there was to know about it. That level of mastery colors my perception of the game, as it has for the past 20 years.

Now? I may be able to look up strategies to help me get through Mega Man 9, but after that I'll be done with it. This has to do with how games have changed, and how I've changed as a player. What this game has done is convince me that if I played Mega Man 2 for the first time today, I wouldn't like it very much. I can't imagine anything sadder.

Cheat codes versus public education

Video game codes I remember without even trying:

• 30 lives in Contra: Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A
• Face Mike Tyson in Mike Tyson's Punch Out: 007-373-5963
• Warp to Dr. Wiley's castle in Mega Man 2: A1 B2 B4 C1 C5 D1 D3 E3 E5
• Play Metroid without Samus's suit: JUSTIN BAILEY
• Jump to the second quest in The Legend of Zelda: ZELDA
  
• Activate blood in Mortal Kombat (Sega Genesis): A B A C A B B
• Invincibility in Doom: IDDQD
• Acquire all weapons and keys in Doom: IDKFA
  

Things I remember from high school chemistry class:

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