Return To Monkey Island review – video game piracy at its best

metro.co.uk:

Guybrush Threepwood and the world’s favourite, and funniest, point ‘n’ click adventure sets sails for a highly successful comeback.

When you’re dealing with video games of all eras on a daily basis, nostalgia doesn’t often grip you quite the way it does other people – who might suddenly see a beloved game for the first time in 30 years, without having ever thought about it once in the intervening time. We’re not in quite that position when it comes to Monkey Island, but it’s certainly a long time since we’ve played any of the originals, and this return to the golden age of piracy, and graphic adventures, has been a real treat.

Although the last entry wasn’t that long ago, with Telltale Games’ okay-ish Tales Of Monkey Island, it’s the first three entries in the point ‘n’ click series which are the most revered. The first two were directed by Ron Gilbert, with Dave Grossman acting as designer/programmer (along with Double Fine’s Tim Schafer). The third entry, The Curse Of Monkey Island, didn’t involve any of the original creators and while it was surprisingly good it ignored the weird theme park ending of the second game and carried on very much like a Pirates Of The Caribbean game before there was ever a Pirates Of The Caribbean movie.

The comparisons with Disney’s pirate franchise are not skin deep, as the first three Monkey Island games are not only definitive examples of the graphic adventure genre but they’re also very funny. They’re all essentially comedies, which is an achievement not to be underestimated given the general quality of video game script writing in the 90s and the fact that even today video games are very rarely intentionally amusing.

The fact that Disney now owns Lucasfilm had many assuming that Monkey