This particular journalist remembers well the day that, nearly twenty years ago he handed over a crumpled ten pound note – one that he’d recently swapped at Budgens for a sack of piggy-bank swill – to the bespectacled owner of an indy games store in return for the promising-looking cardboard container in which the game came. They were all independent – games stores we mean – back in those days. Also worthy of note was that the shop itself was humbled alongside the almighty Beatties; a far more popular boutique by all accounts, specialising as it did in model aeroplanes, radio-controlled cars and Citadel lead miniatures. Videogames were marginalised to a certain degree and those who spent their time and income engaging with them seen as pale-skinned outcasts – geeks, if you will – that not only shut out the sunshine with blackout curtains for a better view of their bulbous screens, but were perceived also to shut out the world as a whole.

These days of course, everybody is playing games, but their evolution from a hobby that was once perceived more geeky than decoupage, through to the mainstream acceptability we now take for granted, we reckon owes at least by some small token, a little thanks to The Secret Of Monkey Island and indeed a number of other LucasArts point-and-clicks of the period.

You see they were funny. And not only to the geeky, how shall we put this, Emo kids. Technically speaking this was before Emo. Premo. No, the Secret Of Monkey Island was funny as hell to anyone, gamer or not, who would care to pass a glance over your shoulder back in the day would be sucked in at first by a chuckle, and then by the burning desire to assist in the puzzle-solving, hoying useless remarks at the keeper of the mouse. “Use the chicken with the pully in the middle on the bridge troll”. “Say Arf, Arf, Woof” and so on. To be honest, even back then we just wished they’d f*** off.

This update is marvellous. Taking the original script, puzzles, characters... in fact changing nothing in this respect, we’re able to scientifically test the efficacy of the game twenty years on. In order to do this, we’ll need a control group – those who have never before played the game – and a nostalgia-drenched group who loved the game the first time. Both will need to test whether the game still induces regular laughter and whether or not the puzzles remain engaging and fun. Unfortunately, we were unable to find anyone in the first group type, so the remainder of this review is from the perspective of a nostalgically-challenged raving Monkey Island fanboy.

… continued