The Secret Of Monkey Island
The game begins on an island in the Caribbean. The main character by the hilarious name of Guybrush Threepwood who’s goal in life is to become a pirate. There is a ghost pirate named LeChuck that is madly in love with the Governor of Melee Island, Elaine. During the course of the game, he kidnaps Elaine and takes her to Monkey Island. Guybrush gathers a crew, buys a boat and sails to Monkey Island to rescue Elaine.
The game is an adventure game. Pretty much you have a cursor that you can click on things. You can look, use, take, etc. many items. Those items can in turn be used in other places to either open more of the story or get you more items.
The game is full of jokes and references to other games and movies. One of the best known jokes is the “Stump Joke” where the player finds a stump in the forest maze on Melee Island. When you look at the stump, Guybrush looks inside and says he can see an opening inside it with catacombs. He then tries to go inside and at this point the game says insert disk #22 to continue. Since the game originally came on 4 or 8 diskettes, there is no disk #22. You hit enter and it keeps asking for higher and higher numbered disks until Guybrush finally gives up and says, “I guess I can’t go down there. I’ll just have to skip that part of the game”. That joke caused so many people to call Lucasarts and complain or ask for the missing disks. It was then removed from the re-releases of the game.
The game is so popular it has a cult following online. When they were going to release Tales of Monkey Island, a 5 part game for the Wii, PC, Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3, they decided to re-release the original game. The 2009 re-release had updated graphics and sound and featured full voice acting by the voice actors from the other games in the series. Unfortunately, the Stump Joke is missing.
Lufia & the Fortress of Doom
Lufia is a traditional menu-based RPG with some puzzle elements. While most games start at the beginning of the series, the Fortress of Doom starts 100 years after the second game in the series. It’s kind of confusing, the second game in the series is a prequel to this one.
It starts with a group of warriors led by a dude with the stupid name of Maxim. The other members of your party are Selan, Artea (both decent names) and Guy (did they run out of ideas?). Pretty much the game starts right before the end boss battles from the second game. After defeating the Sinistrals (another stupid name) the real game begins (well, 99 years later).
The story is about the Sinistrals rising and the player has to stop them. Simple enough.
Yes, but not only yours.
I may not think much about the character names, but this game was one of my favorite SNES RPGs. I liked it because it was one of the first RPGs I played that had a story that drew me in. Another thing I liked were the puzzles. Most RPGs, you just go from point A to point B and kill things. The dungeons in Lufia are full of puzzles like those in the Zelda series. Some rooms may not let you pass until you answer a riddle or find the hidden door. Other rooms you may need to arrange things in a particular order for the door to the next room to unlock.
I know I said this is a traditional menu-based RPG, but that’s not very accurate. In battle, they have a cross with the battle commands. Center is attack, up is magic, left is items, etc.
Some Screenshots
