The Secret of Monkey Island

The Good
The Secret Of Monkey Island for the Sega CD is a near-perfect port of the DOS game of the same name. Most of what is great about this Lucasfilm PC adventure game is still great on the Sega CD.

The player takes control of a young and naive wannabe pirate as he explores the people, places and puzzles found in some Caribbean islands.

Initially, you are on a quest to become a pirate, at least in the eyes of the pirate leaders who hang out in a crummy looking bar.

However, as the game's story progresses you quickly become entangled in a supernatural and super funny world of zombie pirates, sword fighting, jail breaks, monkeys, a beautiful governor, cannibals and, yes, a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle of it.

Guybrush is (mostly) easy to control with the standard Sega controller, and a password feature allows you to save your progress in the game.

But for a few faults the game is a perfect port of an adventure games classic. What faults are these you may be asking? Well, some are the fault of Sega and some are the fault of Lucasfilm.

The Bad
The Sega CD promised to be the "Next Level" in gaming, but the hype was mostly just that.

The Sega CD had less internal memory then the Sega Genesis, and could only utilize 64 on-screen colors out of a total pallet of 512.

These two design flaws made it difficult for Lucasfilm to produce a perfect port of the Secret Of Monkey Island.

Standard PC computers often had more internal memory and the ability to utilize far more colors.

The Sega CD port has fewer colors, giving it a somewhat duller or darker tone.

The Sega CD port has to pause, quite often, to load the music, or whenever you move to a new location or, in the sword fighting quest, look through your list of available insults. It rarely goes longer then a few minutes, but it is noticeable.

The password feature, while helpful, doesn't always save all the items you collected. It does save the items you need to complete the required puzzles, but it does seem to discard the optional inventory items, where much of the game's humor comes from.

Finally, I have to say that it probably would have made much more sense to have released Monkey Island 1 and 2 as a boxed set collection or, the first Monkey Island with another classic adventure games.

The Sega CD port of Monkey Island didn't sell enough copies to warrant future ports of Lucadfilm adventure games. Why?

Beyond a lack luster advertising campaign, little in the game really takes advantage of the massive storage capacity of the Sega.

Had the first two Monkey Island games been sold together on the Sega CD, or maybe the first two Manic Mansions sold with Monkey Island 1, it would have been in a better position to justify the port of classic adventure games to the CD format.

The Bottom Line
Sega CD gamers have, in this game, a nearly perfect port of a PC adventure game classic. The Secret Of Monkey doesn't highlight the Sega CD potential terribly well, and suffers from the system's embarrassing hardware limitations. However, the game is still fun to play and a must own for any die-hard adventure gamer.