alt Hacker NewsMonkey Island: all 13 versions side by side
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Every time I see CGA graphics in cyan, magenta, black and white it reminds me of my youth and how 'cold' it felt at the time to see those graphics, I could never really get used to it. When EGA/VGA graphics came along it felt so warm and in my experience games really started to come to life.
Respect for the graphics artists in general for that time to be able to make something out of almost nothing, four colors or less and/or black and white low resolution.
Monkey Island II was one of the reasons I got into computers as a kid originally (an industry where I of course work today).
The latest Monkey Island was a disappointment - not the artwork, the Disney nature of it. It was bubbly zany, had a child and a dad as narrators and had music and other aspects of a children's movie. Maybe I didn't age enough and didn't reproduce enough to fit the creator's demographic, but I miss the self deprecating and slightly mysterious aura of the early games.
VGA was beautiful back then, EGA was definitely tolerable. Now they are making EGA games on Steam for die-hard adventure gamers.
You don't need photorealism to make a good game.
Hell, people used to listen to football games (in the UK sense too) and baseball games on the radio. Imagination is a powerful thing. It's the content that matters.
Beautiful. I love the CGA interface.
When I see monkey island I always think of the Amiga copy protection on monkey island 2. The game was on something like 13 floppies that you had to keep switching but there was only super hard copy protection on disk 7 or something so you'd get part way through the game before getting scuppered. (I was only about 10 years old).
Oh, the nostalgia! I like the Borland Turbo Vision UI look of the site, which most DOS apps used at the time.
The first time I played Monkey Island on an Hercules monitor, it made me fall in love with graphic adventures. Years later, I played the VGA CD version. At that time, I bought the Monkey Island CD, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Day of the Tentacle. They were the peak of LucasGames.
Sometimes I really wish i could back to this time of my life. Those adventure games had a certain magic that hasn't been reproduced so far. There are some good throw back games on steam, but somehow its different. Is it because I am older now? Would be interesting to be able to experience them from scratch with the mind of my present being.
Anyway, just on to of my mind: - Indiana Jones , especially the one with the Paris underground and the Nazi fortress. Forgot the name.
- Monkey Islands
- Phantasmagoria 2
- Baphomets Curse 1 and 2 , especially 1.
- Kings Quest 7 (god, the drawings. Like a Disney movie)
- Simon the Sorcerer
All bangers!!!!!
So many crazy memories. They all had really good stories, a nice humour, tough puzzles and really good drawing. Idk, I really can succumb to nostalgia here :-)
Nice. I want to hear each rendition of the opening title theme.
I see retro, I upvote. Good times back then with Monkey Island, great art, great adventure game.
It’s an incredible that graphics artists provide 13+ variations on the same artwork, especially without the help of modern tools.
I replayed the series recently and I think the gameplay didn't age that well especially after you played some japanese puzzle games like Professor Layton or Ace Attorney. It's not the difficulty of the puzzles but rather there is almost nothing intuitive about them and a lot of times they are detached from the story. The story, the writing, the humor, and the characters holds up of course but not the gameplay.
I am very impressed how the 32-color Amiga version is close to the 256-color VGA version (and how much the Atari ST is lagging behind, more similar to the EGA version :)
Brilliant design for a brilliant game. I remember my dad showing the opening mountaintop scene with campfire. Like others have said, remains my favourite.
That’s pretty cool.
Technically not all. The anniversary re-release is missing.
Don't miss all the options in the menu bar at the top of the screen
I immediately revived an old feud and compared the Amiga and Atari ST versions... Amiga, definitely. Ha!
Who ever played games on hercules card? I never met or heard of them
I remember being impressed by all these editions even as a teen in the nineties. It's pretty uncommon, especially as a game with graphics on this level. What a nice site that goes in depth with the differences!
Beatiful, when comparing PC and Mac versions, I got the feeling that the Mac screenshot has the old Mac gamma 1.8 VS PC gamma 2.2 that Apple started to use not that long time ago...
Played this on the Amiga when it first came out. It was a magical time back then to experience a generational leap in gaming.
Ron Gilbert was such a hero for me, and I'm always amazed at what an incredible story-rich gaming experience you could squeeze onto 256 colours and four floppy disks.
I got the monkey island tune ringing in my ears, thanks for replacing the 7/365 jingle bells for at least a moment!
Claude, please rewrite this game in GTA VI style graphics.
GROGtastic.
I remember this as a whole immersive world, is funny to look back and realise that it was all only in 16 colours.
I like seeing people make beautiful things. This is a very beautiful site imo
OT:
Didnt know that there are by today 13 versions and that they extended the productline ad infinitum :-D
IMHO, VGA looks by far the best, but EGA is a second one! It has a lot of charm.
This is beautiful, thanks for making it. My fav game of all time
This was posted 3 times and for whatever reason.
This post did well.
Guess the right people were awake to upvote it
CGA... oh man, it's like I'm a kid again :)
The difference in the pirate close-ups is amusing.
no love for the Atari 2600 or Apple II versions?
Beautiful, well done :)
"All" 13 versions. But no Commodore 64?
The sheer amount of talent that went into art, audio and coding back then, the limitations of the hardware really forced the best out of people in many cases.
I compared my "gaming pc" of old (286 with EGA) to my current one via ChatGPT and it's quite mind boggling; "I’d say roughly 100,000× the CPU computing power, with millions× or more on suitable work handled by the GPU."
There's a SEGA CD version! Never knew that.
Oh cool there's a Gobliiins Switch ROM that runs on the average potato ... Nobody bother me for the rest of the weekend, please!
AND all the discworlds have PS1 ROMs. I'm going to have to report in sick. Everybody else is doing it for GTA6 anyway.
You know, we really need a PC game ROM standard ...
I think I played it on PC back then, but I am not 100% certain anymore; could have been on Amiga too. Interestingly the Macintosh version looks the best to me therein, but I am also not absolutely sure about that since it seems to be differently scaled than the PC version. I wish I would have noted down back then what I used and played. And when.
it's kinda awesome how back then they could keep coming out with new versions on the shelves, if we did that with a game these days it would get all kinds of hate but back then it was the total opposite
Had the OG Amiga version and always wondered why it looked different on my friends PC. Back then I was a kid and thought it was the different CRT monitor and not 16 v 256 colors lol
neat :thumbsup:
lfg so clean
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The last two feels like a downgrade after Mac for some reason
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I see a few people saying they couldn’t get used to CGA, that it was absurd, or worse than no graphics at all.
I can relate to that. But as I’ve aged I’ve appreciated just how much was done with less back. I mean that literally: we couldn’t afford a computer so my dad would haul home his work computer each weekend. We’d call BBS’ on it, print stuff. Play shareware games. It pissed my mom off because it took up half the dinner table. But my brother learned to code this way too.
So later on when my friends got EGA and VGA, CGA meant “poor.”
Fast forward many years and I have kids and were in better financial circumstances than my dad and mom back then. My kids have MacBooks. One of their friends was over one night and was visibly embarrassed that all she had was the school assigned Chromebook. She and my daughter were doing homework and her friend said that she wished her family could afford better laptops.
I didn’t want to embarrass her but then next morning after I made pancakes and I was sitting at the table I was like hey let’s take a look at these Chromebooks (we had an old one sitting around) and the three of us sat there and in about an hour and a half they’d put together a very simple farm game in the spirit of Stardew Valley on PICO-8.
Point being, we live in a world where especially with AI, it’s easy to think we can do everything. And it can feel like that, which means that when you can’t, you feel worse that you can’t because it would appear everyone else is doing amazing things with no limits.
But maybe we need more limits on things. Maybe that 4 color palette forced devs and artists to be creative back then in ways that make things better for everyone.