From: O'Connor, Kevin
Sent: Monday, November 27, 2000 10:04 AM
To:
'randy@justadventure.com'
Subject: EFMI review right on
Just wanted
to say thanks for writing a measured, level-headed review of Escape from Monkey
Island at the Just Adventure site, when nowhere else on the net will any reviewer
dare to criticize this mediocre game. At first, I played this game thinking it
was superbly designed, but after getting to the more difficult, and rather illogical
puzzles, the keyboard control system had me stymied, and the long, stupid conversations
made me chain-smoke with frustration.
Other reviews seem to either ignore
the glaring problems, or, like you say, point them out while not factoring them
into the final assessment. Would a game from DreamCatcher with similar flaws still
get a 8.5 or a 9?
Thanks again!
From: Sterling Wright
Sent: Monday, November 27, 2000 11:06 PM
To:
randy@justadventure.com
Subject: Escape from Monkey Island Review
It
isn't often that I read something and feel the want or need to say something about
it. I have been reading the articles and reviews on Just Adventure for a good
part of a year and find is a decent source for news and reviews. However, your
review of Escape from Monkey Island seems unusually harsh.
I'm not
complaining because you gave it a mediocre to bad score. I've played it, and agree
that it is only an average adventure with a few good puzzles. But I disagree with
the biased way you wrote the review.
At first I was surprised to see you
wrote the review yourself. After your article "How About Some Cheese with
That Whine?" where you complained about Lucasarts Marketing Campaign, I would
think you would want to get someone else to review it, that way no one can say
you were biased against it. As it is, you sound like you started playing the game
intending to not like it, so of course, you didn't.
You complain about the
controls, but it sounds like you didn't even look at the help screen to learn
how to use them. When you have multiple items that you can interact with listed
on the bottom of the screen, you don't need to take baby steps to switch witch
one is highlighted. You have two keys, Page Up and Page Down that scroll through
the items on the list. You want the wooden hand, get to where you can see "Look
at Wooden Hand" in your list and scroll to it with page up and page down
then press "P" to pick it up. This is a major improvement to Grim
Fandango where you looked at only one thing based on where you were standing.
I'm
not going to go into how long you say the game is, when you admit in your review
that you played half the game with a walkthrough.
You call the game bug-riddled,
and I do not doubt there are and were bugs. However, the only major one I have
heard of involved the sound on some systems. I finished the game before the patch
came out and the only place I noticed anything I would think of as a bug was twice
while in the Bait Shop it paused the dialog while it accessed the CD. Let's compare
that to a game you gave an A+ rating to, The Longest Journey. The British
edition of The Longest Journey does not have a patch. Instead it had a
link to a fan site where someone had posted a way to work around a very annoying
sound bug that they couldn't or wouldn't patch. I wonder if that is still going
to be the case with the US version. Worse, The Longest Journey had manufacturing
problems. My CD-Writer couldn't read one of the four CDs, and a second would put
up the blue "Please Insert Disk Screen" at various intervals. I've heard
others complaining about the same thing, and it's a tribute to how good the game
is that that has never hurt any of its reviews. Am I saying Escape from Monkey
Island is as good as The Longest Journey? No. Just that there are so
many different hardware configurations out there, that it's virtually impossible
to test everything. The fact that I was able to play without seeing anything shows
Lucasarts put some effort into QA. The timeliness of the patch also shows that
they are committed to their customers. Owners of Ultima 9 or Daggerfall
know what real bug-riddled code is, and worse they were forced to wait at
least a month for a patch.
I have played the other three games, and being
an adventure game editor I'm guessing you have played at least one or two of them
as well. So we have no idea what the game sounds or feels like to someone who
has not played one before. But I think by making references to the earlier games,
it could be LucasArts way of letting their fans know that they are still committed
to them, especially after their last two "adventure" games, The Phantom
Menace and Indy and the Infernal Machine were so poorly received.
Another
overall feeling I got when I read this article was that you were bashing the game
because it was from a big publisher, Lucasarts. You refer to them as an in-house
developer with no outsider's unbiased opinion. This sounds just like the kind
of preconceived notion that you rightfully attack other websites and magazines
for. Making it sound like it can't be a good game because it doesn't use the latest
3D hardware technology or you don't get to kill anything is just as bad as making
it sound like it can't be a good game because it comes from a large software company
rather than from a little independent company bravely fighting the giant twitch
game companies to bring us games that make you think.
Maybe if they had
marketed the game to you, you would feel different. Then again, maybe not.
If
you read the whole thing, then thanks for your time. I do enjoy your website and
will continue to frequent it from time to time.
Again, thanks for your time,
Sterling
