The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

If you have read my story, you know that adventure games were the first source of English input that I used outside of English classes. These games showed me how much fun I could have with English and opened my eyes to the power of reading English sentences on your own.

One of those games was The Secret of Monkey Island. I had played a few adventures before, but The Secret of Monkey Island I really enjoyed. The difficulty level was not too hard, you could not kill your character (no “Game Over” screen), and the game’s premise (you are a young lad with a funny name who came to an island in the Caribbean to become a pirate) sucked me right in. Monkey Island had the right mix of originality, quirky humor and mystery to make it a cult classic and one my best childhood memories.

And now LucasArts has released a remake. They re-created the hand-drawn graphics, re-recorded the beautiful music, and added voice dialogue, while remaining 100% faithful to the original. Finally a way to experience the great adventure on modern computers with big screens. I bought the game on Steam (it’s only €9!) and finished it in two days, but it could take you weeks if you have never played it before.

The Secret of Monkey Island is a great way to learn English, especially if you like video games and have the patience to solve some light-weight puzzles. The dialogue is clearer than what you hear in movies, there are subtitles (in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish), and you can run the game in a window, pause it, and look up words in your dictionary. The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is available for PC, Xbox and iPhone. Take a look at the trailer and the official site.