Originally, this post was going to be a lament that I have Return to Monkey Island in my Steam library but couldn’t play it yet because my graphics card isn’t good enough. Which was actually true until last weekend because the AMD Radeon 6850 I’ve had for a while was just a tiny little bit too old. DirectX 12 turned out to be the culprit as expected, but I wasn’t really in a hurry to get something better. But now I did something about it and managed to snag an AMD Radeon R9 270X on eBay. It took a while to arrive because of the long weekend but now it’s here and yesterday I operated on the computer again… and now I’m back on Melée Island!

Return to Monkey Island has turned out to be an absolute marvel. I have already completet the first act, exploring a familiar, but also slightly different Melée Island once again. It feels like 1990 again, only on a huge cinematic screen in high definition instead of slighly blurry pixels on a flickering 14″ tube monitor. The heart and spirit of Monkey Island is very much present and you can feel that this game is a labour of love much like Thimbleweed Park was. Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossmann and their team have hit the right spot perfectly. I will probably write a full review sometime, but now I’m just enjoying the game a lot and will play through it without any hurry.

It wasn’t altogether simple because I also had to put in a second harddrive and install a separate new Windows 10 system on it, but it worked. My concerns about the old Athlon X4 II 640 CPU were thankfully wrong and the new graphics card did the trick! This computer with its more than 10 year old components in a 20 year old case is now not a gaming potato anymore! Many other games now run much better and some that didn’t even start before are now working.

But for now it’s back to the Caribbean and see what shenanigans Guybrush Threepwood is up to!