They are very good! Obviously the style is out of fashion and some puzzles can be a bit frustrating (though not as much as old Sierra adventures), but they are amazing games...
Honestly, I have the special edition and after about ten minutes of playing I switched to the original graphics and music and didn't really look back. They really have aged quite well, even though of course they look much blockier on a 24" TFT compared to the original 15"ish CRT experience...
Which is kinda strange because the "pixel" art of those days was never intended to be rendered as blocky pixels, but designed to make use of the CRT's softness.
Arguably true for the EGA versions (when played on real EGA hardware), but the VGA versions used a 320x200 resolution, which was line-doubled to 320x400, and displayed on monitors sharp enough to be usable at 640x480. The pixels were obviously blocky.
Indeed, you could see the pixels, but that was all it was. Advanced games used antialiasing to lessen the blocky effect. You only could dream of a future where graphics are "paper like" without pixels. At that moment, it didn't fill like low-res, at all. 320x200 256 colors was the bleeding edge of computer graphics. Later on, some games started appearing with 640x480.
That's also why I can't stand some of the modern pixel-games. They are too blocky and doesn't work well on modern screens. Using blocky graphics is not "retro" at all. It's more an artistic impression of how they think old games looked like.
I bought the special editions of 1 and 2 over the weekend with the sole intent of extracting the original game files and playing them via scummvm. Didn’t even try to play the special editions. And getting them working in scummvm was as much fun as getting to play the original games themselves!
The Verbs menu taking a third of the screen is the original SCUMM UI. The "verb coin" idea didn't come along until Full Throttle/Curse of Monkey Island years after Secret of Monkey Island and LeChuck's Revenge.
The only tiny "original UI" subtlety in play with Secret of Monkey Island was that the floppy version used a text inventory menu and the CD version added the inventory icons. I can't say I've met anyone that prefers the text inventory over the icons.
The second game is really good. I think it's a lot funnier than the first and has more colourful areas and dialogue (although some puzzles are ridiculous).
I also see Monkey 2 as by far the superior game. The first is excellent and charming, but the second is a great work of literature. (I played Monkey 2 first though, so I'm inherently biased.)
Well, I played the first one first, and I liked that one better. Especially once you get to Monkey Island, it's one gag after the other: the three-headed monkey, the head of the navigator (which you trade in for a leaflet called "how to get ahead in navigating"), ShishKeBob and his pals ShishKeJoe and ShishKeLarry, ...
I played the LeChuck's Revenge first and later tried the first one. It didn't have quite the impact.
Also, I replayed the games like 10 years ago and found them very short and the humor being quite outdated. A bit like watching all the Star Wars movies in one go. The pacing in the first triology is pretty crappy.
You should really play them both; I have the remastered versions on steam and enjoy playing the hell out of them. I often switch backward and forward from new to original graphics and music for nostalgia reasons though.
