Yesterday we downloaded the first chapter of The Tales of Monkey Island, Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, and finished it this afternoon. It is excellent :D

I'd been looking forward to it, but been slightly apprehensive that it would be an inferior ripoff by some people who'd bought the rights to the original series and slapped them on their own unrelated games, or a graphics-fest at the expense of gameplay and fun, but those fears were completely dispelled. It's a delightful, extremely fun game in the spirit of the originals, with at least some of the voices from #3 and #4. The puzzles are intriguing and are pitched at a good level of challenge. The dialogue is excellent, with witty one-liners, cheesy puns, and occasional amusing innuendo ("Release my wife at once, LeChuck - she gets a bit tetchy if she's tied up for more than an hour"), which I hadn't noticed in the previous games, but maybe I was too young. There are the obligatory references to the previous games and to Indiana Jones. As well as the main three characters, the Voodoo Lady makes a reappearance, and there's a hint that Stan might be involved later, or it might just have been an in-joke. The relationship between the no-longer-newlywed Threepwoods is entertainingly depicted. Elaine treats Guybrush with a mixture of patient amusement and annoyance that reminds me of Susan from Coupling.

I give it 9.5 out of 10, and the missing 0.5 is all interface niggles. You have to click and drag to walk anywhere; and you can't combine inventory items by clicking on one with the other, but you have to drop each into a special area of your inventory and click a "combine" button. And it took us until nearly the end to find the button to skip unwanted dialogue (e.g. that you've seen before), that was always mapped to the dot key in LucasArts games (it's right-click now).

We've also bought the remastered Secret of Monkey Island - Special Edition. We haven't started playing it at all yet, but from the screenshots, it looks as though they've stayed very faithful to the original - the scenes look very familiar, drawn from the same camera angles, just with improved graphics and (presumably) voices. And it was only £6.99 - I thought it might be full game price. And it includes the original un-remastered version, and you can hot-swap back and forth between the two renderings at any point.

So we're going to play that next (well, Alex will play it, because he's never played it all the way through before, and I will sit and watch, squee with nostalgia, and offer cryptic hints if required).

Tags: games, monkey island, reviews
Current Location: Flotsam Island
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Monkey Island theme tune