Shipless, crewless and with the wind and your right hand as improbable foes you set forth to overcome these obstacles by interacting with a myriad of interesting and entertainingly voiced characters, completing absurd quests and leaving even stranger conversations hanging in the air.

The atmosphere of these new tales, is superb. The cartoon visuals, humorous writing, caricatured voice acting are all on par with or surpass the previous iterations.

The control mechanics have their pros and cons. As it has been weeded out through previous iterations, there is no longer the ability to perform several separate actions with an item in your inventory or environment. You can look at, talk to, or have items interact with characters in whatever way they are meant to. Clicking on an item will either result in helpful or simply witty observation, pilfering said item, or using it in whatever way it is mean to be used. The inventory itself is activated by dragging the cursor to the right side of the screen and clicking on a tab.

Item and character interaction all work splendidly for the most part, but the navigation of your own character takes a little getting used to and could perhaps be improved. You move your character by clicking and holding down your cursor and moving it through the 3D space.

This works well enough in general, but it is in light of the absence of the more traditional movement that it becomes a problem.

If you click on an item or charcter some distance away, Guybrush will hurry to it and interact appropriately. However, in that you can not simply click or perhaps double-click in game space and have Guybrush run to that area – auto-piloting if you will – and the compromise often has you interacting with people and things that you’d rather not at the moment.

Although I found this at times annoying, it should be noted that it is generally just inclded here in order to balance the review and have something to bitch about – there is a certain quota in today’s world, you know?

These minor gripes aside, my remaining concerns were over its nature as part of a serialized adventure. I am, in general, a very big proponent of serialized, digitally distributed entertainment, seeing it as a better business model and a personally more enjoyable venue than broadcast television, theaters, concert venues, and retail.

The cynical suspicion I had with Tales of Monkey Island, having to pay the entire amount instead of several micro-transactions, is that the game would be whittled down into such small slivers just barely adding up to the length of what we’ve been accustomed to as a full game.

While playing Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, I several times suspected to be proven right, but was astounded to find an incredible amount of game left to played. Not taking into account my atrocious patience, this genre of games is perhaps best suited for such delivery as their ancestors were also originally separated into chapters.

The climax of Launch of the Screaming Narwhal is a little less than climactic. This too is something shared with previous iterations. However, wherein the past your anticlimax would be quickly overcome by the ready continuation in the next chapter, we are now left to wait a month. Perhaps in the new delivery system the actual design of the story should be such as to leave more tantalizing conclusions to chapters, providing a better sense of accomplishment for the audience, a better authoring of the story, and a stronger addiction to continue the tale.

Already out on PC, Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal is set to be released for the Wii via WiiWare Monday July 27, which should prove to be a great venue for the series.

THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND: SPECIAL EDITION

The digital distribution revolution and increasing venue for the world of Monkey Island is further bolstered by original publisher LucasArts releasing The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, a serious upgrade of the original game for PC, XBOX Live Arcade, and brilliantly recently released iPhone.

Creating brand new illustrations and animations and newly recording voice acting and an updated score, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is vastly improved and made more palatable for today’s audience.

Although the pacing of the dialog and action is still somewhat sluggish, the improvements can be quickly appreciated by reverting to the original game, the audience having the ability at any time to seamlessly switch between versions.

image copyright LucasArts
A comparison of classic and special editions of Secret of Monkey Island

In addition to the aesthetic gloss, the game also provides a hint system providing gamers a series of increasingly explicit directions to progress the story should they get stuck and still be too lazy to minimize the window and scour the internet.

While I almost didn’t use a walkthrough at all for either game, I did take advantage of this feature…only to test its functionality for this review…not at all because of my threadbare patience or lack of imagination.

While Secret of Monkey Island still has enough warts to make one take notice, it is still rife with the humor and cleverness that has run through the entire series.

Hopefully, the success and increased proliferation of both The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition and Tales of Monkey Island will make future offerings of their like more certain.

Indeed, perhaps Monkey Island will become just so popular that it may take to the silver screen in the wake of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Imagine Justin Timberlake in the role of Guybrush Threepwood, 20 feet tall with a thunderous surround sound score behind him and us as we watch him try to stick a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle in everything and everyone he meets in the course of the movie’s 2 hour runtime.

Savvy?

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