Well, I have thoroughly played and beaten Chapter 1 of Tales of Monkey Island called Launching of the Screaming Narwahl. I have to say it is great to play a Monkey Island game again and with some help with some of the cast of the past games it feels almost like returning home to the family. The game is like the past a point & click adventure which I still find fascinating.

Now before I jump into the boat and start rowing I have to give a heads up that what I have played is the PC version. There should be really no difference between this one and the one on Wii Ware later this year.

The Monkey Island theme continues with Guybrush Threepwood on another adventure. As you can see from some of our gameplay captures it starts off on two boats Guybrush’s and Elaine’s. On Elaine’s boat is Lechuck is about to voodoo-fi a monkey for whatever purpose and it is your job to kill off Lechuck but things go wrong as usual with Guybrush. One thing leads to another and Guybrush is on another island this time Flotsam Island. I won’t go into details about the story or the game too much because it is an awesome play.

To jump into the normal bits of a review we start off with graphics. With the PC version I played it was a tad bit slow on the Nintendo-Centrum workstation and had to drop the quality down to 1 to play smooth. I played this game on my gaming pc machine that I haven’t touched in awhile and it was much smoother and quality at max 9. There will not be this problem on the Wii Ware version as it will have a set quality limit as there is no point to have different quality settings for a console game. The game is in 3d rendered for characters and some of the objects in the game. You play on a 2d or 2.5d world using clicks and drags much like the last iteration of the game.

The graphics where what I expected and were similar to the last iteration of the game a couple of years ago.

talesofmi101_idol_lowres

Now jumping to Audio & Music section. The music of the game is pretty good quite a bit different from the last games but still has the Monkey Island feel. Congrats to the music person for creating the classic Monkey Island mood. Nice music. As for the audio department it is quite good. You can hear the wind blowing in the trees and flags and pieces of paper floating around in the game. Every object that is supposed to make noise sound like it should nothing really stands as wow but boats and chains sound real so it does the job.

Moving to the controls for the game. To walk around in the game you click a button and move your cursor or Wiimote (I assume as I haven’t played it yet on Wii). There is also an item department or chest you can pull up to select and use items you have collected. You have the ability to combine objects to created desired objects to pass certain puzzles in the game, which is similar to past Monkey Island games. To pull up the chest you move your cursor to the right and an arrow pops up to allow you to select to open the chest. The Wii versions should be quite simple however on the PC side I found it a bit frustrating to us the keys or to drag the mouse to the right to select the chest. It would have been easier to use a double click or right click to pull up the chest at least on the PC side.

The other thing that I felt was not working or was very strange was the walking or running mechanism. As I stated above you click a button and drag your mouse or Wiimote to make Guybrush walk and to run you had to press and hold a second button or right mouse button in this case. I had some issues with this during the game, as it did not feel fluid. I just seemed clunky especially when remembering and going back to the old Monkey Island games where you can click on the ground to walk to a location or double click to run. I would love to have this type of control back on the PC side and probably the Wii Ware version but we honestly can’t say, as we have not played the Wii version. Outside of the movement and chest minor inconveniences the controls work well.

talesofmi101_hemlock_lowres

Swimming to the other shore of replay and longevity I can say that the game is fun and can be played a couple times but it does lose some of the fun on a second or third run. Now the first time you go through the game you want to click on every little detail and select every line to get the full bang of the game and most people will as you cannot proceed without asking or speaking about certain things. Also keep in mind the possibility of items carrying over to the next and next and next chapter.

To be honest though as I have ran through the game a couple times Chapter 1 can be beaten in about an hour. How and why? Well the game doesn’t change on the second or more runs so you can skip pretty much all the dialogue. However that was to check for any minor issues I may have missed. Looks to be pretty clean. I have played the evaluation and full version of Chapter One and there is a major difference in speed and graphical enhancements but hey that it what you should expect from a not final build and the final build.

Overall the game is awesome for those Monkey Island fanatics as we get another taste at Monkey Island and those that are new to Monkey Island will get to experience one of the better game franchises in history. All in all in our rating system for games I give it a B+ due to the game bringing back memories and fun but also due to some minor things that bothered me a bit. Check out Chapter 1 on PC and soon on Wii via Wii Ware. And if you’re daring get the whole series and if you’re quick enough you can get a special DVD for the PC version of game.