So, by now you probably finished playing Tales of Monkey Island Launch of The Screaming Narwhal (yeah I wont by typing that again), if you are a fan of the Monkey Island series.
I have to say right now that I played the first Monkey Island (which is now available), back in the day when I was young… I remember that game and I have very good memories about playing it with a friend of mine, my brother and even my uncle (we used to share the “how to” of the games over the phone back in that day (no internet).

So I tried to make the first episode last… but it will give you about four or six hours of play time. Of course you will have to wait another 30 days for the second episode and at least this time around you wont be waiting years for a continuation in the story (yeah Valve, I’m looking at you), you know that TellTale will be releasing the five episodes on a monthly basis, so you can… you know, play other games in the meantime that are awesome too. And if you are feeling nostalgic and cant wait, just grab for 5usd games like “The Dig” and “Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis” on STEAM. I want to play Fate of Atlantis again, I will probably get it since is only 5usd and it runs without any problems on win xp. A special edition just like they did on Monkey Island would be nice…

But what do I think about this Monkey Island episode?
I like it, a lot. I mean, I like the idea that an adventure game is not frustrating to the point of “I will just head to the walkthrough here because I can’t figure this one out”. The puzzles are not that hard, but even then not that easy. One thing that used to frustrate me most about the old LucasArts adventure games were the fact that logic wasn’t a main factor on the puzzles; they used to were complicated solutions and too many factors at the same time. Just give the SCUMM system a look; you can have a lot of interactions on a single scene only with a handful of items.

Graphically they kept the Monkey Island style… I would have liked that they were a little bit more “sophisticated”… I don’t know, maybe that’s not the word but is how I feel.
The humor is there, of course it helps a lot if you have played the previous Monkey Island games, but on the story side there is nothing very big you will miss because of that.

Episode 1 is fun in the dialogues, easy on the requirements and still looks good. Maybe a little short but not too long for a single episode of pirate fun. And I get to play Wallace and Gromit for the 35usd deal they got going on there… it seems to be a very good game if you have some knowledge of Wallace and Gromit.

This reminds me. If you go to STEAM “top sellers” the first episode of Tales Of Monkey Island was there on top (now is Monkey Island SE)… and I can bet that those represent a LOT of sales. A friend of mine once said that the adventure genre was dead, he said it at the time TellTale was starting, he also said that they would fail because it was a dead genre… I think we can say that all the people who thought that now stand corrected.