Tales of Monkey Island

It was almost a ten year wait period for the avid monkey island fans to finally get their hands on another monkey island game after 4th installment of the series. Well, it's here and it's pretty flippin' fantastic.

For those of you who don't know, that's Guybrush Threepwood: mighty pirate (or so he tells everyone). Guybrush Threepwood is no ordinary pirate in the way that he uses funny dialogue and objects in a clever way to solve problems. However, Guybrush is... a bit of a wimp, which only adds to his comical aspect. His wife, Elaine, is a tough pirate adventurer who usually ends up helping poor Guybrush out of those tough situations through her swordfighting and strength. That's basically all you need to know before you play Tales, but it would be even better if you played through the first four games of the series because there's a lot of good references to past games and it's really cool to see reoccurring characters.

Tales of Monkey Island is a great start for any newcomers of adventure gaming. Tales is a point-and-click adventure game meaning that you tell the character where you want it to go and click to pick-up/ interact with things. So to move around you can either drag the mouse to where you want to go (which is pretty lame) or use the keyboard (which is a lot smoother) and then click on things you would like to interact with. It's also inventory based which means you'll be solving puzzles with objects that you've picked up throughout the course of the game and sometimes combining them to make something more useful. This simple design allows it to be very easy to play and allows it to retain a moderate difficulty that challenges the player. For the most part, I found the puzzles to be of a reasonable difficulty and very fun, but if you have any trouble you can turn on hints in the menu.

If you're looking to purchase Tales of Monkey Island you can go here. As you'll see, the game is released in an episodic format, like a season of a TV show. The game comes with 5 episodes (at this point in time the 5th one has not been released) that'll take you about 4 to 5 hours each, so it's a pretty good deal. Don't be afraid to check out their forums, either. Their community is almost as awesome as me (no really).

Warning: *Spoiler Alert* This be the beginning of the first episode. Ye be warned!