So. There's this crazy-awesome series. A video game series. It's not really well known, at least not by a bunch of people around here. But it should be.

I've been alive long enough for the entire series, but only just. I was way too young to play the first two, the third one never worked until recently, and the fourth I watched my dad play, I was still too young to play it myself.

This series is a game of craziness and randomness known as *insert fanfare here*

MONKEY ISLAND.

Oh, go on. Go look it up. I'll be here waiting. Watch some gameplay or something. Just... go view the awesomeness that is Monkey Island.




Okay. So now that you know how amazing it is, let me go over the series as a whole.

The Secret of Monkey Island released in 1993, a year after I was born. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge released in 1995. The Curse of Monkey Island came out in 1997, and is the first one that I played by myself (unless you count the guidebook and my cousin sitting on my lap watching me). Escape From Monkey Island came out in 2000 and was the first to be released not only in 3D, but on consoles as well as PC.

Notice a trend here? Like, maybe... how they all came out within two years of each other?

It's been almost a decade without a new Monkey Island. And finally, a spark on the horizon!

At E3 of this year, LucasArts announced two Monkey Island games. One is going to be a remake of the original game, with full voice acting and much better graphics. The other has sorta released and is why this topic came up. The second game is Tales of Monkey Island and is being made by Telltale Games. It's being released in an episodic fashion.

The first episode released on July 7, 2009. And the only thing that I can say is HOLY CRAP AMAZING.

You have to understand. This is the FIRST Monkey Island game that I will be playing, by myself, as it comes out. Though I was certainly old enough to play the fourth one, and as I've been "playing" since I was eighteen months old on my daddy's knee, so I knew how to handle the controller, I am also a huge bookworm. And at the time, my dad got the guide for basically every game. See where this is going? I was smart enough to realize that I didn't have the dexterity/reflexes to perform Monkey Fu or whatever.

Why they didn't stick with Insult Swordfighting, I'll never understand. If Telltale doesn't put Insult SOMETHING in this game, I'm going to be extraordinarily pissed. That has some of the best lines in the entire game, and that's saying something.

Okay, not the point. Anyway, I'm just excited. Let's just leave it at that.

So I played through the first episode, and though I got stuck on a rather simple puzzle (bomb goes IN the underwear, Guybrush...) I thought it was amazing. From the opening puzzle, when you have to enchant a cutlass with voodoo root beer, but the root beer MUST be fizzy and yours is flat, so you have to put breath mints in the root beer, to the hilarious/French stereotype/EVILLL Marquis de Singe who wants to take your evil, cursed hand off of your body by using a miniature guillotine (and he pronounces it like I always thought it was: gillotine instead of geeyotine) to the aforementioned bomb-in-the-underwear puzzle, this chapter was amazing. The one-liners were spot-on, from Guybrush making a reference to the length of time since the last game to the multiple Indiana Jones references.

The games are riddled with references. Unfortunately, I'm apparently not cultured enough to understand most of them. There were a few Star Trek references in the third game that I didn't get until I read about them on one of the best Monkey Island sites around: World of Monkey Island.

Overall, Tales of Monkey Island Episode One: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal gets four and three quarters out of five stars.

How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

ROCK ON TELLTALE!!!

and i'm serious. you'd better put in some insult swordfighting or armwrestling or something or many of your fans are going to fire the studio. the mel gibson way.