Archive for July, 2009

Tales of Monkey Island 1: Review

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Tales of Monkey Island - Guybrush and Lechuck

This review is a reposting of the review that I wrote for the Warwick Boar – complete with intended italics.

Only a month ago, the landscape of PC adventure gaming seemed a desolate and barren place,  Telltale’s episodic offerings being the only visible remains of one of the bastions of traditional PC gaming. Since then Lucasarts had confirmed that they were returning to work on Monkey Island, one of the most infamous of adventure gaming franchises. Indeed, it was soon confirmed that not only were they working in collaboration with ex-Lucasarts staffers on development of a quintet of new Monkey Island episodes, titled the Tales of Monkey Island, but also on a special edition rerelease of the first Monkey Island title, the Secret of Monkey Island, resplendent with both a graphical overhaul and new voice acting. Only hours before this writer put fingers to keyboard, Lucasarts further announced that they would start releasing their back catalogue of titles on the digital delivery system Steam, starting on Wednesday with a selection of ten titles ranging from LOOM to Battlefront II.  Perhaps adventure gaming could be stirring from its long forgotten ashes?

The first of these Monkey themed releases is the Tales of Monkey Island, whose five monthly episodes begins today with The Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, which I’ll be looking at here.

(more…)

What annoys me…

Monday, July 6th, 2009

That game developers insist on filling my Documents folder up with hundreds of folders bearing their company name, with the sole reason of storing their save files in those respective folders. There’s a reason that there’s a “Saved Games” folder, guys. The ability to use this folder seems to be a skill learnt only by Darwinia, Red Alert 3 and C&C3 (even then, the latter two create a folder in /Documents to store Replays – DO NOT WANT).

My Documents folder

Compsoc Holiday Caption Competition

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Probably not the best choice of photo possible, but here’s an interesting one that the camera threw up:

Monk goes for a ride

Answers on a postcard… or in the comments section.