14 DAY TRIAL // Telltale Games, as the developer, and LucasArts are announcing that they have released the first episode of the all new Tales of Monkey Island series. The first part of the five-episode series is called the Screaming Narwhal and is set to introduce players to the game world while offering the humor and the puzzling for which they embraced it in the first place.
The new adventure starts with a battle between Guybrush Threepwood, the hero of the original game, and his legendary nemesis LeChuck, the demon pirate. When the battle ends, our hero is marooned on an island featuring winds that are blowing inwards while both LeChuck and Threepwood's wife, Elaine, seems to be missing.
To add to the problems, a voodoo pox plague seems to be sweeping the island. Puzzles need to be done and adventures need to be completed to solve the mysteries and reunite Elaine and Guybrush.
Dave Grossman, who is the design director on the new series and the lead writer on the original games, stated that “I was laughing my eyepatch off on a daily basis while we were first cooking up Monkey Island at Skywalker Ranch, but if you'd told me then that it would become a classic, and that twenty years later I'd be working with a killer all-star piratey crew to spin an epic new tale and bring the series to a whole new generation of players, I would have said, well, probably, 'Look behind you, a three-headed monkey', but then I've always been a bit weird that way.”
Tellatale is saying that the new story will be told in five episodes, with one coming each month and that the full plot of the series will only be revealed towards the end. Players who are not interested in playing Tales of Monkey Island on the PC can use WiiWare, which is set to get the first episode in the coming weeks, but those who get the game in the first week from the Telltale site can also download for free another episode from one of the series that the company has created: Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit, Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People.