potentialities

I was legitimately blown away by this new Monkey Island fan game, The Booze of Monkey Island.

It's a labor of love by actual indie game developers, so they do actually know what they're doing. They did it Curse of Monkey Island-style, with gorgeous digital watercolor backgrounds, animated sprites, point-and-click navigation, and the streamlined three-verb coin interface, which was the pinnacle of adventure game design. The music incorporates the classic themes from the original games, and it sounds great. The setup is that classic one where you need to convince three different people to do a thing, which in this case is come to a new bar, and you get to roam all over Booty Island until you've solved all the puzzles, which are appropriately convoluted. The dialogue feels slightly off-kilter, but it was originally written in Italian, and if you allow for the vagaries of multiple layers of translation from and to English, it's funny and in-character, and there's plenty of depth in the dialogue trees.

Definitely recommend this as a good way to pass a couple of hours for any Monkey Island fans.

The credit crunch threatens the ancient sport of the caber toss.

If you've ever played the classic Monkey Island games, then you will readily apprehend that this is the best thing ever.

It's an exuberant animated recap of the first game, sketched in the style of the third, cheerfully voiced by a fellow with a German accent (on account of he is German, and there is also a deutsche Version for those of you who are into that sort of thing). Those of you who haven't played the Monkey Island games (and why on earth not???) should bear in mind that it also serves as a thumbnail walkthrough to most of the puzzles in the first game.