It's been 9 years since we last saw Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™ in his swashbuckling, grog filled adventures and now Telltale Games, responsible for reviving Sam & Max, another beloved LucasArts franchise, takes us back to a Caribbean with talking skulls and three headed monkeys. Needless to say, living up to the legendary status of Monkey Island is not an easy task - let's see how Telltale fared so far.

Getting the worst out of the way first, if you were longing to see something along the lines of the hand drawn graphics from Curse of the Monkey Island, you're out of luck. Launch of the Screaming Narwhal features 3D graphics and even if character design is leagues above the previous game, it's still not very fetching.

The worst offender here is the framerate, once again, Telltale couldn't get the console version working as well as the PC one, with a very unstable framerate that hurts the game quite a bit. On the bright side, animations and expressions do their job very well, adding to the overall comedy of the plot and making the characters more alive. Moving around is also handled like in the previous game, via the joystick or by cumbersomely dragging the cursor instead of the simple point and "click" mechanics, which would've been appreciated.

Every Monkey Island fan worth his or hers pieces of eight knows that humour is just as important to the series as the nonsensical puzzles and Telltale surely delivers in that department. Guybrush Threepwood, despite all his adventures still looks and acts like the unlikeliest person to be a pirate, the dialogue is razor sharp with lots of wit, there are plenty of references to the old games sure to delight fans and of course, the characters are teeming with charm and personality.

This is an ex-parrot! He has ceased to be!

There's a peculiarity in the dialogue trees: the phrases you choose rarely if ever correspond to what Threepwood actually says. This is a double-edged blade: on one hand not only does it seems like you're reading what our Mighty Pirate actually thinks before moderating his responses, it also keeps surprising players. On the other hand, it's a "mechanic" that would work better if used more sporadically and most of the time regardless of what you choose the result is the same, removing any challenge from conversations. Still, the writing elicits responses that range from a forced smile to a good laugh, and just like in other Monkey Island games makes it a very entertaining and enjoyable experience. Every line of text is voiced by a great cast of voice actors and Dominic Armato returns to voice our hero alongside a familiar and very fitting soundtrack. Again, the Wii version doesn't quite hold up and the sound is quite compressed. Whether this is because of the size limit or not, it's a flaw and it's there.

The puzzles, usually bordering on the non-sensical, make you combine items for unexpected and often humorous results, making sure the player takes a good look at the inventory as well as everything and everyone on Floatsam Island. However, more challenge would be appreciated with the game's mysteries only slightly tickling the brain - never enough to give a big sense of satisfaction for solving them. One particular puzzle that involves traversing a jungle is especially annoying and worst of all, you'll have to pretty much do it a second time, feeling like it's just there to pad the game's length.

One can't stop but wondering if the lack of challenge and boring jungle mazes aren't a byproduct of the episodic nature of the game. Since this is the first episode, depending on the next ones it might be viewed as natural difficulty progression. This episode will take you about 3 hours to finish and there aren't a lot of reasons for you to go back to it, but that's pretty much how the genre rolls.

So did Telltale fill the shoes left behind for 9 years? Hard to say for sure yet. Launch of the Screaming Narwhal is a good adventure game that mostly lives up to the series: the jokes are there and so is the series' feeling. But - considering the bad framerate and badly compressed audio the 1000 Wii Points this title costs may better be spent on the superior PC version. If it weren't for these issues we would've whole heartedly recommended Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, as it is, proceed with caution.