Tales of Monkey Island 2: The Siege of Spinner Cay

For Those Who haven't taken the simian plunge, Spinner Cay is basically exactly the same as the series' first episode, Launch of the Screaming Narwhal. It's also a little bit better, with no porcelain power pirates to embarrass us, or vast swathes of time spent navigating dull jungle terrain. Well, there is a boring jungle bit, but it's smaller than before. And the ending suggests there's no chance of another cropping in the third episode.

Guybrush isn't stuck on one island either, though only two of them have more than one area to explore. In some ways Spinner Cay feels smaller than Screaming Narwhal, strangely. There's also the question of whether the new race - the Merfojk - work or not They certainly don't add anything to the comedy side of things - apart from a book devoted to fish jokes - although this is almost entirely made up for by the return of LeChuck. Teeth might be gnashing about his (surely temporary) transformation, but he's easily the best of the non-Guybrush characters.

The same problems that plagued the first episode are still present here, just diluted a little bit Character models have still been reused a lot, but at least there are few new ones in there.

It might seem as if all I've done is slate Siege of Spinner Cay, but there's still a lot of goodness here. Guybrush is still such a fantastic character that weaker elements don't seem to matter when he's around. The puzzles are solid enough too.

So, while greatness might not have been attained yet, there's evidence to suggest Telltale are working hard enough on the flaws that it could still happen. Fingers crossed.