Back a long, long time ago, when computers had very little processing power and the idea of upgrading ones video card meant increasing your display from CGA to EGA or even VGA, adventure gaming was at the peak of it’s popularity.  As computers grew faster, video cards rendered in real-time and sound capabilities “blasted away the sound barrier”, PC gaming gave way to first person shooters and MMORPGs and the adventure game was almost forgotten.

There have been some attempts at reviving this long lost genre with such incredible games as The Longest Journey and it’s sequal, DreamFall, or Runaway: A Road Adventure and Siberia.  These were, and still are, great adventure games.  However, no major game publishers have released anything of significance in almost 10 years.  That is until the revival of the Monkey Island franchise.  Lucasarts teamed up with Telltale Games and released the next installment of Monkey Island, Tales of Monkey Island.  Lucasarts also made a, so I’ve heard, fantastic, remake of the original cult classic, The Secret of Monkey Island, which I have yet to replay.

So now on to the other part of this topic, Wine and Linux.  Windows and I do not mix, thus, I no don’t bother wasting my money and the hours of my life installing, fixing and maintaining a Windows installation.  However, when I heard Tales of Monkey Island was coming out I was tempted to toss an install on my system.  So I did.  This lasted about a week before dying.  So I figured I’d try ToMI under Wine in Linux.  I had little hope but lo and behold it worked almost without a hitch.  The version of wine I was running at the time was 1.1.25.  It installed fine but refused to register.  My laptop was running 1.0.1 of wine, it installed and registered fine on there.  So I copied the registry over to the desktop system running 1.1.25 and it worked.  One last problem was I was stuck in 1024×768 resolution.  Attempting to change resolutions caused the game to crash.  I started playing in this mode, as it’s not horrible, but after a quick search discovered a patch for Wine to fix the resolution.  So I pulled the latest sources from the git repository and let it compile with the defaults.  I needed to run ‘apt-get build-deps wine’ in Ubuntu Jaunty to allow gcc to build 32bit binaries on my 64bit system.  I also found that the latest git repositories had the patch included.

So I let it compile, after a good 30 minutes it finished.  I fired ToMI up under this new Wine and voila, everything works beautifully.  I spent some time this evening relaxing infront of a new Monkey Island game and have been enjoying every minute of it.  What a fantastic game this far!

Aside from an odd looking version of Guybrush, I still consider the Guybrush from Curse of MI to be the best, Dominic Armando reprises his roll of Guybrush and does an excellent job as usual.  Telltale did a fantastic job of capturing the Monkey Island feel from the prior games as well.  I also heard that, while not on the payroll, Ron Gilbert (original Monkey Island creator) lent a hand in the production of the game.

Definitely worth my $35.  I am so far more than happy and can’t wait to game some more tomorrow evening.