Something new to the Monkey Island series was the use of voice actors, starting with Curse of Monkey Island. With the first two games released on both CD-ROM and floppy, making use of vocals wasn't feasible. The primary voice actors from Curse of Monkey Island return for the new installation, casting Dominic Armato (Guybrush) and Earl Boen (Charles), and introducing Alexandra Boyd (Elaine). If one thing is totally impeccable about this game, it's definitely the voice acting. The characterizations are perfect, and the actors really fit their roles. There seems to be some unnecessary nationalization in places, such as a priest voiced with a Russian accent, but I didn't mind. It adds to the general feeling of overwhelming variety in the game. Very few of the characters sound similar, and so you'll never really get tired of hearing from one particular person. Of the main features of the game, I definitely say that this scores the highest.

Another fire? How many have you had today?

The music and sound effects were fitting and in most cases appropriate, but I found several logistic problems. Throughout the game, I noticed the background music almost "skipping". The best comparison I can make is a "blurp" often found in poorly-coded MP3s. It was quiet, so it wasn't very distracting, and it could very well have been part of the original music, but it happened too often for me to write it off as such.

The sound effects, on the other hand...

I encountered an issue throughout the first disc where audio events would be randomly skipped. If I were to turn the voices off and turn the subtitling on, then all the lines of text would be displayed, but whenever the voice was on, independently of the subtitles, lines of dialogue and sound effects would just be totally skipped. I checked the troubleshooting FAQ and set all the "Gee whiz!" factors to their lowest in an attempt to fix the issue, but it still presented itself. I consulted with LucasArts support, who gave me what seemed to be a fix at the time. I was using Detonator 7.17, and I downgraded to the latest Microsoft-certified drivers, 6.34. By the time I received this recommendation, though, I was already into Disc Two. Going back to play the game again on Disc One revealed to me later that the problem still stands. For LucasArts' benefit, though, they did ship me a copy version-dated vQA12, meaning that I probably got a release-candidate, and not a final copy. Interestingly enough, hough, this problem was only restricted to Disc One, and in playing the game on an eMachines running Windows 98, the problem didn't show there. This was probably an isolated incident, therefore, and you shouldn't see it happen. But if you do, be sure to let LucasArts know. They'll go out of their way to make sure you're enjoying your game! Thanks, Jay!

Dagobah system...Must find Yoda...