The other major new function is the Hint button, which I suspect will be of great use to those who haven't played Monkey Island before. Holding X in-game brings up a hint, seemingly based on both location and context. They'll start off simple, giving you a vague idea of which puzzle you should be solving next before, four or five requests down the line, you'll have not only an explicit answer as to how to solve whatever puzzle you should do next, but a big yellow arrow pointing in the direction you need to go. For a hint system, this is surprisingly well-designed, as it even takes into account your inventory. While that's a minor touch, it's impressive for a hint system in a game to realise you're missing an object required and point you towards it.

For newcomers, this is an important point. I'm of the firm believe that everyone should play Monkey Island, because even without the rose-tinted specs of nostalgia, it's a great game. It's also a bloody hard game, particularly if you're not used to LucasArts' particular brand of absurdist logic, and the excellent hint system will ensure that everyone who buys it has the opportunity to see it to the end with the hints they need, online walkthroughs be damned. It also strikes me as a bit of a shame, though, if only because I can remember struggling through this without hints all those years ago, and I get the feeling that using hints or walkthroughs will detract somewhat from the sheer joy of solving a bugger of a puzzle. In this day and age a quick Google search can answer any question, though, so perhaps we'll move on from this topic before I start reminiscing about when all of this was just ASCII.

No, the main things changed are the graphics and the voice acting. The graphics are gorgeous, though they're stylised in the same way as the later Monkey Island games were, and I can't say that's a look I ever found appropriate to Guybrush. This is doubtless because I'm a purist, and can likely be at least somewhat ignored. As said before, the game appears to be built directly on top of the original game, and this leads to one graphical oddity: the animation, which has a fairly low number of frames and as such isn't as smooth as you might expect. Likewise, don't expect lip-syncing. The mouths never used to move in the slightest during close-up scenes, so don't expect them to now. The one issue with the graphics is that there were a fair few pixel-hunting puzzles and items in the original, and they're even worse now, if anything. In particular, the updated overhead map of Monkey Island makes it an abject bastard to find one or two of the smaller locations, as the colours don't stand out nearly so much now as they did before.

The voice acting makes use of Dominic Armato, who has always been the voice of Guybrush, and his delivery adds a surprising amount to certain parts of the game – in particular, the insult sword-fighting. The rest of the cast vary between excellent and adequate; despite previous reservations I've got a lot of love for whoever did LeChuck's voice, and the conversation with the dog in the bar is just the kind of absurd I've missed from these games.

Crucially, though: should you buy it? Well, yes. It's Monkey Island. Have you played the old games? Then you know what to expect, and that'll be 800 Microsoft Points, please. If you haven't, then you really should, and with the new graphics and voice acting there's no better time, so that'll be 800 Microsoft Points, please. You still don't want to? Pah. You fight like a dairy farmer.

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