WiiWare Monkey Island Ep. 2 on sail Monday, Aug. 31

You'd be fine to start with Tales, the story is distanced enough on the timeline from the earlier ones that you don't really need to know the backstory, and playing it shouldn't hamper your enjoyment of the oldies when you get to them.

MI2 is beautiful as it is though, and CMI is recent enough to look and sound great without a remake, so I recommend grabbing scummvm, finding a copy of each and playing them through. Two of the greatest adventure games of all time right there.

Don't go out of your way to play Escape though.

Tales is definitely distanced, but this episode especially had a lot of little references that were really awesome, I'd recommend playing the originals first. Monkey Island 2 probably will be redone the same way as the first, but that could be a long way off.

The third one though was already fully voice acted and was completely hand drawn, it looked a lot better than even the recent remake, so you could play that one right away (though I'd still play the second game first)

And I'd honestly just ignore the fourth game, it has its moments but it's no where near as good as the others, the story was just bad and so far Tales has almost completely ignored its existance, I've only noticed one reference to that and it could be easily missed if you blinked.

I never played the originals. Had the first one (on pirate, it was back in the day, I was a kid) but didn't get into it at all, so basically never played it past the first few screens. Sorry, I was more into Sierra...

So anyhow, you can go ahead and get this series, it's good and doesn't particularly seem like you're missing that much without having played the original (probably some injokes).

I assume this chapter will have the same shitty framerate and general lack of polish as the first... so if you have a choice, I'd get the PC version (personally, I'll be getting it on Wii, though - luckily the game is easily good enough to make up for its performance.)

@my post above - gah! 'on pirate' was not intended as a pun! (honestly)