Dtp entertainment has released a new teaser for Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island.

This is I believe the first available sample of the English voice work, and judging from the above trailer, which tells us little else, this area was well done.

Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island is currently available in Germany, and will expand to other territories with full English voices in early 2010. Between this and Tales, 'tis a fine time to be a fan of swashbucklin' graphic adventures, and in both cases brought to you by LEC veterans.

Update by Zaarin: You may be interested in this here totally unrelated, but awesome, tribute to Monkey Island by Miquel Montllo.

I was looking at my new iPhone today, a birthday present from my family, and I saw an email about Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island coming out in Germany today. I am so happy it finally made the shelves. If someone over in Germany could take a picture of it on the shelves I would appreciate it. I want to congratulate my awesome team for all the hard work they put into it.

I also heard there was a new trailer, but that some people didn't like the FMV animation. To meet our deadline I decided that we should focus on the programming and in game animation, and if we had to make cuts we would do it in the FMVs (full motion videos). The FMVs only make up 15 minutes of a ten hour game. I was talking with Ron Gilbert one day and he said “cut scenes are the least important part of an adventure game," and that I should "keep them to a minimum and focus on the game. Players are just going to skip them anyway.” Coming from a background in traditional character animation I was a bit bummed to hear that, but I reluctantly agreed that what he said made sense, so that is what we did. Not to say all the in game animations are perfect but we definitely put more time and effort on those.

Also we learned a lot from making our first game, A Vampyre Story. We improved the in game dialog, voice acting, the puzzles, the programming and scripting. Although not perfect, Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island is, in my opinion, a much more ambitious and improved product over our first one. I hope you agree.

As much as it may look like a copycat release, however, Ghost Pirates Of Vooju Island is anything but. Written by Bill Tiller, the artist behind The Curse Of Monkey Island, Ghost Pirates is an adventure that actually started off as an idea for a proper Guybrush adventure all the way back in 1999. “Larry Ahern was relating to me how Tim Schafer wanted to do more adventure games but was annoyed how long they took,” explains Tiller. “The idea surfaced that maybe instead of one project leader doing one big adventure game you could have three project leaders doing one small adventure each. One project leader could do an adventure from Le Chuck’s perspective, another from Elaine's and again another one from Guybrush’s. It was a cool idea that never got off the ground, but the idea stuck in my head. After I left LucasArts, I still wanted to do a Monkey Island game but Jim Ward said Lucas would never do one again. So I started formulating my own game idea that didn't involve the Monkey Island licence.”

the idea of Ghost Pirates came from an idea we bandied about at LucasArts to play three different Monkey Island characters in one game, to see the adventure through their eyes.

But the cool thing is the fans REALLY win here no matter how or why the MI games got made. Fans get Secret of MI with sound, voice and new take at the old graphics, they get an episodic down loadable game with real time environments from Tell Tale, and in January they’ll get a retail CD, full game, with hand painted backgrounds in the CMI style, but with a whole new story line and new characters, and you get to play ghosts and switch between three main characters. So as a huge MI fan I consider this a win, win, win! I hope other Monkey fans do too.

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So I was looking as some forums that were discussing Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, and one thing that popped up that I wanted to address went something like this ”Aw man! not another pirate game?!!” Well I agree there are a lot out there and we did pitch a lot of different game ideas and do have a lot of original ideas for games, - don’t we all really? But the game pitch that seemed to get the most traction was Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island. I love pirates and I haven’t worked on a pirate game since 1997 so for me it’s been 12 years and I have been itching to do another one.