i also hate the cartoon look. i can't identify with such ugly cartoon characters. adventure games only worked for me when the resolution was 320x200 or less. then the graphics was abstract enough to leave room for your own imagination.
The cartoon look doesn't look very impressive to me either.
I feel a bit like when Blizzard decided Warcraft 3 should be cartoony.. and WoW too. A shame as the original games had great graphics for their time. I feel it's somehow a trend when it comes to these much older games and their remakes. Speaking of remakes, the remake of the first Monkey Island doesn't look very different from the original. Or perhaps in my memory it was much higher-res graphics than it really was. Of course, it's not really a bad thing, but I've still got the original disk of Secret of Monkey Island right here.
"Graphically it looks weak and much worse than competition:"
I agree, but I also have to say that the Sam & Max episodes do not suffer from their 'poor' graphics. The humor and fun still very much exists.
In the end, even though the animations of the 2D games looked a hell of a lot better being smooth, crazy and true cartoony, I did like the Sam & Max episodes. I guess a lot can be said for going 3D these days (less expensive, less work), but I do find that the 3D animations often look stiff and almost boring compared to the old 2D game.
Hopefully 'Tales of Monkey Island' proves me wrong in thinking they won't get close to the original game series. (I didn't actually like the last Monkey Island game by the way, nor the last 2 Leisure Suit Larry games, but that's a whole different topic.)
