Have often said that Grim Fandango is a gorgeous art piece but a relatively bad adventure game. Sort of a shame, but also appropriate, as LucasArts’ pointnclick swan song.
This oughta be obvious coming from me but Full Throttle, while slightly less beautiful, is leagues more consistent and coherent.
I got hit by that same forklift bug 20 years ago and spent years talking shit about the game as a result. I didn’t know it was a bug! I thought the game just had really terrible puzzles.
Which I guess it did I dunno I really hated those controls
Grim Fandango is a really excellent adventure game in Year Two, which does the classic Lucasarts adventure game thing of giving you a list of objectives and letting you roam around slowly figuring out how to complete them. It falls apart after that because it does the other classic Lucasarts adventure game thing of not knowing how to structure an endgame, running out of time before they can figure it out, and withering away into an increasingly linear cramped finale full of half-baked puzzles
The game gets worse as it goes on. there’s a puzzle where you have to get a demon drunk so he’ll vomit in your garage which of course covers the entire floor in liquid demon vomit which you then you have to freeze which somehow safely disarms the booby traps on your car and you can just drive it out. most of grim fandango’s puzzles towards the end are at least as bad or worse than gabriel knight 3’s disguising yourself as someone without a mustache by assembling a fake mustache out of cat hair and then drawing a mustache with marker on their passport photo puzzle
when I first played I approached it like it was gonna be this mature thematically consistent artgame and it lost me by the flaming beaver puzzle in the first act. this time I approached it as a game that had a flaming beaver puzzle in the first act, which I guess made me feel more pleasantly surprised by the other stuff.
the year two section is definitely the best part!! I do have a fondness for the goofy action movie segments of the third and fourth sections, though. it made sense finding out the sassy/weeping child skeletons in the island section locked in a cage making lightbulbs to a sad xylophone song were apparently inspired by “the city of lost children” since it was one of the more bizarre tonal shifts hahah. maybe the adventure game for that movie has an inexplicable hotrod-themed location to keep the dialogue going.
it’s hard to pick out the absolute worst puzzle but I felt a kind of numbness kick in when I, uh, found myself putting a severed skeletal arm into a handheld grinder for reasons which would not become apparent until three puzzles later. oh wait: the absolute worst puzzle for me was taking a photo of a recently dead conspirator, and showing it to a carrier pigeon, so it would take a message not to the dead conspirator but to someone AROUND the dead conspirator, so that he would fall into the sewer where you were hanging out although there were only the vaguest hints at his location before that. maybe I was just brainfogged but that was the one I least regretted having to look up.
I never played full throttle but got that and the first monkey island once I finished because they were both on sale. also the second legend of kyrandia game since it was also on sale and I guess I’m on a kick!!!
this is how I am with all anime I like.
It’s tough out here being a Mahou Shoujo-tai Arusu fan
Monkey Island is also excellent because it leaps into the goofass videogame logic that’s so tonally weird and inconsistent in Grim Fandango and makes it a completely integrated part of the goofass plot.
Full Throttle is still better, though. And funnier, if you have my sense of humor.
here it is
the first 11/10 game I’ve played for 2020
what was first an incomprehensibly difficult dumb shitty piece of Euro jank gave way to a frenzied, brilliant puzzle shooter in a Detroit where thugs have bazookas, there’s drones with guns and rats can make RoboCop explode by touching him for a few seconds
it’s got all the hits
it’s the most incredible 15 minutes of game one can learn to try to get through and then hate themselves for
also I’ve been playing Prey. Prey is alright.
please do be careful, doctors and nurses are already stretched thin
been trying to clear out the tedious shit in hyrule warriors, but the game keeps crashing. fun tho
I used a Tabletop Simulator discount a week or two back to hook up family members and myself with the game so that we could play board games for Easter since we are all stuck in isolation from one another. It mostly worked and was good but I think it took 3 1/2 hours to get through three not-that-long boardgames.
I very not-subtly hinted to my friend that we should get together an Isolation Tabletop Simulator Board Game Night going, and he seemed very uninterested. Super disappointed. I get that it’s “not the same” compared to actual board games, but c’mon, we’re all stuck in our stupid apartments going bonkers, can we do something?
I am very new to it but it seems like certain games work well with it and certain ones don’t at all. Like I just had to get working versions of Sorry and Bonkers which are both fairly basic games (like dad ain’t gonna be able to follow anything that complicated in person, much less via computer/phone), but anything that had a lot of cards or small pieces seemed to be an adventure in itself. Still like you said, at this point something is much better than just waiting several months in loneliness.
Working the tiny pieces, and having to manage a shit ton of parts, can definitely be a lot to handle. If you’re new though, I will say that your capacity for this definitely increases after some time getting used to the system and controls. Just a combination of learning all the hot-keys and possible controls, along with good organizational habits which you would never think of or need in a physical setting.
Also, the quality of the workshop content you’re getting matters a lot too. The good setups will include all sorts of QoL features that take a lot of the frustration and having to fudge about with pieces out of the equation. Stuff from auto-setup and auto-cleanup buttons, to grid-snap systems for placing down things. If you see a billion content downloads for one game, definitely take the time to find the high-quality ones.
I played Modern Warfare last night and every game had either:
So I busted out this micspam
It’s been a few years since I played but Monkey Island 1 is still good so far. Still think the fight in the governor’s mansion is one of the better adventure game jokes, although I guess it’s also the sort of thing you can only really do the once.
It’s funny to me how gamey and abrupt the opening scenes are: here’s your task, here are the three sub tasks that make it up, along with some hints. All presented as explicitly as possible. It’s basically the same structure as the best section in Grim Fandango and kind of reinforces how weirdly un-scaleable this kind of adventure game structure is at heart. Like, one of the most refreshing things about MI1 is how comparatively easy it is! Maybe part of that’s just because parts of it are still in memory somewhere, but: there’s a part where you get “gopher repellent” as a joke item, and there’s a guy in prison who wants you to get rid of the rats there. If you give him the gopher repellent he says “yes, this might work, here’s the item”. In most subsequent adventure games I’ve played there’d absolutely be an extra complicating step in here, like you’d have to paint the rats yellow before the gopher repellent would work on them or something. I love point and click adventure games but in retrospect do feel they probably work better being treated as a compressed and approachable subcategory of Zorklike or something than an independent form that benefits from having its logic intensified and extrapolated upon.
Maybe I just need to catch up on the several hundred text adventures just structured as “you are in a CASTLE, you must find the fifty TREASURES”, something kind of appealing about that clear and anonymous structure.
The energy level in Roblox games is so next level, “Growing Up” has you continually doing small tasks to Age-Up (which is visualized as your Roblox character model getting stretched out vertically more and more) and each age brings a new toy/responsibility.
At like 13 you get a cell-phone that has two options, “TEXT” which brings up a text chat for the server you’re on that’s been secretly running in the background the whole time, and “mario” which overlays your screen with a simplistic 2D platformer that uses a Mario sprite but otherwise has no resemblance to Mario (you don’t die in one hit, you have an “attack button” that makes you spawn hammers, jumping on ‘enemies’ does nothing/etc.)
And every time you get stretched out with age it’s this continual process of prebuilt assets being compounded together with reckless enthusiasm & early-3d disregard for ‘rules’ or ‘coherence’.
You go on a camping trip that ends with you finding a (ridable) raptor in a cave, your ‘driving lesson’ (age 16) that allows u to drive any car littered on the map doesn’t end until you ‘accidentally’ blow up the Gas Station and have to save your driving instructor. You keep getting pets with age, until you simultaneously have 3 all of which constantly hover by you while operating on completely different animation cycles.
In my mind, maybe the Xbox’s only “killer app”
My kid plays Roblox constantly and I am a terrible parent cause I couldn’t tell you about what it actually does other than use its crap engine to remake extant game genres
Honestly the stuff I spent the most time in as a kid was map editors and The Sims and some Tribes 2 mod that let you construct buildings so it’s heartening to see that the games kids still love are ones like Minecraft and Roblox, even if they seem sinister to me as An Old.
entmod was just minecraft for boomers
