A new adventure game by LucasArts alumnis Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, following the spiritual and aesthetic veins of Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken.
Did you know that Loom, The Dig, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Fate of Atlantis were already available via Steam? Well, they are, readily compatible with ScummVM. Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island you’ll have to make do with enhanced editions if you want to net legally.
Haha my pledge that includes guilt absolution was $5 more than the final price. Nice!
I’m tempted because maniac mansion was one of the few scumm games that I thought actually played well (monkey island comparatively sucks, I will die on this hill), but after I initially loved dropsy a couple years ago I had to drag myself through actually finishing it so idk
You should play Last Crusade. It was hugely formative for me, being the first PC game I ever played, but over the years and multiple revisits I’ve also come to appreciate much of its design. Namely that it’s an adventure game that allowed for multiple avenues to solve a puzzle, including brute force, and that this openness would be later telegraphed openly in Fate of Atlantis by providing three main branches pushing for puzzle-solving, co-operation or a more action-focused experience.
Last Crusade is also the first LucasArts game to introduce talking as a gameplay verb. As such it serves a very mechanical function I actually appreciate far more over the more exposition-driven purpose later games would employ. You spend a lot of the game bullshitting your way past antagonistic forces who you need to get an individual sense of just from dialogue. You can also attempt to bribe them or take them on.
The big highlight setpiece is Castle Brunwald, where a number of potential branches can be explored allowing for different material opportunities and solutions as the game goes on from that point.
Also you can punch Hitler.
I think Monkey Island is truly notable for the consistent effort they made to avoid the design of puzzles repeating themselves. You’re always doing something new each step. I also have a lot of affection for the darker EGA looks of both it and Indy 3, especially since you spend so much of your time on an eternally nocturnal island in the former case, but sadly that look seems to have gone out of style and you can’t get those versions legally any longer.
enjoying this a lot so far, especially the extent to which it plays on the kind of weird narrative indeterminacy of adventure game protagonists, where they’re not only split by being both player avatars and characters in their own right at the same time but also by the way they kind of MC the world you’re being introduced to and the way the limits of the game system tend to be expressed through them (“i don’t want to pick that up”). and the generally shady feeling that results, as they seem to both be inside and outside the game world and also alternately performing / resisting the unpacking of that world. i’ve seen reviews of this that complained the different player characters couldn’t talk to each other but this is the shrewdest thing in the game!! i can’t think of anything that would dissipate sense of mystery more completely than just being able to ask people straight-up bioware-wise “so what’s YOUR character history”.
just got to chapter 4!
It’s odd looking at them in either VGA or EGA now as I had played them in MCGA, which had the color depth of VGA but maxed the resolution at 320x200, with the result being a lot less of the color harshness of the EGA but not having the pixels to spare (or square pixels in general)on gradients that the VGA mode offered
finished this, really enjoyed it. don’t think many of the jokes particularly landed for me as much as the pacing and structure did, in particular the way the standard adventure game concentric-circle design was set off with various segues, small changes and one-off events to stop it ever feeling too settled. the early parts in particular had a nice mix of goofiness and ominousness which worked especially as i wasn’t sure how far in either direction they would go with it. and there’s a nice mood to the locations and characters in general. i feel there were a lot of plot / game elements that were just kind of abruptly dropped by the end, unless i’m missing something, but truthfully i kind of enjoyed how the focus on that point was on maintaining emotional momentum rather than trying to close off every hole.
re. the ending: i liked it, although am not sure why, as it was exactly what i dreaded it would turn out to be as soon as i read the first journal. i’m not sure i would have cared for it if i hadn’t known they’d done something similar in monkey island 2? making the same widely reviled decision twice after a 20+ year break made it feel more earned, in a weird way. but also i think it connects more to that sense of the formal and narrative amiguity of adventure game characters and how the game in general takes pains to preserve that: it made more sense that rather than all being pinned into place by the narrative at the end they’d just drift further into indeterminacy, leaving the husk of a puzzle game behind.
also small thing i just noticed today: in the dialog puzzle where the dad has to prove how “with it” he is to the kid i guessed correctly at one option since i remembered it as a throwaway line in delores’ flashback section and only later realised how perfectly in character it is that he’d guess at what was cool based on stuff he’d overheard his daughter say!! 
delightful
Sold
Life of D. Duck is one of my favorites.
http://www.bjornarb.com/dduck.html
The sequel I didn’t like quite as much, but it’s still worthwhile if you enjoy the first game.
I only post when I’m out of it cuz I usually feel like King Graham. SB (and the World) is the Leprechaun Kingdom. But Dracko called for posts so here is a post.
Please read the solution to the Rumplestiltskin puzzle from the official King’s Quest 1 hintbook. Old adventure game hintbooks are all wroth reading.
I love Sierra games way more nowadays than I did as a kid, but that’s because I have the internet and can cheat at any time.
I know no one’s gonna agree with me on this but I think the final puzzle in Leisure Suit Larry is top 10 worst of all time.
King’s Quest as a series is just absolutely brutal. I don’t know how anyone tolerated it in the pre-FAQ era.
Al Lowe likes to tell a story about how in the 80s because before PCs had multiple megabytes of RAM DOS would allocate your onboard RAM as low memory, hi memory, extended memory or expanded memory.
System processes were the sole occupants of low memory but other software would access other designations. These were purely fictional, with the motherboard just slotting one type of RAM, but a program that made a call to read or write to hi memory could be out of RAM and crash even if there was plenty of memory available otherwise.
So PC gamers got used to creating their own boot discs to allocate memory types for different games. He said that he had written eight or so custom command.com files so the he could play his various games.
The moral of this story is that prior to Windows PC gaming’s audience was self selected for people who are willing to put up with pointless bullshit and who like to believe that makes them smarter than other people
Or their parents wouldn’t buy a game console but would buy a PC so you learn to make do
OMM is evergreen
don’t make me get that great umberto eco bit out again
(I strongly relate to this as someone who is deeply, incurably protestant but who increasingly thinks that’s a huge waste of time and energy)
We Must Never Forget Our Traditions
In additional resurrection Ron Gilbert Complained no one bought this game for the Switch so I did. Then I finally played it today.
It is umm…hmm. Not very funny. I like the unreliable protagonists. But I am actively rejecting almost the entire cast. Each one could be broken into bulletpoints describing their whole character.
I will keep playing it thinking about Curse of Monkey Island being on steam now.
I have pretty strong nostalgia for Maniac Mansion on the NES, but it’s mainly focused on simply walking around the outdoor areas with Dave’s music playing.
Also, I just now came across this arrangement of the song.
