Day of the Tentacle
filfre.net
filfre.net
[1]: https://www.gog.com/game/day_of_the_tentacle_remastered
I ended up doing it anyway at the time, but later I would play all three, and the third one really benefits - in my view anyway - from having played the first two ones, even though they can all stand on their own. So I wonder whether Day of the Tentacle is similar?
They address this in the linked article (also from personal experience) -- you really don't need any context from Maniac Mansion to thoroughly enjoy DOTT and they are really totally different games in style and substance.
BTW: In the version of DotT I played in the 90s there was a funny easter egg: A computer in the game was running a playable version of Maniac Mansion. I don't know if this is part of the remastered version though.
Agree on not needing to play Maniac Mansion first, too. I came to the original having no idea that MM even existed. The characters and story are great even if you don't know the references.
[1]: https://playclassic.games/games/point-n-click-adventure-dos-...
The time travel aspect and that you control three characters in the past, present, and future, where things you do in the past affect the future was truly innovative to me. I realize now that it's not as magical design or programming wise as it appears. It's not that hard to have something done in one room affect something in another room in the game, but as a player having to think across time as well as space was really cool.
The article goes on to talk about the time travel, so it's not ignored, but it seems that I found it more innovative than the author.
It also opens the game up in terms of how many puzzles you can be thinking about at once; if you're stuck in a traditional 1-protagonist game you might only have one or two things you think you need to do next, at least in a pretty linear game, but now you always have at least 3 things to work out at once...
[1] I'm not a big IF buff, but I guess Infocom's "Suspended" (1983) is a classic game where you can control different "characters" at once, and I really loved "T-Zero" (1991), where you also open up 3 different timezones you can travel between at will, and changes in the past affect the present/future in a slightly DOTT-esque manner - although it's a very different game.
Suspended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_(video_game)
T-Zero: https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=u8qqrwutdugkexpr or reviewed on filfre.net here: https://www.filfre.net/2017/12/the-text-adventures-of-1991/
Zork Grand Inquisitor (1997) definitely did time travel as different playable characters in a graphical adventure, but that was four years after Day of the Tentacle (1993).
I got the talkie on CD-ROM for a christmas present one year. I struggled with a lot of it, but my Dad before giving me the present removed the hint/solve book from the box and watched us (me and my younger brother) play and try and figure everything out and just gave us enough of a hint at the right times to make it feel like a really satisfying experience.
I'll RTFA after work.
> "Of course, there’s no accounting for taste. If you loathe cartoons, perhaps you might not like this game. If you prefer more serious plots or more rigorously cerebral puzzles, perhaps you won’t love it. [...] It remains at the end of the day a slapstick cartoon comedy"
Personally, this caveat did apply so much to me. I bought and played the game, all way to the end, trying to give it a chance, but in my case, I found it plain boring. If you like slapstick, that's probably your gold nugget indeed, based on the glowing reviews. Me, I don't; I need at least some substance (?). I loved Loom, I enjoyed The Monkey Island (esp. the 1st one in the series), as well as the Indiana Jones games. I found amusement in their lightheartedness and casual humour. I liked Grim Fandango too. But DoTT fits the same place in my mind with Psychonauts: I plainly don't get why so many people are so stoked about them. To me, they're both just super boring.
I really, really like almost anything that involves manifesting the inside of the mind, as long as it's halfway decently done. (That is, it doesn't have to be excellent, just not terrible.)
But even as one who rather liked the game, I will say Psychonauts has a particularly horrible pacing problem where it takes too long to get to the first level, and the first level is (IMHO) the worst one in the game that most fails to take advantage of the premise, and then it takes too long to get to the second level, which is the second worst one in the game in terms of taking advantage of the premise. Also both those levels are themselves too long; I'm pretty sure they're padded out to try to make all the major levels similar in length, but "learn how to use the jumping controls" simply doesn't warrant the same amount of time as "resolve a paranoid schizophrenic's conspiracy issues". Things don't really start feeling unique until the third level, but it's a lot to swallow to get that far. I've tried to replay it a couple of times and bounced off of this; if I ever try again I'm going to try to go online and steal someone's save file just before the third level.
As much as I liked it, I've had a really hard time recommending it to anyone for this reason.
With a game like this now (Say, the excellent Thimbleweed Park - you played it, right?), if you get truly, epically stuck, there's a walk-through no more than a few clicks away. And you'll probably admit defeat and go there after a few hours.
When I picked DoTT up (a few seconds after release ;) ), no such thing. You were in it alone. Maybe there was a magazine write in for hints, and if you were lucky you knew a guy on a BBS, but other than that, you were on your own. That made the puzzles so much sweeter when you got them.
Completely agree. Unlike today, there was really no alternative to really thinking "deep" and trying to figure something out on your own. If push really came to shove, you went to the local bookstore and hopefully they had a magazine or guide available. I miss those times. :)
(It helped that I only got a new commercial game every few months and maybe a couple of mostly short shareware games, so plenty of time to explore each one. Now I have a massive backlog of unplayed Steam games and still keep buying more.)
But not having hints and walkthroughs to fall back on definitely enhanced how much attention I paid to the game. I replayed various Lucasarts games from my teenage years recently and remembered a little bit from each section of each game, until I got halfway through Grim Fandango.
I knew I'd finished it before but the last two or three areas seemed completely unfamiliar, I think because I first bought it in the UHS Hints era, looked a hint up halfway through, and started leaning way too heavily on hints for the rest of the game.
This is true, but it made winning all the more satisfying. :)
Myst comes to mind as another game which was a beast to figure out. Once you did though, you felt like a god.
(LucasArts had 1-800-STAR-WARS set up as its hint line. It still plays as an obvious Star Wars joke in the game today, but for kids that were familiar with the hint line it was much more on-the-nose joke about bothering your parents to call for a hint.)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/day-of-the-tentacle-remaster...
The other adventure games I had played to that point I was only able to finish by playing in parallel with several friends and when one of us got stuck, we would help each other. Hero's Quest was the first game I completed in this manner (we were stuck on King's Quest until someone downloaded a hint guide from a BBS; that game was primarily difficult because how easy it was to get in an unwinnable state).
If they can make a movie about The Magic 8-Ball...
Apparently Ron had a final chapter in mind for Monkey Island, but with Disney/Lucas owning the rights, we'll probably never see it. I'm guessing the last chapter might do a bit of retconning on the final moments of Part 2, but no one outside of Ron apparently knows how it ends. :(
We all were blocked at the same point until my uncle found the puzzle where you have to close a door to get the keys, and as soon as he found it he phoned my mom and we all progressed.
That type of puzzle discovery hasn't happened since. Amazing game and amazing memory.
I replayed the remastered game a couple of years ago on PS4 with my daughter who was seven years old, and this time the only thing I was stuck on was the cat puzzle with the squeaky mattresses. I read a blog post just now about that puzzle, and it's special because you use the Use verb on two different things outside of your inventory. You usually go inventory->world or inventory->inventory, but here it's world->world. So I had to look up that one solution in the whole game.
Playing as an adult, it's much easier to keep in mind what clues you have and what the open puzzles are. As a kid, I would just start using everything with everything else, and the hints from failed interactions wouldn't clue me in. Now I see they make a really god job at telling you why things don't work and what you should try instead.
I was pleasantly surprised that my daughter thought the game was hilarious. I expected her to get bored quickly, but we played through it all together.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compilers:_Principles,_Techn...
Walkthroughs in text today are OK because you can read until the first mention of something you haven't done to get unstuck, but nothing beats a real person giving you appropriate hints. Also, there's the Universal Hint System [1] that gives you more and more detailed hints when you're stuck, but I haven't used it in a real situation. I looked up a puzzle now that I was stuck on in Day of the Tentacle, but couldn't find it.
Shigero Miyamoto has talked about this about The Legend of Zelda. They purposely added secret stuff in that game with absolutely no hints, almost impossible to find for a single player, to encourage people to talk about the game in school and elsewhere. You could only find the secrets when discussing the game with others, which was what they intended. Imagine getting a hint at school and having to wait until you can run home and test it; that way you're thinking about the game all day!
Another gem from this era is Grim Fandango, which also has a recently remastered version.
The strong coherence between story, time, and gameplay was really really striking
So, friggin what. I dearly wish more game designers (and not a few critics) would remember that a lot of these games are meant to be fun. I don't want some message or insight or innovation all the time. I often want to sit down and spend some time having fun and unwinding. Its not a negative, its like the comfort of an old book that I've decided to reread.
Plus, fun and funny are damn tough to get right. Its so much easier to do drama than comedy because a so-so drama is still ok, but a so-so comedy is just bad.