Deep breaths. You can do this. You can do this.

Good god, but it’s difficult. Escape From Monkey Island, while not exactly plumbing the same depths as the truly awful LucasArts adventures like Zak McKraken and Fate of Atlantis, still does not make itself a particularly easy game to like, or to play. I am not entirely sure what was going on with the personnel situation at LucasArts while it was being made, but the feeling I get when playing it is the same one I experienced when playing Mass Effect Andromeda, or the single-player campaign of Halo Infinite, where the teams responsible for the original classics had long since moved on and their replacements were trying to put together a sort of cargo-cult copy without understanding how or why anything in the originals worked.  Escape feels like the most expensive Monkey Island fan game ever made, and while I don’t have the phrase “fan game” down in my lexicon as a pure pejorative, when I apply it to a product made by the professionals at LucasArts, the supposed masters of the adventure game genre, I definitely mean it as one.

It’s not like I didn’t go into it with an open mind. I have played through Escape exactly once, when it first came out in 2000, and while I thought it was incredibly average in comparison to Curse and there were some bits that seemed spectacularly idiotic even to 16-year-old me (like Monkey Kombat), I didn’t hate it. Sure, the discourse turned against it during the subsequent decades and I had my opinion partially poisoned by groupthink that it was actually a disaster of a game, but set against that is… well, I have played some real fucking stinkers as part of this series, and also Chinatown Detective Agency earlier this year, so my scale for what constitutes a truly crap adventure game has been appropriately recalibrated. In spite of its reputation I wasn’t expecting Escape to be that bad, just incredibly underwhelming, and gave it the fairest go I possibly could.

Only to find that, no, it really does just suck.

Story-wise, Escape From Monkey Island is a (sort of) direct sequel to Curse, in so much as that actually matters for a series of comedy pirate-themed adventure games. Having reversed the curse of the diamond ring and defeated the ghost pirate LeChuck for a third time, series protagonist Guybrush Threepwood marries Elaine and spends the next three months on a pirate honeymoon… only to return to Melee Island and discover that he and Elaine have been declared dead, Elaine is being challenged in the gubernatorial elections by a slimy politician called Charles L Charles (hmm, I wonder who this could be?), and that the Carribean generally is being taken over by an unscrupulous Australian business magnate called Ozzie Mandrill, who is driving out all of the pirates and replacing them with tacky pirate-themed tourist traps like Starbuccaneers and Planet Threepwood.

And straight away we have a problem. I like the Monkey Island series because, while it’s ostensibly very stupid and self-referential and not afraid to break the fourth wall at all, it’s usually quite clever about how it does it.  The first game was the best at leveraging this, being full of anachronistic jokes about the extremely theme park-y nature of its world (as well as adventure games in general), but they were always delivered with the narrative equivalent of a knowing wink because the writing assumed the player was smart enough to already be in on said jokes without over-explaining them. You have isolated absurdities like the grog machine and the piranha poodles and the guy in the troll costume who eats the red herring, and there are a lot of them, but they’re isolated; most of the time the game is paying just enough lip service to its pirate theming to maintain kayfabe, because these anachronisms are only funny if they’re actually anachronisms — i.e. genuinely out of place given the context of the surrounding world.

But where Monkey Island’s story and humour was stupid in a clever way, Escape From Monkey Island’s story and humour is just stupid in a stupid way. This is not a pirate-themed adventure game with a lot of modern-day references, this is a modern-themed (or at least 2000s-era modern) adventure game that occasionally remembers that it was supposed to have pirates in it at one point. When nearly everything in the game is something ripped directly from the real world, the anachronisms cease to be remarkable — they’re just normal, at that point. Why is the idea of a Starbuccaneers funny if it’s on an entire island full of chain restaurants and microbreweries and real estate offices? If everything in your game is absurd and ridiculous, then nothing is; it’s just business as usual, which is kind of a problem when this is the only joke that Escape really knows how to do. And if you’re so insecure that you have to explain that joke up front, again and again, then you’re a terrible comedian. This is the exact same mistake the end of Monkey Island 2 made, except applied to an entire game, and it is absolutely awful.

So Escape, by its very nature, is a game that’s laser-targeted to piss me off, with absolutely none of the exceptionally self-assured dry humour of the games it’s supposed to be following up, and which failed to make me laugh even once. This time around, though, there was something that felt awfully familiar about the way it was going about this. Escape features:

• An obsession with Americana and tourism.
• Incredibly US-centric humour that has all of the subtlety and sophistication of a fart machine.
• An Australian villain.

And yet I didn’t manage to connect the dots until a friend explicitly pointed this out: the lead designers on Escape From Monkey Island are the same criminals responsible for Sam & Max. Everything fell into place after that; Escape From Monkey Island has far more in common with Sam & Max – a game that I intensely disliked — than it does the Monkey Island series, to the point where it isn’t so much Monkey Island 4 as it is the Sam & Max sequel that Sean Clark presumably hadn’t been allowed to make.

This goes a long way towards explaining why Escape is the way it is. Perennial series villain LeChuck is stuck playing second fiddle to an incredibly boring pisstake of Rupert Murdoch because the Sam & Max designers think Australia and Australians are inherently funny. Spoiler: they are not, and the uncharitable part of me strongly suspects that the designers and writers of Escape From Monkey Island had never travelled outside of the continental United States, because that’s the only way you could find the mere concept of an Australian accent side-splittingly hilarious. This would also explain why Escape appears to be a game targeted solely at the US market; LucasArts games have always had this problem where a lot of the humour is dependent on having at least a surface-level understanding of US history and culture, but Escape takes it to another level entirely. Even now, twenty-two years later, there are lines in Escape that are clearly structured like jokes, and which are clearly meant to be funny, but which remain largely impenetrable to me because they’re only parsable by people who grew up in the US in the 80s and 90s. The Marco Polo “joke” is the best example of this — I think it’s a game (or hazing ritual) in American schools, but that’s only my best guess based on the context it’s presented to me in, and even with that knowledge I don’t understand why the joke is supposed to be funny.

(Of course I’m overlooking the most obvious explanation here: that the joke simply isn’t very good.)

The really weird thing about Escape being the most insular LucasArts adventure game of them all is that Curse undersold in the US — the entire series historically undersold in the US — and Wikipedia tells me that Escape would not have been made if not for strong sales of Curse in Germany. When the game performs so poorly in the US market, why are you cutting out everyone who lives outside of it — i.e. the people who bought your game in the past, and who you are hoping will show up to buy the sequel — from half of the jokes? And then the other half are just absolutely insipid, lowest common denominator stuff. We have some charming 2000-era joking around disabled people and the use of politically-correct language, Guybrush complains on multiple occasions because he’s been given a pink ship, and the portrayal of Guybrush and Elaine as a married couple is one step away from deploying words like “ball and chain”. This wouldn’t have raised too many eyebrows at the time but coming back to it in 2022 is pretty cringeworthy stuff; when the figurehead of Guybrush’s ship comes alive and starts talking to him it’s actually a relief that it’s only used to hit you around the head with a Titanic reference (that I already got thanks to the figurehead’s pose) instead of anything mildly sexist or ableist.

I’d like to say that the Sam & Max connection also explains why Escape is such a startlingly ugly game, but this is something that makes a little less sense than the rest of it. Both Sam & Max and Escape are massively overfond of every single character in the game being a grotesque caricature that is thoroughly unsettling to look at and unpleasant to talk to. In Escape’s case this is at least partly because of the limitations of the 3D models; where Grim Fandango wisely chose to populate its world with a cast of stylised skeletons that didn’t have a huge amount of model detail, Escape has to figure out how to render a convincing pirate using technology that honestly feels pretty primitive even for 2000. Guybrush is the only character drawn in a semi-straightforward style and he might be the worst of the lot; he has none of the expressiveness of his prior incarnations, and so you spend most of the game in the company of an empty-eyed mannequin wearing a constant idiotic smirk. Given how he turned out I can somewhat understand the more extreme cartoonish stylisation of the various NPCs he meets along the way, but the overall choices made are baffling: the game is full of too-long noses, too-wide smiles and proportions straight out of a Hellraiser movie that make me wonder if I’m going to be meeting any of these characters in my nightmares later.

And Escape’s handling of its pre-rendered 2D backdrops gives me a new appreciation for Grim Fandango’s. Sure, they haven’t aged well in places, but there was an artistic vision driving most of Grim Fandango (except for the brown bits) that occasionally transcended the limitations of late 90s CG artwork and which somewhat insulated the rest of it from the passage of time. By contrast Escape’s backdrops are best described as the CG equivalent of drawings in Microsoft Paint, because they have no imagination. Every building is a square box with a sign on it telling you what it is. Every interior is the same collection of brown walls and brown flooring and brown stairs and brown railings and brown furniture. In the rare event that the game chooses to insert some detail into an environment, it’ll self-sabotage by using Comic Sans (or an adjacent font) for its lettering. The only thing that really stands out is the signature Monkey Island cloud artwork, and even this just serves to highlight how crap the rest of it is by its sheer incongruousness. It’s only when you get to Monkey Island itself in the third act of the game that the game steps outside of the Brown paradigm; it’s here that the one mildly impressive environment is to be found, with the stained glass windows in the Church of LeChuck serving as the only real creative outlet for an art team that used to be regarded as the best in the industry. This is not a world that I want to spend any time in, and Escape From Monkey Island as a whole is quite possibly the ugliest LucasArts adventure since Zak McKraken.

So the writing sucks and it’s no fun to look at, but what about the puzzles? Well, the best thing I can say about Escape’s puzzles is that, having played through the entire LucasArts adventure game catalogue now, they’re not quite as bad as they could have been. There is a tenuous thread of logic that runs through most of them, and while that logic is often cartoon logic (these are the same people who made Sam & Max, after all), it wasn’t that often that I was stymied by a complete non-sequitur of a solution. Guybrush still gives verbal hints as to what you’re supposed to do, and while these aren’t as helpful as the ones from Curse they’re usually enough to stop you straying too far in your thinking. There is one extremely notable exception to all this that I’ll get into in just a moment, and there are a few other blips that I could call out if I really wanted to (like the manhole cover and the parrots) but on the whole I think Escape’s puzzles are, while incredibly tedious, also reasonably inoffensive; the real problem with them is that they’re usually trying to be funny in some way, and Escape’s constant failure to actually be funny just ends up being sad, after a while. Because they’re not funny they just come across as the tedious make-work that adventure game puzzles ultimately are; since I didn’t care about the story and they weren’t making me laugh, and also because the GrimE engine has really cut down on the potential for custom animations or interface fuckery, solving them was a comparatively mundane process that carried zero weight or sense of accomplishment. It was just a series of boring, joyless tasks, and then once I’d finished them the game was over.

Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to play Escape themselves can probably guess what the exception is though; two words guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of any Monkey Island series veteran: Monkey Kombat. This is Escape’s take on Insult Swordfighting, a series “tradition” that has at this point been run so far into the ground it can probably start mining for rare earth minerals. Unlike most people I’ve hated Insult Swordfighting ever since it appeared in the first Monkey Island; it’s a puzzle that’s mostly reliant on trial and error as you gather the insults and their responses, but Monkey Kombat goes one step further and makes itself entirely reliant on trial and error. Because this is 2000, and because the writers of Escape are a collection of the least funny people on the face of planet Earth, Monkey Kombat is an entire game system predicated on the idea that the player will laugh and laugh and laugh when they see Escape has included a parody of Mortal Kombat. Guybrush fights a collection of monkeys by assuming one of five stances, and each stance can beat two of the four other stances. But he doesn’t know which stances beat which to start with, and he also doesn’t know which button combinations move from stance to stance, and he has to gather this by repeatedly losing to the monkeys while the player painstakingly generates a list of the 25 possible stance combinations and the button presses required to win each one.  There are no jokes in Monkey Kombat besides the name, as the button presses correspond to monkey noises (“Oop! Ack! Chee!”) instead of “witty” repartee, and so all it is is a pure time sink. Escape From Monkey Island clocks in at a whopping six hours long, and a full half an hour of that was Monkey Kombat. It’s the single biggest factor in my rating of Escape dropping from “not as bad as Zak McKraken” to “almost as bad as Zak McKraken”.

(And just in case you’re thinking “Well, if making the list of stances is so boring, why not just look it up on the internet?” LucasArts are way ahead of you, since Monkey Kombat is one of several puzzles in Escape where the solution is randomised per playthrough to ensure that the player has to endure the sheer tedium of it.)

As tedious as the puzzles are, though, they’d be even worse if not for the improvements made to the GrimE engine. If I had had to play Escape with Grim Fandango controls I would not have made it to the end; it’s the longest LucasArts adventure game of them all, and having to deal with that crap for six hours is completely out of the question, especially when I’m playing the original release and not a fancy remaster with point-and-click controls that could be optionally invoked to sand off some of the rough edges, as I was with Grim Fandango. Fortunately while LucasArts may have forgotten how to write or structure an adventure game, with Escape they did belatedly remember some of the quality-of-life lessons they’d learned after making 11 games in the SCUMM engine:

• The biggest one is listing all objects in proximity to Guybrush at the bottom of the screen and letting you page through them with Page Up/Down to select the one you want him to interact with, which probably shaved around an hour off the game’s running time because I wasn’t wasting any of it accidentally interacting with the wrong item as I did in Grim Fandango, repeatedly.
• The inventory is still something that you scroll through one item at a time, but in Escape you can at least see the entire inventory while you’re scrolling and quickly get to the item you want.
• There are once again dedicated keyboard buttons to Use and Pick Up objects instead of having to rely on the blunt instrument of Interact for the entire game, and — a godsend — an additional Outside command that immediately teleports you either outside the building you’re currently in, or out of the settlement to the world map

These improvements are still nowhere near providing the precision and convenience of the final tranche of SCUMM games, but they are appreciated nevertheless, and if Grim Fandango had had these extra features I think I would have liked it a lot more.

Otherwise I think the only part of Escape that really pulls its weight is the music. This is not outstanding by LucasArts standards — it’s severely handicapped by the best tracks having obnoxious background ambience baked into the sound files — but it sounds like Monkey Island and makes for a perfectly pleasant listen. I was even surprised to find that I remembered some of it, like the Lucre island theme; it had been buried in my brain for over two decades, but as soon as I heard the first few bars the rest of it came flooding back. There aren’t that many standout tracks, but what’s here is good nevertheless and I think I was just surprised to find something to like about Escape since the soundtrack is so much better than the game it’s unfortunately stuck in.

(Oh, and while we’re on the subject of sound stuff: Dominic Armato returns as Guybrush but there’s a weird desperation to his voice acting performance in this game, like he’s a struggling improv comedian who really wants people to laugh at his jokes. This is at least in keeping with the tone of the rest of the game, and I can’t exactly say I blame him since I don’t think there’s anyone out there that could make this material work.)

About the best thing that I can say about Escape From Monkey Island is that it’s not quite the worst LucasArts adventure game ever made. As unfunny as it is, as ugly as it looks, and as boring as its puzzles might be, I think that if you gave me a choice between playing Escape or playing Fate of Atlantis or Zak McKraken again I would probably still pick Escape. It’s a very close-run thing, though, and a damning indictment of LucasArts that, with all of their experience and talent, the last adventure game they ever made was also one of their worst. My piece on Curse already covered the wider reasons why adventure games were becoming increasingly unprofitable to make in the late 90s, but I think Escape is sufficient evidence that even if this were not the case, LucasArts were still starting to lose their grip on the genre thanks to technological changes and employee churn. It’s probably for the best that Escape was their final adventure game. As it is they get to be fondly remembered as the once-mighty titans of the adventure game genre, a studio known for top-notch production values and who were not content to rest on their laurels; one thing I’ve learned from this series is that LucasArts were always trying new things in an attempt to keep things fresh and maintain consumer interest, and while this produced games of wildly varying quality I could almost always find something to like about them. A few more games like Escape, though, and I think their reputation would have gone straight into the toilet the way Bioware’s has today.

—————————

Two years and thirteen games later and I’m finally done with this series. If nothing else it’s been very educational and has filled in some long-standing gaps in my gaming knowledge. I’ve been doing this blog for ten years now and I think this is the first one of these dedicated series I’ve actually managed to finish, and I’m happy to be able to finally draw a line under the LucasArts adventure games — after all, they’ve been dead for nearly as long as this blog has been alive, and surely nobody in their right mind would release a brand new adventure game using LucasArts IP in 2022?

Ah, shit. Here we go again…

The post LucasArts Time Machine: Escape From Monkey Island appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Oh, you thought we were done with this? Oh no. Not by a long shot.

To be fair, I did prevaricate for a bit over playing Grim Fandango – for about ten months, to be precise, as I booted it up just after putting up my piece on Curse of Monkey Island in October of last year and noped out of it about 15 minutes later. Part of that is because, after going through 12 adventure games in a little under a year, I was all adventured out; I needed a break from solving obtuse puzzles with an array of comedy items, no matter how pleasant the presentation around it might have been. But mostly it’s because I don’t think the actual experience of playing Grim Fandango in 2022 lives up to its lofty reputation — I thought the world of it back in 1998 when I first played it, but 2015’s remaster highlighted just how badly it had aged despite all of the mod-cons that Double Fine added, and playing through it again with all of those mod-cons turned off is even worse.

(Why turn off all of those fancy remaster features? Well, my goal with this series is to try and experience these games as they would have been on release, but you can’t find an original version of Grim Fandango on any digital store; all you can get is the remaster. The closest I can get is to disable as much of the remaster as I can and play through the game in 4:3 aspect ratio with tank controls.)

Grim Fandango is the story of Manuel Calavera, a travel agent in the Land of the Dead who “sells”¹ the freshly-deceased travel packages that will speed them on their way through the afterlife. Manny feels like he’s being intentionally set up with bad clients, and so chapter one has him applying some adventure game logic to get the details of a good one, Meche; in the process he stumbles upon a plot to deprive good souls of their express tickets on the Number Nine train and sell them to the rich and undeserving, and this kickstarts Manny’s own journey across the underworld as he attempts to track down Meche and unravel the plot. The game is split into four chapters, each of which is separated by a year-long interlude where Manny alternately waits for Meche or travels onwards in search of her, and this is both the biggest strength and the greatest weakness of Grim Fandango. I have maintained for years that Grim Fandango is 50% of a great adventure game and 50% sub-Longest Journey-tier trash, but unlike most LucasArts adventures — where they tend to have an incredibly strong opening and then a weaker back half — Grim Fandango’s location-hopping makes it more even in its unevenness, spreading out the shit bits (and god knows there’s a lot of them) so that every single chapter has at least a couple of incredibly tedious moments that make you reconsider what you’re doing with your life.

We’ll get to that, though; what I can’t remotely fault Grim Fandango for is its imagination. Leaving aside the extremely ill-advised jump to 1998-era 3D graphics, in terms of setting and style I think Grim Fandango might be the most unusual adventure game they ever made. It was the brainchild of Tim Schafer, who had a lot of creative freedom thanks to his previous project being the multi-million selling Full Throttle, and blends elements of film noir, Humphrey Bogart films (the entirety of Year Two is an homage to Casablanca), and the Mexican Day of the Dead. The characters are all stylized skeletons based on calaca figurines — a wise choice on a technical level as well as a stylistic one, as this is something that the primitive facial textures and animation can actually cope with — and many of the environments fuse 1930s-era art deco architecture with Aztec imagery. The 1930s influences extend to the technology, too; the computers used by the Department of Death feel like they could have come out of a Fritz Lang movie, and the building “server” is a complicated interchange of pneumatic message tubes. In the course of his job Manny makes a couple of trips to the Land of the Living dressed as the Grim Reaper, and this is portrayed in a supremely unsettling Dadaist scrapbook artstyle. I think Grim Fandango was my first exposure to any of this stuff, and it remains a fresh and unusual world nearly a quarter-century later.

We can’t go any further without addressing the most obvious departure Grim Fandango makes to LucasArts’ tried and tested approach to adventure games, though. The 2D point-and-click SCUMM engine that their last twelve games were built on top of has been consigned to history, and in its place is a decidedly dubious substitute: GrimE, which draws 3D characters and objects on top of 2D animated backgrounds that have been pre-rendered from CGI, much like the Playstation Final Fantasies. Because this is 1998 Grim Fandango’s characters are all made up of around a hundred polygons each and don’t have much detail outside of the faces, but I’ll admit to being selectively impressed by those CGI backgrounds on the revisit; thanks to Myst there was a prevailing trend at the time for adventure games to use pre rendered backdrops of a similar style and they almost all looked absolutely terrible. Grim Fandango doesn’t, though. I remember thinking it looked tremendous at the time, and while history has shown GrimE to be a dead-end there are certain parts of Grim Fandango that still look pretty good today, like the first half of El Marrow and almost all of Rubacava. I was struck by the background detail in several scenes, like the mural above Manny’s head when he’s talking to Charlie in the Calavera Cafe and the engravings on the walls of the Department of Death. There’s a surprising amount of good art here — I know, this is LucasArts, that’s the one thing that shouldn’t be surprising, but I’m inherently prejudiced against CGI adventure games now and I forgot that once upon a time somebody managed to make one look good in places.

Only in places, though. For every El Marrow, there’s a Petrified Forest; for every Rubacava there’s whatever the fuck is happening in Year Three of this game.  The standout areas of the game are bright and colourful, or at least moody and colourful — I think Rubacava leverages a lot of what LucasArts learned drawing night-time environments in their other games. However, I have real difficulty believing that, when Tim Schafer and the designers and the artists sat down to storyboard Grim Fandango, that original vision contained the incredible amounts of brown that ended up in the final product. There are parts of this game that have aged very well, and there are parts of it that show every single one of the twenty-four years that has passed since Grim Fandango came out, and I have real difficulty reconciling the two. Certainly I’d blocked the bad parts from my memory until I played the Remaster back in 2015; up until that point when I thought of Grim Fandango what I mostly remembered was Rubacava, which was understandable since it’s undeniably the game’s high point. After it, the thing that mostly comes to mind is screwing around with large brown industrial machinery on a large brown drilling rig on a large brown island, because that’s what Year Three is and it drove me up the wall.

But while Grim Fandango might not be the looker it was back in 1998, and while I think it’s a massive downgrade from the absurdly good art of Curse, I don’t actually actually have that much of a problem with the new graphical style introduced by the GrimE engine — at least, not in comparison to the controls introduced by the GrimE engine, which are an unmitigated disaster and the number one reason why I find Grim Fandango so painful to play today. Jettisoning the hand-drawn 2D graphics of SCUMM is at least understandable given the lacklustre sales of Curse, but what I don’t understand is why LucasArts simultaneously tossed nearly a decade of iterative interface improvements into the garbage and replaced them with… well, in most cases absolutely nothing.

Outside of the menus Grim Fandango is controlled entirely with the keyboard, so instead of just clicking on somewhere to walk to it, or interact with it, you instead have to manually pilot Manny over to the location of interest using the arrow keys; forward and back make him go forwards and backwards, while left and right make him swivel verrrrrry slowly in the given direction until he’s acquired his target. These painfully antiquated tank controls are one of the most infamous things about Grim Fandango², as well they should be given that their fundamental imprecision makes everything take twice as long as it used to in a SCUMM game. But that’s only the tip of this iceberg of shit; you can’t click on things to examine them any more or even wave your cursor around to see what is in the current area. Instead you have to walk Manny up next to something that might be interesting, wait for him to turn its head in its general direction — which indicates he’s picked it up on his radar — and then press the USE key. Of course, since there are no tooltips indicating what exactly Manny is currently looking at he could just as easily end up initiating a conversation with the NPC standing next to the item you wanted him to use; getting him to home in on the right item is a pure exercise in frustration at times. And given just how awful some of the LucasArts inventory systems have been, it’s really saying something that I think the inventory in Grim Fandango is the worst one they’ve ever done. Pushing the inventory key gives you a close up of Manny’s jacket as he pulls various items out of it; left and right scrolls through the inventory, but the catch is that you can only see one item at a time, so if you need a certain item and it’s not the first thing Manny proffers you need to pick a scrolling direction at random and hope it’s closer to the thing you need. Often you end up picking the wrong one and scrolling through the entire inventory. Thankfully Grim Fandango has less of an item proliferation problem than other LucasArts adventures — you’ll never be carrying around more than six or seven at a time — so it never takes that long to get to the thing you want, but it’s still unnecessary wasted time that really adds up over the course of the game.

The worst thing about the controls, though, is that they make Grim Fandango’s puzzles ten times more annoying than they really should be. One thing that I’ve learned as part of this series is that LucasArts have put out some truly dire adventure games alongside the ones that are deservedly remembered as all-time classics, so I’m under no illusions about Grim Fandango’s puzzle quality; they do lean rather too far towards the “oblique bullshit” end of the spectrum for my taste, but one thing LucasArts didn’t forget how to do was using incidental character dialogue as an informal hint system as to what the solutions might be. The worst ones are the ones where you’re interacting with some big machine to do something (strangely enough these are also clustered in Year Three with the anchor and crane puzzles) as here the objective is never obvious, never mind the solution, and you end up just randomly trying things via trial and error until you get something interesting to happen, but nevertheless there is a logical line running through most of Grim Fandango’s puzzles, even if it’s a fuzzy one at times. Thanks to this the puzzles are firmly middle-of-the-road by LucasArts standards (and shining paragons of logic compared to everyone else) — or they would be, if the tools the game gave you to help you solve them weren’t so abjectly unfit for purpose. But because you’re constantly fighting the game, wasting so much time fine-tuning Manny’s positioning, or in the inventory, or accidentally selecting the wrong item and getting stuck listening to some canned dialogue, Grim Fandango ends up being the most painful LucasArts adventure game to actually play since Fate of Atlantis.

And this makes me far less forgiving of Grim Fandango’s general unevenness than I might be otherwise. Every time the game feels like it’s picking up some momentum it gets brought to a screeching halt by a location or a time skip. Some of these are leveraged extremely well — the transition from Year One to Year Two is one of the all-time greats — but mostly they just make Grim Fandango feel weirdly disjointed; the game doesn’t really have time to breathe the way something like Puerto Pollo does in Curse. The move from El Marrow to the Petrified Forest is probably the best example; El Marrow is a decent starting environment that looks great and which doesn’t take the piss too much with its puzzles, and then just as it felt like I was getting into the game and that perhaps my opinion from 2015 was overly harsh it rudely ejected me into the Petrified Forest, which is coloured solely in shades of brown and where I spent most of my time trying to get the unnecessarily-fiddly timing right on a single puzzle³. Then I got to Rubacava, which is the most classically adventure-game bit of Grim Fandango, but because of this it’s where the frustrations with the tank controls really start to surface because there’s a hell of a lot of back and forth around its various locations — and also the forklift puzzle can absolutely do one. And the entirety of Year Three feels like it’s literally treading water to pad out the story before the denouement; there’s a couple of good bits like the safecracking puzzle, but in general I have nothing but contempt for that part of the game.

None of this is to say that Grim Fandango is bad, of course. Even I’m not going to go that far; even if my opinion hadn’t been properly calibrated by playing through games like Zak McKraken, I’d still think that Grim Fandango gets an incredibly long way on style alone. Despite the supreme awkwardness of the GrimE engine the production values are through the roof; the voice-acting is absolutely top notch, the music is a tour de force of jazz and big band fused with mariachi and pan pipes (along with a bunch of other styles I’m not musically erudite enough to recognise), and the script is punchy and clever — albeit not as funny as prior LucasArts adventures. And as much as I’ve ripped into GrimE here it has to be remembered that there wasn’t really anything about it that was massively out of the ordinary for 1998; it’s disappointing that LucasArts couldn’t figure out how to integrate all of their learnings from working with SCUMM for a decade, but my recollection is that it mostly passed without comment at the time, except for the tank controls. It is extremely telling, however, that when Double Fine did the remaster they went to the effort of putting in a classic point-and-click interface (i.e. one modelled on Curse) that makes Grim Fandango a much more tolerable game to play — and even with point-and-click controls, I think Grim Fandango has more than enough annoying bits to it that it falls some considerable way short of greatness.

The post LucasArts Time Machine: Grim Fandango appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Whatever happened to Impressions Games?

Well, obviously I know what happened to Impressions Games: they suffered a rapid decline in the early ‘00s thanks in part to interference from parent company Sierra Entertainment, pushed out the exceedingly mediocre Lords of the Realm 3, and then ended up as a casualty of Sierra’s final implosion. But this would have seemed unthinkable to anyone playing PC games in the mid-to-late ‘90s. Impressions weren’t exactly an industry-bestriding colossus, but after the powerhouses of Blizzard and Westwood Entertainment they were definitely the best of the rest in the strategy gaming stakes, responsible for not just one, but three classic franchises.

(Is that an incredulous “Three?”, I hear you muttering under your breath? It’s true, though; they’re primarily known for their City Building series, which the bulk of this post will eventually get around to talking about, but they also had an astonishingly high output rate of other games during the 1990s, releasing a whole host of crunchy business sims and wargame-lites. The two I remember most fondly are Lords of the Realm 2, which was an excellent medieval strategy game even if its RTS battle segments were a blatant attempt at trend-chasing, and Civil War Generals, an accessible take on the American Civil War with some charming art, mechanics that were just slightly more complicated than Panzer General, and — because this was the mid-’90s — FMV of historical re-enactments that played on every. single. attack. That FMV ended up getting turned off pretty quickly, but both of those games were extremely respectable entries into the contemporary strategy game market

Looking at the credits of these games provides another clue as to why Impressions didn’t survive into the 21st century, though: they were made with incredibly small development teams by modern standards. Lords of the Realm 2 was made with a core team of around 15 people. Caesar 2 was the same. This Microprose-like development model of small teams developing a lot of games in parallel worked during the early ‘90s because games were simpler and that kind of team size was all you really needed, so Impressions could have a lot of irons in the fire and it didn’t matter if some of them didn’t work out because the sunk cost was low and the return on investment for the hits was high. Unfortunately this model was undone by the increasingly sophisticated PC technology of the late ‘90s; except for Lords of the Realm 3 Impressions never succumbed to the siren lure of making their games 3D for the hell of it, but even sticking to the 2D art that they knew and were good at the credits list for Pharaoh had doubled to 33 people in 1999. Their games were getting more expensive to make, and they weren’t making that much more money despite the increased size of the market. I don’t think they would have survived much longer even without the added catalyst of Sierra becoming an absolute basketcase of a company.)

Anyway, that City Building series. The fact that it’s lugging around the slightly awkward name of “the City Building series” indicates that it’s a little bit of an oddity; it started with the Roman Empire-set Caesar in 1992, which was then followed up by Caesar 2 in 1995 and Caesar 3 in 1998, but it’s not called the Caesar series. In part this is because the first two Caesar games are very much in the mould of SimCity, albeit with a more detailed economic system (and an odd tactical battle layer in Caesar 2). Caesar 3 was the first game to properly break away from that and turn the series into something unique, but it was also the last Caesar game to be made¹. From that point onwards the City Building series started to flit around history, visiting ancient Egypt in Pharaoh and ancient Greece in Zeus, before finishing up in ancient China with the series’ final game, Emperor². All of these games share the same basic mechanics established by the Caesar trilogy with a few refinements and period-specific gimmicks sprinkled in on top depending on which specific game you’re playing. Boot two of them up in quick succession and it’s very easy to see that they’re part of the same lineage despite having very different trappings. Unfortunately for Impressions they never planned any of this and failed to come up with appropriate branding for the series in advance, and so it was left to the gaming community to do so. Since said gaming community is notoriously terrible at naming things (4X? Looter shooter?) I suppose they’re actually pretty fortunate that their time-jumping strategy game franchise came away with something as obviously descriptive as “the City Building series”, even if it is kind of dull.

Of the six games in the series, I’ve played three in sufficient detail to have capital-O Opinions on them. The first Caesar predates my access to a PC so I missed it, and the demo of Zeus was enough to put me off of it completely as the art style went too far in the direction of “wacky cartoon”. Thanks to that I never even tried Emperor up until, oh, about two hours ago, when I booted up my GOG copy for the very first time and was surprised to discover that it’s an incredibly solid game; I don’t really understand why it got such a mediocre critical response. But Caesars 2 and 3, and — most important of all — Pharaoh? I’ve played those a ton. Importantly I’ve played them enough to know that despite looking superficially similar there was a massive, series-defining paradigm shift between Caesar 2 and Caesar 3, which Pharaoh then refined into something with real longevity: walkers.

First, for some context, an explanation of the basic mechanics of a City Building game. At first glance Caesar 2 looks a hell of a lot like SimCity — because it is a hell of a lot like SimCity. You zone regions of housing and then plop down buildings that provide utilities and services to evolve that housing to a higher level that can house more citizens who will pay you higher taxes, it’s just that instead of police stations you have Praefectures and instead of schools you have Grammaticus…es, and instead of Stadiums you have the Circus Maximus. Caesar 2 did take the unusual step of having a thing called a Province Layer that was separate from the standard city view — the whole idea of the game was that you’re ruling an entire Roman province rather than a single city, and so the Province Layer is where you’d connect smaller towns with your city and lay down industry such as farms and quarries. Once an industry is present in the Province Layer you can build a matching building in your city to import the goods produced by that industry, which is then be distributed to your citizens via markets. But instead of that distribution being done via some abstraction based on market radius of effect or distance from market travelled via road, Caesar 2 chose to have its markets spawn an actual in-game agent — called a walker — that travels around the road network of your city. Any houses that the market walker passes by receive the benefits of the market goods, and can evolve to a higher class of building.

So it’s not like walkers were an unheard of concept for the Caesar series by the time Caesar 3 came out, but Caesar 2’s implementation of them was pretty limited. There was only a small subset of buildings that would spawn walkers like this, with most service-providing buildings instead working in the traditional SimCityish way of providing coverage over a certain area, or the entire city. If you load up Caesar 2 today you’ll find its cities to be comparatively static, dead-looking things, with even a densely-packed layout only having a few scattered walkers ambling around the road network. This all changed in Caesar 3, which made two big improvements:

• The Province Layer was thrown out of the window and all of the industrial buildings that had previously existed there were condensed into the city layer. This meant your entire economic supply chain was now in one place – you had to gather raw materials, ship them to processing buildings, and then distribute them to your population, all on the city layer.
• With the exception of housing, every single building in the city now spawns walkers to do their job.

Watching a Caesar 3 city in motion is really, really cool.  Workers dig clay out of the ground and transport it to a Pottery. The Pottery bakes it into pots and transports it to a Warehouse. A market worker collects the pots and brings them to the Market, and then another market worker distributes them to nearby houses. Each step in this chain involves a walker physically moving a good from one place to another within your city. You can see which type of good they’re carrying at all times, so this is much more than an unnecessarily detailed way of modelling a city’s population since it allows you to see exactly what goods are flowing where with a simple glance at the screen. And this happens for every single supply chain. It happens for grapes being converted into wine, for iron being converted into weapons, for wood being transported from timber yards to shipyards to build boats. You can see all of this stuff moving around your city in real time, bringing something of the thrill that the little cartoon men of The Settlers did as they transported planks of wood and slabs of stone, but combining it with the scale of SimCity. Even the buildings that would ordinarily rely on radius of effect now spawn walkers to do it instead, with schools and temples and hospitals generating teachers and priests and doctors who march around the city spreading the positive effects of their buildings. A Caesar 3 city bustles in a way quite unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. It’s hypnotic to watch, and tremendously addictive.

What it is not, though, is perfect. Readers with particularly long memories will recall my SimCity 2013 review, where Maxis tried to apply much the same principle to SimCity by using agents to model both individual Sims as they travelled from home to work and back again, as well as the flow of electricity and water. It was a complete disaster because the agent AI was nowhere near good enough to handle all of this complex pathfinding on its own, and the player had next to no tools to help it on its way. Caesar 3 teeters on the edge of the same pit; thanks to its walkers being able to move through each other it avoids congestion problems and is very playable where SimCity 2013 absolutely was not, but you’re still largely at the mercy of its walker AI. There are some blunt options for controlling which warehouses receive goods, but no fine control, and the only option you have for controlling walker paths is by laying out some rather odd road networks so that they don’t wander off down the wrong junction. (Just as with SimCity 2013, road junctions in Caesar 3 are extremely bad and should be avoided at all costs.) Caesar 3 also has metagame issues that have never sat right with me, in that your goals for each campaign mission you embark on are usually pretty abstract. You’re chasing target scores across a range of categories such as Culture, Prosperity, and population, and since the formulas for boosting each one are largely the same each time the campaign missions end up feeling rather repetitive in spite of the designers’ attempts to switch things up with different types of raw materials, food sources and map layouts. You have to enjoy building the cities for their own sake in Caesar 3, because otherwise you’re going to encounter some serious longevity issues when you load up mission 32 of the campaign and it involves putting down the same damn housing block you started the previous twenty missions with.

This is where Pharaoh comes in. Released in 1999, just one year after Caesar 3, Pharaoh improves on it in just about every single way, from the graphics to the mechanical refinements to the way it plays to its particular historical theme. I’m actually a little bit astonished at just how good the game looks in 2022; Pharaoh’s citizen animations and building art upscale so well to modern widescreen resolutions that it’s difficult to believe it was designed for a maximum resolution that was almost three times smaller. The art hits just the right level of detail, expressive and characterful in a way that Caesar 3’s cruder, more grounded graphics were not, without devolving into being an outright cartoon the way Zeus did. This greatly aids the visual aspect of being able to see, with a simple glance, just what’s going on in the city. Want to know what your storage yard stocks are like? Just look at the thing, it has unique art for every single good in the game. Why are your housing blocks not getting entertainment? Well, there’s no entertainers present at the Pavilion, let’s just go over to the Dancing School and… ah, the stage is empty and there’s no dancers being trained. All of this information is available just by looking, without having to dive into more detailed menus and readouts — and even that is handled extremely thoughtfully, with a simple right-click on literally anything in the game bringing up a short summary pane with the exact details of why it is (or isn’t) working.

Aside from the graphical improvements, the most immediately impactful mechanical addition Pharaoh makes is one that sounds laughably dull, out of context: it lets you put down Roadblock tiles on top of roads that will stop any walkers from passing through. Given what I’ve just said about walker pathing you can probably imagine that something like this would be quite useful — but just how useful it is won’t be clear unless I explain a little more about precisely how the walker pathing works. With just a few exceptions all walkers in Pharaoh have to follow the roads you lay down for them, but beyond that they’re split into two distinct types. The first are what I’ll refer to as patrollers; these are walkers spawned by buildings with no specific destination in mind, but which simply patrol the nearby area semi-randomly (if they encounter a junction they’ll essentially flip a coin to decide which path to take) until they get “tired” and then walk back to the building that spawned them. The second type are walkers with specific destinations in mind, usually when they’re picking up or dropping off goods. And the key to why Pharaoh’s Roadblocks are so useful is because while any patroller-type walker that encounters a Roadblock will turn around and go somewhere else, a walker travelling to a specific destination will ignore it completely and blow straight through it to get to wherever it needs to go.

This means that you can happily plonk down Roadblocks wherever you want to shape the paths of those patroller walkers without worrying that you’re about to cripple your supply chains. It gets even more interesting when you realise that nearly every single patroller-type walker is meant to spread the positive effect of their building to housing areas that they walk past in order to evolve it. This lets you segregate your housing zones into their own self-sufficient sub-areas; by building them around a simple road layout and putting Roadblocks at the connections to the “outside” world you can keep your housing-enhancing patrollers from escaping into the more complicated industrial regions of the city where they’d be useless, while your Bazaar workers are free to pass through those same Roadblocks on their way to nearby Granaries and Storage Yards to collect the food and refined goods required to keep the houses in the housing area at a high level of evolution

In short, Roadblocks make the management of housing — and thus your overall population of workers — much more stable and predictable, enabling more expansive scaling-out of your industrial zones. And you’ll need all of that extra industry, too, because my favourite thing that Pharaoh does (which I’m not sure either Zeus or Emperor fully replicated) is actually give you concrete, tangible objectives that drive your entire city setup. Instead of just expanding until you meet some arbitrary scoring criteria, you’re now building a mighty economic machine capable of constructing a variety of grand monuments like mastabas, obelisks, and — of course — a whole host of pyramids. And these aren’t the anaemic wonders you’d find in an Anno title either; Pharaoh starts you off with a small tomb or two to teach you how monument construction works, but eventually you’re building entire pyramid complexes, including the Great Pyramid, that take up half of the map.

It’s extremely pleasing to me that Pharaoh went in this hard on the monument side of the game. Building a pyramid is a ridiculously involved and detailed process that leverages your entire production chain. At minimum you need to build up big housing areas to create the massive worker population required to support dozens of Work Camps and Construction Guilds, with all of the supply chains that maintaining that population involves. Once the Work Camps have been built your work gangs will start clearing the construction site and digging the foundations, flooding a grid of trenches with water and marking the water level, and then filling in the holes to level out the ground. Then your stonemasons and carpenters are up; the carpenters need to build scaffolding and ramps as the pyramid is built up, which requires modest supplies of Wood, but the stonemasons need literally thousands of blocks of Plain Stone and Limestone. These need to be either quarried by your own workers and transported to nearby Storage Yards, one at a time, or else purchased via Pharaoh’s excellent trade system³ — and buying them via trade is expensive, so you’ll need to set up the supply chain for a matching export industry to offset the cost. The stone then needs to be dragged into position by your work gangs and set in place by your stonemasons, and this process needs to be repeated dozens of times for each layer of the pyramid.

Yes, layer; none of the monuments in Pharaoh are constructed all in one go, but are instead built up one layer (or course, as the game refers to them) of stone at a time. Even the smallest mastaba requires 5-6 courses of bricks, and the actual pyramids have a dozen plus. I said that watching a Caesar 3 city in motion was cool, and it is, but watching the workers of a Pharaoh city build a pyramid is genuinely fascinating. Seeing these roving work gangs dragging huge stacks of stone up the pyramid, ascending ramp after ramp, watching your small army of stonemasons assemble to start the construction of a new course, having the entire output of your economic engine painstakingly materialise this bafflingly grandiose thing out of nothing… it’s brilliant, it really is. You really feel like you’ve achieved something when you finish one of Pharaoh’s pyramids, because it is an achievement; you had to build a fearsomely complicated city-machine to do it and keep it running for a couple of hours against all that the game could throw at you. Not only that, but it’s one of the most flawless examples of a game playing to its theme that I’ve ever seen; of course a game about ancient Egypt needs pyramids, but it would have been very easy for Impressions to make a pyramid just another kind of building. It didn’t need to have so many different types of monuments, all with absurdly in-depth construction processes composed of multiple different stages, but by doing so it gives itself more meaning than any other city building game I’ve ever played.

Pharaoh is so good that I’ve come away from my most recent replay of it with a much-renewed respect for Impressions Games in general. Most of their contemporaries have since folded as the strategy game market contracted in the mid-to-late ‘00s, but it seems particularly cruel that Impressions were one of the first to go when they had the potential to put out more games like Pharaoh. And the reason I do keep periodically revisiting Pharaoh is that in the two decades since nobody has released a city builder that scratches the same itch that Pharaoh does. The Anno series is doing sort of the same thing, but nowhere near as well and without the monument construction aspect that makes Pharaoh such a coherent, structured game. A straight retread of the Impressions city builders called Nebuchadnezzar (no prizes for guessing where this one is set) did appear on Steam last year, and it does have monument construction. I’d been putting off playing it because it got a pretty lukewarm reception, but on the strength of this replay of Pharaoh I’m more inclined to give it a try to see if it can even get close to the real thing. If it doesn’t, though, then at least there’ll always be Pharaoh itself, a city builder which has lasted twenty-three years while barely losing a step and which will likely last for decades more; it is ageless, matchless, and damn near divine.

(And yes, I’m also aware that a direct remake of Pharaoh was announced recently. This sounded like one of the best ideas anyone in the indie space had ever had right up until I watched a video of it in motion, which was extremely funny because it does direct then/now comparisons with the original game and the version that comes off best is not the one that the makers of that video intended.)

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The post In Praise Of: Pharaoh appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

And so, after a rather longer period than I anticipated, we come back to the beginning. This whole series was prompted by my booting up Curse Of Monkey Island back in October of last year, and wondering: why was Curse the last high-profile 2D point and click adventure game that LucasArts made? Was the genre an evolutionary dead-end? Was the lure of 3D graphics — which were exploding in 1997 thanks to the Voodoo accelerator card — too strong to resist? And considering Curse in particular, I wanted to get a bit more context on just why LucasArts had abandoned their previously wildly-successful genre at precisely the moment they’d managed to usher it to its apotheosis — because Curse is absolutely fantastic.

My (admittedly hazy) recollection is that this wasn’t exactly a popular opinion to have at the time. Said popular opinion tended to rank Curse in a distant third place behind the first two Monkey Island games, and one of the things I do definitely remember is a certain amount of griping from the gaming media that the 2D graphics made it look old-fashioned; 1997 was around about the time when everything was making the jump to 3D whether it was a good idea or not, and so Curse sticking to its guns was seen by some as an unforgivably antiquated approach. The big irony is that now, in 2021, if you stick Curse next to any 3D game that was released in 1997, the 3D game will be a mess of jagged edges and pixelated textures while Curse hasn’t aged a single day. It remains absolutely the best-looking adventure game ever made; even the modern adventure game renaissance hasn’t managed to produce anything that matches the colourful, stylised art and animation of Curse. If you’ve played the previous Monkey Island games it is a bit of an adjustment to see the previously regular-sized Guybrush Threepwood transformed into a lanky giant, and the fact that everything is made out of cartoonish curves — I don’t think there’s a single straight line in the game — also takes a bit of getting used to. I thought Curse was a weird looking game back in 1997, but time has proven the value of its art direction.

The technical advances made to allow the SCUMM engine to take advantage of better technology are also impressive. Starting from Last Crusade in 1989 and going all the way through to The Dig in 1997, it’s obvious that all of LucasArts’ adventure games were based on the same engine; they (mostly) all use the same font and the same mouse cursor, and while the later games improved on the art and animation and experimented with the interface it never diverged so much that the game was unrecognisable as a SCUMM game. Even in Full Throttle, which spliced in a whole other game engine from Rebel Assault to do its on-rails motorbike bits, it was easy to see which parts of the game were driven by SCUMM and which were not.

But while Curse doesn’t jettison SCUMM convention entirely, keeping the conversation interface and the coloured subtitle text that indicates who is speaking, it’s otherwise impossible to tell that it’s running on the same base technology as all of the other LucasArts games. It’s the first (and only) LucasArts adventure designed to run at a resolution of 640×480 — this sounds laughable today, but it represents a near-doubling of the number of pixels¹ on the screen, allowing for much richer environments, backgrounds and animation detail. I love the classic pixel art of Loom and Secret of Monkey Island, which did so much with so little to work with, but The Dig pushed that art style about as far as it could go and Curse is a quantum leap forward that would have changed the entire 2D adventure game genre if it hadn’t died about two seconds after it was released. The iMUSE dynamic music system has been beefed up to work with Michael Land’s brilliant CD-quality soundtrack (see the Puerto Pollo theme and the Barbery Coast theme for two of the standout tracks… look, just go and listen to the entire thing, you’ll thank me later) and the truly ridiculous amount of voiced dialogue meant that Curse was also the first LucasArts adventure game to ship on two CDs rather than one. Unlike a lot of prior efforts which threw in pre-rendered videos and voice tracks just because they had the storage space going spare, Curse actually needed all of it.

Speaking of voice acting, this was the first thing that jumped out at me on getting past the introduction and into Curse proper. At this point LucasArts had been fully voicing their games for several years starting with Day of the Tentacle in 1993; the novelty has long worn off, so I wasn’t expecting Curse to make much of an impression on me in that regard. However, I was not prepared for just how much of it there was. Curse has more conversation options — and thus more voice acting — by about a full order of magnitude compared to prior LucasArts games. It’s a dramatic change in approach compared to Full Throttle and The Dig, which went to great lengths to stop you from talking to anyone and whose conversation systems were largely functional gameplay mechanisms with a few jokes scattered around the edges. Curse instead views its conversation interface and voice responses as the primary delivery mechanism for its humour, and so it hits you with joke after joke after joke. There are characters in this game where one conversation option with them advances the storyline and the other four lead to sub-trees of nothing but jokes. And the jokes are actually good! Sure, there’s the occasional line that falls flat on its face, and whether others land depends on how much you enjoy terrible pirate puns, but I think Curse’s hit rate is higher than any other LucasArts game outside of the original Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle.

(A good example of just how ridiculously in-depth Curse’s voice acting is can be found in the theatre in Puerto Pollo. Guybrush can barge into the theatre while the actors are rehearsing to hear a selection of gloriously awful jokes mashing up classical plays with braindead modern entertainment trends. Most games would record one or two lines for this and then switch to a generic “sod off” response from the actors as they get tired of Guybrush’s constant intrusions. Not Curse, though; Curse has fifteen or twenty of the things that you can cycle through in succession, and then when the game is finally out of jokes it switches to a procedurally-generated set that, while admittedly not very good, is still far more effort than I expected them to put in to a location that other games would treat as an afterthought. Because who is going to see this? Who is going to actually go to the trouble of cycling through all that dialogue for no gameplay benefit? Curse dedicating so much effort to making the player laugh is a development philosophy that’s entirely at odds with modern achievement-driven game design, which is why it’s also a very refreshing thing to experience in 2021.)

The clever writing is also helped along tremendously by Dominic Armato’s performance as Guybrush. In a game so stuffed full of dialogue, where the main character is providing one half of every conversation and is also giving wry, self-aware commentary on everything that he’s doing, it would be easy for Guybrush to seem smug, grating and/or tiresome, a little like Boston Low eventually did in The Dig. It’s largely thanks to Armato that he does not, and there’s also many jokes that rely primarily on his voice acting talents in order to sell them, like El Pollo Diablo or the excellent segue into a William Shatner impression when he’s reading from the ventriloquy guide. The rest of the voice acting in Curse is extremely high-quality — the Barbery Coast pirates are astonishingly good — but even so Armato manages to stand out with a performance that literally defined the character; it’s unsurprising that he went on to spend a large portion of the next fifteen years voicing Guybrush, because it’s impossible to imagine anyone else doing it now.

From an actual mechanical perspective, though, it’s interesting that despite LucasArts having voiced their games for nearly half a decade now, Curse is the first one to leverage its voice acting as an informal hint system. If you use the wrong item on the wrong object in any previous LucasArts adventure game, you get a pretty generic response from the protagonist: “That won’t work.” or “I can’t do that.” or in Full Throttle’s case “I’m not putting my lips on that!” This was mostly a historical compromise forced on LucasArts because they didn’t have the resources to write and then voice unique lines for every interaction, although there’s also the factor that this wouldn’t have seemed like the wrong thing to do at the time because it had never been done differently. Thanks to its vastly increased quantity of voice acting lines, though, Curse can afford to be much more specific. For example, early on in the game you pick up a pair of scissors, and a little later on you run across a sawhorse-type thing supporting a barrel of gunpowder. You need to move the gunpowder barrel to another location by rolling it, but it’s held firmly in place by the sawhorse, so the next logical step is to try and saw the sawhorse to bits. At this point in the story the only sharp item you have in your inventory is a small pair of scissors, but thanks to the series’ prior record of Adventure Game Logic (hello, monkey wrench puzzle) it’s possible that these might still do the job. So you try using the scissors on the sawhorse, but instead of that generic “I can’t do that” line, Guybrush instead responds with “I can’t saw the sawhorse with scissors!” Okay, great! That means I must be able to saw it with something, and that I’m on the right track here; I just need to find the right item.

These special hint voice lines aren’t in place for every possible interaction, but they exist for enough of them that the impact of Curse’s at-times utterly obtuse puzzles is softened to the point where they are bearable. Coming to it 24 years later, I think the puzzle design is definitely the weakest link in a game that’s otherwise got stellar production values across the board. That is not to say that they are bad — by the standards of this series alone Curse still ranks in the top fifty percent for puzzle consistency, and if we widen the comparison out to its mid-90s genre contemporaries it’s a shining paragon of internal logic. It does feel a bit too variable, though, with a few too many puzzles where 90% of the steps make perfect sense and then the remaining 10% were designed by an alien or something. Particularly enraging puzzles this time around were using the magic wand on the top hat to get the ventriloquy book — this is especially awful because the top hat is just another prop that’s camouflaged in a backstage room in the theatre that’s absolutely full of props — and catapulting the corpse of the groom through the hole in the wall. This latter one is pretty emblematic of Curse’s bad puzzle design habits; you can see that there’s a boarded-up hole in the wall that you can pry the boards off of, and you can see that the groom’s skeleton is on top of one of those spring-driven beds that folds away into the wall, which is nailed down to the floor. Removing the nails is another obvious interaction (once you have the crowbar, anyway), but what’s not obvious at any point of this process is why you are doing this; the eventual outcome is so cartoonish that there’s no possible way to predict it before you do it.

Fortunately those puzzles are in the minority. While the puzzle design in general might be nowhere near as elegant as the ones in Secret of Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle, and while I had significantly more trouble with the back half of the game on Blood Island, which I remember far less well than the opening episodes in Puerto Pollo, I only had to resort to a walkthrough twice. And to be completely fair to Curse, while the logical aspects of its puzzle design can be a bit lumpy that’s usually because it is (once again) using them as an excuse for some absolutely cracking jokes, which is a tradeoff that I’m willing to accept as long as it doesn’t completely compromise the game the way it did in Sam & Max. I was very happy to see the return of inventory humour with the python/quicksand puzzle (it last appeared in Day of the Tentacle), and there’s an absolutely brilliant meta-joke where Guybrush drinks what is essentially poison to get interred in the Goodsoup family crypt. He passes out in the hotel bar, and “SOME TIME LATER…” the gravekeeper turns up and comments on how he thought you couldn’t die in LucasArts adventure games. “Perhaps they’re trying something different”, drawls the bartender, and so Guybrush is duly hauled away and dumped inside the crypt; the credits start to roll, complete with a “You scored 0 out of 800 points” riff on Sierra adventure game death screens, and get a surprisingly long way before Guybrush loudly interjects that he isn’t dead. Just like the original Monkey Island, Curse is at its best when it’s taking the piss out of adventure game tropes; it takes a lot of finesse to accomplish this without falling victim to the same bad design it’s supposed to be mocking, but Curse just about manages to successfully thread that needle.

I haven’t really talked about Curse’s plot or story structure yet, and I suppose I should even though I see it as somewhat irrelevant — the story is there largely as a framework to hang the pirate barbershop quartets and lactose-intolerant volcano gods off of rather than existing in its own right as an actual coherent thing. Curse starts a little while after Monkey Island 2’s infamously bad theme park ending, with a bit of hand-waving narration from Guybrush as to how he escaped and ended up adrift in the middle of the Caribbean. He washes up on Plunder Island, where his girlfriend Elaine is conveniently governor but who not-so-conveniently gets transformed into a solid gold statue after Guybrush gives her a cursed diamond ring. The voodoo priestess (another source of great meta-jokes about the series) tells him that the only way to break the curse is to replace the ring with an uncursed one of equal or greater value, and Guybrush quickly discovers that there’s one on Blood Island. So step one of his quest is to find a ship, a crew and a map to Blood Island; step two is to retrieve Elaine (who is stolen by pirates shortly after the game starts); and step three is to sail to Blood Island and find the uncursed diamond ring.

Curse is technically split into six acts, but most of the game’s content is found in just two of them, the Plunder Island and Blood Island segments. It unfortunately makes the mistake of frontloading most of its best content; I understand the value of making a good first impression on the player, but Plunder Island is so much better than Blood Island that it feels like a significant comedown once you leave the former and get to the latter. This isn’t because Blood Island is bad — it’s got a decent number of its own standout moments — but rather that Plunder Island is the bit of Curse that you can put up against any other adventure game in existence, including the original Monkey Island, and it’ll probably come off best. It is absolutely superb, stuffed end to end with memorable characters, excellent jokes and fantastic music, and there’s only one or two duff puzzles in the whole act. Things noticeably and immediately drop in quality the moment you leave, not least because…

…ugh…

…we’re doing Insult Swordfighting again. Act 3 is the insult swordfighting act that has you sailing around the Caribbean fighting other pirates (complete with Pirates!-lite ship vs ship combat) so that you can upgrade both your ship and your insult repertoire to the point where you can take on the big boss who has the map to Blood Island. The insults and responses are rhyme-based now, but otherwise this act is identical to the insult swordfighting segment of Monkey Island 1, which was funny for about seven seconds back in 1990 and then merely incredibly, unbearably tiresome every time I encountered it after that. You can imagine how overjoyed I was to be asked to repeat the process for a full twenty minutes in Curse. (And honestly, it’s a mercy it’s as short as that.) This isn’t even a reference or a callback, it’s just the same joke repeated over and over again like a bad fucking catchphrase, which is something that Curse, for all of its series meta-humour, is otherwise remarkably good at avoiding. I wouldn’t give up the start of Act 3 for the world because it’s one of the best sequences in the game, but I could really do without the rest of it.

The game does pick up again once Guybrush gets to Blood Island, although it can’t match the highs of Plunder Island. Blood Island’s strengths are its astonishingly lovely artwork — just like Melee Island in Monkey Island 1 and Scabb Island in Monkey Island 2 it’s perpetually shrouded in night, which lets the art team do some incredible things with the lighting and colour palette — and a few excellent set-piece jokes. Its weakness is that it’s less goal-oriented than the Plunder Island section of the game, which split its objectives up into a series of manageable tasks and puzzles; Blood Island on the other hand has one objective — get the uncursed diamond ring — but your route towards it isn’t always clear and sometimes becomes so murky you end up going in circles for far longer than you really should. Regardless, it’s a perfectly good chunk of adventure game that only looks bad because it’s sat next to the much better Plunder Island segment. I know this because Curse’s finale comes perilously close to being almost as much of a wet fart as Monkey Island 2’s was, and while it is mercifully short enough that it doesn’t drag the rest of the game down (the puzzles here are so simple that you can be done with it in just ten minutes) it still serves as a timely reminder that things could always be much, much worse.

Still, this unevenness is something of a series tradition by this point; no game should try to emulate the confused, meandering structure of Monkey Island 2, but even Monkey Island 1 had a back half that was noticeably weaker than its front half. Curse falls somewhere in the middle, in that the majority of its content is rock solid but it occasionally feels the need to bamboozle the player with cartoon logic and take inexplicable detours away from the fun adventure game stuff into boring minigames and railroaded gameplay. Its standout features are its art, animation, music, voice acting and writing; that the actual puzzles are a little hit and miss only detracts slightly from how fantastic Curse is as an experience. I don’t think we’ll ever see a 2D adventure game with these production values ever again, because the modern genre is the preserve of small indie studios who don’t have anywhere near the resources required to pull it off. It needed a big budget studio like LucasArts, who had been making these things for ten years and whose development staff was at the top of their game in almost every single respect.

And that also answers the question I had a year ago, when I started this series: why did the 2D adventure game genre die out shortly after it produced what was arguably its finest game? Coming at that problem from 2020 it wasn’t immediately obvious, but now that I see Curse with the perspective granted from playing through the previous decade of LucasArts adventures the answer is pretty clear. Curse of Monkey Island goes above and beyond everything that came before it, but this came at a cost; the original Monkey Island was developed by a core team of around twelve people, but the credits for Curse list over seventy (the art team alone has ballooned from three people to twenty-four) and this is completely ignoring the voice actors and corporate support staff necessary for a company of the size of LucasArts in 1997. Curse did not sell well at all — 300,000 copies doesn’t sound all that bad until you remember that Full Throttle sold over a million  — but even if it had, could it have sold well enough to justify such a large development team? I don’t think so. By the mid-to-late ‘90s game development was becoming increasingly corporate, and one thing corporations are very keen on is favourable return on investment². Unfortunately by 1997 the cost of the development resources required to make an adventure game was starting to outweigh the amount of money made back from sales, and the market only continued to shrink after this — Grim Fandango sold even more poorly than Curse, indicating that perhaps the problem wasn’t with 3D accelerators after all.

So while Curse was far from a dead end in evolutionary terms, in terms of the market and the cold, hard financial truth that lies behind every video game it definitely was. You can’t make a game like Curse and also make money at the same time. Even today, in 2021, you probably still can’t. All of the things that so impressed me about Curse, like the vast quantity of throwaway jokes and voice lines, are also precisely the sort of things that would make anyone in charge of financing a game wince slightly before scrawling “REJECTED” across whatever formal paperwork was attached to their greenlight process. If the big-budget adventure game genre had to die, though, then I’m glad we at least got Curse of Monkey Island out of it before it shuffled off this mortal coil; whether it is the best adventure game ever made is debatable, but it is unarguably the best-looking, the best-sounding and the best-written one out there.

The post LucasArts Time Machine: The Curse Of Monkey Island appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

So, I’m about to say something that might sound surprising coming from somebody who has been going around with the box art from The Dig as his avatar for the last 15 years. There’s good reason for that; not only is it an extremely striking piece of artwork, but there’s a lot about The Dig that I absolutely adore. I love the theme. I love the music. I love the artwork and the animation, and above all I love the sheer sense of atmosphere that The Dig conveys at all times. It’s the first one of these games where, for once, I don’t resent having to watch my character walk from one side of a screen to the other because that gives me a bit of time to soak in the sounds and visuals of its mysterious alien world.  The Dig gets a hell of a lot right, for all that it makes some weird choices in terms of its interface; it would work extremely well as a visual novel, or perhaps as the 1995 equivalent of a walking simulator.

But as a classically-styled point-and-click adventure game with puzzles? I’m not so sure about that.

It’s interesting to compare The Dig to Full Throttle, since they both came out in the same year. Full Throttle started development in 1993 and was released in 1995, giving it a two-year development cycle — this is a little on the short side by modern standards¹, but it’s still around twice the development time prior LucasArts adventure games received because it had a much larger budget and was consciously searching for ways to revitalise a genre that was increasingly seen as being too niche to attain the kinds of sales numbers that contemporary hits such as Myst and Doom were raking in². The Dig, on the other hand, started development in 1989. It was in development for six years — an eternity by early ‘90s standards — and was one of the first high-profile examples of a game being stuck in development hell thanks to some rather unfortunate pre-release publicity telling players that The Dig would be Coming Soon… in 1992. The Dig underwent several reboots and four different game directors before finally coming out in November 1995, seven months after Full Throttle. Given that, it’s something of a miracle that The Dig is as good as it is; I can think of many other examples of games with similar development trajectories where the final product ended up being a buggy, borderline unplayable mess. However, this is also why there’s a significant amount of evolutionary divergence between The Dig and Full Throttle, and it’s why The Dig feels like the older game despite coming out seven months after Full Throttle, since it branched off from the family tree long before Full Throttle even got started.

If you read the piece I wrote on Full Throttle, you’ll know that I don’t wholly consider that a bad thing. The Dig is, at least, much more recognisable as a LucasArts adventure game, with a quasi-open structure that allows for exploration and experimentation on the player’s terms instead of rudely pushing them down a linear path from one set-piece encounter to the next. The Dig opens with a short introduction sequence set in space, which functions as the game’s tutorial; there’s a giant asteroid headed towards Earth, and since this is the 1990s the obvious solution to giant asteroids headed towards Earth is to send a team of astronauts to blow it up with nukes³. Once the fireworks have died down a three-person team descends into the newly-uncovered interior of the asteroid and discovers that it’s actually a gigantic alien spaceship, and after rather unwisely pushing some buttons they shouldn’t have the three astronauts are rudely whisked away to the aliens’ home planet. This wouldn’t be an immediately bad thing since it seems NASA suspected something like this might happen and staffed the mission with specialists for talking to aliens, except it turns out that all of the aliens vanished millenia ago and the astronauts are now stranded in the middle of their decaying ruins with no way to get home.

This starts The Dig proper: exploring the alien ruins, figuring out what happened to all of the aliens and their technology, and hopefully finding some way of getting back to Earth in the process. The alien spaceship has deposited the three astronauts onto a central island platform surrounded by five rocky spires, which in turn are surrounded by nothing but ocean as far as the eye can see; the astronaut team pretty quickly splits up to “cover more ground” (have these people never seen a horror movie?) and you’re left in control of Boston Low, the expedition commander. Boston opens up access from the hub island to the spires one at a time, gradually piecing together how the alien technology works and what each spire was used for. Once an area is opened up it remains open, and you’re free to backtrack to your heart’s content if you think you missed something; there’s only a few puzzles that actively require this since under the hood The Dig is still quite linear in the way that all adventure games ultimately are — puzzle A yields the item needed to solve puzzle B which opens the door leading to puzzle C, and so on — but it’s much better at camouflaging this linear path than Full Throttle was. It might be a facade, but the feeling of freedom that this open structure confers is not, and for The Dig it’s absolutely crucial. You need to feel like you’re exploring on your own terms in The Dig; you need to be able to buy into the fiction that you are playing an archeologist on a dead alien world uncovering long-lost secrets, because otherwise there’s absolutely no way anyone would put up with The Dig’s mind-meltingly obtuse puzzle design.

Now, whether it’s accidental or not I do not know, but there’s definitely a certain amount of playing-to-the-theme that The Dig is doing when it comes to its puzzles. You find a lot of weird alien devices where you have no idea what they’re for, and you have to figure it out by (sigh) trial-and-error — except that actually makes sense here, since that really is the only way you could figure out what a totally alien device would do. There’s a lot of clues shown to you via pictograms and carvings and tablets, and The Dig is a game that rewards taking notes, or at least screenshotting those pictograms for reference later. I have less of an objection to the puzzle design being somewhat illogical in The Dig than I did in, say, Monkey Island 2 or Fate Of Atlantis because, thanks to the core conceit of The Dig, it’s somewhat fitting that you spend your time in its little ring of islands mostly mired in a state of perpetual confusion. It takes the common problem adventure games of this era have, where they’re less about solving puzzles than they are figuring out the workings of a strange, utterly alien intelligence (i.e. the puzzle designer), and flips it into something of a strength because in the case of The Dig that’s the entire premise of the game — that you do have an actual alien intelligence behind it all.

Despite this strength, though, The Dig really does take the piss in a lot of places. Several of its most obtuse puzzles stem from one of its major gimmicks; pretty early on Boston finds a big stash of “life crystals”, which can temporarily restore dead things to life from nothing more than their skeletal remains. These are used in many major puzzle solutions, but it is almost never possible to predict the outcome of using the life crystals in advance. An example: there’s a pair of guard dog skeletons in front of a door. One of them is resurrected by an automated mechanism, preventing you from getting close to it — how then are you to pass through the door? Logic would seem to dictate that if one guard dog is adamantly out for your blood, using a life crystal to resurrect the other guard dog would merely double the size of your original problem. But no, it turns out that the second guard dog hates the first guard dog — presumably had a big promotion nobbled by him several millennia ago, or something — and immediately goes for its throat, smashing it into a wall and extremely conveniently knocking a piece of ceiling masonry loose which crushes them both. You are now free to go through the door. There’s also the infamous turtle bones puzzle, whereby you have to reassemble a turtle skeleton from around fifteen different pieces so that you can bring it back to life… and feed it to the sea monster that’s blocking your passage. Somewhat surprisingly I found the reassembly portion of this puzzle to be far easier than it was the first time I did it (which is when it seared itself into my brain as emblematic of The Dig’s puzzle design) because I know much more about basic skeletal structure now than I did when I was 12; however, there’s an additional step where you have to put a cryptic alien sphere inside the completed skeleton before you use the life crystal on it… because the sphere turns out to be a remote-controlled bomb that you can then use to kill the sea monster. Obviously.

However, The Dig’s crowning moment of absurdity doesn’t involve the life crystals at all, and instead comes towards the end of the game when one of your companions has been abducted and webbed up by a spider-like monster. To rescue her, Boston has to enlist the help of the third member of the expedition to shout at the monster as a distraction, while Boston leisurely walks off screen, down a nice, breezy, sun-dappled canyon, and up a cliffside pathway — his friend at this point is probably monster food, but Boston is remarkably relaxed about it all — to a river above a waterfall. There is a rock here. The rock has no obvious relevance to the problem at hand and is separated from it by at least two screens, but Boston still pushes it over while lampshading just how utterly random this is by saying “At this point, I’m ready to try anything!” It turns out this rock blocks the river, which redirects it to a grate just behind where your companion is being webbed up (how the hell are you supposed to figure this out?), which she can then open to blast the monster out of the cave with a jet of water.

One advantage of having played through all of the LucasArts adventure games in sequence is that I can now see the differing, evolving schools of thought in the puzzle design. There’s one side of the company that’s focusing on the writing and general experience as a shortcut to replayability, and while their puzzles are by no means simple (except in Full Throttle) they’re also comparatively self-contained and streamlined, as they don’t need to rely on puzzle difficulty as a crutch to pad out the playing time; the resulting games may be shorter, but they’re designed to be periodically replayed and hold up much better over time. I can tell just by playing through The Dig that the people who worked on it were from the other side of the company, the one that’s more concerned with trying to outwit their players with increasingly esoteric puzzles; I recognise many of the design tics in The Dig because I’ve seen then a couple of times before in games like Sam & Max and Fate Of Atlantis — it even recycles the “bait and trap an animal in a cage” puzzle from Fate, albeit with an even more fiddly spin on it — and they’re even less tolerable the second or third time around. The Dig didn’t need to be this convoluted, especially when the premise and the art and the animation and the sound are all more than strong enough to support the game on their own; the irony is that while I overall disliked Full Throttle’s too-streamlined puzzle design (I thought the rest of the game wasn’t substantial enough to support it), it would have fit The Dig like a glove. As it is, while not all of The Dig’s puzzles miss quite as badly as the above examples, most of them are painful enough that I regard them as something to suffer through in order to experience the rest of the game, rather than an end in and of themselves.

It’s fortunate, then, that despite The Dig’s tortured development process it came out of it with such a coherent sense of atmosphere. The game is quite obviously a mishmash of several different design iterations — for example, you can talk to the crew of your space shuttle remotely via a little PDA device, except two of them get left behind when Boston and co. are transported away on the alien ship and can’t be contacted outside of the opening twenty minutes of the game, and the geologist Brink stops answering his phone calls shortly afterwards, leaving Boston with just linguist Maggie to talk to (and even she spends most of the game telling him to stop bothering her); I suspect the PDA interface used to be a far more substantial element of the game but got cut down to this sadly truncated form in the final product. The things that consistently land across the entire length of the game, though, are the visuals and the sound and the sense of place. The unnamed alien world you’re stuck on is ancient and abandoned, but it is not dead; as you’re on an island you’re surrounded by the ocean and the constant pounding of waves, and in the distance you can see thunderstorms punctuated by flashes of lightning. There’s plenty of birds and small critters around, and there’s some impressive scenery like the aforementioned waterfall, all of which go towards The Dig feeling substantially livelier than the sterile deserts of Full Throttle — having this wildlife also accentuates the feeling of age and decay surrounding the alien artifacts, as birds make their nests on lightbridge lenses and rodents steal vital components from door controls.

The Dig’s art and animation is mostly superb. I do have a soft spot for it because it’s the very last of the classically-styled LucasArts adventures, with pixel art, the cross cursor and the emblematic LucasArts font that they’ve been using ever since Last Crusade. There’s a few occasions when The Dig does demonstrate why they moved to a higher-definition cartoon style for Curse Of Monkey Island, but even today I find myself impressed by the character design and animation for Boston and his friends; this is one area where they have learned from the mistakes of Fate, which attempted to cram so much detail into the Indy sprite with such a limited range of colours available that it ended up as a confused, indistinct mess. Instead the designs of The Dig are very, very simple: black boots, highly contrasting orange jumpsuit bottoms, one or two colours for the torso (this is the main distinguishing feature between the three astronauts), and that is it. The character sprites can’t be much more than a hundred pixels tall, but thanks to this economy of design they have all of the detail they need to. It helps that the artists are quite literally at the top of their game here (I think you’d struggle to find better pixel art at these resolutions until the indie revival of the late `00s), cramming Boston’s head into a ten-by-ten pixel square, picking out the nose and mouth with just four pixels of shading, giving him three pixels of grey hair at his temples to show he’s an older gentleman — they do a hell of a lot with so little to work with. By contrast the walk and generic interaction animations are silky smooth with more frames than any previous LucasArts game, and it really is a genuine pleasure just to watch Boston walk around trying to uncover the mysteries of the island.

(This does backfire slightly when Boston has to do any kind of one-off custom interaction with an object, as these animations have quite understandably had far less time and effort spent on them and end up looking significantly clunkier by comparison. The Dig also makes the utterly baffling choice to punctuate significant events by portraying them via FMV cartoon sequences, presumably to use up all of that juicy CD storage space that’s suddenly become available, and these look absolutely terrible.)

A running theme through these retrospectives has been the slow evolution of the adventure game interface, and this is another area where The Dig feels like a throwback compared to Full Throttle because it’s using a modified version of the much-hated (by me, anyway) interface from Sam & Max, with an icon-based conversation system and a full-screen inventory containing your action verbs accessible via a single right-click on the mouse. This is understandable when you remember that the final iteration of The Dig started shortly after Sam & Max was released and was helmed by one of the guys behind Sam & Max, but still could have been absolutely disastrous had they not made a few basic yet much-needed changes.

• First, there’s now brief tooltips explaining what each icon in the conversation interface represents is if you hover over them with the cursor — the previously-baffling question mark and exclamation mark icons return, but thanks to the tooltips I now know that the exclamation mark means “Say something profound”. This makes the conversation interface usable, if a little clunky with some conversation options disappearing off the edge of the screen and having to be scrolled to.
• Second, while your action verbs are still technically accessed as items via the inventory (there’s no click-to-cycle option here, thank god), The Dig has cut down the number of action verbs further than any other LucasArts game, to just one: Examine, which is The Dig’s implementation of LOOK AT. Everything else is handled via single left-clicks which are handled appropriately depending on the context — click on a button and you’ll PUSH it, click on a character and you TALK to them, click on an item and you’ll PICK it UP. This is a really nice, streamlined way of handling interactions, although it does come at the cost of some granularity and the only reason The Dig can get away with it is because there are very few characters to interact with.
• And third, the inventory background is now transparent, making the inventory less of a screen-blocking, context-shattering nightmare. I was surprised to discover that Curse’s inventory is basically a full screen switch just like Sam & Max’s, and I think this is one area where it could have learned some valuable lessons from The Dig.

Thus The Dig functions as an interesting look at the other way LucasArts adventure games could have evolved if they’d iterated on Sam & Max’s interface instead of throwing it out wholesale in Full Throttle. These changes worked, too, since unlike Sam & Max The Dig’s interface is perfectly usable; they probably wouldn’t have stuck with the conversation icons but the rest of it is fine and could have been iterated on further in later games. Of course in the historical context it doesn’t matter all that much as LucasArts only made one more 2D adventure game after The Dig; it’s not like we ever got to see if they made the right choice in choosing Full Throttle’s interface as the one to take forward, and as it is the interface choice merely cements The Dig’s status as a weirdly retro (for the time) offshoot from what LucasArts were doing with their other contemporary games.

Finally there’s the sound, and especially the music. The professional-grade voice acting –  a big selling point for LucasArts titles ever since Day Of The Tentacle — takes something of a back seat in The Dig because there isn’t really anybody to talk to on the alien planet aside from your two teammates, and as mentioned previously they spend nearly all of their time telling Boston to sod off. As a result the game’s voice acting is mostly Boston talking to himself; Boston is voiced by Robert Patrick, who initially seems well-cast in the role of the sardonic-yet-professional astronaut, but the script he’s given isn’t doing him many favours as Boston is very aware that he’s an adventure game protagonist and keeps making meta references to how stupid the scenarios he is currently facing are (which, let us remember, are entirely in the control of the puzzle designers and so function as an effective critique of just how bad they are at their jobs). These remarks would be very at home in a Monkey Island game, but they’re less welcome in the more grounded sci-fi world of The Dig, especially when this dumb humour is juxtaposed with some pretty gruesome events that occur as the story unfolds⁴. Still, Boston’s commentary does the job of filling the otherwise dead air of the unnamed alien world, even if his characterisation does tend towards the insufferably smug at times.

The Dig’s music, on the other hand, I’m finding quite difficult to describe. It’s certainly the most unusual soundtrack to be found in a LucasArts adventure game, and arguably any adventure game: all synthesiser tones, some of which connect with one another to form intelligible snippets of music whenever a cutscene or other event happens, but mostly isolated short sequences of notes and sounds that are rhythmically repeated and which are dynamically changed by the iMUSE system as Boston walks around the island. It is not the sort of thing you’d go to Youtube and listen to (although you can if you want) since it makes little sense when shorn of the context of the game⁵. However, the rather avante garde nature of the soundtrack is arguably what makes The Dig so good at building its atmosphere; it sounds so unusual and ethereal that it sets the perfect tone of otherworldly mystery. The visuals are great, of course, but it’s the music that pulls your brain away from the sillier elements of the puzzles and the story and draws you into that quasi-transcendental feeling like a warm bath.

And when you put the visuals and the music together, well, it’s why I’m willing to forgive The Dig an awful lot that I unhesitatingly damned other games for. I booted it up knowing that it was a heavily flawed game, but I was surprised at how fiddly and annoying a lot of the gameplay was in 2021; the interface may have improved but some of the puzzles were distractingly bad — and not the ones I was expecting from previous playthroughs, either. Despite all that, though, The Dig has a sense of place and purpose that Sam & Max and Fate Of Atlantis and Full Throttle would all kill for. It doesn’t have the humour of Monkey Island or the cleverness of Day Of The Tentacle, but instead brings something quite different to the table: wonder, and a feeling of delving into the truly unknown that still holds up today, for all that The Dig feels quite dated mechanically, even for 1995. It’s something that no subsequent adventure game has managed to recapture for me in quite the same way, and that’s why I treasure The Dig.

The post LucasArts Time Machine: The Dig appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Prior to playing it for this series, I would have sworn that Full Throttle belonged firmly in my “unplayed” category of LucasArts classics. “Unplayed” isn’t an exact description, as I did have access to most of them at the time and the ones that I didn’t I’ve since picked up on GOG, but anything in this column I’ve not played for much more than twenty minutes — the amount of time it takes to boot it up, think “That’s neat!” (or not¹), and then immediately forget about it for the next decade or three. In Full Throttle’s case I had very distinct memories of playing through the opening biker bar segment three or four times and absolutely nothing after that, since I hadn’t played past that point.

This made the uncomfortable sense of deja vu I was getting all through the first half of the game rather odd. This was the first time I’d experienced the tiresome Road Rash puzzle and the canyon jumping and the getting-through-the-minefield section, wasn’t it? The further I got into Full Throttle the more ancient memories were disinterred and the more uncertain I became that this was my first time through, but I put that feeling at the back of my mind. After all, we live in a miraculous age where full playthrough videos of nearly every single game in existence are available with just a quick Youtube search, and it was very possible that I’d just seen one of Full Throttle and that’s where these false, fleeting memories of having played it before were coming from.

That rationalisation lasted me all the way up until the demolition derby “puzzle” towards the end of the game, at which point it hit me like a sledgehammer: I had played Full Throttle before. I’d finished Full Throttle, for god’s sake, and the reason I knew this for certain now was because I remembered getting just as frustrated with the opaque objectives and terrible controls and physics of this segment as I had almost twenty years ago. It’s just that unlike the other LucasArts adventure games — some of which I’d last played long before I played Full Throttle for the first and only time — there were no half-remembered details, no stand-out moments that stuck in my mind. I’d simply forgotten the entire thing, and for good reason: it’s incredibly forgettable, one of the most middle-of-the-road adventure games ever made. Partly this is a result of the theming — I am incredibly disinterested in bikes, bikers, heavy metal and the open road — but mostly it’s because of the way Full Throttle has been made.

We’ve seen that LucasArts liked to experiment with their adventure game design to try and keep the format from becoming stale, but even by those standards Full Throttle is quite unlike anything that has come before it. Released in 1995, it was the first LucasArts adventure to properly make the jump from floppy disks to a CD-ROM, which says something about the era: this is a time when CD drives are becoming commonplace and so FMV adventures are absolutely everywhere, and Full Throttle feels in part like an attempt to fuse the LucasArts adventure game style with the more constrained, cinematic gameplay of FMV adventures. Full Throttle puts far less emphasis on travelling around different locations and picking up inventory items that you have to use to solve puzzles — i.e. what LucasArts adventure games have mostly been doing up until this point, Loom excepted — and much more on participating in a more-or-less linear series of impressive (for the time) audio-visual experiences that, if you squint a bit, might pass for puzzles.

That’s not to say that Full Throttle goes full FMV adventure, rather that it sits halfway between the two genres — it’s still a LucasArts adventure game, just a massively stripped-down one. At first the differences aren’t even all that apparent, since it’s the first chapter of the game that has the most LucasArts-y elements: namely, picking up items in multiple locations and using them to solve puzzles in different locations that are reached via an area map. Even here, though, I was struck by the comparative simplicity of the puzzle design; there are five locations (Mo’s garage, the trailer, the fuel tower, the junkyard entrance and the junkyard itself) and each of them has at most a single puzzle to solve. You’ll never be carrying around more than four items in your inventory at once, either, so the solutions are usually incredibly obvious; on the one hand I did actually appreciate this simplicity for cutting down drastically on the use-everything-on-everything approach that has plagued the last few LucasArts adventure titles. On the other it does mean that Full Throttle needs to rely on its customised set-piece puzzles — the junkyard crane, the Road Rash fights, the demolition derby and so on — being ridiculously obtuse to pad out its running time, since without them it’d be about ninety minutes long.

This truncated running time is perhaps the number one reason why I’d totally forgotten playing Full Throttle all those years ago; it’s not around for long enough for any of it to really make an impression. Yes, LucasArts adventure games are all quite short if you know the solutions or use a walkthrough, but I did neither here and I was still done with the game in a little over three hours, most of which was spent smashing my head against the aforementioned set-piece puzzles, none of which land properly today. The junkyard dog puzzle was the most frustrating one, where you have to throw some meat inside one of the car wrecks to lure the dog inside and then lift the car up off the ground with a crane so that you can reach the junk pile it’s guarding; by prior LucasArts standards this is an incredibly logical puzzle solution, but the mechanical implementation of it is so fiddly that I was convinced I was doing something wrong since the crane just would not attach to the car with the dog in it. Then there’s the demolition derby, which is one of the most awful puzzles I’ve seen to date in a LucasArts adventure where you have to figure out the solution via pure trial and error, that just so happens to be masquerading as a top-down arcade driving section. There’s even a timed puzzle at the end where – gasp! – you can actually die in a LucasArts adventure game²! And the window of time in which you have to react is not large, although thankfully the checkpointing is also quite generous.

But these are sideshows compared to the main event, the thing that it feels like much of the traditional puzzle gameplay was stripped out of Full Throttle to make room for: the on-rails bike segments. These comprise almost a full chapter of the game and are part navigation puzzle, part Road Rash-style biker fights, and leverage tech that has been spliced in from the INSANE engine running the similarly on-rails Rebel Assault games in order to make it happen. This is a large part of why Full Throttle reminds me so much of an FMV game, because that’s literally what a core part of the game engine was designed to do. Fortunately for Full Throttle these segments have aged just a little better than Rebel Assault itself has (which was already looking rather rancid just a few years after release), and these days come off as more of an inoffensive gimmick than anything else. Or at least the navigation bits do; this is a game about bikers and bikes and it would be a bit weird if there wasn’t a bit of the game where you got to ride your bike around some location, even if the location in question happens to be an endless stretch of featureless brown desert backgrounds and what little gameplay there is consists of picking the right turnoff to get to where you want to go.

I’m far less sanguine about the biker fights, however — I keep comparing these to Road Rash because visually they’re very similar, with your bike going side-by-side with an enemy and the two combatants flailing at each other with a variety of weapons, but under the hood it’s actually just a heavily-obfuscated version of the Insult Sword Fighting from from Monkey Island. Each biker uses a specific weapon, each weapon has a specific counter-weapon, and defeating a biker lets you pick up their weapon. The goal is to work your way through the bikers and the weapons in a specific order until you have the one that lets you beat up the guy with the turbocharger on his engine so that you can steal it, but unlike Insult Sword Fighting (and remember, that’s the one part of Monkey Island that I absolutely despised) there are no obvious tells to let you know which weapon you should be using, and so once again you have to figure it out by trial-and-error. And after nine of these sodding games my opinion on the trial-and-error approach to adventure game puzzles should be well-known by now. I know that it was far more palatable to players back in the ‘90s, but today I can’t see Full Throttle’s overreliance on it as anything other than some desperate padding to try and make these on-rails segments last long enough to justify their inclusion in the game.

The FMV-like side to Full Throttle misfires badly, then, while the more classic LucasArts puzzle elements that are present are so simple that they pose almost no challenge to somebody who has just spent three months chewing through their entire back catalogue to date. The plot is also very thin, revolving around the main character being framed for murder by an evil motorcycle executive, whose master plan is to… stop making motorbikes and start making minivans? The stakes couldn’t be any lower if they tried, and while Full Throttle does have a wry sense of humour that I appreciated it’s not going for laughs as its number one goal either, making the story a bit of a bust too. However, despite this my opinion of Full Throttle is basically unchanged; I think it’s an incredibly forgettable adventure game, but I don’t have the same visceral, deep-seated hatred of it that I do for something like Fate Of Atlantis or Sam & Max, and that’s because Full Throttle is a much nicer game to actually play.

I don’t just mean that it’s nice to look at and listen to, either, although it is; Full Throttle is rather overfond of the colour brown but as ever for LucasArts the art and animation is absolutely top-notch and has aged exceedingly well — far better than the primitive CGI models that have been spliced into some of the cutscenes, anyway. The voice cast is superb, bolstered considerably by the (at the time) surprising inclusion of Mark Hamill at a time when he was just on the cusp of packing in his film career in favour of becoming one of the most accomplished voice actors in the industry instead. The really good parts of Full Throttle are the interface improvements, however, which walk back some of the dumber ideas we saw in Sam & Max (conversations are handled via a text interface again, which is a huge relief) along with making a couple of massive UI innovations that are still used in adventure games today.

The first is a seemingly little thing, but it produces such a huge quality of life boost that I can’t believe I played through eight games where it didn’t exist: double-clicking on a scene exit to instantly transition to the next area without having to waste entire minutes of your life watching your character slowly walk over there first. Being able to zip around from area to area basically as fast as you can think of it removes an incredible amount of downtime from the game, and is in fact a big part of why I was done with Full Throttle in just three hours. Indeed, the cynical part of me suspects this might be why they didn’t include this feature in Sam & Max when it was so sorely needed, although it’s also possible that this is an actual tangible benefit of the switch to CD-ROM. Whatever the reason, this feature is the number one factor behind the last three 2D LucasArts adventures — Full Throttle, The Dig and Curse Of Monkey Island — feeling so much more modern than their predecessors, and it’s why Full Throttle gets away with a lot despite being the weakest of the three.

Then you have the new action verb interface. Full Throttle quite rightly looks at the awkward, overly-clicky way Sam & Max handled verb selection and tosses it directly into the garbage. But it doesn’t give up by going back to the space-inefficient verb menu at the bottom of the screen either; instead of either of these approaches, Full Throttle pioneers the now-standard right-click verb menu. If you see something interesting in a scene, mousing over it and clicking once with the right mouse button brings up a heavy metal album-style cartoon skull with a fist and a boot sticking out of the sides of it. Mousing over various parts of the skull bring up appropriate verbs you can use to interact with the object in question — eyes for LOOK, mouth for TALK, fist for PICK UP and so on — and clicking on a verb instantly executes that action on the object. This solves nearly all of the problems the previous two interfaces had: the entirety of the screen can be used for art and animation, you can still see most of the screen when you have the verb menu open since it’s a much more compact interface, and it’s still only two mouse clicks to do something. Full Throttle doesn’t get it 100% right the first time since the inventory still blocks most of the screen when you open it, and they also made the mistake of relegating tooltips to the right-click menu meaning that when you find an interactable object you have to open that menu just to find out what it is, but I also think that Curse owes a lot to being able to refine this interface instead of inventing it whole-cloth, not to mention a lot of modern adventure games — including the two Monkey Island remasters — also using an improved version of it. And it says a lot when the control system you invent for your game is still the genre standard twenty-five years later.

It’s thanks largely to these improvements that, for the very first time in this series, my frustration with Full Throttle was directed almost exclusively at the puzzles rather than the actual mechanical process of playing the game. When Full Throttle has to come up with a specialised gameplay system for a specific puzzle, as with the junkyard crane or the demolition derby, it often falls flat on its face and I really wish it hadn’t relied on them quite so heavily. Outside of these segments, though, Full Throttle feels about as natural to play as an adventure game can be, even if it does end up being a bit too simplistic and, ultimately, disposable; I might have disagreed significantly with some of (in fact a lot of) the puzzle design, but at least I didn’t resent the game for making my life unnecessarily difficult. Doubtless I will have forgotten all about Full Throttle in a year or two (again) and I’ll almost certainly never replay it, but it didn’t leave quite such a bad aftertaste as certain other LucasArts adventure games I could name, and that alone is enough to raise Full Throttle up above the majority of its peers.

The post LucasArts Time Machine: Full Throttle appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Yeah, it turns out that I still don’t like Sam & Max Hit The Road.

It’s not for lack of effort on my part. I have tried to play it several times over the last twenty-five years, and yet never made it more than an hour in. There’s something about its particular brand of wacky cartoon meta humour that just rubs me up the wrong way, and always has done. Playing Sam & Max is basically like playing an internet webcomic come to life, except I’ve just had to sit through two decades of increasingly shitty internet webcomics and so experiencing it in full for the first time in 2020 rather than 1993 hasn’t exactly improved it much. Being ahead of the curve on something that was subsequently run so far into the ground it’s now tunneled an appreciable fraction of the distance to the Earth’s core is not really Sam & Max’s fault, and my dislike of its humour is a purely subjective thing. (Although I would stand by my opinion that this wasn’t funny even back in the ‘90s.) However, Sam & Max is also a tremendously frustrating game to play today for two other reasons, one of which we’ve seen before in this series, and one of which is entirely new.

If you have been following these posts for a while, you’ll know that I started with Maniac Mansion, which was the first adventure game to move to a mouse-driven interface by putting its action verbs on screen and allowing the player to construct commands by clicking on a verb and then something in the environment. It was a big improvement over what came before, and up until this point all other LucasArts adventure games (with the exception of Loom) have used an identical interface with the verb list and the inventory taking up the bottom 40-50% of the screen. This is, obviously, a huge amount of space to devote to an interface, but that didn’t matter so much back in the late ‘80s because 1) computers were much less capable so the less actual on-screen art they had to draw the better, 2) the art was much uglier, and 3) everyone was doing big chunky interfaces at the time anyway. As computers became more powerful and the art and the animation improved, however, only being able to use half the screen to show it off must have really rankled with the LucasArts artists. And given that Sam & Max is in many ways a statement of just how good they’d gotten at comic book-style 2D art — the one nice thing that I will say about Sam & Max is that it still looks phenomenal 27 years later — it is not surprising that it’s also the first game to do away with the verb interface entirely.

That’s not to say that it gets rid of the actions, though, and this is where Sam & Max comes a cropper. PUSH and PULL are gone, but PICK UP, USE, LOOK and TALK TO are all still here as discrete actions (GIVE is now context-sensitive and is achieved by using an inventory item on an NPC) and WALK TO is now more important than it has been in any previous LucasArts adventure thanks to the way Sam & Max handles them. Actions are accessed via one of two methods: either clicking on the box in the corner of the screen which brings up Sam’s inventory — helpfully blocking the entire screen in the process — in which he stores all of his actions as inventory items, or else right-clicking to cycle through each action symbol on the mouse cursor.  In practice this means that USING an object has gone from two clicks (click USE, click object) to either four (click inventory, click USE, click inventory again to close, click object) or anywhere between three and five depending on which action your cursor is currently set to and how far away it is from USE in the action cycle — it could be the next one, in which case you get away with three, or it could be the previous one, meaning you have to click through the other four actions before getting back to USE.

Needless to say, in pure interface terms this feels like a step backwards as executing simple actions feels much clunkier than the (relatively) elegant flow of the verb interface. The mechanical process of playing Sam & Max is more annoying than any LucasArts adventure game since Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, especially because the game makes the baffling choice to remove text tooltips entirely. What this means is that we are, essentially, back to the bad old days of WHAT IS, as mousing over an object will not tell you what it is; you’ll have to get Sam to walk on over and LOOK at it. Since the noisy art style obfuscates what is and isn’t interactable this makes the game’s already obtuse puzzles even harder to solve because you cannot tell, just by looking at a scene, what the points of interest are; you have to wave LOOK around, wait for the cursor to switch from a closed eye to an open eye, click on the thing, then wait for Sam to amble on over (he is the slowest adventure game protagonist yet) and describe what it is, and then repeat the process until you’ve found all the objects of interest. Not that you can be sure you’ve gotten them all, because there’s simply no way to tell; more than once during my playthrough I checked a walkthrough to discover that I’d missed multiple items despite doing thorough sweeps with LOOK.

The low readability and lack of feedback is a dramatic step backwards from Day Of The Tentacle, but Sam & Max isn’t content to leave it there: its war on tooltips extends to the conversation interface too. I guess the thinking here went along the lines of, oh, we replaced the text-based inventory system with a set of icons representing the player’s items back in Monkey Island 2 and it worked really well, so what if we also replaced the player’s available conversation topics with a set of icons? This is why, instead of the normal list of sentences representing things that Sam can say next, he’s forced to choose from a series of abstract pictograms. Because Sam & Max hates tooltips you can’t mouse over the pictograms for a description of what they actually are, so conversations in Sam & Max are a frustrating process of trial and error as you click on things randomly to try and figure out what the hell Sam is going to say. Here’s a typical example:

Oh yeah sure, I’ll just ask this circus guy about Rubber Duck, and then maybe follow it up with a question about Hand. This is the problem with this system: conversations are abstract and indefinite concepts that don’t translate well into a symbolic form (or even a truncated text-based one, as modern conversation wheel-based RPGs have sometimes learned to their cost). If you have specific things to ask about then it’s a bit easier as it’ll flash up a picture of that thing, but while I quickly realised that Hand meant “end conversation” I never really figured out what, exactly, the other three options were for. Question Mark makes Sam ask a question, but you can never tell what the question is going to be about until you ask it. Exclamation Mark usually makes him insult the person he’s talking to, which is not really what I was expecting from it. The worst thing about it is that some of these generic conversation options open up other, specific conversation options once selected, but because you don’t know what Sam will say when selecting one of the generic ones there’s no way of following that chain of logic; all that you can really do is push the pretty buttons one at a time until something happens. In every conversation.

(And this is all leaving aside the fact that making the conversation interface so impenetrable makes it useless for the actual most important thing a conversation interface should be doing in an adventure game: giving the player hints and/or direction. God knows Sam & Max could use some.)

Playing Sam & Max is painful. There’s no getting around that, really; even if this interface was attached to a much better game, which Sam & Max is not, it would still be awkward and unpleasant. It did arguably clear the way for Full Throttle and The Dig to also ditch the on-screen action verbs, and both of them learned from Sam & Max’s mistakes with much better takes on the same basic concept. Perhaps it was necessary for Sam & Max to trip over its own feet and pants itself so that those other games could run, but knowing that didn’t make the experience of playing it any better for me.  It’s a big step backwards in usability, although not to the point of being unusable; it is, perhaps, the sort of thing I’d put up with if the writing was good and the puzzles were clever.

Alas, Sam & Max is neither.

To understand why, you need to understand how Sam & Max came to be at all. The characters of dog-detective Sam and his psychotic rabbit sidekick Max were not invented for this game; they’re the much older creations of LucasArts artist Steve Purcell, having been featured in their own comic series in the late ‘80s and subsequently adopted as something of an unofficial corporate mascot for LucasArts. Sam and Max were used as training material for onboarding new artists and animators and made cameos in many LucasArts adventure games, starting with Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. And eventually LucasArts thought, well, Steve has these semi-popular characters that our own employees clearly love, so why don’t we ask him if he wants to make a game featuring them? Steve Purcell obviously said yes, and that’s how we got Sam & Max Hit The Road, which is based on a storyline from the comic book.

This is why Sam & Max is the way it is: a self-indulgent, nonsensical, incoherent mess which basically doesn’t have a story and where the puzzles make no sense whatsoever, but which has incredible art and animation because the artists and animators were 100% bought into the concept of making a Sam & Max game and had been already been drawing the pair of them for years. There is so much bespoke animation in Sam & Max’s cartoon world that it really has to be seen to be believed; there’s detailed, one-off animations for nearly every interaction in the game, including a few failed ones, and you can tell the art team was having an absolute blast with it. It also explains why the interface has been switched around to be so visual with zero text outside of the subtitles, since this is a project where the artists are firmly in the driving seat.

But for all of the extra attention paid to Sam & Max’s outstanding visuals, it seems like there was even less effort than usual spent on making the actual game good — at least, for people who hadn’t already read the comic book and who weren’t fully on board with the world and characters of Sam & Max. One of the very first puzzles in the game is finding the orders from the police chief so that you can show them to the fire-breathing guy guarding the entrance to the circus so that he’ll let you in. They are, initially, nowhere to be found; there’s the sound of a courier showing up in the street outside their office, but once you trundle on down there there’s no mailbox or anything that would obviously contain the orders. In fact the only interactable object in the street is a cat, so obviously the orders are inside the cat. Obviously. Even if you figure this out, you then have to work out how to get the orders out of the cat, which is to get Max to put his arm down the cat’s throat and extract the orders by force.

This puzzle encapsulates everything I hate about bad adventure game puzzles, and everything I hate about Sam & Max. The awful interface and conversation system offer next to no help as to what the possible solution to each puzzle might be, so you’re forced to figure everything out on your own. The solution itself is governed by cartoon logic, so it’s completely unpredictable and forces you to fall back on a use-everything-on-everything approach. And it’s not just this one puzzle, either, because nearly every puzzle in the game is constructed the same way, like the designers felt that they had to try and outwit their players with something unsolvable instead of giving them something that was merely challenging. There’s many famous examples of Bad Adventure Game Puzzles, like getting the key from the subway track in The Longest Journey or the cat hair moustache puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3, and I don’t understand why Sam & Max gets a pass when these lists are compiled because, unlike Monkey Island 2 where the monkey wrench puzzle and the non-alcoholic grog puzzle were notable blips in a game that mostly worked on regular human logic, it’s an entire game of bafflingly obtuse horseshit.

Maybe it’s more acceptable if you like the styling and the humour and what little story Sam & Max actually has, but I unfortunately do not. Both Sam and Max are deeply unpleasant characters to spend time with — I guess this is supposed to be the joke and I’m supposed to be laughing at them, not with them, except it doesn’t exactly endear them to me to the point where I’m willing to spend a game’s worth of time in their company. The theming of the game is based around a road trip around a series of ludicrous tourist traps such as the World’s Largest Ball Of Twine, and Sam & Max in general is suffused with a love of tacky, chintzy Americana that I’m not convinced translates all that well outside of it. There’s a lot of cultural in-jokes in here that you either get (if you’re from the US) or you don’t (if you’re from the rest of the world) and if you’re in the segment of the population that doesn’t then the entire game is in danger of misfiring. Sam & Max certainly leans on that cultural knowledge far more heavily than Day Of The Tentacle did — where all you really need to know to get most of the jokes is that George Washington and the Declaration of Independence are things that exist — and my not being in on the joke contributed significantly to my dislike of the game in general. Not to mention Sam & Max being the first of two LucasArts adventures that think giving their villains an Australian accent is inherently funny¹.

So. I apologise if you’re reading this and you happen to be a big fan of Sam & Max. Perhaps you do fall into the target audience for its humour, or perhaps you’re really into its art and animation; it’s not like Sam & Max does everything wrong, and even the worst LucasArts adventure games have made important contributions to the evolution of adventure games in general. Sam & Max’s contribution does at least mean that this is probably the last time I have to put the boot into a beloved classic quite this hard, as they figured out how to do textless interfaces properly after this and never repeated the mistakes made here. However, that LucasArts’ subsequent output was far better for Sam & Max existing doesn’t excuse the fact that Sam & Max itself has at best aged absolutely terribly, and at worst is comfortably resting at the nadir of the LucasArts adventure game catalogue along with Zak McKraken and Fate Of Atlantis, and it is most definitely not something that I’d recommend playing in 2021.

The post LucasArts Time Machine: Sam & Max Hit The Road appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This one is going to be tricky. Everything I am about to write is, in a way, largely redundant, because I already wrote an In Praise Of post about Day Of The Tentacle back when I still wrote In Praise Of posts, and I also reviewed the Remastered version when it came out in 2016¹. I think it is a strong contender for the best adventure game ever made, it’s probably also the smartest adventure game ever made, and Day Of The Tentacle is the one game in this series that I actively go out of my way to replay every few years. Because of this, it’s also the one game in this series where I have the entire solution already memorised. I don’t need a walkthrough to beat Day Of The Tentacle. I’ll never need a walkthrough to beat Day Of The Tentacle.

And this is a bit of a problem, since I have come at all of the previous games from a place where I can remember maybe 20% of the ones I’ve played before, but I am mostly playing them completely fresh and so can get a good idea of how frustrating (or not) the puzzles and game structure are. I don’t have the luxury of that viewpoint with Day Of The Tentacle; to me, all of the puzzles just make sense² even though I am reliably informed by people who are going through it for the first time that they find several parts of it to be confusing and counterintuitive. Playing through it for the eleventh or twelfth time with an eye on how well the game breadcrumbs its puzzles does make me think that that most things in Day Of The Tentacle are either pretty well-signposted, or else can be worked out using normal human logic despite the time-travelling premise — there’s nothing here on the order of the sodding crab sandwich in Fate Of Atlantis. Still, it should be kept in mind that I am hardly a neutral observer where this game is concerned, and I couldn’t be objective even if I wanted to. I love Day Of The Tentacle too damn much for that.

Now, that all being said, it was definitely interesting coming at Day Of The Tentacle having played LucasArts’ prior body of adventure game work beforehand, since there’s a couple of things that I think it does particularly well in light of previous attempts that did not. For example, it’s the first LucasArts adventure game that was designed to be fully-voiced from the start — by modern standards the actors put in a performance that’s good rather than outstanding (although nearly every line that comes out of Dr Fred’s mouth is excellent) but which fits the Saturday morning cartoon nature of the game, and most of the jokes are written with voice acting in mind and leverage this magical thing known as “comic timing” that the previous games could not, and so it holds up pretty well today. By 1993 standards, however, Day Of The Tentacle is nothing short of exceptional. Loom and Fate Of Atlantis both had voiced versions released after the original text-based ones, but because they were afterthoughts that were solely trading off the fact that people wanted full multimedia experiences that would make use of their expensive CD-ROM drives rather than anything actually designed for voice-acting from the get-go, both of these prior attempts were extremely ropey to the point where I wouldn’t have played with the voice acting on even if I’d had the option. By contrast I can’t imagine playing DOTT without voice acting since it adds so much to the experience, and it set the standard for future LucasArts adventures which all had a similar quality of voice acting; it was one of the big selling points for their games that made them feel so much more polished than the competition.

That goes for the art and animation too, which have weathered the 27 years since the original release astonishingly well thanks to their highly stylised nature. Day Of The Tentacle is a full-on cartoon and it leverages this to good effect, with all of the comedy Wile-E-Coyote animations (eyes bulging, necks stretching, falling off of high places and leaving person-shaped holes in the ground, that kind of thing) that Monkey Island 2 arguably overused feeling perfectly at home here. The background art for the various locations inside the mansion is full of crazy, irregular shapes and oversized cartoonish proportions on otherwise normal objects, which is a style that I don’t usually enjoy but which works here, and which has insulated Day Of The Tentacle from aging like the more realistic backgrounds in Fate Of Atlantis did. And something that I hadn’t realised before doing this series was that Day Of The Tentacle was the last hurrah for the interaction verb UI; the intro sequence is a good indicator that it might be outstaying its welcome with LucasArts, as this gorgeous full-screen cartoon suddenly loses the bottom third of its screen area to a comparatively ugly interface, and after DOTT LucasArts ditched it in favour of some alternative approaches starting with Sam & Max. It still works perfectly well here and I do have a soft spot for the specific iterations of it that were used in DOTT and Monkey Island 2, but this time around I got a definite sense that it was starting to be left behind by the ridiculous pace of technological improvement in the ‘90s PC market and that it might be time for something new, which is not something that I think I would have said if I hadn’t just played through eight games that used it in a row.

It’s also been interesting to see what Day Of The Tentacle has in common with Maniac Mansion, which it is ostensibly a sequel to. The answer is: not all that much, really — it keeps the character switching mechanic and the concept of exploring a single mansion location, but while it also recycles characters such as Bernard and Dr Fred they might as well be from completely separate universes since all they really have in common are the names. However, where Maniac Mansion had multiple characters exploring the same mansion — which is unexpectedly complex, since many of its puzzles involve having characters positioned in separate locations doing some finicky timing-based puzzle — Day Of The Tentacle introduces a hard border between its three protagonists by separating them into three different time periods at the beginning of the game. Hoagie explores the mansion in the past, Bernard explores it in the present, and Laverne explores it in the future, and despite the potential complexity that all time-travelling shenanigans inevitably invite I actually think this makes Day Of The Tentacle a far simpler game. To compensate for being split over three different timestreams the mansion has been made much, much smaller — it’s a grand total of sixteen screens — and it’s got more or less the same layout in each one, meaning you can learn the spatial element of the game very quickly. This stands in stark contrast to Maniac Mansion’s messy sprawl, or even a more recent attempt like Monkey Island 2 which spreads the action out over multiple locations on three different islands — Day Of The Tentacle is, ironically, a much more logically organised game, where all you really need to worry about is figuring out the solutions to its cause-and-effect puzzles.

Even here I think Day Of The Tentacle is quite forgiving. Most of the conventional puzzles are heavily signposted if you just listen to the dialogue — one of the categories for the Human Competition is Best Laugh, so you need some way of making Dead Cousin Ted laugh. The inflatable clown Oozo laughs sarcastically every time he hits you, and it doesn’t take a huge amount of brainpower to figure out that the two are related somehow; all it then requires is figuring out which item will let you extract Oozo’s voice box, and that is a problem that’s entirely solvable using real-world logic. The puzzles based around accomplishing something in the past to change something in the future are a little more complex, but even here the game drops some very heavy hints. In general if something is present in two different time periods there’s some way of using it to transport an item between the two; for example, the washer-dryer exists in the present and the future version of the mansion, and you have in your inventory a sweater that is explicitly stated to be soaking wet the moment you pick it up as an additional hint, so it’s just a matter of sticking the sweater inside the dryer and finding enough quarters to keep it going for a hundred years. That last part is where things really do start to veer into the cartoonish, but once you have your giant pile of quarters there are only two things in the game you can potentially use it on and one of them won’t let you, so you can at least predict the correct interaction even if the usefulness of the outcome isn’t immediately clear.

Still, I can’t deny that Day Of The Tentacle has a little more scope for being confusing and frustrating than, say, the first half of Monkey Island; it can’t quite match that paradigm of consistent internal logic despite Monkey Island being almost as absurd and Day Of The Tentacle deploying a few of the same tricks to try and keep things legible. Hoagie’s adventures in the past have the same kind of deliberately anachronistic energy as he torments the signers of the Declaration of Independence with joke teeth, exploding cigars and a fake fire alarm, while Bernard is trapped in the extremely relatable³ personal hell of a hotel that’s in the middle of holding a convention. Laverne’s jaunt into the future is where the game wobbles very slightly; I feel like the designers knew it too because she spends the first half of the game stuck in a tree and then has to overcome the further obstacle of making a tentacle disguise before she can achieve anything meaningful. This feels like it’s trying to hide the fact that the future is much less elaborate than the other two time periods — or at least, most of the puzzles in it are solved by doing stuff in the other two time periods, and so Laverne has the least amount of work to do. This is probably a good thing as the future is where things do start to tread on the wrong side of the “cartoon logic” line, with a couple of rather unpredictable outcomes like what happens when you push the mummy out of his room, or when you toss the cat into the prisoners’ cell, and so Laverne’s gameplay being mercifully brief in comparison to Hoagie and Bernard at least ensures it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

The thing that surprises me most about Day Of The Tentacle after all of these years, though, is that it is funny. This is hardly a first for a LucasArts adventure game, which have all attempted to be funny with varying degrees of success — Monkey Island is masterful, Zack McKraken is painful, and Loom’s wisecracking protagonist just came off as an asshole — but what stands out about Day Of The Tentacle is that out of all of the ones I’ve played so far it’s the most overtly humorous, and arguably the most successful. I think the overall joke quality in Monkey Island is higher, but DOTT makes up for it with volume; nearly every single line in the game is either a joke or the setup for one, to the point where the plot is essentially an afterthought. That’s not to say that it’s irrelevant, since while the game might be light-hearted nonsense your goals are always clear (in fact Dr Fred explicitly lists them during the intro sequence), and that’s quite important for preventing DOTT from becoming a confusing mess like Zak McKraken or (as a sneak preview of what’s coming next) Sam & Max Hit The Road. Instead, DOTT manages to thread the needle of being confident enough to be funny without trying too hard and subverting its own internal structure in the process — this is all the more impressive because I have a longstanding hatred of humour that involves either of the words “wacky” or “zany” in its description, and at first glance DOTT appears to fall squarely into those categories.  The thing is, though, while DOTT might be an absurd game, it is also a clever one. If it was all cartoon effects and fourth-wall breaking humour it’d be dangerously close to insufferable,but the core of the time-travelling puzzles balances things out nicely and it’s smart enough not to let the jokes get so out of hand that they suffocate the game.

I am conscious of my own bias here; perhaps that’s the nostalgia talking, and perhaps somebody coming into Day Of The Tentacle for the first time in 2021 would find the game insufferable. My bar for that is higher than most people’s, though, and while playing through DOTT as number eight of a twelve-part series of adventure games did expose a few rough edges that I previously wouldn’t have noticed, it still holds up remarkably well today. I think my replay of the first Monkey Island did enough to raise my opinion of that game that it’s sitting on the same level as DOTT in my head, now — I will probably not be quite so blase about throwing around phrases like “greatest adventure game ever made” when talking about DOTT without putting some sort of qualifier in front of it, anyway –  but my replay of DOTT didn’t diminish my opinion of DOTT at all. It’s still an all-time classic.

The post LucasArts Time Machine: Day Of The Tentacle appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis is second on the list of games I was most looking forward to playing for the first time as part of this series. Unlike most of the other games on that list it’s only ever referred to as a stone-cold classic — both at the time and by anyone you ask about it today — and I also quite liked Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade despite that game being comparatively clunky and obtuse by modern standards. The concept of an Indiana Jones adventure game clearly has legs, and I was excited to play something wholly original that wasn’t shackled to a movie script, and which had been developed during LucasArts’ true golden age.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that, contrary to everything I’d heard about it over the last quarter-century, Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis fucking sucks.

Oh, it’s not without a few interesting ideas that expand on the multiple-routes idea pioneered by Last Crusade, but make no mistake: Fate Of Atlantis is a terrible adventure game which reminded me of nothing more than Zak McKracken in a fresher coat of paint. It has the same depressing tendency to revert to Adventure Game Logic when solving puzzles, the same misguided belief that having the player blunder around in a pitch-black room for twenty minutes counts as interesting gameplay, and the same utterly inexplicable love of mazes. That last item is taken to the point of absurdity here, since practically the entire back half of the game is nothing more than a series of mazes with a few substandard, illogical puzzles scattered inside of them. I very nearly didn’t make it to the end of Fate Of Atlantis, even with a walkthrough, because the process of going through maze after maze after maze was slowly sapping my will to live. LucasArts had released two Monkey Island games by this point! They know better ways of making adventure games now! Hell, the team responsible for Fate is the same team responsible for Last Crusade, which did a lot of this stuff (especially mazes) in a far more bearable fashion and would have been quite easy to spin into a respectable adventure game with updated graphics and “modern” conveniences. What on earth made them think they should go backwards in time and double down on all of the genre’s most insufferable vices?

Fate Of Atlantis at least starts fairly promisingly. You get the classic Indiana Jones title card, and then a cute little introduction sequence where Indy bursts into a storeroom on a search for an ancient artifact and pratfalls his way from screen to screen while the opening credits play. But wait, what’s this?

Where is the familiar list of action verbs? Where is my inventory? The intro to Fate doesn’t have either, instead plumping for full screen backgrounds and an actual, honest-to-god tooltip that pops up next to the mouse cursor when you hover over something interesting. Clicking on the thing causes Indy to either make an observation about the thing or attempt to interact with it. I was initially very confused by this, because it appeared that Fate Of Atlantis had come up with the next big leap in adventure game interfaces a year or two early¹: ditching the on-screen interface and instead implementing context-sensitive mouse controls. The reason I was confused is because I had at least seen screenshots of Fate in gaming magazines at the time, and I definitely remembered it having some kind of interface, and I briefly wondered whether or not I was playing some later rerelease that overhauled it out of the game.

I needn’t have worried, though; there is only one version of Fate Of Atlantis, and it’s the one composed of pure 100% certified A-grade shit. (They did add some incredibly bad voice acting in the now-obligatory CD rerelease a year later, but I turned it off within ten minutes of starting the game and the versions are otherwise identical.)  A more traditional adventure game interface appears the moment the opening credits are done, and it is spectacularly ugly with none of the charm of Monkey Island 2’s take on the concept; I know that it was the style at the time for most computer-related things to be beige, but there’s no reason Fate’s inventory and buttons have to be as well. The intro scenes themselves are strikingly lit, leveraging some of what was learned over the last three years, but subsequent locations are… not badly drawn, as such, they’re just a bit generic in style; unlike Monkey Island 2, Fate’s backgrounds are obviously art for a videogame, rather than art that has been transplanted into a videogame. If you slapped a background from Fate Of Atlantis next to a background from (to pick a random contemporary example) Shadow Of The Comet, I think I’d struggle to tell you which one was which. After playing Last Crusade it was nice to control an Indy who wasn’t composed of flat colour blocks and had a bit more detail to him, but at the same time that detail is somehow indistinct — there’s a lot of light and shade applied to a generally Indy-shaped silhouette, but not much in the way of recognisable features.

And that’s the problem with the art in general: it might never look less than okay, but it has a serious readability issue when trying to pick out actually important detail from the background art. I could mouse over a scene once, twice, three times and not actually find the important item that’s present because it’s blending in so well with the background scenery. This is a running thread throughout the entire game, starting from the library at Barnett College, running through Tikal and Algiers, Crete, and then finally into Atlantis itself; in all of these locations I missed critical items not because I hadn’t spent enough time inspecting the location — this is the seventh LucasArts adventure game I’ve played so far and I’ve gotten quite good at it — but because it was so hard to see them against the fuzzy backgrounds. It doesn’t help that Fate Of Atlantis has also inherited Last Crusade’s obsession with pixel hunting; here at least the objects you’re hunting for are three pixels big instead of one, but when you make them that small it’s no wonder they get missed even by a reasonably on-the-ball player such as myself.

Puzzle-wise Fate Of Atlantis does try something interesting. A common criticism of adventure games around this time was that they had zero replayability: you’d play the game once, and then there’d be no point playing it again because you knew the solution now and it’d play out the same way every time. This is why so many of the early LucasArts games contain features such as character switching and randomised puzzle elements, and it’s why Last Crusade also tried out the idea of alternate routes through the game — steal the biplane or board the zeppelin, fight the big guard or get him drunk, and so on. The idea was that the game would track your score across multiple playthroughs, and only by exploring every possible path would you be able to achieve maximum points. Fate Of Atlantis does the same thing, but in a much more structured way; the game’s plot is a fairly standard race against time to discover Atlantis before the Nazis do (if I were feeling particularly uncharitable I’d call it a straight rip-off of Raiders Of The Lost Ark), and Indy hooks up with a bogus psychic called Sophia Hapgood who has a connection to Atlantis. Sophia follows Indy around during the early part of the game; she isn’t a directly controllable character but can be talked to in order to get hints on where to go next or to create distractions. After the first few locations are out of the way she gives Indy a choice under the guise of telling his fortune.

• Ditch Sophia in New York and continue solo, with an emphasis on puzzles.
• Ditch Sophia in New York and continue solo, with an emphasis on the returning boxing minigame.
• Let Sophia accompany you and continue to use teamwork to solve puzzles.

Each option changes how the middle portion of the game progresses; Indy will visit Monte Carlo, Algiers and Crete regardless, but the specifics of how each location plays out depends on which path he took, where he reaches the Algiers dig site on a camel if you choose the Wits path, but has to steal a balloon instead if you choose Teamwork. The puzzles solved with Sophia present are quite significantly different than those solved without her, and if you choose Fists you always have the option of punching Nazis in lieu of solving the harder ones. The Indy Quotient scoring system also returns, and only by playing all three paths can you max out your score.

On the face of it this is all quite welcome, but it’s a plan with one tiny flaw: the end of each route, in Atlantis, is exactly the same (Sophia gets kidnapped by the Nazis and transported there if you didn’t bring her with you), and this is by far the most tedious part of the game. The first segment of Atlantis is a big, top-down circular maze split into four chunks, with each chunk having 4-5 rooms in it. The locations of the rooms are randomised on each playthrough, and you have to visit them in a specific order — you need an insulated cup from the statue room so that you can fill it with lava in the lava room so that you can pour the lava into the machine in the machine room — which means at least two trips around the maze, one to find out where everything is and another to actually do the things you need to do. Then there’s some incredibly awful backtracking, where you need to bring a collection of items from the maze through five screens’ worth of canals (hope you didn’t miss any of them!) so that you can use them to break down a door into the inner section of Atlantis. This also knocks a hinge pin loose, and if you want to save Sophia you have to go back out through the canals and into the dungeon so that you can use the hinge pin to free her. A big thing Fate Of Atlantis likes to do is repeatedly use the same item over and over again to bypass an obstacle, but with no hints given that you’re supposed to pick the item up again after the first time you’ve used it; after you’ve freed Sophia the hinge pin is stuck in place propping up a door, so I left it behind and went forward again through those five screens’ worth of canals plus another three screens’ worth of corridors only to discover that I needed to insert a lever-like object into an ancient digging machine, a lever-like object much like… that hinge pin. So back I went for it through eight screens’ worth of wasted time and then again on the return trip, where Monkey Island would have just had your character automatically pick the hinge pin up when I tried to leave the room for the first time and saved me from all of this tedious backtracking.

Finally, once you’re through the maze and the canals and the backtracking and you’ve turned on the digging machine, it bursts through a series of walls to reveal… another maze, this one of the screens-with-multiple-connected-exits variety. I had to quit the game for a few hours at this point, despite knowing that I was very close to the end of the game, because I couldn’t bear the thought of going through the third successive maze. Fate Of Atlantis had several of these moments; one thing it likes to do is throw Indy into a dark room and make him blunder around in the dark trying to find the light switch. On the plus side these scenes have significantly more effort put into them than Zak McKracken did, as Indy’s eyes slowly adjust to the dark over time and he can start to make out the general shape of objects so that he can interact with them. Objects in the room don’t have specific names while it’s dark because Indy can’t see what they are; they’re just referred to as “wood thing” and “stone thing”, and he has to get up close and touch them before he gets a detailed description. However, what makes them so much worse than Zak McKracken is that turning on the light is no longer a process of finding the light switch and turning it on, but is instead a multi-step process of refueling a generator with fuel siphoned from the truck outside, or putting down a ladder so that you can reach a statue that you have to insert a magic bead into, and having to do all of this in the dark is incredibly obnoxious as it involves several separate stages of sweeping the room with the mouse cursor to try and find the interactable objects (as if I weren’t doing that enough in this game already) and then figuring out what order to use them in.

And then there’s some examples of Adventure Game Logic in here that I can only describe as spectacular. Early on Indy is faced with a coal chute that he cannot climb up because it’s too slippery. His solution to this problem is what any of us would do when faced with the same situation: get some chewing gum that was stuck to one of the desks upstairs and stick it to his shoes to provide traction, as it’s well-known that the adhesive strength of chewing gum is more than enough to support the weight of a full-grown man. Shortly afterwards, in Tikal, Indy picks up a kerosene lamp and takes it inside a pyramid. Now, if you or I were to put a kerosene lamp into an adventure game, it would probably be for the purposes of “making light”, or possibly “making fire” as a secondary option. Fate Of Atlantis instead elects to use the kerosene inside the kerosene lamp as a solvent to clear away the dirt around some of the engravings in the pyramid, because that’s obviously the first thing that comes into everyone’s heads when they think of a kerosene lamp. Indy has to dig holes at several points in the game, and the thing he uses to do it isn’t a shovel, but an ancient ship rib (i.e. a stick) that he finds on a table in Algiers. In Atlantis he has to distract an octopus before he can traverse the canals, so he has to go back into the maze, pick up a specific human ribcage — there are bones everywhere in Atlantis, but only this ribcage will do — combine it with a sandwich he picked up on a Nazi U-boat, and then chuck the whole thing into a pool full of crabs. This is apparently a foolproof method of catching one, which he can then use to placate the octopus.

God, just reading some of the solutions in the walkthrough made me angry. (And yes, I resorted to a walkthrough halfway through Crete because I couldn’t stand the game’s magical thinking any more; looking back on it I’m amazed I made it that far before cracking.) Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis might have multiple routes through the game, but after being bored to tears by the Teamwork route I was in absolutely no mood to try either of the others; the boxing minigame is much harder this time around, and you absolutely cannot convince me the absurd puzzles would be improved by making them more complex on the Wits path — and anyway, they both terminate in the same tedious trek around the Atlantis mazes. After hearing so much about the game’s quality — both in contemporary gaming media and by starry-eyed fans for decades afterwards — and after how promising Last Crusade turned out to be, it’s dreadfully disappointing that Fate Of Atlantis has seemingly learned nothing from LucasArts’ subsequent efforts and ends up feeling like nothing more than a deliberate throwback to the Bad Old Days, and a good reminder of how far adventure games have come since then.

The post LucasArts Time Machine: Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Did you know that the original Secret Of Monkey Island didn’t do that well commercially? It’s true; it sold strongly in Europe but these were offset by poor sales in the larger US market, and so it was only a moderate success. If LucasArts had known that ahead of time it’s likely that Monkey Island 2 never would have been made, but fortunately publishing and distributing a game on a global scale took much longer back in the 90s and so Ron Gilbert and co. jumped straight into the development of Monkey Island 2 after they finished Monkey Island 1, with no idea of how well the first game had sold because it hadn’t even made it to stores yet. This approach had its good and bad points; on the one hand we got a Monkey Island 2, but on the other the developers going head-first into a sequel meant they didn’t have time to critically assess why the first one worked and why people liked it.

Consequently Monkey Island 2 is a much more uneven game than its predecessor. This wasn’t helped by the development being wrapped up in less than a year — standard practice for LucasArts adventures at the time, but finishing one pirate-themed comedy adventure and going straight into another pirate-themed comedy adventure means a repeat visit to the same creative well, and at times Monkey Island 2 does feel like it’s pulling up the absolute dregs of the ideas that were passed over by the original for whatever reason. Its puzzle logic is far less, well, logical, with the game now devoting its conversation system almost entirely to comedy and offering far less in the way of direction compared to Monkey Island 1, and plenty of interactions and solutions that the game doesn’t even hint at (good luck figuring out that you can pick up the dog…). It lurches back to the bad old days of “use everything on everything” puzzle design at several points and is far less careful about compromising on its puzzles in the name of cracking a stupid joke. I found Monkey Island 2 to be a bit of a slog, all in all, and this surprised me because prior to playing it for this series I’d actually considered Monkey Island 2 to be the better of the first two Monkey Island games. That was an opinion helped along by the fact that I played it first, and didn’t get around to playing the original until a couple of years later — and thanks to some important technological improvements the mechanical process of playing Monkey Island 2 does feel much nicer.

The most obvious difference is that the EGA colour palette has finally been ditched entirely, with Monkey Island 2 using VGA art as standard; it does technically have an EGA version, but this is simply a filter applied on top of the VGA artwork rather than anything custom-drawn, and it looks absolutely terrible. The EGA art of the previous games really grew on me over time, but the artists were working in a style dictated by the limitations of the technology and it’s really cool to see them be able to cut loose and draw the things that they want to draw in all of their 256-colour glory. Large parts of Monkey Island 2 resemble a slightly pixelated¹ comic book come to life; the backgrounds are much more obviously drawings now instead of pixel art — you can see the pencil/brush strokes in places — and this even has some pleasant consequences in terms of readability because most of the items you can pick up or interact with are still pixel art and have an obviously different look from the rest of the environment. Certain areas such as the beach where the game starts, most of Woodtick, and the voodoo swamp must have looked absolutely stunning to an audience previously used to a diet of EGA colour back in 1991, and still look pretty great today. The range of character animations has also been expanded, with Guybrush now having a vast range of unique animations for nearly everything in the game. They possibly go a little too far with the comedy cartoon effects — comically bulging eyes, heads staying in place while the rest of the body falls off a cliff, Guybrush’s hairpiece coming off and doing somersaults through the air on three separate occasions –  and I think that’s something much more suited to the wacky style of Day Of The Tentacle and is a little incongruous here.

(That’s a bit of a theme with Monkey Island 2, though, as we shall shortly see.)

Monkey Island 2’s audio has received improvements to match the visuals, too, thanks to better sounds in general, a much greater volume of music compared to the original (practically the entirety of Monkey Island 2 has musical accompaniment now) and also a great innovation from Michael Land and the LucasArts team: the iMUSE system. The town on the game’s starting island, Woodtick, shows this off the best; the Woodtick theme is consistent throughout, but as Guybrush moves from screen to screen within Woodtick the theme dynamically changes to layer in different instruments that give each area its own unique feel. It’s leveraged a little less heavily afterwards, sadly, mostly being used to seamlessly segue between different music tracks instead of between different versions of the same track, but the Woodtick theme remains the game’s great musical accomplishment and iMUSE itself was used to great effect in later LucasArts adventure games such as Day Of The Tentacle and The Dig, and even in some non-adventure games; the way TIE Fighter leverages iMUSE to play different musical stings that highlight in-mission events contribute significantly to it feeling like a proper Star Wars game.

Lastly, the interface has also received a full overhaul. The selection of action verbs is further reduced to nine with the long-overdue demise of TURN ON and TURN OFF, and this lets them make the interface a bit more attractive by turning the verbs into a 3×3 grid of buttons. It also frees up the space needed to switch to a visual inventory, with each inventory item represented by a chunky icon instead of a simple list of words. This isn’t leveraged for humour quite as much as I’d like; it has a good one at the start with Guybrush starting the game with huge piles of money, cash and treasure visible in his inventory, and then immediately getting mugged by Largo which causes all of it to disappear. Otherwise the closest Monkey Island 2 gets is the absurd illustration of Jojo — but it’s certainly much more pleasing on the eye, not to mention allowing eight items on screen at once instead of six. However, the move to static buttons and icons does mean that it’s more difficult to do that interface-subversion humour that I enjoyed so much in the original Monkey Island; I don’t think Monkey Island 2 ever does anything clever with it, preferring to rely solely on its in-game jokes, and these are significantly more hit and miss than Monkey Island’s.

I think that where Monkey Island made the right choices around balancing the comedy with being a good adventure game — using the conversation system to give the player hints at the same time as cracking jokes, deliberately avoiding specific pop culture parodies so that the humour was more universal, and reducing the amount the player has to keep in their head at once by restricting things to a single island at a time — Monkey Island 2 makes all of the wrong ones. It goes all-in on the comedy at the expense of the actual game, and while it’s still pretty funny there’s been a subtle shift in the tone of its humour that means certain elements of it have aged particularly poorly.  Take the monkey wrench puzzle: there’s a pump off in the middle of nowhere that Guybrush can’t turn on, and Guybrush doesn’t have anything in his inventory that looks like it will obviously do the job. Most adventure games would have you picking up a pump handle, or using a makeshift lever, or something that makes logical sense. The first Monkey Island would have dressed it up with a little bit of absurdist humour, like the rubber chicken with the pulley in the middle, but the general use of the item would still be pretty clear. Monkey Island 2, however, decides to base this puzzle entirely around a terrible pun with no logical root in the real world, or the game one: you have a monkey called Jojo in your inventory, and using him on the pump allows Guybrush to turn it — because he’s a monkey wrench, get it? Not only is this a puzzle that makes some very specific assumptions on the part of the player — that they speak English (in order to get the pun) and that they know what a monkey wrench is — but it’s not actually a thing predictable by them, because only in a cartoon would you be able to use an actual, living monkey as a wrench. If you don’t have that information and you’re not able to get inside the designers’ head like that, the only way you can solve this puzzle is by using every single item in your inventory on the pump until you find one which works. All in the service of a not-particularly-good joke.

This isn’t a fair example of most of the puzzles in the game, but it’s a fair example of a lot of them: logical outcomes have been replaced either by joke ones or by my old enemy, Adventure Game Logic. Late in the game you need to win a drinking contest with a pirate by switching the real grog he gives you with non-alcoholic grog. The bartender in Woodtick tells you he sold the last of his to Kate Capsize, who is currently trying to sell trips on her glass-bottomed boat on Booty Island, and she won’t give you any. How, then, do you get this grog? Well, the answer is very simple: there’s a Wanted poster for Guybrush up on a wall on Phatt Island, complete with a little ten by ten pixel doodle of Guybrush’s face.  The flyer Kate gives you for her boat trips has a little ten by ten pixel doodle of her face on it. This is all the help Monkey Island 2 gives you to indicate that you’re supposed to use the flyer on the wanted poster, which will cause Guybrush to paste Kate’s face over his own. What this achieves is not immediately obvious, and only becomes apparent once Guybrush leaves the area:

• Kate turns up on Phatt Island, having sailed all the way over there from Booty Island (no other characters in the game move around like this).
• A guard accosts her, mistaking her for Guybrush, and puts her into the Phatt Island jail.
• Guybrush can then go and collect her possessions, which have been decanted into a vanilla envelope and which consist solely of the non-alcoholic grog.

Again, I ask you: how on earth are you supposed to figure out that this will happen? There’s another good one where you win the spitting contest (an actually good puzzle, despite certain dissenting opinions to the contrary) and all you get for your trouble is a cheap prize plaque. You’re supposed to take this to the nearby antiques dealer and convince him it’s incredibly valuable and get the seed money to hire Kate’s boat, but this is another instance where the only way this interaction would become apparent is if you went through your entire inventory and tried to sell everything to the antiques dealer.

Enough of Monkey Island 2 is like this to make playing it significantly more of a slog than going through Monkey Island’s admirably directed puzzles. It’s not helped by its structure, either, which is much more non-linear: the bulk of the game happens in Part 2, where you can travel between three islands at any time with the puzzle chains spread across multiple islands at once, despite the player’s brain — and the game, via loading screens — creating mental disconnects between each set of locations. This makes it much harder to keep everything in your head at once; if you got stuck in Monkey Island you could just go to the map of Melee Island and look at the location names to jog your memory, but in Monkey Island 2 you don’t have that easy reference for remembering what’s at a given location without going there. Perhaps I’m still coming at it from too modern a perspective; perhaps it’s unfair to tackle these games without keeping a copious amount of notes just like I would have back in the 90s. Still, it’s fairly damning that I actually needed a walkthrough to complete Monkey Island 2 despite having played it more often, and more recently, than the original game.

And then there’s the game’s infamous ending sequence, where (and I suppose I should drop in a big SPOILER WARNING here, although the game is twenty-nine years old now so you have no excuse for not having played it already) Guybrush finds the treasure of Big Whoop and immediately falls through the floor into a set of underground tunnels that are revealed to be the staff corridors in a pirate-themed amusement park. Guybrush turns out to be a small child playing at being a pirate, while his nemesis LeChuck is actually his older brother, Chuckie. This is partly an excuse for them to make a load of Star Wars pop culture references — “I am your brother!”, “…remove my mask…” etc. — that have aged like milk thanks to an additional 29 years where the internet has run those references straight into the ground. (Monkey Island 2 does this a lot, with multiple Indiana Jones references scattered throughout the game.) Mostly, though, it’s just Ron Gilbert hitting you over the head with the joke that he’d previously just assumed you understood and which worked because it was taken as a fait accompli that didn’t need explaining: that the world of Monkey Island was inspired by pirate theme parks and was deliberately set up to resemble one, so wouldn’t it be hilarious if it actually turned out to be one? As usual foregrounding the joke makes it far less funny, and I’m staggered that this was where the story ended until Curse came out in 1997 and partially retconned it.

None of this is to say that Monkey Island 2 is a bad adventure game. It’s still obviously made by the same team behind Monkey Island 1, and their talent shows through despite all of these poor decisions. It is a self-indulgent one though, a game which is much more desperate to show you how clever it is and how funny it is, and which will hit you over the head with its jokes in search of a belly laugh where its predecessor would have settled for a wry chuckle. I think my previous good opinion of it was partly because I first played it when I was 12 and all of these things would have been very, very funny to me; replaying it as an adult, it just seems a bit tired, and not at all worth compromising on the story and the puzzles for. Unlike the first game, which turned out to be a moderate commercial success, Monkey Island 2 was a commercial failure and the franchise was shelved until a surprisingly strong long tail of sales and an increasingly large cult following caused LucasArts to bring it back for the last hurrah of the 2D adventure game in 1997. That was probably something of a blessing in disguise, since Monkey Island 2 is just good enough that the series escaped with its dignity intact and they had some time to figure out what they wanted to do for the third one. Had LucasArts continued along the trajectory set by Monkey Island 2, though, I think that the Monkey Island series as a whole would be nowhere near as well-regarded as it is today.

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