Day of the Tentacle: Remastered
GreenWarlock
Member Posts: 1,354
in Off-Topic
Just discovered this last week, and thought I should share here for anyone else with a love of the classics (sounds like the right forum!):
http://dott.doublefine.com
For those of you who have never played it, Day of the Tentacle is arguably the pinnacle of the classic adventure game. I could argue that this is the game that killed the genre, as nothing could ever quite live up to this game afterwards...
LucasArts solved the main problem with adventure games, which is that prior to their fun point-and-click games, a classic adventure game would kill you for the slightest mistake, and there were MANY ways to make a mistake as whole point of these games is to solve puzzles. This leads to an endless sequence of reloads, thoroughly breaking immersion.
The LucasArts folks replaced death and save-scumming with humor. Yes, you could try many bad solutions to the various obstacles in the game, but rather than force a reload with some grim death scene, you would get a humorous line about why your character did not want to do that instead, and just carried on playing the game.
Day of the Tentacle really nails the humor, with a distinct 2D cartoon game art and game-logic that should appeal to fans of the classic warner brother toons onwards. If you don't enjoy the humor of classic toons, this game is probably not for you.
My abiding memory of this game is that my cousin and I picked up this game on a Saturday, got home, and started playing immediately. Now one of the joys of a puzzle game like an adventure is getting stuck, frustrated, and finally reaching that ahah! moment that unlocks more of the game. That never really happened for us - it is not that neither of us ever got stuck, but we had complementary skill-sets/humor, so were each unlocking the problems that the other could not. We charged through the game, and finally had it beaten around 2AM - beating an adventure game the day that you buy it is not usually a good sign. What did we do the next day? Fired it up and beat it again, even though we now knew the answer to every puzzle, just because the game and humor was that much fun. It was like watching a favorite movie again, and I don't remember having /that/ reaction to any other game, ever.
The nice thing about the remaster is that they have done a nice job updating the graphics. I wish this was not such a big deal, but in practice, for a lot of games from the 90s, it really is. A video game designed to look good at 640x480 256 color resolution, on 14inch CRT monitor, really does not scale up well to even entry level kit these days. The remaster graphics look more like the rosy memories in my head than the originals do, but this game offers both for the purist, so you can see if you agree with me or not
Last fun snippet of my possibly-false memory, but I believe this is the first game I played that had voice acting from beginning to end. It is certainly not the first game to include voice acting, far from it, but I don't remember a previous game that voiced every line - something we take for granted now.
I think this is another piece of gaming history that ranks up there with Baldur's Gate, not as a game that invented/launched a genre, but the game that perfected it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go save the world one last time...
http://dott.doublefine.com
For those of you who have never played it, Day of the Tentacle is arguably the pinnacle of the classic adventure game. I could argue that this is the game that killed the genre, as nothing could ever quite live up to this game afterwards...
LucasArts solved the main problem with adventure games, which is that prior to their fun point-and-click games, a classic adventure game would kill you for the slightest mistake, and there were MANY ways to make a mistake as whole point of these games is to solve puzzles. This leads to an endless sequence of reloads, thoroughly breaking immersion.
The LucasArts folks replaced death and save-scumming with humor. Yes, you could try many bad solutions to the various obstacles in the game, but rather than force a reload with some grim death scene, you would get a humorous line about why your character did not want to do that instead, and just carried on playing the game.
Day of the Tentacle really nails the humor, with a distinct 2D cartoon game art and game-logic that should appeal to fans of the classic warner brother toons onwards. If you don't enjoy the humor of classic toons, this game is probably not for you.
My abiding memory of this game is that my cousin and I picked up this game on a Saturday, got home, and started playing immediately. Now one of the joys of a puzzle game like an adventure is getting stuck, frustrated, and finally reaching that ahah! moment that unlocks more of the game. That never really happened for us - it is not that neither of us ever got stuck, but we had complementary skill-sets/humor, so were each unlocking the problems that the other could not. We charged through the game, and finally had it beaten around 2AM - beating an adventure game the day that you buy it is not usually a good sign. What did we do the next day? Fired it up and beat it again, even though we now knew the answer to every puzzle, just because the game and humor was that much fun. It was like watching a favorite movie again, and I don't remember having /that/ reaction to any other game, ever.
The nice thing about the remaster is that they have done a nice job updating the graphics. I wish this was not such a big deal, but in practice, for a lot of games from the 90s, it really is. A video game designed to look good at 640x480 256 color resolution, on 14inch CRT monitor, really does not scale up well to even entry level kit these days. The remaster graphics look more like the rosy memories in my head than the originals do, but this game offers both for the purist, so you can see if you agree with me or not
Last fun snippet of my possibly-false memory, but I believe this is the first game I played that had voice acting from beginning to end. It is certainly not the first game to include voice acting, far from it, but I don't remember a previous game that voiced every line - something we take for granted now.
I think this is another piece of gaming history that ranks up there with Baldur's Gate, not as a game that invented/launched a genre, but the game that perfected it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go save the world one last time...
3
Comments
Well I believe doublefine will do good job just like they done with grim fandango.
Hope I can choose between original and remastered graphic.
At the heart of any of the SCUMM games is great writing and artistry - telling visual gags (and puzzles) is as important as writing great dialog, and the actual game coding is essentially a secondary concern. Unfortunately, we have a medium dominated by the latest techno-glitz, and quality of writing seems to take the back seat when it comes to budget/planning. This should be the medium where future Chuck Jones, Fritz Frelengs, and Tex Avery-s are showing their skills. If it is happening, I don't know where?