Is this the one that contains that easter egg where you can play a full other game within the game?
That's it. You can get to a terminal and play Maniac Mansion pretty early on in Day of the Tentacle.
...As the article explicitly mentioned?
Day of the Tentacle
61–70 of 90 posts
Re: Day of the Tentacle
#62Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, floppy disks and dreaming of one day getting a huge 17" CRT monitor on a Pentium, that was my early teenage years.
I built a retro system a few years ago for old games. It's more for late 90s/2000 (Windows 98) era games, but it can do DOS, too.
Re: Day of the Tentacle
#63> One of the few negative things I can say about Day of the Tentacle is that it’s more fun than it is truly innovative; it doesn’t break any new formal or thematic ground The time travel aspect and that you control three characters in the past, present, and future, where things you do in the past affect the future was truly innovative to me. I realize now that it's not as magical design or programming wise as it appe…
I think the site author comes from an interactive fiction background, so I suppose there were text adventures that did switchable playable characters and time travel before DotT [1], but I don't know of a graphic adventure that beat DotT to it. I found the interaction between the 3 timezones pretty innovative as a kid too and think he does the game a disservice here.
It also opens the game up in terms of how many puzzles you can be thinking about at once; if you're stuck in a traditional 1-protagonist game you might only have one or two things you think you need to do next, at least in a pretty linear game, but now you always have at least 3 things to work out at once...
[1] I'm not a big IF buff, but I guess Infocom's "Suspended" (1983) is a classic game where you can control different "characters" at once, and I really loved "T-Zero" (1991), where you also open up 3 different timezones you can travel between at will, and changes in the past affect the present/future in a slightly DOTT-esque manner - although it's a very different game.
Suspended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_(video_game)
T-Zero: https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=u8qqrwutdugkexpr or reviewed on filfre.net here: https://www.filfre.net/2017/12/the-text-adventures-of-1991/
Re: Day of the Tentacle
#64One of the things that's interesting to me is the resources available at the time - in terms of help.
With a game like this now (Say, the excellent Thimbleweed Park - you played it, right?), if you get truly, epically stuck, there's a walk-through no more than a few clicks away. And you'll probably admit defeat and go there after a few hours.
When I picked DoTT up (a few seconds after release ;) ), no such thing. You were in it alone. Maybe there was a magazine write in for hints, and if you were lucky you knew a guy on a BBS, but other than that, you were on your own. That made the puzzles so much sweeter when you got them.
Re: Day of the Tentacle
#65Man, this takes me back. For me, the two pinnacles of my childhood PC gaming were easily Monkey Island 2 and Day of the Tentacle. I was so thrilled when Ron Gilbert announced his Kickstarter for Thimbleweed Park. Hopefully Disney one day sells him back the rights to Monkey Island, I'd love a true sequel by its creator.
Re: Day of the Tentacle
#66To people considering buying it, given so much praise here and in the article, I would like to just ask you to take note of the following quote: > "Of course, there’s no accounting for taste. If you loathe cartoons, perhaps you might not like this game. If you prefer more serious plots or more rigorously cerebral puzzles, perhaps you won’t love it. [...] It remains at the end of the day a slapstick cartoon comedy" Pe…
I think it's probably to do with the fact that many of us here played it when it was first out and were either kids or much younger than we were now. My memory of that game is amazing, but I highly doubt I'd pick it up off the shelf today as my tastes have changed.
It still holds up even now; I've got the iOS version on my current iPhone X.
Re: Day of the Tentacle
#67To people considering buying it, given so much praise here and in the article, I would like to just ask you to take note of the following quote: > "Of course, there’s no accounting for taste. If you loathe cartoons, perhaps you might not like this game. If you prefer more serious plots or more rigorously cerebral puzzles, perhaps you won’t love it. [...] It remains at the end of the day a slapstick cartoon comedy" Pe…
"But DoTT fits the same place in my mind with Psychonauts: I plainly don't get why so many people are so stoked about them."
I really, really like almost anything that involves manifesting the inside of the mind, as long as it's halfway decently done. (That is, it doesn't have to be excellent, just not terrible.)
But even as one who rather liked the game, I will say Psychonauts has a particularly horrible pacing problem where it takes too long to get to the first level, and the first level is (IMHO) the worst one in the game that most fails to take advantage of the premise, and then it takes too long to get to the second level, which is the second worst one in the game in terms of taking advantage of the premise. Also both those levels are themselves too long; I'm pretty sure they're padded out to try to make all the major levels similar in length, but "learn how to use the jumping controls" simply doesn't warrant the same amount of time as "resolve a paranoid schizophrenic's conspiracy issues". Things don't really start feeling unique until the third level, but it's a lot to swallow to get that far. I've tried to replay it a couple of times and bounced off of this; if I ever try again I'm going to try to go online and steal someone's save file just before the third level.
As much as I liked it, I've had a really hard time recommending it to anyone for this reason.
Re: Day of the Tentacle
#68Man, this takes me back. For me, the two pinnacles of my childhood PC gaming were easily Monkey Island 2 and Day of the Tentacle . I was so thrilled when Ron Gilbert announced his Kickstarter for Thimbleweed Park . Hopefully Disney one day sells him back the rights to Monkey Island, I'd love a true sequel by its creator.
I'd love that too - although I have to say I didn't really like the endings to MI2 or Thimbleweed Park, so I might love it even more if RG writes everything except the ending...
Re: Day of the Tentacle
#69> One of the few negative things I can say about Day of the Tentacle is that it’s more fun than it is truly innovative; it doesn’t break any new formal or thematic ground The time travel aspect and that you control three characters in the past, present, and future, where things you do in the past affect the future was truly innovative to me. I realize now that it's not as magical design or programming wise as it appe…
I think the site author comes from an interactive fiction background, so I suppose there were text adventures that did switchable playable characters and time travel before DotT [1], but I don't know of a graphic adventure that beat DotT to it. I found the interaction between the 3 timezones pretty innovative as a kid too and think he does the game a disservice here. It also opens the game up in terms of how many puz…
Chrono Trigger was a really good old SNES RPG that had gameplay centered around time travel, where actions in one timeline affected outcomes in another. Not an adventure game, but it's something that your comment reminded me of.
Re: Day of the Tentacle
#70> One of the few negative things I can say about Day of the Tentacle is that it’s more fun than it is truly innovative; it doesn’t break any new formal or thematic ground The time travel aspect and that you control three characters in the past, present, and future, where things you do in the past affect the future was truly innovative to me. I realize now that it's not as magical design or programming wise as it appe…
Not to mention that intro sequence was breathtaking for the time, especially for a graphic adventure. Lucasarts was hitting on all cylinders back then and DOTT was right there in the middle of it. The game is a work of art. Games as art is something DOTT definitely moved forward.