71–80 of 90 posts
I had unforgettable fun with this game. I think only 2 games provided me with so much laugh, this one and The Curse of Monkey Island
One 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…
Completely agree. Unlike today, there was really no alternative to really thinking "deep" and trying to figure something out on your own. If push really came to shove, you went to the local bookstore and hopefully they had a magazine or guide available. I miss those times. :)
Sam & 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.
The Dig was one of my favorites. Conceived by Spielberg with a script by Orson Scott Card of all people.
If they can make a movie about The Magic 8-Ball...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
One 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…
> When I picked DoTT up (a few seconds after release ;) ), no such thing. You were in it alone. Maybe there was a magazine write in for hints, and if you were lucky you knew a guy on a BBS, but other than that, you were on your own. That made the puzzles so much sweeter when you got them. Completely agree. Unlike today, there was really no alternative to really thinking "deep" and trying to figure something out on yo…
(It helped that I only got a new commercial game every few months and maybe a couple of mostly short shareware games, so plenty of time to explore each one. Now I have a massive backlog of unplayed Steam games and still keep buying more.)
But not having hints and walkthroughs to fall back on definitely enhanced how much attention I paid to the game. I replayed various Lucasarts games from my teenage years recently and remembered a little bit from each section of each game, until I got halfway through Grim Fandango.
I knew I'd finished it before but the last two or three areas seemed completely unfamiliar, I think because I first bought it in the UHS Hints era, looked a hint up halfway through, and started leaning way too heavily on hints for the rest of the game.
While Loom will always have a special place in my heart, DotT is possibly the best all-around adventure game from my childhood; particularly considering that the LA games have aged far better than most of the others.
So, friggin what. I dearly wish more game designers (and not a few critics) would remember that a lot of these games are meant to be fun. I don't want some message or insight or innovation all the time. I often want to sit down and spend some time having fun and unwinding. Its not a negative, its like the comfort of an old book that I've decided to reread.
Plus, fun and funny are damn tough to get right. Its so much easier to do drama than comedy because a so-so drama is still ok, but a so-so comedy is just bad.
One 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…
> 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…
Zork Grand Inquisitor (1997) definitely did time travel as different playable characters in a graphical adventure, but that was four years after Day of the Tentacle (1993).
One 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…