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But man, what a great story and what a beautiful style. I always half expected to see Hollywood pick this up and turn it into a movie. Just imagine what the folks at Pixar could do with this (with Tim Schafer as executive producer, of course).
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That's a really interesting perspective. I grew up around when adventure games were popular, and I learned a lot about the grown-up world (and in fact, American world) through adventure games. Sam and Max had so much Americana that, playing as a non-American, got me into the deep cuts of American culture. I think a lot of it was contextual. I didn't get all the references at first (e.g. who's John Muir for instance),…
I got completely stuck in the Beavis and Butthead adventure game when one of the voice acted characters told me to get a "vee-hickul". As a teenager sitting at my family PC in London, I had no idea what the hell the Texan (?) was saying. Only several years later would I figure it out. The only other thing I remember from that game is the hock-a-loogie minigame, which I mastered. I wonder if my parents had any idea wh…
On day when he was really mad about $(thing I predicted) he just comes out and says ‘vehicle’ like it’s spelled.
I don’t remember feeling smug or annoyed, mostly just kind of bummed at the farce.
Jimmy is right about Grim Fandango's gameplay failings, and it's unfortunate, because the game has enough narrative content that they could have just trimmed away a lot of the adventure game puzzles. But visual novels weren't really a thing in the west yet, and in that era there was a lot of emphasis on playtime as a metric that reviews would focus on. Ironically, one of the most forward-looking approaches to extendi…
An excellent game for its time. The remaster is well worth it. One unfortunate aspect of classic games is how dated mechanics can get. It’s a problem that music or movies don’t really have, besides maybe feeling a bit cliché. In the case of Grim Fandango, the tank controls are a bit awkward, some puzzles are actually quite difficult and require logic that would only make sense to a point and click adventure gamer fro…
Those point-and-click puzzles never felt like anything but time fillers to me. It's interesting to think about the "could have beens" of Western visual novels instead, or at least Telltale-style story games.
I think they have a lot to offer story wise. And very little in terms of being blocked by mechanics.
An excellent game for its time. The remaster is well worth it. One unfortunate aspect of classic games is how dated mechanics can get. It’s a problem that music or movies don’t really have, besides maybe feeling a bit cliché. In the case of Grim Fandango, the tank controls are a bit awkward, some puzzles are actually quite difficult and require logic that would only make sense to a point and click adventure gamer fro…
Those point-and-click puzzles never felt like anything but time fillers to me. It's interesting to think about the "could have beens" of Western visual novels instead, or at least Telltale-style story games.
I was just thinking about it myself when considering the new remake of Silent Hill 2. It's mostly beloved for its story and it spends a lot of time on that, and there's of course a lot of survival-horror combat in between. But beyond that there's another horror game (and just game) staple: lots of puzzles.
The SH2 remake aimed to be very faithful so was always going to have a bunch of puzzles (Silent Hill games typically have had a separate difficulty setting just for the "riddles"). But it's one of those things that you still almost have to have, particularly as a horror for some reason.
Silent Hill 2 is actually a case where even the "obligatory" elements operate pretty well in service of its themes, but plenty of the time games have these things just to have them.
It's interesting how movies today seem to be the "top" art form: there are books, comics, videogames that want to be movies, but never in the other direction. (There are books and games based on movies, but they are clearly secondary.) I wonder if there could be some other art form that would be "above" movies in this sense.
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This is a great assessment that I never realized until you said it. There are so many games from that era that I played that fit that mold. I was playing Leisure Suit Larry as a 10 year old! I can’t imagine parents these days letting their kids play that at all!
My parents couldn't understand enough English to really get why I shouldn't be playing Larry (almost all the screens are just fine) and I was too young to understand the actual theme. Perfect combination... Kind of like Police Quest 1 too. Although it did teach me to type "use handcuffs" fast enough. Also the spelling of "briefcase" and other longer words.