Reviews

Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle

Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle was a third-person point-n’-click adventure game released by Lucas Arts in 1993. Unlike its predecessor Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle was led by project managers Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, instead of Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick. The latter duo that worked on Day of the Tentacle added a cartoonish twist to the game, like a zany spin on the themes that the game Maniac Mansion introduced to us in 1987.

This is a challenging game to say the least, more challenging than the previous adventure game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which was released in 1992 by Lucas Arts. Don’t get me wrong, it took my sister and I two years to beat Fate of Atlantis without the Internet or hint lines during our childhood. What sets Day of the Tentacle apart from Fate of Atlantis, as I have stated earlier in this review, is its cartoonish logic. The artists involved in the sprite design of Bernard Bernoulli, the leading character in this game, and his friends Hoagie and Laverne, reflect the aspect of comic strip characters. The plot designers also really focused on the most tangential and off-the-wall script to coalesce into this whole undertaking of a frustrated gamer playing through with a lot of stops and starts.

There are many ways to play this game: emulator, original hardware, and Steam, where you will find the remastered version from Double Fine, a company led by Tim Schafer, who bought the rights for Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, and Full Throttle from Disney. As you may imagine, this is a difficult feat, as Disney bought Lucasfilm from George Lucas in 2013 when Lucas Arts went defunct. So, if you find this review helpful, give Day of the Tentacle a shot on whichever platform you please. Thank you for reading.    

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the successor to the 1989 Indiana Jones game based on the Last Crusade, and the predecessor to the 1999 3-D Tomb Raider-style game Infernal Machine, was a third-person point-n’-click adventure released by Lucas Arts in 1992 on floppy diskettes. A year later, it was released on CD-ROM as a full talkie with speech and sound effects, if you had a Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro or compatible card to enable them. Unfortunately if you had one of the early Sound Blaster 16 cards, you would encounter an annoying DMA click bug due to the cycle initialization from the DSP chip. That aside, the CD-ROM release featured Doug Lee as the voice of Indiana Jones, and Jane Jacobs as Sophia Hapgood, Indy’s red-headed archaeologist-turned-psychic companion.

Fate of Atlantis takes you on a journey from New York City to the far reaches of Scandinavia in Iceland, to the tropical jungles of Tikal, to the bustling streets of Monte Carlo, and a worthy segment on the islands of Crete and Thera off the coast of Greece, to finally the heart of Atlantis, where you must stop the Nazis from discovering its secrets. It is regarded as one of the greatest adventure games ever made (the greatest in my opinion, surpassing Day of the Tentacle), whose project leader was Hollywood screenwriter Hal Barwood.

Barwood collaborated with Noah Falstein, the latter of which came up with the multipath system for the game, which allowed for a healthy dose of replayability. In my experience with the game growing up in the late nineties, I initially never heard spoken dialogue or sound effects (only music). The motherboard on that computer had a Crystal audio chip which would play sound effects and voice from Kid Pix Studio and Mega Math Blaster, but I must’ve not been astute enough to configure the right port and IRQ settings in the game’s utility menu on that machine, which was running Windows 95.

I won’t spoil the game for anyone reading this, so if you want to enjoy the experience of this game as it was intended, you can either build your own 386/486 DOS rig with a nice sound card and hook up a CRT monitor, or look on eBay for pre-built gaming rigs that meet the requirements of the game. Thank you for reading.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

Sierra On-Line in 1993 was at the top of their game, with King’s Quest VI being released the previous year. This was also the dawn of the era of multimedia PCs with the Creative branded CD-ROM drives that had the stamp of the multimedia signature (MPC). The Sound Blaster and Sound Blaster Pro, along with its clones, were paired with these optical disk devices to recreate the dialogue and effects that were previously unavailable or too expensive to make do. In the case of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, you had the ability to just enjoy the music and some effects on the floppy version, but the CD format – if you had the budget to travel that far – contained the voices of some prominent actors of the time: Tim Curry as Gabriel Knight himself, Leah Remini as Grace Nakimura, and Mark Hamill as Detective Mosely.

In this game, the main character you play is an insomniac author (Gabriel Knight), who is investigating the recent string of voodoo murders in New Orleans for his next book. Gabriel’s research assistant, Grace Nakimura, keeps shop at the antiquated bookstore he owns. The reason for Gabriel’s insomnia is that he can’t shake off experiencing nightmares due to the subject matter of the book he is working on.

Gabriel was crafted by the video game designer Jane Jensen to be the ultimate lady’s man. Tim Curry, with his spot-on voice impression of a Southern character, was the perfect choice for this role. According to the making of Gabriel Knight, a behind-the-scenes documentary that came on the CD-ROM, he stated that the designers wanted a voice to match Gabriel’s masculine persona, and as he smiled with the famous Tim Curry grin, he said admittedly, “and so they chose me [chuckling]”.

As I’ve played this game, I’ve enjoyed its organization and interface. I have yet to get past the beginning, but I encourage anyone out there to give a shot at the original or the 20th anniversary edition to experience Jane Jensen’s well-written conception, an adventure that has stood its ground with its place as a true cemented classic. Thank you for reading.