Made my year...
... 'nuff said
There’s no doubt that the gaming remaster is a strange beast. On the one hand we have the likes of a GTA V, which got the treatment in the space of a year. And, on the other hand, we've got Grim Fandango – a game that last saw release in the year Titanic blitzed the Oscars – which has just been released on PS4, PS Vita and …
"No doubt it’s also why the genre died a death too, only to be replaced by the more user-friendly "Telltale Games" style episodic gaming in more recent years."
Yup, I always like to believe that initially computers and the early games were played by people that were capable of thinking rationally ( even though some of the puzzles were a little unrational to say the least).
Unfortunately the masses have to be catered for and the IQ levels appear to be far lower. Now it's either a "visual experience", ie lots of nice graphics but no gameplay or it is fire, fire, fire at anything that moves.
I do follow the 0adventuregamers site from time to time hoping that a new Gabriel Knight, everyones favourite Schattenjäger, will appear. The last game I bought was "The vanishing of Ethan Carter" but it's slowness bored me to death, the 'trudgery' of walking around was painfull....
...that was claymation style. A tall thin alien type character who had a man eating plant in his living room. I remember myself and a mate playing the first level demo version on my new 150Mhz Windows 95 PC all those years ago. It was good fun but we never got round to getting the full version.
Can't remember its name. Grrrr
Yep, that's the monkey! I bought it and, try as I might, I never managed to get into it. It wasn't the style, I liked that because it was something different, but I seem to recall it being completely illogical, and very linear and, like most adventure gamers, I find linear games frustrating in the extreme, because you really need to be psychic/clairvoyant to get anywhere. I can't think of any examples offhand, so I'll have to invent one, but say you get to a bridge, guarded by a troll who won't let you pass unless you give him the amulet in from the witch's cottage right back at the beginning, and now there's no way back because you had to destroy all the bridges to prevent being hunted down by the bridge troll's mates, and all you can do is start over and, when you DO start over, it takes 3hrs of searching to find the fucking thing! I hate pixel-hunting, too!
I don't mind dying in a game, provided there's good reason, and it doesn't happen every time you stick your head around the door of a building you've not searched before. That gets pretty old, pretty fecking fast. There was a point towards the end of one of the Gabriel Knights (3 I think - it was the werewolf one, as I recall), where you had to perform a series of actions in exactly the right order, and with split-second precision timing, to ,kill the bad guy (who may - or may not - have been a werewolf by that point, look it was about the same time as GF, as I recall) and I remember one of the things was jumping from the middle of a revolving platform, onto a very thin ledge and, if you didn't get the timing exactly right, you fell into the abyss and that was that. I don't recall ever finishing that game, coz it was too frustrating.
I enjoyed the puzzles, but i once got to this library bit and started walking, after an hour i was still walking (well, i had something pressing the key down iirc), then it seemed like too much effort to go back! i do remember i tried another time and it crashed and corrupted my save :'(
I might give it another go, but i was enjoying it quite a bit apart from that weird library place with it's endless text
Spot on!
All comes back to me now. Ahhh yes, buying PC Format each month to get the patch updates and bits of software you needed because downloading a 20Mb DirectX update by 33.6 modem would have just been too much hassle.
Good times!
20MB over a 33.6K modem... those were the days.
Time to get the modem back out as this download is only 3.89GB!! I'll let some other poor soul work out how long that would take to download over your modem.
Nice thing is they are releasing it via bittorrent making downloading a breeze
I've recently been playing the original version and it looks good on my 24" widescreen monitor. I didn't think it needed any 'remastering' but it's nice to know that it's once again available to purchase.
I'm one of those impatient people who wants to get on with the story so I've used a walk-through more often than a genuine puzzle fan would do. I'm full of admiration for people who can play the game without cheating.
That said I still found the game frustrating. There's one part in the undersea section where one has to click a very small and far away item at exactly the right moment. Miss it and there's a (what seems like forever) wait until the object is in the right place again. That kind of 'picky' action tends to put me off a game.
I go back to it occasionally because it looks good, sounds good, and it's funny.
Now I want to give Starship Titanic another chance.
In traditional modern controls, pushing down on the controller makes the character walk toward the screen and up sends them into the background, left is left and right is right obviously. With tank controls, up and down are forward and reverse respectively and L and R rotate your character.
It's a pain in the arse because walking a complex path goes from left-right-down-left-right to UP-ROTATE-UP-ROTATE-UP-ROTATE-UP-ROTATE-UP
Like the original Resident Evil, where you press forwards to walk the direction your character is facing, push left to turn left etc. Most games these days instead map directions to cardinals (i.e. push the direction you want to go) rather than make them dependent on character facing.
Better than better than that if you live outside the UK. $15 in the US, and $16 in Canucksland. Was going to get it on PC, but if it has cross-play and I can play it in the living room with my roommate and ladyfriend to help out with the puzzles, I'm game. This time, just this once, I might betray the PC Master Race.
Why no PS3 version, though?
"No doubt it’s also why the genre died a death too, only to be replaced by the more user-friendly "Telltale Games" style episodic gaming in more recent years."
Funny that, as I for one have no use for either "user-friendly" ("just keep clicking next, feel free to leave your brain in storage, we won't give you any choices that matter anyway") or "episodic" ("we can't be bothered to think up a properly epic Grand Adventure or any meaningful story progression for that matter, have fun with these five mini-monsters-du-jour - we'll throw in a level boss at the end for free, now bugger off") games. Oh, and the "remastered" GF...? Just give me the original one on GOG please - this one I'll pass. To be honest, I'm much more excited about Ron Gilbert's upcoming strictly-8-bit-look Thimbleweed Park than any modern Lucasian 'prettifying' attempts...
Just be sure not to rely on one [walkthrough] utterly, as otherwise you’ll beat the game without any of those "Eureka!" moments of satisfaction.
Funny, I don't think people had "Eureka" moments in the E.T. game (yeah, that one) when they managed to get out of the pits.
And "Eureka" moments in adventure games in the olden days usually went like: "combine this broken metal rod with that plastic bottle in order to create a thingamajig that will combine with that torn piece of clothing which you then give to the king who will give you a cart full of dirt to take to the wizard".
Not in the least logical and if you didn't buy the official guide (usually about the price of the boxed game release!), you needed to hope for your games magazine would print tips for the game you're stuck with and that they would include that specific location and not the ones you guessed.
Eureka? Fat chance. More like sheer frustration.
> And "Eureka" moments in adventure games in the olden days usually went like: "combine this broken metal rod with that plastic bottle in order to create a thingamajig that will combine with that torn piece of clothing which you then give to the king who will give you a cart full of dirt to take to the wizard".
Ah, you've played one of the Discworld Games then?
I'm sorely tempted by Grim Fandango, I played through it so much I think the solutions are all still tucked away in long term memory on quite well worn in mental pathways, wouldn't take me long to play through. Oh, go on then, says the pleasure centre to the wallet hand.
Me too for Starship Titanic. Very weird, very great, slightly disturbing and weird.
Lure of the Temptress, hmm.
I miss these sorts of adventure games. I loved Grim Fandango so will have to try this out.
Equally love the older ScummVM games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road. If only they get remastered at some point too.