LucasArts Day of the Tentacle Dr. Fred: I think I've made myself totally clear. Step one, find plans. Step two, save world. Step three, get out of my house! Let's get cracking! Day of the Tentacle Day of the Tentacle: suck it and see Day of the Tentacle generates a lot of good will and happy memories. The reason this was my first choice for a retro …
They have made some of the best games I've ever player!
- The Secret of Monkey Island (1&2)
- Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
- Day of the Tentacle
- Sam & Max Hit the Road
- Full Throttle
- Grim Fandango
- Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe
- X-Wing
- Tie Fighter
- Dark Force
- Jedi Knight
Even if they are a shadow of their former glory, I'll drink to their legacy
I was gonna say 'they made one', then I looked it up and found X-Wing Alliance was released in 1999. Yikes. Did not realize it was that old.
Yeah, a new game in that series would be awesome. They had a few more recent Star Wars space-fighting games, but none with the sim-style controls and gameplay of the X-Wing series, sadly. Loved those games.
I'm sure everyone still remembers the first mission of the fifth campaign in TIE Fighter. Man, did I not see that coming. Classic design =)
Still have it installed on my old Pentium, but alas, my Gravis Analog Pro joystick is getting worn out, and I'm having problems finding a good replacement.
Incidentally, Rebel Assault and DoT was sold bundled with OS/2 Warp Connect for a while.
But here in Norway most of the shops had no clue what 'the other box with the IBM logo' was...
Keep an old Pentium 400 running DOS 6.22 & Windows 3.11 with the os2 workplace shell on an old Biostar mobo (+ full sized Cirrus VLBus VGA) for Tie Fighter to this day - along with an original SB AWE32 with the old type simm sockets and Pana interface. Was just about enough firepower for you to join the dark side... The same machine normally runs Cakewalk and a dumb Fatar midi piano for SWMBO and has done since the mid '90s.
Amazingly enough Windows 3.11 is still available for Technet subscribers!
The old Quickshot joystick + 8 bit ISA card still plugs on.
Loved the TIE Fighter mods (shields, torpedoes) missions and the freighter called Etmon Orlac that needed inspecting :)
For me, it was Campaign 4, Mission 1 of X-Wing, where you had to defend the galaxy's slowest moving freighter from a Star Destroyer and a never ending wave of TIE Fighters and TIE Bombers, with only one other X-Wing for assistance.
That was a true gaming challenge and it felt pretty epic when I finally managed to beat it.
My assumption was that LucasArts released the games they weren't intending to remake on Steam.
After that, they released the remakes of Secret of Monkey Island, then Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge.
Sadly, LucasArts got a new CEO during the MI2 remake, so chances are we won't see any further remakes.
Indeed, Day of The Tentacle is one of my most favorite games of all time. I remember playing it back in ye olde BBS days of yore and being absolutely impressed by the graphics, voices, and of course, the incredibly amusing storyline and puzzles.
I replayed it just last year using DOSBOX, and I must say it has not lost of any of its charms. Wonderful game, a true classic.
-dZ.
Pity it hasn't occurred to them that they could release a HD version of DOTT on iOS and XBox Live and make a bundle, a la Monkey Island.
DOTT was by far the funniest SCUMM game (I hesitate to say the best, as it was quite short, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis holds a special place in my heart).
When I was little, my sister got it for Christmas one year as a way to get her to use the computer more. I remember we played it for ages and had a blast. It seemed big at the time as it came on six floppy disks - huge!
For my birthday I got Sam and Max Hit the Road and it started a love of adventure games that has lasted since.
What's amazing now is that I still remember so many of the puzzles and the dialogue. Agree with the people above, I want it on Steam along with all the other Lucasarts adventure games.
Ah... the good old days when Lucasarts did something other than Star Wars and even the Star Wars games it did were decent. Better stop there otherwise I'll start reminiscing about Civ 2, Theme Park and C&C as well. "When I was your age the PC had its own games and wasn't full of stuff designed for games consoles!".
Leisure Suit Larry 1+2, King's Quest, Full Throttle, Dark Forces 1+2, C&C, Syndicate Wars (the first one)...
I never got to play DoTT or Maniac Mansion, always wanted to though.
I've had a Nintendo, and N64, original X-Box, PSP-3000, but nothing has been as much fun as those old PC games.
I used to love all of the options before games like this.
"What video type? VGA, XGA, CGA, etc."
"What soundcard? SB Pro, SB16, SB 2.1, Audigy, etc."
Never quite being sure which options are best, so always trying a different one only to have the game bail when the first character tries to speak.
Ah, the "good" old days.
SB16 IRQ 7, voices, SFX, loading DOS into the high memory area, hacky config.sys menu's, trying to get as much of your 640k back so you can play a game....oh man that was when you *had* to know your stuff, and that was when I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up....
Beer so I can cry into it over joyous memories...
SB16... you really had to know your stuff if you only had a soundblaster 'compaitble' card instead of the real thing.
It seems amazing now, in the days of high powered graphics cards, that in the good old days it was usually sound that was the major issue. I still remember how much better settlers 2 sounded when i got a SB AWE 64... nowadays, throwing away the soundcard and using integrated was one of the better choinces I made.
Make sure not to try that in DOSBOX!! In order to exit it the Maniac Mansion in-game game, you must press CTRL+C, which the DOSBOX simulation passes directly to its virtual kernel, causing you to exit the DOTT game and all back to the DOS prompt.
This is a known issue with some games in DOSBOX. Make sure to save your DOTT game before playing the Maniac Mansion one.
-dZ.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis first adventure game I finished from start to end :D
X-Wing, Tie-Fighter and X-Wing Alliance need a god damn remake, their combat still has not been topped.
Nothing like running a raid in X-Wing only to have a god damn star destroyer turn up out of no where and the music to kick in.. Man those kids today have no idea what they missed :D
Most of the Star Destroyers in X-Wing could be destroyed, if you had the patience to knock down their shield generators and the will to obliterate every enemy; IIRC, the best one was the aptly named "Badi Dea", which launched dozens of attackers as soon as you hit it. If you destroyed all six in each squadron, a new squad would launch - And if you just killed 5 of the 6, the last would occasionally crash itself so a new squad could launch.
Yep, I had a lot of time & very little money back then
Now being relived thanks to scumm on android and <ahem> copying the CD onto the phone... it's tricky picking some things up.... still, nice to hear the voices again.
Sam N Max also runs quite happily too.. unfortunately these are the only scumm games I actually legally own (OK, maybe copying them onto the phone isn't 100% legit....)
I do remember having and playing this game, but I don't remember any details because the game just was not one to remember.
Played it through, and immediately forgot about it which is a strong indicator that it wasn't all that great.
I've played a few games that were on my mind for days after finishing them, but they were few and far between.
I remember seeing a demo of DOTT and thinking "I must get that game". I think overall I've bought that and the Monkey Island series of games at least 3 times in the past (and the Monkey Island remakes again on the XBOX).
It's hard to say which one I like the most out of DOTT and Monkey Island, maybe DOTT trumps MI ever so slightly.
I remember introducing a couple of friends to DOTT back in the day, they occasionally quote lines from DOTT to me, and I make an iPhone owning friend jealous when I showed him DOTT running in ScummVM on my Galaxy S.
I hope that Lucas Arts do a remake of DOTT, although saying that it's pretty much spot on all ready.
Mine is the one with the fake imitation diamond in the pocket.
Rob
... Didnt the voices only come a couple of years later with the advent of CDROM (a 1 speed huge fold out tray as I recall). I remember playing the original release 3.5" floppy of this game, and all "voices" were simply cartoon style Bubble Text. All sound was produced by my state of the art Soundblaster sound card, with a whopping 8 bits of sound, and no wavetable. The whole game sounded like it was being played on a 70's Hammond Organ.
However, it remains my all time favorite adventure game. I still remember having to <spolier alert> paint tippex on the bottom of the fence, in order to turn the cat that rubbed up against it, into an apparent skunk!
Considering how old this game, I still think it holds up amazingly well - the dialogue is snappy, gameplay is still good, puzzles still challenging and amusing.
A lot of the SCUMM games are actually superb in many ways and most hold up suprisingly well in terms of gameplay.
There was a time that Lucas Arts Games were a dead cert quality game. You didn't have to read a review, you just knew that it would be quality, quality acting, dialogue, gameplay, story, animation etc.
I'm hard pressed to think of a single title that Lucas arts have released in over a decade that doesn't suck donkey c*c*. (If you even dare mention KOTR - I'll come round and slap you, a game so boring and devoid of ambiance and "star Wars-ness" that the developers should be shot!)
I can play many of Lucas Arts old games again and again and again (as I can with many of the non LucasArts SCUMM games)
I wouldn't touch any of their modern garbage with your ten foot pole, let alone my own.
yeah, I liked The Dig, though I think the fact that it's almost entirely joke-free, and some of the extremely hard puzzles, kinda knock it down a few pegs. Fun facts - a lot of the writing on The Dig was done by Orson Scott Card, who also (much more fun fact) wrote quite a lot of the insult swordfight dialog for Monkey Island. yes. Really.
When I was your age, our graphics engine was in our heads!
We played Infocom adventures and we liked it! Real sentences to type, none of that fancy-shmancy mouse-clicky-thingy!
Now get off my lawn!
ObSerious: Oh, for the LucasArts of yore. The days when you saw that guy with the golden arc thingy pop up on your screen and you knew you were in for a treat.
I do tend to think that whilst DOTT is very funny, the better adventure game is Fate of Atlantis - probably still my favourite adventure game.
Also, to nitpick, I suspect DOTT was actually released by Lucasfilm Games. If you attach an MT32 sound module to your system it displays 'Lucasfilm Games' on startup.
It's worth seeking out the original games and an MT32 (rev 2, with the 32 computer game samples) - the sound is an awful lot better than SoundBlaster FM music. Sadly the DOSBox emulation, the special version of SCUMM bundled with the Steam game versions and SCUMMVM aren't quite the same.
You should also go to www.scummvm.org to play the old SCUMM games cross platform and pick up some free games, mind.
I disagree that KOTOR isn't Star Warsy - personally I'm finding it to be excellent so far. Jedi Knight is probably the pinnacle of the Lucasarts FPS, although Dark Forces (with iMuse interactive music) and the much easier to get working Jedi Knight Outcast are also a lot of fun.
I recall that I set up a DOS boot menu to make life easier when playing games. It had options for all drivers, no drivers and loads of CD-ROM/soundcard/etc combinations. I just couldn't face manually messing about with autoexec.bat/config.sys every time I wanted to play a different game.
Ah, Tie Fighter vs X-Wing!
That was one of the first epically great LAN games that we played. As I recall it was a 20hr marathon and I even had to take a short break to go to work for an hour or so in the middle. I also managed to fall asleep at the control of my Tie-In and woke myself by slamming it into the side of an ISD; something my cohorts have never allowed me to forget even some 17 years later! (or thereabouts).
In our collective opinion no game has ever replicated the sheer playability of TvX and since then we have been searching endlessly for a game that can step into those vacant shoes.
C'mon LucasArts, where's the genius you once showed!
(PS, its kinda interesting what you can do with Unity3D and the assets from TvX...;) )
How is a guy supposed to make it rain?
Actually, the solution was quite obvious to me, as I bet it was for countless other guys, given the state of the cart outside. I laughed very hard.
The Dig was a great game, too, which nobody mentioned. That one was the most movie-like adventure experience I had. I believe the original idea was used for some movies later on.
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