I'll never for the life of me, understand why my favorite genres seem to be the ones that get eliminated. The shooter is always seemingly on a life or death precipice, with the ever present threat of another shooter never being made always looming. Strategy RPGs are enjoying a comeback, but they seem to find favor briefly and then die off again. Boom or bust.
The demise of the classic adventure game boggles my mind, though. It's not that adventure game don't get made anymore, it just that good ones are getting harder and harder to find. There are tons of people who slap together a really horrible game...basically their vision of Myst, except with people in it. So the genre still has its fans...it's just that they're not getting very much to be fans of.
Flashback to the late 80s. Graphical adventure games are THE thing to play, after making the logical leap from their mostly-text predecessors, like Cranston Manor on the Apple IIe.
Sierra On-Line becomes a giant based on the success of their various Quest series of games. LucasArts figures they know a thing or two about this story game business, and they create classics like Maniac Mansion, and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders.
In the early 90s the games get a big boost from VGA, and in addition to the newfound colors, they go forth and impress with their clever story arcs. Monkey Island is born, as is cult classic Sam & Max Hit the Road. In that same span of time LucasArts also puts out another one of my favorite adventure games of all time, Day of the Tentacle, the sequel to Maniac Mansion.
The Story
In the original Maniac Mansion, the hero, Dave, was trying to save his girlfriend, Sandy the Cheerleader from the clutches from Dr. Fred, who is currently being mind controlled by an evil purple meteor. You chose a combination of Dave, and 2 of 5 other characters to help him in his quest to save his woman. One of those character you could choose was Bernard.
Bernard's your standard nerd character...complete with the glasses and all. he's got two college friends, Hoagie and LaVerne, neither of whom is exceptionally bright.
One day, Bernard gets a message from his pal Green Tentacle, one of the character from Maniac Mansion. Apparently, your old adversary, Purple Tentacle (the far more sinister tentacle from Maniac Mansion) has taken a swig from Dr. Fred's Sludge-O-Matic and sprouted arms. This leads him to appearing in the most forebodingly evil cutscene ever in a video game, in which you see a close-up P.T., his raising his newly gained arm-stub and declaring:
"I feel like I could...like I could...
(booming voice with echo)TAKE ON THE WORLD!!"
A performance so evil, that Gamespot once named him one of the top 10 Video game villains ever. So, Dr. Fred got wise to this, and had tied up the tentacles in the basement. So Bernard and crew go to help them out. Well, as soon as they are set free, Purple Tentacle recontinues his plan to take over the world. Green Tentacle tries to talk him out of it, but it's no use. Dr. Fred's got a backup plan, though. He'll use his Chron-O-John and flush Bernard et al, back in time so they can turn off the Sludge-O-Matic before Purple can drink from it.
There's a slight problem, though, Dr. Fred's Chron-O-John requires a huge diamond as part of the machine. Dr. Fred couldn't quite afford one, so he thought he could go ahead and use a cubic zirconium. (By the way, you'll notice I throw a lot of links into my reviews. They're for extra learning. I make learning fun!) So, the CZ breaks, and Hoagie is thrown 200 years into the past, to hobknob with the founders of the United States of America. LaVerne is thrown 200 years into the future...where she's stuck in a huge tree. Bernard is just wet, and stays in the present.
The three of them can't get back to their correct points in time, but are able to flush items back and forward in time to each other. While all this is happening, a strange, "triangle-shaped criminal" starts tipping cows, stealing emeralds, and getting elected President. But you must push forward...I mean backwards...to yesterday...where you can stop the Sludge-O-Matic that Dr. Fred was using to impress his mad scientist cronies, and ensure that Purple Tentacle never becomes smarter, more aggressive, and never feels like taking on the world.
Gameplay
Gameplay is familiar to anyone who'd played a LucasArts adventure before. You can walk to anything by clicking on the screen, and if you want to do anything else, you can put together commands using the interaction words at the bottom. This was an elegant solution to the problem you had with Sierra games, where you would not know the proper verb they had expected you to use, and it just wouldn't let you do anything.
The puzzles got damned creative throughout this game and most of them were wacky as hell. One section requires you steal George Washington's gold quill pen that's he's using to draft the Constitution, because Hoagie needs to make a super battery. So, Hoagie accomplishes this by switching out Washington's dentures with some chattering teeth from the future, which leads everyone to think he's cold. They light a fire, so Hoagie jams a blanket up in the chimney...and then blames John Hancock for it. (And you know he deserved it...)
The majority of the puzzles in the game get solved in some similar manner, and if the madcap hilarity of the puzzles doesn't strike a chord with you, the humor in the dialogue should be enough to generate a few good laughs.
Audio
This is one of the few games where the audio is more memorable to me than the graphics were. The MIDI sound was pretty good, and enabled the computer to have constant great music going without it being a huge drain on the processor. Not too many folks remember MIDI from back in the day, but it was a really, really compact music file format from back in olden times. A 3 or 4 minute midi tune would run something like 5-10kb.
In addition, DOTT was a full talkie, seeing as how it was from a time where people actually thought we'd get GOOD voice acting or something...the fools... Seriously, though, some of the voices in the game are SO well done, they're the one thing I most fondly remember from the game. Denny Delk, who does the voices for all the tentacles and Hoagie, is excellent.
Apparently the guys at LucasArts really like using him, as he's all over their games. The same can't be said for Jane Jacobs, though, who is horrible as LaVerne. Maybe it's not her fault though, I just really didn't like the character at all.
Graphics
The graphics aren't anything to write home about, but they fit the mood of the game perfectly. The only things I don't like are the EXTREME! font that they use, and the way they drew LaVerne. She's just way too retarded looking. Aside from that, though, they give the game the great cartoony feels and the other characters are portrayed perfectly for the game.
Overall
One hell of a game. Stop the IRS, end human slavery, and a dramatic final showdown with huge tentacles. Sounds like a recipe for some perveted anime, but it's nothing of the sort. Rather it's just one freakish and funny ride into the minds of Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer.
There's even a working copy of Maniac Mansion thrown into DOTT, as well as a reference to a sequence in the original game. In Maniac Mansion, if you were using Syd or Razor you could throw a hamster in the microwave, and kill it. In DOTT you need to do the same to solve a puzzle, and the character will comment on how you shouldn't do this. Funny story about that...Nintendo didn't know this was possible when the NES version of Maniac Mansion was released, so when they found out...after the game shipped, they demanded that it be removed, so another batch of the game was made where you couldn't nuke the hamster, and that was the version the guys in the UK got.
Humor, great voices, and a great story...I can't ask for anything more. And apparently neither can the fans. Rumor has it that the LucasArts guys are just trying to figure out how to come up with a sequel for this one, and we'll see it. If Sam & Max: Freelance Police flies, well, here's hoping.
