Back in 1995, in Russia, where nearly nobody even seen any legal software, there were countless CDs with titles like "Best 100 adventure games ever", thoroughly repacked by your friendly Russian pirates, with launchers. On one of those CDs, I encountered "Day of the Tentacle". I was 12 years old, and I didn't speak English.
Few months later, when I got to this ending screen with tentacle-shaped US flag, I understood some English, and knew a thing or two about US founding fathers, the Constitution (probably not mentioning any vacuum cleaners), quarter-taking laundry machines and so on. Everyday life in the US seemed no less strange to me than mad scientist's lab with sapient tentacles and toilets converted to time machines.
A few months ago I ate kumquats for the first time in my life (weird, but delicious). Before that I only knew the fruit from playing this game when I was young! (not a very common fruit in the Netherlands).
I had not expected them to be like tiny oranges/tangerines you can eat with peel and all. From the graphics in the game (IIRC basically yellow circles) I always assumed they might some kind of small peaches or you know, yellow cherries ... :)
No, they use a custom engine (Ron Gilbert's pre-existing engine with the Squirrel language for scripting, augmented with custom sugar around coroutines to more or less emulate the way SCUMM did threading).
Well, their lead tester is Robert Megone who used to work on ScummVM (and for Revolution Software), but that's not really using ScummVM.
ScummVM is used by Disney (who bought the copyright of most of Georges Lucas' stuff) for their GOG re-releases (10 years after LucasArts sent out the lawyers to try to shut down the project), and by others for non-Scumm games as well.
Also, the guy who wrote the point and click interface for Grim Fandango on ResidualVM was hired by DoubleFine as a consultant so that they could adapt his code for the remastered version.
That's all the ScummVM-related trivia I could remember from the top of my head.
It's pretty great - showing everything from how all the artwork was redrawn, to the remastered audio (pulled from the original DAT recordings), to Peter Chan's remarkable concept art. (which is included in the game!)
I have the original game packed away somewhere, and I'm sure that I could run a copy on scummvm, but for me, paying $15 to support the kind of care and attention that went into this remaster is a no-brainer.
Grim Fandango is deservedly loved, but Full Throttle has a special place in my heart.
First, because it was one of the first "talkie" adventure games I legally owned -- I think it came as a demo game with the Soundblaster card? -- and also because of the cartoon art style and post-apocalyptic biker gangs theme. And the voice-overs. I really, really would love to see a sequel done in glorious 2D. 3D would ruin it for me; the style was everything in this game.
Ah yes, The Gone Jackals. After finishing Full Throttle and being so smitten by that tune I resolved to find a copy of their album 'Bone to Pick'. As a 12 year old kid it took me some time to figure out where to buy it but definitely worth the time and pocket money spent!
An underrated album and still very much worth a listen.
The intent behind the remakes of Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, and Full Throttle comes from a spirit of preservationism more than anything. The idea was to make these games easily purchasable and playable by modern audiences while keeping as much of the original games intact as possible. So you get things like cleaner audio, uprezzed graphics, simplified controls, and so-on, but nothing that radically changes the games.
As someone who has the original game CDs and played through each of those games at least 10 times over the years, the BEST part of these remasters, IMO, is the added developer commentary. I really, really enjoyed playing through the Monkey Island and Grim Fandango remakes and hearing Tim and crew's thoughts, remembrances, jokes, etc around the development and production of the games, the music, the characters, etc. Really added something new and special to the playthroughs of games that I know like the back of my hand, like old friends.
Graphics aside, the revamped input options alone justify the remaster IMO. They got a lot of things right with the original but tank controls were not one of them.
I still wish the graphics were better, it looks like Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle don't have much improvement in graphics department, so I'm afraid Full Throttle will be similar disappointment to me.
Comparing that to remakes of Secret of the Monkey Island[1] or Bionic Commando Rearmed[2] (different genre) it looks poor. It feels like LucasArt (and actually Disney) are simply going for making easy money on people who are nostalgic about these games with as little investment as they can.
It was certainly different, but I wouldn't say the original art style was 'destroyed' due to the fact the at any time in the game you can switch back to the original style. It's not exactly destroyed if its RIGHT THERE.
I think with DotT there is less room for that kind of art upheaval though, because, frankly, the art already looks good. It still holds up very well today, expecially if you run in SCUMMVM in turn on some graphics filters.
Fond (but painful) memories of playing through Maniac Mansion and I remember seeing DOTT for the first time at a CompUSA display showing off this fancy new CD-ROM thing. That and Tie-Fighter were jaw dropping for the time. It's funny because VR is supposed to be this incredible new thing but even the most impressive demos haven't given me that same amazement as seeing games like this for the first time.
This looks much better than the Monkey Island "Remasters" but looks like they broke "lipsyncing"? What a step backwards.
I'm surprised this game even needs a remaster. Played it a few years back and it still holds up -- timeless style more than makes up for a little bit of pixelation.
You can always use ScummVM to play the original ( http://scummvm.org/ ) on any Linux OS. To be honest, the game is so good in of itself that increased resolution doesn't play a role.
but they probably should be able to control it in this instance. I was playing the original dott with scummvm on my linux laptop yesterday.
It's a great game. One of the first i ever bought.
It occurs to me that DotT, along with Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Curse of Monkey Island, The Dig, Sam and Max, and a whole bunch of other IPs are now owned by Disney.
Grim Fandango, Curse of MI and Sam and max especially. Also Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
I know a lot of that is pure nostalgia, but I sometimes fire them again and even finish them up yet again and wow. It's just art. It's like re-reading a book I guess.
>Players are able to switch back and forth between classic and remastered modes, and mix and match audio, graphics and user interface to their heart’s desire.
There are also some new easter eggs that appear in the new graphics, like a jar jar binks portrait in the past that was very pixelated in the original and some other "hidden" graphical stuff in previously unintelligible pixelated text
Method 1: Purchase a copy of Maniac Mansion on eBay or such. Download a single copy of the data files. Load and play them in ScummVM.
Method 2: So, funny story. See how Day of the Tentacle Remastered is for sale above? It just so happens that the original Day of the Tentacle contained a computer that allowed one to play Maniac Mansion. The Remastered edition above ALSO contains that same computer with that same copy of Maniac Mansion. So if you buy Day of the Tentacle Remastered, then play up to the point where you reach that computer, you can play the original Maniac Mansion.
Yes --- there's a copy built in to Day of the Tentacle.
Go to Weird Ed Edison's room and use his computer, and it'll start up. Or, well, it used to. I've only ever played it on ScummVM, which didn't support that opcode, but it was trivial to haul out the data files and run them separately.
I have no idea whether the remastered version still contains this. I hope so (I've never finished Maniac Mansion).
Serious remark: I am Dutch and when I was very young and computers and games were rare I played text adventures and they were English only: I do not think I can imagine a more efficient way of learning reading and writing as a young child. Why not let them play the games in English? I live in Spain now and the major complaint the youth makes about learning English is that everything is available and usually forced (dubbing in movies and tv shows included) in Spanish so even if they write/speak English I cannot really understand it; too little real case practice.
Edit: also I see in daily life how my Portuguese colleagues struggle finding answers because they read docs/learn and have errors/feedback in PT and so search answers in Google in PT as well which often works but in some cases does not and usually I have to figure out what the problem is in English which will usually provide the answer. I see that the better coders in our team and switch their computers to EN and follow the English tutorials so why not do that straight away... For maintenance, even in small companies, comments need to be in English so why use PT/ES in the first place for codoing. Not saying you should teach your kids programming (although, why not) :)
A thousand times this! I learned English by playing games by LucasArts and Sierra! (Ok, and also taking classes, but you get the point). Text adventures were particularly good for learning, since the parser encouraged me to find synonyms for verbs it didn't understand... I still remember I learned the word "rub" in Space Quest 2, for the part where you need to rub berries over Roger Wilco's body so that he wouldn't get eaten by a monster.
Games seem like a particularly good way of encouraging young people to learn other languages.
Glad you've brought up the dubbing/translating issue in Spain, because as I was reading the start of your comment I could remember how I played DOTT in perfect Spanish... And a lot of other LucasArts games (Indy Last Crusade & Indy Fate of Atlantis, Monkey Island, etc).
Now my computer doesn't even have a Spanish keyboard, let alone OS or any software running on it. Life is much easier now :)
I played it a lot as a child and replaying it now made me realized just how much I missed.
Since I don't live in america I had zero knowledge of their history so the whole past section was about some vaguely famous guys I didn't know.
Now as an adult Hoagie's dialogue just cracks me up every time and so much more stuff is funny that I didn't notice back in the day.
Basically growing up made this game 100% better
Not enough bang for the buck when you can get a similar enough result with scummvm and super sampling. I'm sorry, but I'm not giving any money to Mr. Schafer again, I already made that mistake with Double Fine and oh God how I regret it.
Are you talking about Broken Age? What was the problem? You got an excellent documentary about the realities of game development, the full game, and whatever additional rewards you pledged for.
If the issue is that the game was split into two parts, I have very little sympathy for that, since you still got the documentary, and got the full game. You also received both halves of the game for your original pledge amount. Games take time and effort to develop and sometimes there are delays.
The kickstarter campaign was a mess. The product was delayed a lot, it was way over budget, and this was not the first time Schafer pulled one of this stunts only to finally produce a game that many backers disliked (myself included). There are many articles that explain the kickstarter fiasco better than me, if you need more details.
Spot on. I was waiting for years for this game. To be honest I didn't back it on kickstarter, but I bought it when the first chapter got out.
It was soooo bad, that I didn't even bother to play the second chapter.
2nd experience: I bought Grim Fandango remastered version. Oh my god, what a smart money-grab move from Mr. Schafer. The game still had a notorious bug, present even in the original version, where you could lose an inventory item(your scythe basically) and you couldn't move forward. Only solution was to load from a previous point. I had to replay 1-2 hours work of game, so I gave up.
As I'm saying all this... I'm gonna buy this remastered game also. Simply because Tim Schafer knows that he can manipulate me via my childhood memories and get away with it.
Ignoring the Schafer comments... it's 15 dollars. Depending on your locale, this is probably roughly the price of a movie ticket.
It's odd to me that people value games so little. A quick look suggests this is at least 6 hours of game play. Seems like a fine price for 6 hours of entertainment, especially if you've never played the original.
The only double fine game I ever regretted buying was brutal legend and even then I got a few laughs out of it and appreciated it for what it was. Psychonauts, happy action theater, the cave, and broken age were all wonderful.
Pardon my ignorance, but what was the matter? I loved Broken Age. I wasn't in the kickstarter, but I just bought it in the App Store (well, actually my wife did) and loved it.
I really wish they'd taken the style into consideration instead of just redrawing the characters - the colored outlines worked really well at a small resolution, but they look really weird when you scale them up.
I wonder if the Maniac Mansion you can play inside DoTT is also remastered :D
Great game, one of the best outros in any game (won't spoil it). I think it is the perfect sweet spot of an adventure game for me.
I love this! Loved this game back in the day, love that Elite has been remade and frogger as CrossyRoad now I'm just waiting for ChaseHQ to be the next tablet blockbuster.
There was actually more than one attempt at a sequel (Payback, Hell on Wheels) which were mostly "cash ins" outsourced by LucasArts and focused on more of the action-y stuff (FPS were just becoming the overriding rage in games) rather than the story telling. Tim Schafer, of course, moved on to Grim Fandango was not involved in the sequel attempts.
New rumors are that Tim himself is considering ideas for a Full Throttle 2 once they finishing remastering Full Throttle, but take those rumors with a giant grain of salt.
One entry way into the giant rabbit hole of old Full Throttle 2 news:
Not having to play it in ScummVM, for starters. Second, an updated and much improved UI, better resolution, improved sound, and in general improved visuals without losing the charm (though a few scenes come off with a little less life).
Day of the Tentacle is one of the best adventure games.
On the one side it's great that a slightly improved is now available. On the otherside, the new "remastered" version uses the SCUMM (open source Lucasarts game engine virtual machine) that was made by fans and can be used to run the old games on modern systems. And those "remastered" versions are only very slightly improved due the lack of original game art graphic files. It was certainly easy to vectorize the vector-art style of DoT, but the "remastered" Grim Fandango basically featured blown up background pictures out of Photoshop. A low point of the "remastered"/"HD" versions is certainly Age of Empires 2 HD where Microsoft closed their former studio and lost all its game arts and therefor the HD re-release featured the same graphics and just provided higher screen resolution as single feature that come from a fan patch years ago. Or Age of Mythology which hasn't been improved graphical wise at all, was already used as base for Age of Empire Online and later re-released as HD edition again. Or the Turok remastered release, which still looks like the 1998 3D game even with all the fog that was needed with early 3D cards but not in 2016. Beside all these cheap rehashes, the Monkey Island 2 re-release was great, one could switch between the old and the new graphics art on the fly by pressing a key. (Sure the new art wasn't that lovely done and could have been a lot better.) What I want from HD re-releases are more polished improved games, not just cheap rip-offs often based on fan patches and mods.
Back in 1995, in Russia, where nearly nobody even seen any legal software, there were countless CDs with titles like "Best 100 adventure games ever", thoroughly repacked by your friendly Russian pirates, with launchers. On one of those CDs, I encountered "Day of the Tentacle". I was 12 years old, and I didn't speak English.
Few months later, when I got to this ending screen with tentacle-shaped US flag, I understood some English, and knew a thing or two about US founding fathers, the Constitution (probably not mentioning any vacuum cleaners), quarter-taking laundry machines and so on. Everyday life in the US seemed no less strange to me than mad scientist's lab with sapient tentacles and toilets converted to time machines.
Will definitely play it again.