Udvarnoky

So next up for you is THE DIG, huh? Well, as you're slogging through it just know that the two games that come after are great. I kid, sort of. I love the atmosphere of THE DIG but I've never been a fan of its puzzles and you should know that it's even more serious than FULL THROTTLE. LucasArts always had great voice acting, but the performances here (or perhaps the technology used to implement them) isn't always up to the challenge of the heavier dramatic material. Gerbil is right in that you've been spoiled The one other asterisk I would append to THE DIG is less its own fault - it looks a bit worse, technically, than FULL THROTTLE because it was in development so damned long. I do enjoy that one-click-does-all interface, though. Seems that was Telltale's influence on their pre direct control titles.

All of the veteran adventure designers seem to have mellowed incredibly with age when it comes to the harshness of their puzzles. It'll be interesting to see what Tim and friends came up with for Broken Age, although I think Psychonauts' puzzles are a good reference point.

There are definitely classic puzzles in EMI, and I would include the diving contest in your list, but I find the game surprisingly difficult for the company's final (albeit not by intention) adventure game. And I'm particularly directing my wrath at the obscure stuff. The "File-O-Matic" retrieval system was a tumor on my happiness, even with the guy who voiced Spongebob guiding my efforts. Overall, I am a big EMI defender. Actually EMI's design reminds me quite a bit of Hit the Road's, which shouldn't be surprising. Indeed, and even though the mazes come off as cheap as mazes always do (though EMI's is damn inspired, as you pointed out), they are admittedly a Monkey Island staple.

Inventory item combination seems to inspire the worst in designers. Of the games ahead of you, only the remaining Monkey Islands reprise it I believe. I never could figure out if Full Throttle's puzzles were significantly easier than the others games', or if it was simply that there were way fewer of them. There's a much more conservative inventory in that game, too.

The idea of telling the story of some original characters that takes place at the same time as the "main story" is plausible, but that concept is better suited to the The Walking Dead. I think the best thing they could do is cover some of the backstory that constantly gets alluded to on the show (haven't read the books). Robert's Rebellion, Aegon and the dragons, the mad king...there's a wealth of really compelling-sounding material they could depict that would be worth depicting.

Look for another door in the main party area, to the right of the stage.

Well there's an idea. Are you sure you've visited every room possible at that bigfoot party?

I have to agree with syntheticgerbil - you seem uncommonly good at these games. This thread continues to be a joy to read.

It's slightly tamer and a bit inconsistent in quality, but overall it is a dignified translation to the small screen, and I have no doubt it would have gotten better had it been granted more than one season. Can definitely recommend the Shout! Factory DVD. People have uploaded episodes to Youtube and, not to tacitly approve of that practice but, one of the better episodes if you're on the fence about purchasing.

To Fate of Atlantis' credit, it invoked Williams extremely rarely. Truly an original and magnificent soundtrack. I guess if Hit the Road pales slighty, it's only because it's being compared against some pretty absurdly great competition. Of course, the modern Sam & Max soundtracks by Jared Emerson-Johnson are at a whole other level. I would have been interested in hearing what Mark Griskey was coming up with for Sam & Max 2 as well. I got in touch with him once and he believes that he still has some of the work he did lying around somewhere (with the qualifier that there would have been future recording sessions to enhance the tracks with additional live instruments) but he was too busy to look for the files at the time, plus concerned about the legal aspect.

Sam & Max has some pretty uniformly good music, I thought. And of course Conroy Bumpus' number is classic.

Highway Surfing is a completely pointless mini-game, as are the ones you can purchase from the Snuckey's. And yes, it's quite bizarre, with nebulous objectives. As Mike Stemmle would concede a decade and a half later: He also addresses it here: The SCUMM engine always posed problems when the designers tried to implement arcade sequences with it. Fate of Altantis had some iffy action scenes, as does Full Throttle. I think in Monkey Island 3 they were successful in making the very few and light arcade sequences they included pretty fun, but of course that was the final SCUMM game. As far as Hit the Road goes, I'm partial to Whack-A-Rat and Car Bomb (aka Battleship). The cancelled Sam & Max 2 would have been extremely minigame heavy, apparently. Ironically, I think the best example of SCUMM arcade sequences was the earliest, Last Crusade. They're cruel in difficulty, but the biplane sequence and the Three Trials are actually pretty cool.

I feel like it's gotta be

Bill Tiller purloined it for his studio's two games.

Hit the Road's cycle-thru, icon-based interface always did comes across more as a reaction to Sierra than it did a natural evolution of SCUMM. That said, it was an interesting experiment in a streamlined dialog system that protected jokes from being given away (since you only know the "tone" of Sam's comment and not the content) and it kind of accurately anticipated the general approach some adventure games would take many years later. It's also the first LEC game that finally awarded the game world the totality of screen real estate.

I do believe you're referring to Meteor Mess 3D, another German remake project.

Oh wow, I didn't realize these were the same guys behind Maniac Mansion Mania. Don't know if anyone's familiar, but using AGS somebody put together a starter pack that allows fellow Maniac Mansion fanatics to quickly make these bite-sized, self-contained adventure games that take place in the Maniac Mansion universe I remember participating in an English translation of one of the first episodes; a decade later people have apparently produced ninety of them.

I don't know the origins; I swiped it off Reddit. I remember that DOTT-style remake you're alluding to, though. There's at least one other German remake in development, as well. There always seems to be.

The Maniac Mansion protagonists re-imagined in the DOTT style:

Hey Aonuma, I've got this wild idea: what if you stopped fucking with my feelings, you emotional sodomite? Source.

Bonus reflection: It's hard to believe that the Green Tentacle in this game and the prone-to-jealous-murder one who could alternatively rape you to death in Maniac Mansion could be the same character, but I guess these are the benefits of adroitly recasting the first game as a liberal adaptation of the real Edison family in the universe of DOTT.

I have to reiterate how awesome it is to read your experiences with these classics. And yeah, Day of the Tentacle is a high water mark - that game is put together like a watch. I think you'll find your next installment of awesome, Sam & Max Hit the Road, to be comparatively less tightly designed, but it's still fantastic. Not to re-adjust your expectations for the games that follow but at least as far as puzzle logc goes, I think you've just witnessed the zenith. I envy you.

Tim has said, maybe in jest, that Hoagie and Ben Throttle are related, but I've always found a connection between he and Eddie Riggs to be more plausible. There's an intriguing line when you have Hoagie look at the horse dentures where he references a fellow roadie named Eddie who "eats raw sewage on stage." No doubt a coincidence, but it's amusing to pretend Tim retroactively made that throwaway line a stitch in the fabric of some immane canon. I do recall that being a bit of an exercise in pixel hunting.

</thread>

I think it's the video game that is cited as as the source of Dr. Fred's fortune - They do still mention the TV show though, so your point stands. While I've probably seen no more of the show than you, I did write an article once that attempted to contextualize it. Basically the show bible started out as a loose adaptation of the game that was apparently akin to "The Munsters" and was not all that promising. A power-that-be then brought on Eugene Levy of SCTV fame, gave him complete carte blanche to re-invent the show creatively, and in the end the relationship to the game went from tenuous to nonexistent. At this point the name probably should have been changed and they certainly shouldn't have had a marketing tie-in with the Nintendo game.