Zeusthecat

The Big LucasArts Playthrough

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I grew up with these games, so I can't imagine playing them out of chronological order. But I can confirm that Day of the Tentacle has no significant callbacks to Maniac Mansion. If you're wondering, "Oh, I wonder why there's a mummy in Day of the Tentacle? I guess they explained it in the first game." Uh, you don't need to worry about that.

Yeah, because, why is there are mummy in the first game?

 

 

The hardest puzzle in the game for me was getting past the vicious poodles.  The other two trials I figured out easily, but it took me forever to get into the mansion.  In fact, it was my friend that figured out that puzzle.  It didn't occur to me to try combining things in my inventory.  I spent so many hours throwing every item I had at those dogs.  I must have fed them a thousand pieces of meat before we got it. 

There was one puzzle I could never figure out as a child and it ended up with me begging my dad to buy the hint book from the 1-800 number. He probably could have called the 1-900 number and saved money, but I suppose he wanted the hint book, already having many for Sierra games. After I got my hint, he hid the book and I finished it. He did similar when games started coming with hint books. So I know both Day of the Tentacle and Fate of Atlantis had hint books I never had access to. Curse of Monkey Island had that huge fucking strategy guide though, so I got to keep that. Curse was an easier game though.

 

Anyway, the puzzle was giving the "A head in navigation" leaflet to the Cannibals. I just didn't understand puns.

 

completely didn't get the red herring joke until I was much older, not understanding what the phrase "red herring" meant.

Same here, but the actual manual told me about this puzzle, now that I recall, since it had the "quick walkthrough" thing that explain the first few steps. I guess that makes two hints.

 

I had no problem getting past the dogs but I did have a lot of trouble figuring out how to get to the swordmaster. I ended up having to use a guide and I'm glad I did because it never would have occurred to me that you could follow the shopkeeper out of his store. I didn't think that was even a thing you could do and was my first lesson in learning how to think outside the box when considering the various mechanics in the game.

Yeah you just have to notice him walking away when you walk outside. I think a lot of this puzzle's brilliance stems from the fact that you can do so many things to piss off the shopkeeper that you just want to try every obnoxious thing you can in his store. I kept bugging him over and over later on about getting credit even though I already had the safe combo written down.

The NES version is a rather unique and well-made port, but since it came out in 1990 and adopted a few of the lessons of the MI interface I'd say play it only after the fact if you have the urge simply in the interest of getting to see the engine's evolution play out as it actually happened.

But the NES one has cool music! And I think an extra ending or two...? I own it but I have never played this version in full. I mean to one day. I know a lot of people who were nostalgic about adventure games but didn't really have PCs loved Maniac Mansion on NES.

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Just as an aside, the old LucasArts hint books were works of art that contained all kinds of great content and were actually worth the money.  The character-narrated walkthroughs were wonderful, and the UHS-style hint sections were incredibly exhaustive and insightful.  Reading the Last Crusade hint book exponentially increased my appreciation for that game because it revealed so many alternate solutions to puzzles that I was not even aware of.  Fuck that game for still having dead-ends, but I'll tell you what: it was very impressively designed otherwise.

 

 

But the NES one has cool music! And I think an extra ending or two...? I own it but I have never played this version in full. I mean to one day. I know a lot of people who were nostalgic about adventure games but didn't really have PCs loved Maniac Mansion on NES.

 

And I'm one of them - Maniac Mansion for NES was my adventure game gateway drug, and it's a brilliant port.  It's also got a few dashes of bizarre original content.  Your remark about Dead Cousin Ted actually reminded me of the fact that because they had to replace Edna's phone sex dialog, the replacement dialog actually kind of does delve into Ted's backstory by implying that he had an unfortunate operation and the Edna was unaware of or had not accepted his death!  Of course DOTT sympathetically "retconned" this to have the gag implying that Ted was a mummy that has been around for centuries.

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The Monkey Island and Loom ones weren't so amazing as the ones for Full Throttle, Sam and Max, CMI, and Day of the Tentacle outside of the narrated walkthroughs. I actually didn't realize my dad had purchased a Loom hint book the same day as the Secret of Monkey Island one. I had already beaten the game without hints but I guess he didn't know and he was having a hard time.

 

On a fun note, my dad was notorious for pirating a ton of games from his friends at work, so most of my early life was PC gaming and floppy disks with written pen labels. He traveled around repairing systems for this company called Data General (very early laptop makers) who was later eaten in the 90s. They all had a system where someone would buy a game and just copy it for everyone. They would xerox all of the manuals and share them for the copy protection. He never really bought any game unless it was on sale or was something I asked for for Christmas (which always tended to be one LucasArts game). Secret of Monkey Island somehow came with our CD drive very early on. Zak McKracken and Maniac Mansion came on this budget CD with Bill and Ted on PC and some other unrelated game.

 

Sorry, I'm going to be all over this thread with Nostalgia™. Even though I had an NES and even a Genesis later that all the other kids, none of those games had much time spent with them and I could always beat adventures eventually, unlike 90% of my NES games.

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I was the complete opposite.  I could beat super tough NES sidescrollers at a callow age but Maniac Mansion completely bewildered me until I came back as an adult years later.  I'm pretty sure once I accessed the top floor of the mansion that was the end of my progress.  I'll never forget the impact that game had on me though.  That world felt lived in, it had scariness and tension, and there was Pepsi in the refrigerator.  Video games didn't have those things.

 

The closest story I have to what you related about the pirated games was my friend handing me a hand-labeled floppy disk of Hugo's House of Horrors in elementary school.  I'm pretty sure that was my exposure to the Sierra interface which that game lifted wholesale and I'm sure quite unlawfully.

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On a fun note, my dad was notorious for pirating a ton of games from his friends at work, so most of my early life was PC gaming and floppy disks with written pen labels.

Oh man, me, too! By the time I got my own computer, my dad had accumulated like three boxes full of those 3.5" inch floppies! Sooooo many games. Many of them were shareware, but I'd say almost half were full copies. Haha goddamn. I still have all the files from all those disks in a folder on my computer. Every now and then I get the urge to run through them with DOSBox. It's been a while. This is making me itch again. D:

 

My dad is definitely the one responsible for my love of video games. The first game he BOUGHT for me was Day of the Tentacle. He just came home with a box one day, and was like, "here you go!" The beginning of the end of my freedom from the PC tyrant.

 

MAN. NOSTALGIA INDEED.

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The closest story I have to what you related about the pirated games was my friend handing me a hand-labeled floppy disk of Hugo's House of Horrors in elementary school.  I'm pretty sure that was my exposure to the Sierra interface which that game lifted wholesale and I;m sure quite unlawfully.

I finished all of those terrible Hugo games with walkthroughs out of boredom as a kid. What a bunch of dumb crap. I can't believe I wasted precious childhood time on those games I hated while I was playing them.

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Yes I can attest to them being terrible though the first one I have a soft spot for because it was very brief unlike the wide-open and overwhelming (as I recall) sequels.  And of course my friend more or less had all the answers for me at school from when his older brother had beaten it.  Like I would have known "Narnia" at that age otherwise.  (Lord, I'm only just kind of fully appeciating how aggressively stupid that bit in the game was where the guy literally asks you some trivia questions.)

 

EDIT: Oh man, and the part where you had to evade the mummy through trial and error that basically amounts to manipulating him behind a rock and obstructing his walk path!  Heinous!

 

EDIT EDIT: Okay my last update by holy smokes.  If you want to buy Full Throttle or Monkey Island 3 you can go right to hell, but you'd better believe that the guy who made Hugo has 'em all updated for Windows and readily available!  I notice he retitled the games and made them point 'n click.

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So, Hugo, huh? That just triggered a memory about something I haven't thought of in a long, long time.

 

Fun/sad story: I had my dad print out walkthroughs for all kinds of adventure games when I was a kid. Like literally just print them out and give them to me. I'd hole-punch 'em and put 'em in a big folder, the kind with the metal bits for holding hole-punched files. I would read those walkthroughs.

 

One of them was Hugo. It was at the front (because I didn't alphabetize) and I read it a lot. But I never played the game, ever. Still haven't to this day. Now I think I will.

 

God I wish I still had that folder. It must've gotten thrown away at some point, but I took it everywhere. I would read it while my brother was practicing indoor soccer and I was up in the bleachers. Haha Jesus what a nerd I am.

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Most of my gaming when I was a kid was on consoles. However, my dad did at one point have a computer in the early to mid 90's and a few games on floppy disk that I played quite a bit. I have very fond memories of playing Paratroopers, Bouncing Babies, Dig Dug, and Kingdom of Kroz. That was pretty much it though. I don't think he was even aware of graphic adventures and never really got into games that much.

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Isn't Kingdom of Kroz like ZZT?

 

I was given a pirated version of the first Indy game for the Amiga when I was a kid, Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusades were the only adventure games I had played until I had a bit later.

 

Well, unless you count the text adventures I played on my Amstrad.

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Isn't Kingdom of Kroz like ZZT?

 

Never played ZZT but yes I believe they are similar.

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Technically ZZT is like Kingdom of Kroz, since Kroz predated ZZT and ZZT carried over many of Kroz's graphics and conventions. Or so sayeth wikipedia. All I know is that Kroz is amazing and incredibly hard and I was equal parts baffled and in love with it as a child.

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All I know is that Kroz is amazing and incredibly hard and I was equal parts baffled and in love with it as a child.

 

Until today I had never known a single other person that was even aware of that game. I played it so much as a kid and even had nightmares about certain ASCII characters.

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To this day I don't remember the precise method by which I obtained MI, but I think it was from a friend of my parents who ran a computer store.  I spent a few weeks there one summer helping him reformat hard drives and install Windows.  He kept giving me random games which was my main source PC play.  I remember Doom giving me nightmares, really liking Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II, then being disgusted by Duke Nukem 3D years later.

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Just purchased Monkey Island Special Edition Bundle and LucasArts Adventure Pack. Hopefully now my pirate days are behind me.

 

Now, how to obtain Maniac Mansion...

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You can't get it digitally legally, so you can only get the PC disquette version or the NES version (if you have a NES), it was on C64 too, but I assume you don't have one.

 

You can also search for Lucasarts Classics Adventures or like it's been said before, it's hidden in Day of the Tentacle. You can buy a USB disquette drive relatively easily, just be careful to buy the 3.5" disquette version of the game and not the 5.25" ones, those are nightmare to get running.

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I'm not sure how to get this thing started but I am officially starting

 

Maniac Mansion

 

right fucking now.

 

Edit: (I got it)

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Don't pick Jeff! He sucks! I also remember that there is a reference from Maniac Mansion in Day of the Tentacle, it references a certain thing you can only do with a certain character that is censored in the NES version. Is it version 1.0 or 2.0? 

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I started my game last night and managed to get into the mansion and through all the rooms that I could access without a key (I think I picked Bernard and Wendy). I also fed the wax fruit to the tentacle guy so I could get to the rooms past him. The only rooms I haven't entered yet are the two with Edison family members.

Unfortunately Bernard and Wendy were both captured right at the start so I'm not sure how or if I can free them, hopefully that doesn't leave me fucked. I also at one point used my paint remover on the wrong thing and got the main character captured (which I assume puts me in a fail state) and reverted to an earlier save. Since making those mistakes I have been saving often and have several save files just in case. I guess from where I am now I need to figure out how to use something in my inventory to progress further. That yellow key also apparently can't be used anywhere yet.

Any non-spoilery words of wisdom? I haven't started using a guide yet either and will hold off on that until I have been stuck for a bit.

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Yeah, the paint thinner can be wasted pretty easily, as for the captured friends, I'll give you two hints, because there are two ways of getting out, one is pretty obvious, how do you escape a place with a locked door? The other way to escape is to pixel hunt, something usual in older games, you will find something.... suspicious in the cell.

 

Have you ever heard of the Universal Hint System? They have hints for a ton of older adventure games and they don't spoil it, they tend to point out thing you are likely to have forgotten and they can be very subtle.

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Hmm, should we give him hints about actual fail states? I think the game usually warns you about the ones that can kill you, except for the very obvious one you should know will get you in trouble.

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Yeah, the paint thinner can be wasted pretty easily, as for the captured friends, I'll give you two hints, because there are two ways of getting out, one is pretty obvious, how do you escape a place with a locked door? The other way to escape is to pixel hunt, something usual in older games, you will find something.... suspicious in the cell.

 

Have you ever heard of the Universal Hint System? They have hints for a ton of older adventure games and they don't spoil it, they tend to point out thing you are likely to have forgotten and they can be very subtle.

 

Thanks for the tips.

 

Because I am aware of this game having fail states, I am probably being a little more paranoid than I need to. In the interest of not getting overly frustrated I wouldn't mind knowing ahead of time about what kind of fail states this game has so I can recognize when it happens instead of continuing on and possibly wasting a decent chunk of time.

 

So I pose this question: do you only end up in a fail state when you use an item in the wrong place or is it possible to die or be permanently locked up and reach a fail state that way? Also, is there some kind of time limit that I have to beat? I noticed that the Edisons had a package delivered at one random point and I wonder if there is some kind of timer in the background that pushes the story along whether or not I am making progress.

 

I might check out that Universal Hint System but so far I've enjoyed just getting hints from people here. We'll see where the game takes me and how frustrated I get.

 

Edit: Oh, and I'm playing the enhanced PC version FYI.

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