Zeusthecat

The Big LucasArts Playthrough

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Turning the deadbolt on the door was the first puzzle I got really stuck on my first time through.  Previous adventure game experience had taught me that puzzles were to be solved with complicated cartoonish logic so the ones that make real world sense tended to baffle me far longer than they should have.

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So I re-entered the room, opened the door to the machine, and went inside to try to figure out what I was supposed to do with the messaging tubes. From here it didn't take long for me to figure out that I could use my hole punched card in Domino's message tube to stop his next assignment from going through just long enough for me to read all the details and snag his client before he could get to her.

 

It's funny, I had a friend argue with me about why adventure games all have bad design because they force you to figure out what the designer is thinking instead of what is logically possible, and he used that puzzle as an example of it. Seems like you didn't have much issue at all. I think long ago when I first solved it, I must have just been dicking around and hole punched the card ahead of time.

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Just in case it helps, your "big dog friend" (your driver Glottis) and the "weird monster dude" are demons, who in the context of Grim's universe have been summoned to the Eighth Underworld to perform the more mundane jobs like car mechanic and maintenance repairman.

 

Thanks for the clarification, and sorry for my constant usage of stupid descriptions for characters like that. I'm horrible with names so it usually takes me a little while to be able to remember them consistently. I gathered that those demons were some kind of entities who were summoned to that world based on Manny's conversation with the red demon guy that was fixing the machine. But it was said in sort of a joking matter so I wasn't sure if I was supposed to take it seriously.

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It's funny, I had a friend argue with me about why adventure games all have bad design because they force you to figure out what the designer is thinking instead of what is logically possible, and he used that puzzle as an example of it. Seems like you didn't have much issue at all. I think long ago when I first solved it, I must have just been dicking around and hole punched the card ahead of time.

 

Yeah, punching a hole in one of those cards is one of the first things I did. With that in my inventory that puzzle definitely had one of the more logical solutions.

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It's funny, I had a friend argue with me about why adventure games all have bad design because they force you to figure out what the designer is thinking instead of what is logically possible, and he used that puzzle as an example of it. Seems like you didn't have much issue at all. I think long ago when I first solved it, I must have just been dicking around and hole punched the card ahead of time.

 

I used what was had to be the entire deck of cards trying to stop the letter.  It seemed like Manny was just holding it wrong, so I needed gloves or to make a glue out of the packing foam or something.

 

I didn't even know a hole puncher existed. Though I guess if I observed Eva long enough I would see her use it.

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The card thing they show the message tube demon using a card with punches in it to stop the flow.. It's kind of hard to see though. And finally I can post my favorite video game quote!

 

"Bound only by the paper-thin wrapper of mortality, a soul here lies, struggling to be free. And so it shall, thanks to a bowl of bad gazpacho, and a man named Calavera."

 

"Nice bathrobe!"

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I love how everyone feels so strongly about Grim that they want to explain everything to Zeus so he gets the full experience. Speaking of which...

 

Ah, I see. Doesn't he have enough of an advantage over me though with all the good clients he gets? Two-faced bastard.

 

He did it because the food poisoning wasn't officially allocated to individual agents. It was first-come, first-serve.

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Haha. I'm sure that as Zeus continues to immerse himself in the wonder that is Grim Fandango, he'll quickly grow to appreciate all these things. The game does a very good job of, for example, drilling into you the origin of the demons by repeatedly mentioning that they were summoned from the Land of the Dead itself! The game has one of the richest worlds I've experienced in games, it's great fun being sucked into the craziness then reading about some of the references and origins afterwards. I guess it comes from playing it too many times, but I virtually feel like Grim Fandango's world is some actual place somewhere that I know a lot about.


And if he doesn't appreciate it then we shall promptly end him.

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Don't worry guys, I always appreciate a good game and I don't think this will be an exception. When I play a game, I prefer to focus on the things it does well and derive my enjoyment from that rather than get caught up on the negative aspects. That's why bad controls usually don't bother me, I can ignore a bad story if the gameplay is good, and I can ignore bad gameplay if the story is good. I just really fucking like video games...

 

...except Super Adventure Island. That game can go fuck itself and I would pay money to have every single copy launched directly into the sun.

 

(Oh yeah, and I have had that song that plays in the street fair area with the balloon guy stuck in my head for two days now. The atmosphere in that area is excellent.)

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 didn't even know a hole puncher existed. Though I guess if I observed Eva long enough I would see her use it.

 

 

The card thing they show the message tube demon using a card with punches in it to stop the flow.. It's kind of hard to see though.

 

I think the demon has a metal card with no holes. But if you use a non-punched playing card, it gets sucked away and Manny says "Too much air pressure." I'm not sure if you see Eva use the hole-punch, but when you exit the lifts, the leftover confetti on her desk is in front of shot, which is what tipped me off.

 

The main problem with this game is not always realising there's an item to interact with because you don't notice Manny looking at it, or because it's right next to another one. A "highlight all objects" function would go against the game's dedication to diegesis; a slightly clumsy but useful solution could have been a key to have Manny list everything he can interact with in the room. "I can see... Eva... Eva's hole-punch... the door to Don's office..."

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A "highlight all objects" function would go against the game's dedication to diegesis; a slightly clumsy but useful solution could have been a key to have Manny list everything he can interact with in the room. "I can see... Eva... Eva's hole-punch... the door to Don's office..."

 

I could hear it in my head the moment I read this, down to the little hitch where the different sound files are joined up imperfectly. That'd be a lot of extra dialogue to record, though.

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The main problem with this game is not always realising there's an item to interact with because you don't notice Manny looking at it, or because it's right next to another one. A "highlight all objects" function would go against the game's dedication to diegesis; a slightly clumsy but useful solution could have been a key to have Manny list everything he can interact with in the room. "I can see... Eva... Eva's hole-punch... the door to Don's office..."

 

I agree with this problem however the game does have a highlight-all-objects function.  I think it's Tab?

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I don't think the game ever highlights everything, however one button (period I know on the numpad, and probably tab too), makes Manny swivel between objects he is near to. Which kind of works like a highlight all button. Is that what you mean?

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I got a little bit further this weekend.

 

When I resumed playing, I was in the underground hideout area with Sal and Eva. After talking to them and learning a bit about who they were and what they were doing, I set out to retrieve the pigeon eggs that Sal needed to raise carrier pigeons. Surprisingly, the next few steps ended up being pretty straightforward and I was able to blast through them with ease.

 

After leaving the underground area, I immediately climbed back up to the ledge near the top of the building. I saw that I was able to pick up the other end of the rope and tried throwing it over to the nearby ladder but was unable to without some kind of anchor. After finding that none of my items could be used with the rope, I gave that up and decided to see what else I could do. So I walked down the ledge a little ways to see if any of the windows were open and discovered that I could sneak into Domino's office since he was still out talking to Don. Once inside, I was able to grab a piece of coral and Domino's mouthpiece (after hitting the punching bag a few times). Then I headed back out, attached the piece of coral to the end of the rope, and successfully anchored the rope to the ladder. Once I was on the roof, I immediately noticed a roof vent thingy nearby and tried using one of my bread loaves with it to see if it would lure the pigeons away. It distracted a few of them for a few seconds but didn't leave me any kind of opening to grab the eggs. So I went through my other items to see if I could use any of them with the vent and discovered that I was able to place one of my balloon animals in the vent. With this in place I tried another bread loaf. This time when they tried eating the bread crumbs the balloon popped, scaring them all away and leaving the eggs open for the taking.

 

After bringing the eggs to Sal, I found that they still couldn't let me go since they needed my teeth imprints to access the DOD. I remembered seeing the fil-o-dent in the room I was locked up in so I went back to the garage, dispensed some of it into the mouthpiece, and used it to create an imprint of my teeth. Then I brought my imprints back to Eva and was finally free to move on. 

 

From here, Sal brought me through a long underground path to the Petrified Forest and as I made my way into the forest I found Glottis weeping next to his car-bike. He was so distressed that he ended up ripping his own heart out and subsequently passed out. Shortly after, some weird spider-bats came and took the heart back into their lair. I followed after them and found Glottis' heart strung up on a big spider web. I tried cutting it with my scythe but as soon as I did another spider-bat came and repaired the web. Luckily I noticed a pile of bones nearby and quickly discovered that I could put a bone on the web and then use that as leverage with my scythe to launch the heart out of the spider-bat lair. Then I picked the heart up and stuffed it back into Glottis' chest. As soon as I did so, he woke up and I was able to convince him to drive me wherever I needed to go.

 

I drove around for a little while after this and found an area with many different paths that all seem to take me right back to the same spot. I noticed that I was able to pick up a sign that pointed to Rubacava and carry it around so I brought it back into that area hoping it would point to the path I needed to take. This proved pointless however, as It seemed to not always point to the same path when I put it back down. I tried putting it in several different spots and following where it pointed each time but never got anywhere. I even tried going through one of the paths, picking it up, and placing it again hoping it would then change direction and guide me to the next path but still didn't get anywhere. After trying this for awhile, I decided to move on to a different area.

 

From there, I went to the only other area available to me. This area had a big tree with a wheel on it and a switch that turned the wheel on and off. Glottis also ended up finding a wheelbarrow nearby and brought it into the area to try to turn it into a go kart. After talking to Glottis I tried turning the switch off and as soon as I did, he jumped up on the tree to try to re-balance the weights in an effort to make the tree fall down or something. Once he finished I turned it back on but unfortunately, there wasn't enough weight to accomplish our goal. So I tried again and this time I turned the switch back on while Glottis was still up there balancing the weights. Surprisingly, even with Glottis up there swinging around on the tree-wheel, it still didn't seem to be enough weight and I had no choice but to turn it back off to let him down. I repeated this process several times trying various items in various ways and moving the wheelbarrow to different positions each time. I noticed that there was a 'thwump' sound every time I pushed the wheelbarrow over one of the 4 conduits leading to the tree but even with it resting on each conduit I was never able to make anything happen. And this is about where I stopped playing.

 

I have probably spent close to an hour trying to figure out what to do in these two areas at this point. The possibility space is pretty small so I'm hoping the solution reveals itself before too long but at this point I am completely stumped.

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One of the puzzles in the Petrified Forest is bullshit, and another suffers from interface problems. So don't be too surprised.

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Grim Fandango is my favorite video game. But the Petrified Forest is my least favorite part.

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Yeah... Petrified Forest isn't too great. Hang in there, I would say there is only one other puzzle in the game that is just completely awful. 

 

Did you try shaking any of your balloons at the pigeons? If you get the Robert Frost one, Manny says one of my favorite lines. 

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Are there modern patches that fix the issue with one puzzle being hard linked to your CPU speed?  The last time I played GF, I actually had to use a CPU throttler to get past one puzzle.  That's the only puzzle I really remember infuriating me.

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Are there modern patches that fix the issue with one puzzle being hard linked to your CPU speed? The last time I played GF, I actually had to use a CPU throttler to get past one puzzle. That's the only puzzle I really remember infuriating me.

The first official patch released way back allegedly fixed a certain elevator-related bug of that nature, however I think that it resurfaced as computers reached the 'ridiculously powerful compared to 1998' tier.

Just in case nobody mentioned it already, this is a good time to point out that ResidualVM runs Grim Fandango pretty much flawlessly right now, apart from perhaps a very occasional animation glitch or something. But more importantly, ResidualVM actually includes a lot of bug fixes for issues with the original game; there were surprisingly many, including one that infamously caused a long and important part of the game's dialogue to never occur.

I recall reading that the CPU speed issue was improved further in ResidualVM too. And unlike with the original, you can enable anti-aliasing and such with no ill effects — something that makes the game look tremendously better, especially on a TV.

If you find bugs, you can report them on the ResidualVM GitHub tracker and they'll be fixed at some point. I heartily recommend that those playing it do this, so that we can all continue to enjoy the game forever.

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Well, if the Petrified Forest has some notoriously bad puzzle design I don't think I want to get too hung up on trying to solve these without hints. I think I learned my lesson after playing The Dig.

 

For starters, am I at all on the right track with the tree-wheel puzzle? More specifically, does it involve some combination of turning the wheel on while Glottis is up there and then moving the wheelbarrow to rest on one or more conduits which will somehow cause it to become unbalanced?

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Thanks for the hints!

 

 

JUST GIVE ME A SECOND TO BALANCE THESE DOGGIES

 

Maybe I'm reading into this hint more than I should but I'm going to try waiting a bit before I turn the wheel on to see if giving Glottis a chance to make his adjustment will make a difference.

 

 

As for the other puzzle:

 

Is the arrow always pointing at an exit?

 

Hmmmm... Now that I think about it, it looked like it might have been sort of pointing between two exits, but it's really hard to tell. Based on the earlier comments about navigation issues and whatnot I am going to assume that there might be some ambiguous spot between two exits that I need to go through.

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