Zeusthecat

The Big LucasArts Playthrough

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Halfway through MI: Special Edition I encountered a game breaking bug and lost my save. Have to start over.

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What was the game breaking bug?

 

I got an issue where I couldn't exit the melee island clock scene and it was stuck, but I can't remember the details.

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I finished my second playthrough of The Dig last night and this time

I didn't revive Maggie when she died.

 

I think this game probably has the best atmosphere of all of the LucasArts games. Aside from some of the obtuse puzzles, the first 80% of the game just has so much fantastic dialog between characters and is much more smartly written than I remembered. Everything they say is just so on point and believable and the environments and music create such a fantastic mood. And then all that space-time 6 nonsense crops up near the end and the game kind of shits on itself. Regardless though I really like this game quite a lot and being able to go through at a decent pace without getting stuck on some of those shittier puzzles made for a much better experience.

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Every Monday on Twitch Day9 streams an adventure game with his 2 friends from his time in grad school at USC.

They played the Dig & it's delightful (they also played the Atlantis Indiana Jones game, and are currently playing Grim Fandango) If anyone wants to experience the Dig without playing it themselves, I recommend this.

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I mentioned it before when Zeus was first looking for recommendations on the LucasArts library, but The Dig is one of my favorites.  It's definitely flawed in some serious ways but its also one of my favorite environments in any game ever.  I love the barren landscape and the hints of what life used to be like.  The loneliness and isolation really felt appropriate to me, moreso than in most other adventure games where I'm the only one in a world full of people that's actually doing anything.  The Dig is on my short list of games I would really love to get a sequel to.

 

Fun fact: There was a novelization based on the game written by Alan Dean Foster.  While I haven't read it myself, its supposed to diverge from the game in several ways.  Notably, the cover art features the ultimately cut 4th astronaut, Toshi Olema.  He was a Japanese businessman who provided major funds and technology for the mission, then in a later iteration became a physicist before being eliminated altogether.  He was to have met a rather gruesome death in the game by being melted by acid.

 

Audio_Book_Novel_Alan_Dean_Foster.jpg

 

dnm_toshidead1.png

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Fun fact: There was a novelization based on the game written by Alan Dean Foster.  While I haven't read it myself, its supposed to diverge from the game in several ways.  Notably, the cover art features the ultimately cut 4th astronaut, Toshi Olema.  He was a Japanese businessman who provided major funds and technology for the mission, then in a later iteration became a physicist before being eliminated altogether.  He was to have met a rather gruesome death in the game by being melted by acid.

 

I found that novelization in a Minneapolis book store while on vacation and bought it!  I have yet to read it, though.

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Oh wow, that's pretty cool! As much as I would have liked for Boston and company to have an additional companion, I think having a fourth character would have made the situation seem a little less dire and isolating. That and it's just hard to imagine another character mixing well with the dynamics between Boston, Brink, and Maggie.

 

Also, for some reason, when I think about how absurd the ending to this game is, the first thing that comes to mind is Lemmiwinks from South Park.

When the alien is thanking Boston Lowe for saving his entire race from space-time 6, I can't help but be reminded of catatafish talking to Lemmiwinks. He almost made it through the whole game as a regular dude and then at the last minute he became a space savior.

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I read that novelization but I must have been in like fourth or fifth grade, so more than fifteen years ago. I don't remember much other than I think it had some extra characters (don't remember Toshi though) and there was a shitload of time spent before Boston even gets up to space.

 

I only read it because it came with our copy of The Dig I think and it was a pretty shitty book, or at least completely unmemorable.

 

Also lots of time I wasted reading LucasArts hint books that were written like novels, although those were a lot more fun than The Dig book. That's certainly something Sierra didn't do in their hint books.

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I think they just had those extra characters on the intercom early on that were later removed then.

 

I recall the book feeling rather dry and boring for a game that was maybe sometimes boring but was also very pretty and had amazing music. Definitely a story that benefits from the visual aspect more than the writing.

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Never read the novelization, which I appreciate as a curio but which I've always heard really bad things about.  It's my impression that it's a bloated equivalent of what Jo Ashburn used to do way better in-house for the hint books.  Very pleased to see that GOG has been including them as bonus features in PDF form.

 

In addition to authoring The Dig novelization, I believe Orson Scott Card did or contributed to the Loom rewrite that was necessary for the CD version.

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I managed to put 3 hours into Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade last night and got through the Castle Brunwald section without getting into any fights. What was originally my least favorite part of the game turned out to be freaking awesome once I understood what I needed to do to get through it non-violently. The different dialog options and disguises you have to use for each soldier is pretty smartly done and I really like how you can glean clues from the environment or from what the soldiers say to give you more options in future encounters. It's just too bad that it is virtually impossible to get through non-violently without a guide or a lot of trial and error because this section really did a good job of capturing that Indiana Jones feel.

 

And this time since I'm not playing the FM Towns version I get to enjoy the sparse and not-so-good bleep bloop version of classic Indy tunes. It's not horrible but the FM Towns version was leagues better.

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Very pleased to see that GOG has been including them as bonus features in PDF form.

That's cool, those were always kind of a fun little bonus. Almost all Lucasarts games we got came with the hintbook anyway, which was bizarre as no Sierra game ever did that. I recall one time and one time only my dad purchased the MI1 hintbook from 1-800-STAR-WARS simply so that I would not longer be stuck. I guess it was almost two months and I could not figure out that damn giving the leaflet to the cannibals puzzle. I still hate that stupid puzzle. Not sure why he didn't just get 1-900-STAR-WARS to give him the one hint I needed.

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I finished The Last Crusade last night with an IQ of 451. This time, since I was using a guide, I actually made notes of each of the hints I needed to determine which was the real grail and then read through the grail diary pdf (which Steam was kind enough to provide a link to right on the game's launch screen) to figure out which one was the correct grail based on the hints in the catacombs and the picture in the art room at Castle Brunwald. Having to go through that was really awesome and I wish more games did that (the cursive handwriting was a little tough to read in some spots though).

 

I really like the whole idea of having a separate thing outside of a game that you have to do to figure out a puzzle in the game. It seems like a really cool way to actually make a game manual more meaningful beyond just having basic information on how to play the game. I miss game manuals.

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I finished The Last Crusade last night with an IQ of 451. This time, since I was using a guide, I actually made notes of each of the hints I needed to determine which was the real grail and then read through the grail diary pdf (which Steam was kind enough to provide a link to right on the game's launch screen) to figure out which one was the correct grail based on the hints in the catacombs and the picture in the art room at Castle Brunwald. Having to go through that was really awesome and I wish more games did that (the cursive handwriting was a little tough to read in some spots though).

 

I really like the whole idea of having a separate thing outside of a game that you have to do to figure out a puzzle in the game. It seems like a really cool way to actually make a game manual more meaningful beyond just having basic information on how to play the game. I miss game manuals.

 

It's great now that we have digital manuals, but as a kid renting/borrowing games, I can think of twice that I got really screwed by not having access to that material.  I think it was startropics that had a combination lock where the code was hidden in the artwork of the manual.  But I didn't have it, so I bruteforced a 3 digit code until I got it. 

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