Zeusthecat

The Big LucasArts Playthrough

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I'm sure he's aware of it, though (at the very least due to Rodi's avatars!), as was I when I played COMI before Grim had been released.

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Haha, that's the first time I gave thought about the way in which my avatar might spoil something.

For the record: hardly.

Another open expanse of adventure gaming I had was in Deponia, where you get to run around a town freely for half of the game. I really liked that part, so I concur that a measure of freedom and non-linear exploration can work to create something more than a straight succession of scenes/screens could.

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No no, I'm saying Zeus is likely aware of the existence of the character Manny Calavera and what he looks like, at the very least due to your avatars.

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No no, I'm saying Zeus is likely aware of the existence of the character Manny Calavera and what he looks like, at the very least due to your avatars.

Well let's just leave it at that then. The extent of what I've heard so far is that there is a place called Rubacava and a character named Manny Calavera whom Rodi's avatar is based on. I still have zero context for any of this so I would be inclined to think that nothing too important has been spoiled.

Also, thanks for looking out.

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The Grim Fandango reference in Curse wasn't entirely clear when it first came out because Grim Fandango wasn't even out yet at that point. When I first played Curse I only vaguely knew about Grim Fandango and it had encouraged me to download the HUGE 10 mb trailer. At least I think it was 10 megabytes. I remember it taking a few hours on our dialup.

 

With that in context, what on earth is there to spoil?

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I think I went on a similar trajectory. When I saw that Grim trailer (10 MB!) I was blooooooooooown aw-IGN.com-ay.

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Okay, let me explain once and for all!

 

I'm just saying that specifically referring to Manny's cameo in the chicken restaurant in COMI is a teeny bit of a spoiler, as it ruins that nice surprise. Zeus hasn't played Grim yet but presumably is aware of the existence of Manny Calavera and what he looks like. Therefore he is likely to experience the surprise cameo in a similar way to how I, and presumably many others, did when they first played COMI (Grim had not come out but I was aware of it).

 

I fully agree that it's not a big deal!

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Just a quick update... I'm still stuck. I tried the log throwing contest with the barber but it turns out Guybrush can't throw a log to save his life. I suspect I might need to somehow cut down a rubber tree and toss that instead since it would probably be all bouncy in typical cartoon fashion. Everything else seems to be a dead end at the moment. I can't pick any items up at the cabana since I'm not a member, Gary Coleman doesn't seem to like any of my items and just wants to keep scamming me out of lemonade, and the dudes on the stage are too busy rehearsing to give a shit about anything I show them. I still haven't been super thorough at this point though so I'm hoping that taking another pass through each area and exhausting all item usage possibilities will reveal what I am missing.

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Another hour and a half spent and I'm still stuck. That mega monkey is kicking my ass so far.

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In larger, less-directed spaces in adventure games, I find it helpful to break down what I'm trying to achieve. So, right now you'll need a map, a ship and a crew. You already know where your crew are, and if you talk to 'em, it won't be too hard to work out what they want from you.  

 

Apols if I'm stating the really obvious, here :P 

 

Have you searched thoroughly around the backstage area? I know I missed a few things there my first time around.

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In larger, less-directed spaces in adventure games, I find it helpful to break down what I'm trying to achieve. So, right now you'll need a map, a ship and a crew. You already know where your crew are, and if you talk to 'em, it won't be too hard to work out what they want from you.  

 

Apols if I'm stating the really obvious, here :P

 

Have you searched thoroughly around the backstage area? I know I missed a few things there my first time around.

 

Yeah, I've definitely spent enough time to where I have several different tasks I need to accomplish broken down. There just seems to be a piece I am missing somewhere.

 

My main focus has been on the barbers. I have to beat the big guy at the caber toss to get him on my crew and I need to find something valuable for the shorter bald guy (and I don't recall at the moment what the other barber needed). I feel like I've picked up everything there is to pick up so far and none of it suffices for the bald barber. I also haven't been able to figure out any way to rig the caber toss so I can beat the big dude. So I'm at a complete dead end on both of these right now. I'll double check with the taller skinny dude to see what he was after.

 

Other things that I've identified are:

  • I need to get the scissors out of the ceiling (likely for the undergrowth blocking Danjer Cove) but I can't get the chair high enough to reach them without the barber stopping me. I tried to wait till he was looking down but he catches me every time.
  • There must be some way I can get the lemonade from Gary Coleman. I'm not sure what this would be for but I'm guessing I'll need it.
  • Fat chickens on the beach. No interactions are working with these little demons yet.
  • Restaurant that requires reservation. Haven't found it yet and the guy promptly kicks me out every time. It doesn't seem like I can do anything with the drive thru yet either. And I'm suspicious of the drain pipe and mud by the building but so far these are useless too.
  • I can't get into the Cabana or pick up any of the items and the dude doesn't take any kind of bribe.
  • There is still a building with a locked door that I can't open.
  • I found that I can use the voodoo doll in the voodoo hut to hurt some dude. I'm not sure where he is though, the room he is in doesn't look familiar.
  • I need to find some instructions so I can use the lights at the stage area.

And I spent a lot of time searching the backstage area but all of the items there can't be picked up or used with anything I have. I am starting to suspect that I am missing an item somewhere because I keep running across new things in various areas that I haven't noticed before. Or maybe I'll get lucky and figure something out as I ponder all of the possibilities throughout the day.

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I finally made two key discoveries last night.

 

First, after talking to the skinny barber dude again and hearing him tell me I would need to beat him in a duel, I figured I would try to use the white glove on him to see if that would work to initiate some kind of old fashioned cartoon duel. Sure enough, Guybrush slapped him in the face with the glove and we headed to the field near the grassy knoll to have a duel. At the start, I was able to pick one of three guns to use in the duel. So I picked one and was quickly defeated. After a few more failed attempts I noticed that I could pick up the banjo that was in the case behind the guns and upon doing so the real duel began.

 

The dueling banjo segment that followed was pretty awesome but it did end up taking me far longer to figure out than it probably should have. It was clear right away that I needed to basically repeat whatever riff he threw at me but for the first dozen or so attempts, I mistakenly focused squarely on the timing of when he hit those off-notes and ignored the fact that he was actually hitting specific notes. Each time I failed I was convinced that I had just missed the timing but after repeated failures I eventually noticed that Guybrush was plucking different strings based on where I clicked. At that point I realized that that was what I needed to be paying attention to when the other dude took his turn. Once I had this realization, I wrote down each sequence of notes as the other dude played and repeated them back until I finally got far enough to get him to go into his ultimate solo (which was fucking awesome by the way). Seeing that I had full control of Guybrush at this point, I quickly figured out that I could pick up one of the guns that was still on the ground and figured I'd try taking a shot at him. The resulting shot destroyed the barber's banjo and he immediately conceded that I must be a real pirate since I was capable of being such a dick. He then agreed to join my crew and upon returning to the barber shop, I found that I was stuck right where I was before with no new items from the previous segment. 

 

Through a slight stroke of luck, I made my next discovery pretty quickly. As I was trying various things to try to reach those scissors, I at one point tried to pick up the paperweight while I was sitting in the barber chair. When I did this Guybrush said that he was too low to reach it, so I used the handle to elevate myself and tried again. This time Guybrush kicked the paperweight off of the book which ultimately caused the big Scottish pirate to go into the next room to get something he needed to cut my hair. That finally gave me the window I needed to elevate the chair high enough to grab the scissors that were stuck in the ceiling. Now that I finally had the scissors (and paperweight), I headed back over to the undergrowth.

 

As I expected, I was able to use the scissors to cut through the undergrowth and that led me to a clearing with a bunch of items strewn about. Shortly after I entered the area, a big ass python came down and ate me. Once I picked up all of its stomach contents I found that I was able to mix an ipecac flower with some maple syrup and, after giving the snake the mixture, I was barfed out into some quicksand. And this is about where I stopped.

 

I have to say, it felt pretty damn good to finally start making some progress again. 

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Haha, awesome. Reading that makes me really want to dig this out and play, it is after all my second favourite LEC classic (Grim Fandango is #1, obviously).

 

That section you've just hit incidentally has some of my favourite music from the whole game throughout it and the following several areas — basically everything beyond the trail you cut. Not that the game isn't oozing wonderful melodies.

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I totally agree on the music. Even with the small amount of content I've seen so far I have found that the music is probably the best out of any of the LEC games I've played at this point. And I know I already said it once but goddamn that banjo segment was awesome. Fuck Guitar Hero, I want Banjo Hero now.

 

And to add just a little bit more to my perception of the game, I think I've reached a point where all of my initial apprehension regarding the art style and voicework is gone. This game looks and feels pretty damn good and I think I'm okay with it ditching the aesthetic of the older games now.

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The syrup of ipecac joke is one of my favorite dumb jokes in any game.  Also Guybrush's comment about how weird the feeling of getting all his cool items sucked out by the quicksand is.

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I haven't played this too much over the last week but I did make a bit more progress the other day.

 

When I last left off, I had just been barfed out by a snake and was stuck in some quicksand. There was a vine just out of my reach and a few other plants nearby and, luckily, I was able to grab a reed and a thorn to make a simple blowgun (I think I also picked up the reservation ticket I needed here). Unfortunately, I wasn't able to use the blowgun to knock the vine free but Guybrush did offer a hint that I would need to drop something on it from above to accomplish my goal. I was able to figure out what to do from there pretty quickly because I had previously used the paperweight with the balloon and saw that the balloon would just float next to me after doing so. So I gave it a shot and once the balloon was floating above the vine I was able to shoot it with the blowgun to cause the paperweight to fall down and knock the vine free which I was able to use to pull myself to safety.

 

After pulling myself free from the quicksand, I finally found myself in Danjer Cove. I explored around a little bit here but there wasn't much more than a boat with a hole near the water's edge, a waterfall, some sharks, and a pirate ship out in the water. When I realized that there was nothing I could do here yet I decided to head back to the town.

 

Now that I had the reservation slip, I decided to go back to the restaurant to see what I could find there. After giving my reservation slip to the restaurant guy and talking to him for a bit, I gleaned two key pieces of information. First, he made it clear that I would need to find something crunchy for him to eat. He seemed interested in the gum I had but wanted something crunchy first so I'm guessing after I find what he's looking for, I might be able to give him the gum which I hope his gold tooth will get stuck to and then I can give that to the third barber since he wants something made of gold. The second piece of information he divulged was that he had a membership card to the beach place that he lost when he was cooking something. So I will definitely need to find that membership card to gain access to that beach cabana area.

 

After talking to the restaurant guy, I scoured the room and was able to find a serrated knife in that Grim Fandango guy's back. I also found a biscuit cutter, a pie tin, and a biscuit which spawned some maggots in my inventory after I tried to eat it. Up until this point I had been looking for some kind of saw in the hopes that I could use it to cut down one of the rubber trees to rig the caber toss, so I figured it was worth a shot to try using the serrated knife instead. Unfortunately it didn't work, but through a stroke of luck I also tried using it on the thing holding the rum barrel (I'm drawing a blank on what that damn thing is called) which caused the barrel to fall down and roll right up next to the rubber tree leaving a trail of rum. It was obvious what I needed to do at this point so I lit the trail with the ember I had in my inventory and exploded the tree right onto the pile of logs. Finally, I challenged the big barber again and defeated him in the caber toss which convinced him to join my crew. And that's about the extent of my progress.

 

So now I'm basically just trying to locate that membership card and find something crunchy for the restaurant dude. 

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A biscuit which spawned some maggots in my inventory after I tried to eat it . 

 

Ugh!  I forgot about that.  I got skeeved opening my inventory every time after that.  They wiggled!

 

Now I'm hoping Broken Age doesn't have an animated inventory.

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There's neat callback later to one of the signs you may have read whilst stuck in the quicksand. Made me laugh loads, and it's little attention-to-detail gags like that which made Lucasarts the champions of the genre.

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There's neat callback later to one of the signs you may have read whilst stuck in the quicksand. Made me laugh loads, and it's little attention-to-detail gags like that which made Lucasarts the champions of the genre.

 

I did read the signs a couple times while I was stuck but I don't recall exactly what they said. Hopefully I catch the reference later on.

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I played some more over the last couple days and got a bit further.

 

Shortly after resuming play, I made my way back to the restaurant to double check everything there and see if there was anything I missed. It appeared that I had found all of the items I could pick up in that area so I decided to go back through my inventory and make absolute sure there was no potential item combination I was missing. As I was going through my items I happened to try using the maggots on the nasty chicken and was disgusted to see them gobble up the whole thing and run back into the biscuit barrel. This ended up being exactly what I was missing and upon looking at what remained of the nasty chicken, I found the Brimstone Beach Club membership card nestled inside.

 

After picking the card up I headed straight over to the dickhead cabana boy. After showing him the card, I picked up a towel from the towel bin and headed to the beach. Unfortunately the sand was too hot so I had to figure out a way to get across without burning my feet. Luckily it didn't take me too long to figure out that I could grab multiple towels, dip them into the ice bucket back at the entrance, and lay them down on the sand to make a path. Once I finally got across I talked to the creepy guy at the end who kept calling me 'babe'. After talking to him, I learned that he had the map I needed tattooed onto his back and that I would need to wait for him to roll over to get a look at it. Once our conversation was over I was able to pick up the mug resting on his belly and from there I went to the most logical place I could think of: Gary Coleman's lemonade stand.

 

Once I got to Gary Coleman's lemonade stand, I immediately switched out the bottomless mug with the mug I had picked up at the beach. I then asked for a glass of lemonade and was finally able to quench my thirst. Unfortunately, this put Gary Coleman out of business and he ran off, leaving his lemonade pitcher and the mug I had switched out. I then picked up the lemonade pitcher (apparently the mug was useless now since Guybrush didn't want it) and, since the dye vat was right next to me, I tried using the pitcher with the vat and was able to fill the pitcher up with dye. Once I saw that that was what the pitcher was for, I had a sneaking suspicion that I would need to somehow use the dye on the creepy 'babe' guy to trick him into thinking he had a tan or a sunburn so he would roll over to tan his back. So I headed back over to the beach to see what I could do.

 

At this point, getting the 'babe' guy to roll over ended up being pretty simple. I just put the bottomless mug I had picked up from Gary Coleman onto his stomach and poured some red dye into it which then leaked all over the guy's chest. As expected, he was convinced that he was starting to burn and flipped over. Now I could finally look at the map, but upon further inspection I realized that I didn't have any way to copy it. So I spent some more time going through some of the various spaces before eventually discovering that I could snap a wet towel at the cabana boy to scare him away. With him finally gone, I was able to pick up the oil that was sitting next to the fryer. From there I headed straight back to the 'babe' guy to try to use the oil on his back map, thinking that it would somehow enable me to transfer the map. Thankfully, it ended up working, although not quite as I had expected. It turned out that using the oil on his back caused him to get an instant 2nd degree burn which enabled me to get the map by peeling it off his gross back. And this is about as far as I got.

 

I've played at least another hour since getting the skin map and am once again stuck. I strongly suspect I will need to get the gold tooth from Captain Blondebeard and that I will need to use that to convince the third barber to join me. To do that, it looks like I will need to find something crunchy for him to eat since that is what he's craving (and now that I have access to the fryer I bet I will need to fry something in there to make it crunchy). Then either that will knock his tooth out or I will need to give him gum afterwards and the tooth will get pulled out by the gum. To add another interesting layer, I found that I can dip the pie pan in the mud outside the restaurant to pan for gold, but each attempt comes up dry. I'm wondering if Blondebeard's tooth will somehow end up going down the drain pipe and into the mud and I will need to "pan for gold" to get it out. Also, I found a secret button in the beach area with all the feral chickens. It makes one of the fort cannons fire but so far it doesn't seem like it really does anything useful.

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As an example of the difference between Mega Monkey and the normal difficulty, on the normal mode the chicken is already eaten when you enter the restaurant so all you have to do is pick up the card.  Mega Monkey mode adds the step to eat the biscuit and use the maggots.

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As an example of the difference between Mega Monkey and the normal difficulty, on the normal mode the chicken is already eaten when you enter the restaurant so all you have to do is pick up the card.  Mega Monkey mode adds the step to eat the biscuit and use the maggots.

 

So far I'm kind of surprised at the quality of the puzzles. I would have expected a mode with extra puzzles to just have a bunch of half-baked filler puzzles but so far most of them don't seem too unfair or unreasonable.

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Yeah I think they would have designed Mega Monkey mode first, and simply cut out stuff (in a judicious, intelligent way) to make Regular mode.

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