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Grim Fandango being remastered for PS4 and Vita

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I've never played this before but I remember really wanting to, when I saw my older cousin playing it years ago - I guess it would have been new, or not very old, at least, at the time. I'm really excited it's come out now and looking forward to starting it.

I know some other new readers of the Thumbs out there are also working through the backlog of old Idle Thumbs podcasts and I just wanted to warn anyone else also doing this and planning on playing Grim that Jake spoils a puzzle in, I believe, Ep. 37. I'm a little sad about it because I heard it coming, tried to skip ahead past it, and skipped right to the spoiler exactly. Even worse, it's all in the context of how it was one of his favorite puzzles because he felt like a real detective figuring it out (in much the same manner, I think, of more recent discussion of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.) So I'm a little bummed to be missing that moment now, but still pumped to play this soon.

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but i highly doubt they'll put Grim up straight way like this. Maybe in like 6-9 months

 

They've done it with Double Fine before. I want to say the PS3 version of Stacking was free day one?

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I disagree with Polygon's review of this game. I wore no rose tinted glasses when I played this game for the first time last year and still thought it was really really good and would deserve the same accolades it originally got if it was released today. I think it's fine to gripe a bit about the controls but to complain about the puzzles being too hard and that there are no waypoints or hint system kind of annoys me. In my opinion there was really only one puzzle that was kind of crap (that weird rolling over the pipes puzzle to knock down the tree machine thing) and the rest were designed in a way that made sense but took some time to work through. In other words, they were difficult but fair and I think these types of puzzles are far more satisfying to solve than obvious puzzles. Knocking this game for the puzzles being too hard would be like reviewing a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle and giving it a lower score than a 100 piece puzzle because it was harder to find the pieces you were looking for.

 

Plus, I think a part of what made this game (and a lot of the other LucasArts games) so special for me was the pacing that was imposed by how long it took to work through some of the puzzles. If the puzzles are obvious or there is some kind of heavy hint system at play, the impact of the game and setting is lessened for me. Having difficult puzzles forces me to comb the environments multiple times and burn the settings and items into my memory. It makes the game special to me because not only do I get to enjoy the amazing music and story, but I notice and appreciate every little detail about each environment and interaction that I might otherwise ignore. It has already been around 9 months since I first finished it and I remember every little detail so much more vividly than I typically would with any other modern game that doesn't force you to think.

 

Of course this is all just my measly opinion, but I don't think rose tinted glasses are required for a person to appreciate the greatness of this game as much today as they might have when it first came out.

 

Agreed. I think that tree puzzle didn't make visual sense to me until the 8th or 9th playthrough. The first time solving that puzzle it was just luck.

 

I think overall they have really done a fine job with this remaster-- although it has already crashed for me once, right at the start of year 2, which happened last time I played as well. 

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I disagree with Polygon's review of this game. I wore no rose tinted glasses when I played this game for the first time last year and still thought it was really really good and would deserve the same accolades it originally got if it was released today. I think it's fine to gripe a bit about the controls but to complain about the puzzles being too hard and that there are no waypoints or hint system kind of annoys me. In my opinion there was really only one puzzle that was kind of crap (that weird rolling over the pipes puzzle to knock down the tree machine thing) and the rest were designed in a way that made sense but took some time to work through. In other words, they were difficult but fair and I think these types of puzzles are far more satisfying to solve than obvious puzzles. Knocking this game for the puzzles being too hard would be like reviewing a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle and giving it a lower score than a 100 piece puzzle because it was harder to find the pieces you were looking for.

Man and Justin McElroy wrote that. ;(

 

This is not the only review I've seen where it was a "con" that there was no hint system. Like, the game is really not that hard. It's a very long and nonlinear game at times, but I can think of two or three puzzles that don't make a ton of sense. Even if a puzzle is hard in an adventure game, I try to think if sufficient clues were given in dialogue and description and I had just overlooked them. With Grim and many LucasArts adventures this is more than often the case.

 

But I like your jigsaw analogy, because often I think people tend to shit on adventure games because one or two puzzles got them stuck for a long time, therefore the whole game is unfair. Yeah there is a certain type of expectation when you play enough adventures and get better at seeing how a designer would typically create the puzzles, but learning idiosyncrasies is part of every genre ever.

 

But I guess what do I know, I tend to like more open traditional adventure game stuff like the whole Rubacava section while it seems like now that everyone has played a bunch of choose-your-own-adventure Telltale games and the like where you often are just doing QTEs and solving simple one or two step puzzles, then Grim Fandango is going to seem like the biggest asshole. McElroy at least addresses that shift in demographic I suppose.

 

Anyway, I don't think the pipe puzzle is bad just a little obtuse. The signpost stuff in the same area is kind of stupid in my opinion. Also picking up Chepito underwater made no sense to me because it was very late in the game and while I understood I could grab the guy, there was no indication you could walk while grabbing him, so I had to cheat. I suppose you could argue the game gave you a heads up because there were things you dragged around beforehand, like the battle axe, just not a person. There's one other puzzle I think is really bad but I can't remember it right now. But like you said Zeus, it's like what 3 puzzles out of the 300 in the game? Is that a 7/10?

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I just see another disconnect between score and review.  His review reads fine to me, he praises a bunch of parts of it and then explains the things that bugged him.  Cool.  Then the score is just kind of "Da fuq?"

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I hope they put out the soundtrack somewhere for buying or streaming or anything! I need to pour it into my ears at all times, thanks.

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I just see another disconnect between score and review.  His review reads fine to me, he praises a bunch of parts of it and then explains the things that bugged him.  Cool.  Then the score is just kind of "Da fuq?"

Since Polygon doesn't have that breakdown I can only surmise his major complaint is just the puzzles are too hard from reading it, which doesn't necessarily seem fair.

Is kitty hat day may be a pretty hard puzzle that requires one to pay a lot of attention to the game, but it is not a bad puzzle.

 

For some reason when I think of terrible adventure game puzzles, besides most of Sierra's oeuvre, I mainly think of one of the Simon the Sorcerers where you have to pick up a dog from another area and then use the dog on an Argus so you can sneak past it. Simon turns the dog into house slippers somehow despite no mention of the possibility and the game having not had any sort of magic system (he's a bad sorcerer) and then puts them on and walks past.

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I hope they put out the soundtrack somewhere for buying or streaming or anything! I need to pour it into my ears at all times, thanks.

 

Yeah, bandcamp very welcome, I'm buying. I guess Disney wouldn't like it though - Tim has stated that merchandise is a problem rights-wise, and the soundtrack certainly counts as such.

 

It's not that much has changed though. I rather guess they have about three new minutes Melbourne orchestra total and some very few "hey that's different" additional instrument audio tracks played by Peter himself (which is, granted, a plus ;) ).

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For some reason when I think of terrible adventure game puzzles, besides most of Sierra's oeuvre, I mainly think of one of the Simon the Sorcerers where you have to pick up a dog from another area and then use the dog on an Argus so you can sneak past it. Simon turns the dog into house slippers somehow despite no mention of the possibility and the game having not had any sort of magic system (he's a bad sorcerer) and then puts them on and walks past.

Hush puppies, I guess? God, that is a bad puzzle, even so.

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I think that's what they were going for, but I don't know if those shoes were/are in the U.K., but I suppose they most likely would be. It's almost like they wanted to rival Monkey Island 2's bad monkey wrench puzzle (and steal the "pick up dog" and put it in my coat randomness to boot).

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Anyway, I don't think the pipe puzzle is bad just a little obtuse. The signpost stuff in the same area is kind of stupid in my opinion. Also picking up Chepito underwater made no sense to me because it was very late in the game and while I understood I could grab the guy, there was no indication you could walk while grabbing him, so I had to cheat. I suppose you could argue the game gave you a heads up because there were things you dragged around beforehand, like the battle axe, just not a person. There's one other puzzle I think is really bad but I can't remember it right now. But like you said Zeus, it's like what 3 puzzles out of the 300 in the game? Is that a 7/10?

I can't say anything about the pipe puzzle. The pipe puzzle is the only thing I still remember from 14 years ago (apart from the soundtrack, which I listened to every year). And when I got Grim Fandango to run afterwards, that was about as far as I got before reproducible crashes or ridiculous controls killed off my interest. What comes now, I only remember faintly, and knowledge of the puzzles is wiped out almost completely. I'll tell you in a week how difficult they really are. ;)

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I'm very much enjoying playing through this again both as an adult and also remembering (mostly) how to solve all the puzzles - I'm picking up a lot of the clues in the dialogue that I either just didn't get, or that are just more apparent in the context of the solution.

 

Some of them are really clever or funny, too. Year 2 spoiler:

 

You can talk to Max in Year 2, and Manny will say "Your waiter is so snooty" and Max says "Don't label people, Manny, it puts them in tiny boxes."

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Yeah, bandcamp very welcome, I'm buying. I guess Disney wouldn't like it though - Tim has stated that merchandise is a problem rights-wise, and the soundtrack certainly counts as such.

 

It's not that much has changed though. I rather guess they have about three new minutes Melbourne orchestra total and some very few "hey that's different" additional instrument audio tracks played by Peter himself (which is, granted, a plus ;) ).

 

Most of the cutscene music is orchestral, which amounts to around 50 minutes. I've only watched the opening so far, but that was definitely redone. As for the in-game music, it became apparent very quickly that the original uncompressed music was used as a base and then parts of it were remastered and/or given fresh performances.

 

Overall, it's a very faithful yet worthwhile revisit.

 

I hope they put out the soundtrack somewhere for buying or streaming or anything! I need to pour it into my ears at all times, thanks.

 

I'm informed that the SCUMM Revisited extractor used for the original game still works with the remastered edition's resource files. Unfortunately the cutscene music has all of the voice acting, sound effects, etc mixed in with it just like before. But the good news is that the in-game music is completely extractable, meaning that for the first time we can now listen to the entire soundtrack in high quality.

 

The official soundtrack from before contained only a fraction of the game's music, which would likely be the case for any subsequent releases. So extracting is undoubtedly the best way of getting hold of the in-game stuff. I just hope that Double Fine somehow finds a way of getting the cutscene score out there.

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This remastering seems really buggy, i've had it soft lock on scene transitions, scripted interactions, and even in the inventory multiple times each, always forcing a save restore. I've also had it crash to desktop multiple times. The original game certainly can't have been this busted, or was it?

I'm also not liking the remastered lightning model. The new textures, the shadows, the increased resolution all look great, but the original lighting model is clearly tweaked to hide the seams in the models, which the new lighting model tends to instead highlight. (It looks especially terrible with the white suits Manny and Glottis wear in the second chapter of the game.)

 

Also, speaking on the game itself, there's been quite a few points where the story gives Manny no clear motivation to be doing anything he's doing. You're left kind of randomly clicking into place events that have no clear connection to the objective you may or may not have, simply hoping to find the story again. You're almost never presented a convincing image of a character who could be acting with a clear objective in mind, given the arbitrary and piecemeal tasks he's setting himself on. I've said before that i don't have a strong history with point and click adventure games, so maybe this is just an accepted part of the genre that people don't even think about anymore. In my limited experience with the genre, that hasn't been the case, and it feels really, really weird in such a character-centric and narrative-focused game.

A lot of it could ultimately just be blamed on arbitrary and strange puzzle design, perhaps.

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This remastering seems really buggy, i've had it soft lock on scene transitions, scripted interactions, and even in the inventory multiple times each, always forcing a save restore. I've also had it crash to desktop multiple times. The original game certainly can't have been this busted, or was it?

 

Weird. I have not experienced any of that so far (just got through year one). 

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Only issues I have encountered with the PC version is some lag in the cinematics and one sound bug, where the noise from a tattoo gun followed me till I saved and reloaded.

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Did they up-res the

race track photo with the kitty hats?

That's an important clue that is a little obscured by the low res of the original...

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None of the backgrounds have been touched, so probably not.

 

The backgrounds seem to be the originals, compression and all. It's pretty tragic that high-resolution uncompressed versions were never stored, but by the sounds of it the computers they had took hours if not days to render each frame of pre-rendered 3D — and that was likely at the minimum size they needed (480p) to save time. They found some in high resolution (probably for promotional art), but in this kind of situation it's all or nothing.

 

I know that I've said it before, but TVs handle upscaling 480p content a lot better than virtually any monitor you're likely to use. The compression and poor resolution is way, way harder to spot. If getting the console version is an option, this seems wise. I actually gave the game a shot on my 5K iMac and the backgrounds really do look bad. I've bought the PS4 version to play instead.

 

Of course, I'm still grateful that the game has been released in a format that can be enjoyed for many more years. It's just a great testament to the importance of preserving high-quality master assets whenever possible, even if it's a bit more work.

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Weird. I have not experienced any of that so far (just got through year one). 

 

I have now finished the game and will say that I had probably around half a dozen CTD's and softlocks each over the course of the game, and came across lots of other oddities such as the new directional analog control sometimes not mapping properly to the scene's orientation, or some elements in certain scenes not rendering properly, and probably a dozen or so hotspots not being interactable with the new mouse control scheme. (This was most noticeable when you go to the diner at the end of the first year, there are a lot of miscellaneous things in that scene that i was not able to click on, despite being hotspots that could be interacted with via the other control schemes.)

Most of the softlocks i had happened around the vip lounge in the second year, i got stuck in the elevator that leads to it from the ticket area a couple of times, the door closing shut in front of Manny and him not being able to step out or return to the previous area. Also, after ascending the ladder in the kitchen area and trying to interact with the locker beneath you, manny would descend the ladder and get stuck on a corner while trying to turn around and interact with the doors, becoming completely unresponsive. One more that stood out to me was right after your ship sinks in the third year, if you try to access your inventory while holding the diver, the game softlocks there. The inventory is unresponsive and there's nothing you can do. This one was repeatable, i tried it a few times and it happened each time.

The CTD's seemed completely random, but always happened on scene transitions.

It seems pretty buggy to me.

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After 2 days of installing, uninstalling and reinstalling drivers, with a dozen back-and-forth emails with Double Fine Support, I finally got the game working. So pumped to play it!

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Got through the second year just now without any major bugs. Was expecting more, I've heard a lot of reports about crashes. Up to now, none on my PC.

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Loving the game so far, but I've barely started and I'm already stuck. I've

 

gone to the poisoning and now I'm trying to get into the tube machine. Already did the thing where I put the chemicals in the balloons and the repairman (repair-creature? repair-spirit?) told me that if I use the fire extinguisher on it, everything will go boom! but I haven't figured out how to make that happen. I've also noticed that I can grab the tie-rope when I'm on the ledge, but I can't throw it anywhere useful.

 

Any hints? Don't need anything specific, I'd ljust like to know if I'm on the right track, and maybe the room I should check next.

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I couldn't resist and bought the Vita version as well. Noticed immediately one big bug. When pressing examine button, the game hangs up for 1-2 seconds every time. It's a bit annoying.

I haven't encountered anything like that with the PC version.

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The original game certainly can't have been this busted, or was it?

 

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh, mercy! The original game was buggy out the arse. Crashed to desktop all the frigging time.

 

Loving the game so far, but I've barely started and I'm already stuck. I've

 

gone to the poisoning and now I'm trying to get into the tube machine. Already did the thing where I put the chemicals in the balloons and the repairman (repair-creature? repair-spirit?) told me that if I use the fire extinguisher on it, everything will go boom! but I haven't figured out how to make that happen. I've also noticed that I can grab the tie-rope when I'm on the ledge, but I can't throw it anywhere useful.

 

Any hints? Don't need anything specific, I'd ljust like to know if I'm on the right track, and maybe the room I should check next.

The fire extinguisher is a red herring at this point but you might want to store it in the back of you brain. This is a puzzle that involves exploring the environment rather than any object you're holding.

 

 

 

Seperately: Is it just me or are the FMVs just playing at lower compression? They haven't updated the models or textures as far as I can tell.

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