Grim Fandango being remastered for PS4 and Vita

[arde]

Finished this today, happy to have finally played it through as I got stuck in year 3 as a kid. Apart from the crashes/freezes around years 2-3 (save often!) I really enjoyed playing it again. Some of the puzzles are really ridiculous though, especially the ones I didn't remember from before

[dium]

I'm playing this game for the commentary, essentially, since I've replayed Grim so often that I could probably try to speed run it (which would be very boring).

 

One thing I've noticed is that, out of the many times I've played this game, I must pick the same dialog options every time. I just recently heard some dialog from Lupe (the coatcheck girl) that I've never heard before, which was surprising. Unfortunately, while I can remember all the puzzle solutions clearly, I can't remember which dialog options are mutually exclusive and which ones I've never chosen. But perhaps this is a particularly neurotic completionist thing to be worrying about.

[ratamero]

I hadn't played this in maybe 10 years before buying the new version for my Vita. It still is probably my favourite game ever. I'm going through it slowly so I can enjoy it for longer, and it's just so well written and funny and brilliant. 

[Ben X]

I feel the same way. I think this was normal at the time, but modern times have moved game storytelling forward somewhat, and I would be disappointed if a newly designed game had you discover crucial puzzles by noticing some minor detail that you can't really care about.

 

Why would Manny care about the server room in the beginning? There is a cut-scene that tries to make it relevant, but fails to really motivate Manny to explore it. So, since it's really long since I last played it, I missed the fact that

Domino's tube

is interactive and was wandering around aimlessly. Manny is kind of separate from the player, having more knowledge than him or her, but he never tries to motivate the player to do anything, leaving everything to the player -- collecting background info, sorting the relevant from the irrelevant and come up with motivation and an action plan that is not necessarily very in sync with what is going on on the screen.

 

I think the puzzles are definitely not up to modern standards. In the beginning, there's also the thing with the rope... there's an implication that you can use it to find some new area, but no real indication that it's just too early. I kept trying to do something with it again and again.

 

Sorry to necro-disagree, but I just saw Jennegatron's post about this issue in an episode thread and also recently played through year one again.

 

I think the motivation for the server-room puzzle is set up well:

 

You're told that Domino is getting the good leads. Manny says almost directly to the player "I'm sick of missing the good leads, I need to TAKE one." You can see that Dom has a locked red pipe in his room and you can also see it in the server room. And you get told that putting stuff like beer bottles in the pipes breaks the server. Plus the tie-rope thing I think is perfectly fine - you throw the end of the rope but it doesn't latch on. Surely it's inherently implied that you need to do something more before it will?

 

I do think that there are problems with the puzzles elsewhere, though. Especially

the one where you're getting Glottis to vomit a load of stuff over the domino trap

where you pretty much only figure it out because you're only given access to a handful of objects and end up doing what makes most sense with those objects without knowing what the outcome is supposed to be.

[jennegatron]

The tube room was the place that I got really monumentally stuck in my playthrough. I played through a little of the beginning again with commentary after I beat the game, and Manny's inner monologue clued me into why I was doing what I was doing, but only after knowing what I was supposed to do through brute force the first time through?
I don't know what they could have done differently, maybe allow me to vent to an NPC about how frustrated I was for

getting exclusively bad leads, and maybe the secretary could have told me to do something about it, leading me to think that I should find a way to steal one of Domino's leads. I think that would have been more effective for me, personally, instead of the inner monologue. 

They made it clear to me along the way what it was I was supposed to do with the balloons & the foam to gum up the gullyworks, but I really didn't feel like I knew why I needed to disrupt the service.

[Merus]

For me, it was much more natural to

go to Domino's office and try and steal some from there rather than do this ridiculous thing with the pneumatic tubes.

[Ben X]

Well yeah, but then you can't so you follow the big red clue to the more convoluted way of doing it. Adventure games!

[SecretAsianMan]

This is probably going to be a repeat of stuff said in this thread but it wasn't said by me so here goes.

 

Despite loving this game as a kid and being really excited for the remaster, I didn't actually pick it up until the last Steam sale.  I started playing it last night and I'm surprised how much of it I remember.  I probably can't recite the puzzle solutions directly from memory, but as soon as I was there I knew exactly what to do.  Without worrying about trying to figure out the puzzles, I've been able to stop and truly appreciate the art and style of this game.  It's such a fantastic setting.

 

That said, the remaster is rather glaring in a lot of ways.  Seeing a higher texture head on a low res body is really jarring.  Having it suddenly pop into an original cutscene then return to the updated game really emphasizes how much time has passed since the game's release.

 

Still, I'm having fun swimming in nostalgia.  I'm even using the tank controls, as Tim intended.

[Udvarnoky]

I actually didn't even consider using the point 'n click controls when I played through the remaster.  You'd think I would have at least tried out of curiosity.  Maybe when I get home.

[syntheticgerbil]

I've been playing this lately, looks great but there seems to be a number of buggy animations. I'm not sure if it was in the original, as there are a few things I do remember such as certain objects not actually connecting with the hand holding them, but I don't remember so many conversations where a character's animation will start popping back and forth between different positions, sometimes getting as silly as the character going into a T-pose for a fraction of a second. It's kind of looking really unprofessional unfortunately. Also I hit some kind of game ending bug by talking to Nick about needing a lawyer where I can never complete the conversation. I had multiple saves since I heard about newly introduced game endings bugs, but I didn't think it'd be so soon.

 

Also "GOLO FLAKES?!" and the water animation on the Rubacava four way hub skipping. Oh and NOW the cat race announcer completely stops after one visit! Come on now, Double Fine.

 

That said, it's nice to have a game where the in game stuff now matches the cutscenes in terms of lighting, yet now the cutscene stuff sometimes looks worse because even though the documentary said they had uncompressed versions of the cutscenes (which I am guessing means 100% fidelity image sequences), I see some parts with some pretty nasty compression, especially when Glottis is driving

 

I suppose I figured this would be a more impeccable remaster since I thought it was mostly a factor of slapping on higher res everything but it seems it's not so. I love this insane amount of commentary and concept art though.

[SecretAsianMan]

I'm not playing with the commentary yet because I want to relive it once as a game before I start looking behind the scenes.  I'm looking forward to that stuff though.

[Thrik]

I've been playing this lately, looks great but there seems to be a number of buggy animations. I'm not sure if it was in the original, as there are a few things I do remember such as certain objects not actually connecting with the hand holding them, but I don't remember so many conversations where a character's animation will start popping back and forth between different positions, sometimes getting as silly as the character going into a T-pose for a fraction of a second. It's kind of looking really unprofessional unfortunately. Also I hit some kind of game ending bug by talking to Nick about needing a lawyer where I can never complete the conversation. I had multiple saves since I heard about newly introduced game endings bugs, but I didn't think it'd be so soon.

 

Also "GOLO FLAKES?!" and the water animation on the Rubacava four way hub skipping. Oh and NOW the cat race announcer completely stops after one visit! Come on now, Double Fine.

 

That said, it's nice to have a game where the in game stuff now matches the cutscenes in terms of lighting, yet now the cutscene stuff sometimes looks worse because even though the documentary said they had uncompressed versions of the cutscenes (which I am guessing means 100% fidelity image sequences), I see some parts with some pretty nasty compression, especially when Glottis is driving

 

I suppose I figured this would be a more impeccable remaster since I thought it was mostly a factor of slapping on higher res everything but it seems it's not so. I love this insane amount of commentary and concept art though.

 

The original wasn't too buggy in terms of animations when it came out, but for some reason it's become progressively much more so over the years. I can only assume that newer operating systems/hardware/drivers are causing issues with the LUA scripting. In an old interview, the lead programmer did say that they encountered a lot of animation bugs during development. I guess that it's just a weak area of the engine, and without all that old tooling for debugging them it's probably a nightmare to improve. These quotes jump to mind:

 

They ended up coding a lot of state machines by hand in Lua for individual animations and dialogs, when these things should really have been coded more rigidly in the engine and exposed to the scripts via a higher-level abstraction.

 

You could isolate a section of code that was generating an animation glitch and bind it to a menu item from Lua, then trigger it repeatedly from the tool so you could debug it in relative isolation from the game logic.

[syntheticgerbil]

I think I may have remembered some glitches where the animation would pop to the next pose midway but I don't know why the occurance seems to have increased here. I definitely don't remember characters suddenly going into T-pose for an instant. It looks really janky.

 

I also wonder if the game being increased to 60fps (it is increased from 30 right? I am not actually sure) has something to do with some of these popping up. I seem to remember the spiral the bone makes in the dam when it hits the tar because of whatever animation bug, but here it looks terrible. I did laugh when Manny gets in the booth with Chowchilla Charlie while he has a cigarette in his hand and it bends backwards. I vaguely remember triggering that long ago.

 

Just kind of annoyed that this seems to have been released without the substantial amount of polish a remaster should in theory have.

 

Also speaking of the Petrified Forest area, I am more annoyed than ever about the sign puzzle. I hated it before since it's just placing it on a spot on the map but it seems even more silly now that I realize the only reason to solve it is to get the key from the sign ahead of the path. Really should have just been the puzzle where Glottis upgrades the shocks on the Bone Wagon alone and you go straight to the damn. And god, I was laughing out loud making Glottis spin on top of that tree again. I forgot how hilarious that was. "Maaaannny, yoooooou promissssssed!"

[Thrik]

I had the T-pose bug when playing the original game via Residual — in fact, Manny became permanently stuck in that position, even when I reloaded after saving — not to mention various bizarre bugs with characters' heads snapping into ridiculous positions and things just not going the way they're meant to. I haven't played through the whole remastered edition yet so I couldn't tell you if it's worse, but what I can say is that it was already pretty bad. Of course, in my case it was difficult to tell what was issues caused by running the game's code on newer platforms, and what was just Residual. It wouldn't surprise me if they used something like Residual for the remastered edition.

[syntheticgerbil]

Actually the remaster sounds exactly the same as the problems you were having on Residual. Is it using any aspects of the Residual VM? I can't seem to find an answer.

 

I guess I can't for the life of me remember if playing it from the original CDs with the patch had these graphical errors or not. Perhaps I just didn't notice back then because I had very little understand of how 3D graphics worked.

[thorn]

I thought DF just licensed Residual then did some tweaks?

 

*goes to Wikipedia to check*

 

It says that they reached out to some of Residual's developers. I'm gonna work on the assumption that means they took the bulk of Residual's codebase and made their own tweaks.

 

Was there any resolution on releasing the soundtrack?

[mikemariano]

I am currently at the Santa Barbara Bowl for a Morrissey concert slash Day of the Dead celebration. There are people here in Manny, Meche, and Sal costumes!

 

[Bjorn]

Okay, it might be a bit weird to necro a video game thread to make a book recommendation, but hear me out.

 

I just finished Dead Boys by Gabriel Squailia.  And if you ever thought, "Gee, I wish there was something else like Grim Fandango, but different", then this is it.  A journey through the land of the dead by a bunch of rotting corpses hell bent on an impossible quest that might just be the imaginings of an incredibly bored and slightly crazed taxidermist who gets by mending the flesh of the dead, because not even death stops vanity.  

 

Overall I really liked it.  It's charming and weird and was exactly the kind of goofy adventure I was needing right now.

[Ben X]

At E3, a ton of the voice actors reunited for a live table read of some Grim Fandango scenes. Live music from Pete McConnell and hosting by Tim Schafer!

 

(It's on Facebook video, not sure if one needs to be registered to watch it...)

 

EDIT: youtube version found!

 

 

 

[RubixsQube]

Ugh, watching this made my heart swell (even though Jack Black is doing a Latinx accent and I'm not super happy with that). This soundtrack is one of my favorites, and it was wonderful to hear it live. 

[Simon]

I really enjoyed this! They did a great job of picking out key scenes that let each actor shine, and also kind of told the whole story within an hour. What a perfect voice cast. 

 

Glottis' goodbye still gets me, right where my heart used to be, twenty years later.

 

Clint's whistling made me want to play Outlaws again, or maybe just track down the soundtrack.