Your intrepid heroes return to the 90’s, buy some cream, and click on all the things. Day of the Tentacle Remastered faces the CHAIRQUISITION!
Game: Day of the Tentacle Remastered
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/388210/
Devel: Double Fine Productions
Engine: SCUMM (2009)
Price: 14.99 / CDN 16.99
Wazzat: Dr. Fred’s mutated purple tentacle is about to take over the world, and only you can stop him!
*Ported by Josh Bush
Originally released by LucasArts in 1993 as a sequel to Ron Gilbert’s ground breaking Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle is a mind-bending, time travel, cartoon puzzle adventure game in which three unlikely friends work together to prevent an evil mutated purple tentacle from taking over the world!
Disclaimer: They sent us keys
CHAIRQUISITION:
Makes with the working
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- 60 @ 1080 & 2160
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- Like Grim Fandango before it, there’s absolutely nothing to point at here.
- This is probably one of the very few games where the frame limiting is a good thing.
- I’ve already heard the 1080’s fans scream at the top of its aluminum fins (surprisingly quiet) with some of the benchmarks, no need to put strain on it for this simple a game.
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Shiny / Sounds
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- Looks like someone took an auto-vector convert-o-tron to the original content.
- I’m not saying it looks bad in the slightest but, yeah, I’m just saying.
- Zero fks were given about the mouth animations / voice sync.
- Double Fine located the original master tapes so it definitely makes with the sounds.
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- Oh man, that voice acting. Quality 90’s stuff. Right up there
- Yes, for what it is, the game looks good. The remastered models look a lot better than the old ones.
- I’m still not blown away.
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- Bonus points for the remastered audio.
- That said, visually the game is still actively trying to maintain the dithering in the backgrounds and the slow/low-framecount animations.
- This wasn’t as glaring in Grim Fandango, although that game’s 3D models on top of 2D backgrounds were certainly jarring on their own.
- I guess those are the limitations of having the new engine still be based on the old SCUMM engine.
- Maybe time to remaster the engine itself, ‘eh Double Fine?
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Control
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- Point, click, shite gets done.
- I tinkered around with the original version and it’s a massive improvement.
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- It thinks my steam controller is a PS4 controller. Whatever that means
- But yeah, point and clicked
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- This was a very good surprise.
- The Mistress and the Logitech F310 both work out of the box, if you really need them.
- The surprise came when I saw that they give you the old UI, with the Use, Open, Close, Push, Pull, etc., commands.
- But they also give you a newer UI, very similar to that of Broken Age.
- I’m almost willing to believe the Broken Age kickstarter was to fuel the R&D necessary for the remasters and the game itself was kinda just a side thing.
- I’m on to you, Tim!
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FUN
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- Disclaimer: I never played the original.
- Old point-and-click adventure games are hella obtuse.
- Requiring hella time and unless you are sitting at home on summer holiday (or a recent grad with a degree in liberal arts) you’re going to be hard pressed to find it.
- It’s three people, in three times with a novel time travel mechanic.
- You steal things and attempt to use them on other things.
- Sometimes you must combine stolen items with others because that was a thing back in the day.
- Outside of that it’s listening to endless dialogue (mind you, some of it still holds up) and using all the things on all the things in hope of causing another thing to happen.
- At lot of neat happened in 93, the first X Files, Haddaway’s “What is love”, Dazed and Confused, and most importantly Groundhog Day.
- DOTT, was more of a side note, at best.
- And like everything I just mentioned I don’t think it needed to be remastered.
J-
- I never really got into point and click adventure games
- Up until I started doing LGC, I think I really only played one or two, sporadically if at all. One of them was Myst in my therapist’s office. Then I went and talked to him about the trauma Myst caused me
- He also Had Indiana jones and the kingdom of atlantis, so I played more of that
- But I digress, this is definitely a point and click adventure game. It operates on Sierra Logic, while I operate on regular logic
- Some of the dialogue got a chuckle out of me, I basically devolved to attempting to brute force the solution, which wasn’t particularly fun
- Still, I can’t say I hated the game. I have no strong feelings one way or the other
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- Platformers, I’ve grown tired of.
- RTS, I hate with a passion.
- Sports games… Just, why??
- Point and click adventures, outside of Grim Fandango, I never really saw the appeal.
- And Day of the Hentai Sex Instrument is a very good example of that.
- This game, and the other Lucas Arts/Sierra games back in the 90’s, spawned the “Videogame Logic” meme.
- At one point near the start, in order to release one of your characters, you need to paint the Kumquats in a tree red so an NPC thinks they’re another fruit and chops down said tree.
- My save game says I’m 25% of the way through, I dunno how.
- All I’ve been doing is rubbing a thing on another thing to make a third thing happen.
- And most of the times, when said rubbing does produce an effect other than the refusal of the character you’re controlling at the time, I have no idea why.
- I guess that’s kinda how most people did it back in the day but back then the “hold down Shift to find the interactible stuff” wasn’t there.
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