1. I do not share the halcyon memories of playing these old adventure games w/ many in my peer group. I played them, yes. I had fun for sure but they do not exactly reach the highest heights of refined gameplay. Once I got done microwaving the hamster or telling the text parser to go fuck itself, I always just got frustrated at the trial and error halfway through and either cheated or quit.
2. I still do that.
3. For what it's worth, if you do have halcyon memories of playing these games, this remastered version of The Day of the Tentacle really gets it right. They smooth out the pixelated graphics and bring in brighter, more vibrant colors. They updated the compressed, cruddy sounding audio w/ a clearer, modern sound. There's controller support. That's it. It is still the same game just presented w/ a bit more polish.
4. I can see how someone might find the humor in this game charming but I don't believe anyone who says they think it is actually funny. I smiled a few times but never laughed.
5. The setup here is a tentacle drinks a bunch of toxic waste and takes over the world. A mad scientists recruits a stoner, a nerd and a ditz to travel through time and fix things. This is could maybe be the plot of a straight-to-VHS movie full of post-rehab 80s brat packers. Like I said, this game is not actually funny.
6. The way this game works is you solve puzzles by clicking on things until it's time to stop clicking on things.
7. I'm not going to say there aren't some clever puzzles here but I'm also not gonna say you don't have to sometimes just do some random-ass bullshit to figure stuff out. Or use a walkthrough. This game is a quarter century old, you won't be the first person who cheated.
8. The voice acting was done in 1993. God help us.
9. One actor who does a bad impression of Woody Allen and uses it to voice both some random nerdy guy and John Hancock. I will admit, that was one of the things I smiled at in the game. Of course, I did not laugh because this game is not actually funny.
10. Early on, your characters get split up between three time periods. You can easily send items to other time periods using a time traveling porta-john. You can also leave things some place in the past and have them be there in the future, normally changed to some degree. This turns the whole game into one giant puzzle made of sub-puzzles you need to puzzle through.
11. While number 10, sounds good on the surface, the execution of this idea is problematical. For starters, some items are available way out of context and way before you need them. Combine this w/ some of the goofy, not-actually-funny puzzle solutions and you wind up w/ a lot of Day of the Tentacle being needlessly obtuse and frustrating. This being said, this frustration is at least tempered by the fact that you can not put yourself in a situation where you cannot finish the game. Believe it or not, in some of these old adventure games, you could get yourself in a failure state where you couldn't win and the game didn't even have the courtesy to tell you that.
12. This is the golden age of this type of game in some people's minds. I don't get it.
13. So yeah, at its heart, at this point in time, this is really a nostalgia trip or a history lesson depending how old you are or how much attention you were paying in the nineties. If you are after either of things, absolutely, you should play Day of the Tentacle. If you are looking for the most fun way to spend a few hours of your time, don't play a decades old adventure game.
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