There was one particular puzzle involving an elevator that stumped me as a kid. I played the remaster years later and still couldn’t figure it out so I looked up the answer.

Cheating in multiplayer games is obviously indefensible, but I’ve never been above cheating in a single player game. Games are a relaxing outlet for me and if I get frustrated long enough I’ll look up the solution.

That said, I will have one of two reactions upon spoiling a puzzle. I’ll either realize that the answer was right in front of me and I’ll be disappointed I didn’t spend a little more time on it, or I’ll realize I would never have figured it out and be glad I went for help.

The elevator solution was an example of the latter.

As much as I love Jimmy Maher's articles, he has a certain bias against any adventure game that's not streamlined. So, he levels similar criticisms against pretty much every Sierra games, Full Throttle and pretty much any adventure game that is not polished to the level of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle.

He's not completely wrong and the tendency of adventure games to sometimes veer into puzzles that are more moon logic based did I think contribute to the fall of the genre but I do think that he overemphasizes those faults and has a tendency to describe puzzles that are merely hard as impossible to figure out.

Also, I disagree with his criticism of the interface, as a kid it definitely didn't bother me, if anything I find it less frustrating than the amount of pixel hunt in some adventure games.

I remember watching my teenage cousin play it as a young child and being really drawn in, then when he let me play I remember getting frustrated because I had no idea what to do, it ended up being more fun watching him play

I definitely found the world a bit harder to navigate for solving puzzles than the 2D games but the really horrible puzzles in grim fandango were the time based ones that the engine could do but not remotely well. There was one in particular with a wheelbarrow that was fairly easy to figure out but an insane pain to coordinate with the game's controls on our PC

I never liked Grim Fandango despite recognizing its importance. I think it's too weird in a bad way. For me, it lacks the optimistic fantasy of LucasArts previous entries and is just too, well, Grim. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece like, for instance, Monkey Island 2.

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Here's the thing - I remember playing it as a kid and so many things, arguably most of it, went way over my head: the whole travel agent thing and getting ahead in the office, dia de los muertos, the references to noir, the weird but gorgeous mexican art deco combo, I knew nothing about any of it. But I still loved every second of it. It made the world feel very rich and real even if I didn't fully get it, in a way that other games around the time just were not.

Also this is not too dissimilar to how adult life that surrounds every child is to a child. You're sort of used to living in a world that has workings beyond your comprehension and just going along with it. I didn't get what exactly was going on but I did understand /something/ was.

I'm listening to a review of The Great Mouse Detective (1986) which has a similar ethos, as did other content targeting young people from that era. Also I recall picking up books as a kid that were certainly not meant for children and adults back then didn't even blink, and I think it stoked my curiosity and interests and pushed the boundaries of my understanding, as well as prepared me for growing up. I don't think I ended up being a worse person or being traumatized in any way. Part of me wonders if kids' content being much more sanitized these days is a mistake.

> Today "adult" often means "there's sex and/or gore", but the content is still simple and juvenile.

That's indeed an unfortunate fact. In fact, most "adult" stuff is actually for teens or young adults. Teens love sex and gore, they want to be edgy, they want to prove they are not children anymore. Actual adults, the kind with jobs and families, are usually passed that. They may still enjoy their sex and gore, but it is just one theme like another.

I think a good way to make a difference between "teen adult" and "actual adult" is to look at the age and environment of the protagonists. Is the main character a teenager or young adult? Does it involve a school of some kind? Then it is probably for teens. Is the main character middle aged? Does it involve work, especially office work? Are there parents among the protagonists? Then it is probably for adults. Sex and violence are secondary.

That's a really interesting perspective. I grew up around when adventure games were popular, and I learned a lot about the grown-up world (and in fact, American world) through adventure games.

Sam and Max had so much Americana that, playing as a non-American, got me into the deep cuts of American culture. I think a lot of it was contextual. I didn't get all the references at first (e.g. who's John Muir for instance), but the context made it possible for me to figure it out.

This is a great assessment that I never realized until you said it. There are so many games from that era that I played that fit that mold. I was playing Leisure Suit Larry as a 10 year old! I can’t imagine parents these days letting their kids play that at all!

I'm about the same age but personally I had the opposite experience. For me it was refreshing to play something more mature, more 'intellectual', even if I'm sure a lot of the jokes washed over me.

I agree about the accessibility, but Full Throttle is by far my least favorite lucasarts graphical adventure. It's really quite depressing and I deeply dislike the main character.

Agree that it adult stuff in it but loved that as a kid. I always hated 'kid' content, it felt fake.

I thought this game was up there in my favorites as a kid, don't think me or my younger sibling noticed personally, but the puzzles were really hard for sure. Either way we beat it between each other taking turns I remember. Oh yeah, the tank controls were a little less shit with a gamepad - back when there was a dedicated port for those no less

I also remember these games easier to beat before the internet was so pervasive and these kinds of things were the best way to pass rainy days, we'd draw out notes and maps on paper and all sorts of stuff to beat them - different times now, people's attention is way more scattered

And most of all, the classic movie Casablanca. I played Grim Fandango as a 15 year old kid and I when I eventually saw Casablanca many years later it was like, this feels familiar, why… oh wait!

That said, like others here as a kid I loved the adult culture references even when I didn’t fully get all of them.

The tank controls also put me off of it for years.

Sadly, a bug made the perfect score unreachable without hacking in The Colonel’s Bequest. The 1993 rerelease fixed it I think (I believe the fireflies the Wikipedia article mentions were a symptom.)

Its weirdness in indexing arrays notwithstanding, Lua is zero of the most important programming languages ever designed.

It’s much too eccentric for the Pixar formula. They are family movies first and foremost. Characters need to be understandable and relatable to an eight-year-old.

The Pixar movie with similar themes is 2016’s “Coco”. It’s a fine production, but the themes are much less adult than in Grim Fandango.

I play tons of old games these days and if anything it reinforces just how shittier things have become.

> One unfortunate aspect of classic games is how dated mechanics can get. It’s a problem that music or movies don’t really have, besides maybe feeling a bit cliché.

Silent film would like a word. Er, uh… an intertitle.

Lots of modern viewers find films made before digital editing weird, or even near-unwatchable. The editing isn’t quick enough, shot pacing feels too slow.

Acting styles have changed over the years. It can take some work to be able to enjoy film acting from decades ago.

Older special effects are an acquired taste. I’m thinking of things like pirate movies where the ships are very-obviously models in a tub of water, easy to tell no matter how good the models because the water itself looks “small” in motion.

On the music side, older music will be mono. Tons of old blues legends exist only in scratchy, terrible recordings. Older music sounds different than more recent stuff and could not have sounded like the modern kind, because they could only mix so many tracks without ruining the sound, since each down-mix meant a re-recording and a loss of quality. Newer tracks will almost always use visually-aided editing that includes adjusting vocals by eye rather than ear, which changes the way things sound a lot.

Those point-and-click puzzles never felt like anything but time fillers to me. It's interesting to think about the "could have beens" of Western visual novels instead, or at least Telltale-style story games.

The remastered annoyed the hell out of me because it was so buggy. I ragequit the game because there was some point that I had gotten to where one of the characters bugged out in a cutscene and wouldn't move the game forward. I had to reload a save and play about 30 minutes just to get back to the same point. This happened multiple times, too. it's a good game, yes, but the remaster is seriously full of bugs that it's difficult for me to recommend.

Yeah it's one of those games that fits the "thinking about grim fandango vs playing grim fandango" memes.

The characters, the writing, and the story are all so incredibly good. I love that game and I actually think about it a lot lol. But those "puzzles" are just inscrutable.

that's what drew me in

Nicely done

Makes sense considering that movies are usually self-contained art pieces while games these days more of then than not try to upsell you DLC or microtransactions and TV series tend to be so drawn out that hey are cancelled before getting to the point.

Books are the odd one out in that they don't have this problem and as a result are still considered prestigious (probably moreso than movies) but instead suffer from lack of audiovisual communication.

It’s funny, because movies still have the prestige television and games do not, despite both of them outstripping cinema in many ways. Movies have become increasingly global common denominator, with razor edge finances, and have ceded so much ground to TV it’s ridiculous.

An example of this: watch Kramer vs Kramer. It’s a great movie, with a big name cast telling an emotional story. Try to think of a more recent movie like it.

By top i assume you mean most profitable, I guess that movies are simply more accessible and cater to the lowest common denomination.

video games revenues are usually 5x those of video games. call movies 40bb per annum mobile games alone are ~100bb.

Finish Him.

What advances do you think TJD takes advantage of compared to GF besides the improvements in graphics which are IMO barely relevant to the experience. I like the TJD trilogy well enough but claiming it not only holds up to the classics like GF but actually surpasses it is not something I can get behind.

The mariachi band on the first outside scene is unforgettable to me: https://tidal.com/track/101427831?u .

You’re in luck!

https://hexagon.codes/grimhd

> The remastered version has been released before AI upscaling got "interesting"

And thank god for that.

Yes, same.

I had forgotten all about it. Such nostalgia at seeing the cover.

So many factors contributed to big investment in the mid-90s. Windows had exploded, followed by the Playstation a few years later; 3D became relatively easy to use in all games; the US economy was doing well; the internet was full of promise.

It would all come crashing down only a few years later, but it was a massive wave.

Don't forget Gex: Enter the Geko!

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron was also a technical marvel at the time.

Xenogears, Spyro the Dragon, Banjo-Kazooie, Goldeneye, Resident Evil 2...