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Fan-made Maniac Mansion 256 Color Remake

Posted by Hemos on from the Hope-you-don't-get-a-cease-and-desist dept.

xDCDx writes "LucasFan Games have just released an impressive 256 color remake of Maniac Mansion. There is a sequel to Zak McKracken available too. Their website is scarce in details, but the games speak for themselves. It seems the perfect timing for this release, now that LucasArts is obsessed with killing the graphical adventure genre. (If only Ron Gilbert would buy Monkey Island rights and made Monkey Island 3a: The Real Story...)"

3 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Woo and yay by Xpilot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Apart from Monkey Island, Lucasarts appear not to care for the genre they brought so much to in the early Nineties.

    Not just Lucasarts. It seems *nobody* cares about adventures anymore. Because it's just more profitable to make yet-another-3d-first-person-shooter-this-time-with -prettier-graphics!

    --
    "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
  2. Re:How many of you completed Maniac Mansion? by meringuoid · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I played Maniac Mansion on my old pc back in the good ol' 80's. I remember it as being the absolute most difficult adventure game to complete. Did anyone succeed?

    Yep. Finished the NES version, though, which was a bit censored for content. Then went back and did it every way - launch the Meteor in the Weird Edsel, summon the Meteor Police, get the Meteor a book publishing deal... Then I looked for all the ways to blow up the house, and all the different ways of getting the Edisons to murder the kids.

    Remember, Maniac Mansion was back before adventure game designers saw the light and took out all the ways you could get into a no-win situation and not realise it for weeks... Accidentally wasted the paint remover, or the developer fluid? Too bad - you can't win. The nice thing about later games like Day of the Tentacle was that you could play as you saw fit, and know that no matter how badly you treated the NPCs you could _never_ get into an unwinnable position.

    --
    Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
  3. KOTOR == adventure by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Insightful
    > > Apart from Monkey Island, Lucasarts appear not to care for the genre they brought so much to in the early Nineties.
    >
    > Not just Lucasarts. It seems *nobody* cares about adventures anymore. Because it's just more profitable to make yet-another-3d-first-person-shooter-this-time-with -prettier-graphics!

    Huh? LucasArts?

    Killing off Sam and Max was teh suck, but have you played KOTOR?

    Look beyond the 3D (it's purty!) and the fact that it has character stats/abilities a'la D20-based RPG. When I finished KOTOR, I didn't remember a damn thing about any of my characters' stats or class. For an RPG, that's unusual.

    But I do remember spending a lot of time navigating dialog trees where my choices had a greater effect on my character's development than anything I chopped up for XP. I also remember a game salted liberally with math and logic puzzles, none of which would have been out of place in an Infocom title, and I remember a story featuring character development of the player, evolving relationships between the player and the NPCs, and considerable exposition of the history of the early SW universe.

    It's ironic - George Lucas can't make a good movie to save his life. And yet, if you took a LucasArts/BioWare game, recorded it all the way through, edited out about 2/3 of the combat and "walking around town" between quests, you'd have about 2 hours of video that would better Star Wars movie than either of Episodes I or II. Go figure.

    KOTOR, at least for me, was a work of interactive fiction, not an RPG. (A feature, not a bug!)