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Fan-made Maniac Mansion 256 Color Remake
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...)"
There is an 8 minute wait to download the game from the severs provided but you can instead get it from your favorite p2p. I found mine on edonkey (mld) just search for "mmdsetup.exe" for Maniac Mansion and "fanadv_zak2.exe" for Zak McKracken. About 16 sources of each.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Here's a hint: the front door key is under the doormat. It took me almost an hour to figure that out the first time around (but then I was only 7 years old).
;)
Also, watch out if you empty the pool
This game seriously freaked me out as a kid.
Perhaps fan-inspired efforts like this will convince Lucasarts to resume development of the cancelled Sam & Max sequel they were making? Apart from Monkey Island, Lucasarts appear not to care for the genre they brought so much to in the early Nineties.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
Damn u - I submitted this 3 weeks ago! Anyway - more to the point it's a pretty sweet conversion, works pefectly with win2K and brings backk all those memories of SCUM on the A500 :D
My Portfolio
Putting the hamster in the microwave, pure genius.
:)
I can't hear a microwave go ping without thinking about that part of Maniac Mansion
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Looks like the will have to cancel their 256color version of Indy: The fate of atlantis.
Now that it has been discovered...
I loved that game when I was younger... played it on my trusty old (even if it was newer back then ;) ) Commodore 64 until I could walk thru it with my eyes shut. Played it again when Day of the Tentacle came out.. in cause you havn't found it, the entire MM was included as an easteregg.
Good memories... this will definitly be downloaded once I get home from work today!
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Hrm, whatever they're using to host the file doesn't seem to like me...
Not only that, but it looks Windows only (not using the *actual* scumm engine, but a free thing that's similarish)
http://freecache.org/http://www.tentakelvilla.de/t homas/mmdsetup.exe
Join the Free Software Foundation
If you start looking for remakes, you will find out one of the most active "scenes" is the Sinclair Spectrum games remakes. Check out www.remakes.org
also have some remakes of older games, in this case the first two in Sierra's venerable King's Quest series. You can check them out at http://www.agdinteractive.com/
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?
I've been thinking about playing the original again with the help of the DosBox project. I just completed Sierra's Leisure Suit Larry: Enhanced. Pretty cool! Nothing beats nostalgia!
I miss the 80's.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
The FAQ says that the game was remade in AGS (Adventure Game Studio), a no programming required adventure game creation tool. Check Here.
The Kerr Divine: My wife's battle with a mysterious illness.
The NES version of Maniac Mansion is to this day my favorite game ever. I discover new things about it still after all these years.
It was actually a very interesting ordeal for the development team to get the game approved by Nintendo, The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the NES gives some insight into how bland they required their games to be in those days.
The sequel, Day of the Tentacle, for PC was great as well. It's a shame that this game genre has died out.
Most of the kids would say 'How sick!' if you tried to microwave the hamster. But one of the girls would say 'No way - those things are, like, FULL of cholesterol!' Nice touch. A few other censored elements included 'Chewy Caramel Centre' becoming 'Pretty brains' on the medical chart, and the 'Muff Diver' game becoming 'Tuna Diver'...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
www.scummvm.org
I'm fairly certain if you look through the source, you could find out enough to write your own game.
You may treat all information submitted above as wild speculation.
The chainsaw could be fueled by the Chainsaw Fuel container found in Zak McKracken, which was useless without the Chainsaw, which only was found in Maniac Mansion.
..So: It's only a cross-game joke. ;)
By the way, I'm selling these fine leather jackets..
Cheers!
Zawash.
File not found. Fake it(Y/N)? _
dont bother downloading it. The game uses AGS, and this one is ported to linux, but it relies on a plugin written in C++, which cannot be ported, since the Linux AGS version does not support plugins.
I tried it out with CX Office and it works for the most part...the resolution is a bit off and I had to CTRL-ALT-+ a few times and ALT-TAB to get my mouse to escape. Looks like they've completely redone all the graphics, and it looks good for 256 colors!
/me calls in sick today
I keep thinking of the egg in the airplane microwave from Zak McKracken. The only way to get the oxygen tank (last bin, remember) was to egg the microwave.
..I've always wanted to test it myself, but I've heard enough horror stories of egg being found in the most obscure corners of the kitchen for weeks after such incidents.. :-D
File not found. Fake it(Y/N)? _
They did NOT take out the "exploding hamster" scene in the NES version. You just needed to use Sid when putting hamster in the microwave, and he'd happily do the deed.
:)
Then you could give the hamster to Weird Ed...
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I just installed and ran it with CrossOver Office. It's not perfect (the resolution is a bit skewed, I had to manually switch X11 screen resolutions with CTRL-ALT-+, and had to use my windowmanager to get the mouse cursor out of the game and back to doing *real* work), but it's playable.
I have not tried Wine proper, or dosemu.
What really set Grim Fandango apart was the writing, and the audio. The music and the voice acting were second to none. Without them the game loses its character.
In any event, the remakes likely won't get much further without having to start lifting audio, too -- I'm fairly certain LucasArts started doing that not long after Maniac Mansion 2...
I was a truly sick child; I systematically tried it with all the kids and none would do my bidding.
Apparently the first few thousand copies of NES Maniac Mansion would let Sid or Razor microwave the hamster. Then NoA caught on, and later ones gave the message about cholesterol... Boo, hiss, etc. Of course years later I got to play the real thing on a PC (hello, little computer. I respect you, even though you only have 64K of memory) and indulged my horrific heathen ways to the limit ;-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Playing all of those old LucasArts puzzle games was my first PC gaming experience. And they were awesome.
I hope this fan site will remake more classics like Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle, etc. etc. but those mihgt be under more strict copyrights I guess.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
I'm doing a remake of the crap-classic Camelot Warriors, but I am incompetent when it comes to art as this prototype for the knight shows (I gave up when I got as far as the arms). If anybody can draw, please help.
>
> 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-wit
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!)
There were several ways to win.
1) Summon the Meteor Police. Involves fixing the big radio using the vacuum tube from the one in the lounge. They arrive, and if you've opened the lab doors they'll storm right past Purple and Dr Fred, and arrest the Meteor. Then you just have to go in yourself and switch off the Meteor's mind control machine to release Dr Fred.
2) Dispose of the Meteor yourself. Persuade either Green or Weird Ed to help you beat Purple, then go into the Meteor's lair, take it and launch it into space in the trunk of the Weird Edsel.
Both (1) and (2) get much the same ending sequence: don't be a tuna head.
3) Get the Meteor a publishing deal. Have Wendy improve the Meteor's manuscript using the typewriter, and send it off. Get past Purple (with either Weird Ed or Green's help) and go into the Meteor's lair. Give the Meteor the contract, and he realises he doesn't have to be evil any more. This gets a really cool ending where the Meteor's on the sofa in some TV interview show.
4) Nuke the house. Several ways to do this: draining the pool, for instance, and letting the reactor overheat, or pressing the Red Button (which is marked 'Do Not Press - Under Any Circumstances)
5) Get all the kids killed. Weird Ed will kill you if you mutilate his hamster, Green will kill you if you get a publishing contract for either yourself or the Meteor, radioactive steam will kill you if you microwave water from the pool, and if you refill the pool while someone's in it they drown.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
"...you are behind me! If I value my life, I should be somewhere else?"
- after the Sierra/LucasArts merger: "Escape from Babylon 5!"
Gloriously wrong, I'm afraid. The tiny writing was in the attic above Edna's room, beside the safe; it was the combination for the safe, and could only be read using the Really Powerful Telescope. The combination for the inner lab door was, in fact, Fred's high score on the Meteor Mess arcade game. A bug in the programming on the NES version meant that until the cutscene where Dr Fred plays the game, the combination was 0000.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The New Adventures of Zak McKracken
Maniac Mansion Deluxe
There's also a FreeCache mirror somewhere in the article, if you want to use that instead.
My reality check bounced.
Hey, what was wrong with Monkey Island 3: The Curse of Monkey Island? IMO that was a superb game, the absolute pinnacle of the series, even if Ron Gilbert wasn't involved. Great dialogue, excellent art, and both music and sound were to die for (the pirate song still cracks me up, I even have it on mp3). Don't touch MI3!
The fourth game, however, was... meh. The whole game just felt tired and strained, and the 3d look wasn't as vibrant and expressive (MI3 had only 256 colors and STILL manages to come out on top). They should pick up where part 3 left off, and in the same style.
because 257 would just be silly :)
-Cnik
This and Zak McKracken are two of my favorite games of all time. They don't make any good adventures anymore and it's a shame. These games showed how much fun you could have without 3d graphics, multiplayer, or even 256 colors.
They were fully immersive in that you could roam around and complete the game the way you wanted to. In fact, Maniac Mansion had 5 different ways to complete the game if I recall.
The game world itself wasn't incredibly complex but it gave the illusion that it was complete. And when you found something new, it was interesting (draining the pool, the observatory, edna's bedroom). Unlike like these 3d adventure games on N64 or gamecube where you just roam around and find mini puzzles. The world was more cohesive. So you felt like you had many options at your disposal and that made for a great adventure.
Get the Meteor a publishing deal. Have Wendy improve the Meteor's manuscript using the typewriter, and send it off. Get past Purple (with either Weird Ed or Green's help) and go into the Meteor's lair. Give the Meteor the contract, and he realises he doesn't have to be evil any more. This gets a really cool ending where the Meteor's on the sofa in some TV interview show.
3a) Call the meteor police JUST before giving the contract to the Meteor.
"I don't care if you've reformed. You're still coming with me!"
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I can't enter the site. I'm not Spanish, British, or German. :(
"Derp de derp."
Why is it in 256 colors??
Well, why not? 256 colors is plenty if you use them right. A lot of people don't realise that 8-bit graphics can actually look better than 16-bit graphics under the right circumstances(e.g there are only 32 shades of red in 16-bit).
And using 32-bit graphics for simple 2D is just plain silly...
I looked throught the LucasFan site, and couldn't find anything about the legal issues. Wouldn't LucasArts have a valid complaint about them distributing a game that they have the rights to?
If some of you don't already know, ScummVM (available at scummvm.sf.net) is "a 'virtual machine' for several classic graphical point-and-click adventure games. It is designed to run: Adventure Soft's Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2; Revolution's Beneath A Steel Sky, Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2; Flight of the Amazon Queen; and games based on LucasArts' SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system. SCUMM is used for many games, including Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and more. Compatibility with supported games is continually improving, so check back often." -- from www.scummvm.sourceforge.net.
With ScummVM you can play Maniac Mansion (original), Maniac Mansion (enhanced), Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (original), Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (enhanced), Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (256 - FmTowns), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (256), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (256 - FmTowns), Loom, Loom (256 - FmTowns), The Secret of Monkey Island (EGA), Passport to Adventure (Indy3, Monkey and Loom demos), Loom (256 color CD version), The Secret of Monkey Island (VGA Floppy), The Secret of Monkey Island (VGA CD), The Secret of Monkey Island (Alternative VGA CD), The Secret of Monkey Island (Sega CD), Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's revenge, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's revenge (DOS Demo), Indiana Jones 4 and the Fate of Atlantis, Indiana Jones 4 and the Fate of Atlantis (Demo), Putt-Putt Joins The Parade (DOS Demo), Putt-Putt Joins The Parade (DOS), Putt-Putt Goes To The Moon (DOS Demo), Putt-Putt Goes To The Moon (DOS), Putt-Putts Fun Pack,
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Doesn't anyone read my sig? :)
:)
There are usually a dozen or so adventures in development at any given time. Just because you don't buy them doesn't mean they don't exist. A few of them suck outright (usually the MYST clones), but there are a lot of great ones. Click through to Adventure Gamers and have a look at games like Dreamfall, Fahrenheit, and The Westerner among others. The adventure genre is not dead by quite a ways. It's just moved to Europe