Maniac Mansion (1987)

Preliminary: Oh wow, an intro cutscene!

Horror film vibes so far. Some absurd music lol. One of the many reasons I love this chronology project: I can confidently say there were no, or very few, full-body sprite adventure games with cutscenes/movies like this before it! Also the first adventure game from this perspective that, like, has you move by clicking like this? Hard to explain, but of course reminds me of Runescape/OSRS movement. Neat that you can get to the end in many ways, it's not a treasure hunting score type adventure, but I suppose you could say saving all your friends is that. Neat that you can select different characters with different abilities, opens up lots of replayability. And wow, and there's a skip cutscene feature?! Very ahead of its time. That being said, this seems very long and complicated, and I bet its slowness will get to me. Still, exciting and full of firsts--let's see if I push through it! Now... how to turn the camera around the room? What I read said there are cursors, but I see none...

Look: 9/10 The Look was constantly great and so unique for its time.

Sound: 8/10 Some annoying beeps and boops but the good parts were great, so I was generous to this, plus with it being such an expansive adventure game rooted in the text adventure world, so sound wasn't the focus heh.

Play: 8/10 Whaaaaa an adventure game that doesn't have severely limited inventory space?!?! Yet still incorporates the classic challenge of inventory management through its multiple characters?! I usually haven't liked the early attempts at multiple-character-at-the-same-time adventure games, and adventure games with real-time somewhat-randomized factors, but this one does it right!

Feel: 9/10 This was full of so many well-done screens, the Look really made it feel like the first true adventure game I dunno I suppose the King's Quests did too, but this was special. I loved how the cheese guy (Ed) has what I assume is a map of the house in his bedroom. I also love how the "cutscenes" played to let you know when a character was going somewhere, rather than entirely randomized or frustratingly unavoidable deaths/imprisonments like in most early adventure games. I had some real close calls! And it was interesting seeing that the game remembered if I left the fridge open etc for the cutscenes, as he was just a door away from me! Lots of cute additional things throughout the game, that I believe were purely optional, like that funny ad about them being willing to publish any game :-p And Razor shredded on the piano, good C64 sid music there. For some reason the "Pick up yellow key" and other descriptors for the keys reminded me of Resident Evils? Suddenly craving to play those. Good thing RE2 is on my poll for next Monday night game to stream :-p

Attachment: 8/10 To think there are so many other character combinations I could play as! On my 2nd play session, the lots of loading and slow movement did start to take its toll. Still, I was finding things I love like how you can lift weights to become more powerful to do things like open grating or the garage door you couldn't before :-p And lol "for a good time call edna." Still, it was a sign that I was burning out--this was hours! and I usually don't commit that long to clunky-slow adventure games or super long text adventure games--when I looked up the possible combinations for Edna's safe rather than doing the whole telescope part. All those puzzles for a quarter?! lol. But I was getting back into it, so that was good. Lol that the evil family is blaming itself for the items I'm picking up and moving around. Probly should've broken it up into 3 or more sessions.

So it's time to head downstairs, and I've done everything right but the police aint showing up, nor is the postman?! I had to fast forward and the police finally showed, the postman never did even tho I put up the flag? And was mailing Green Tentacle's demo tape to Three Guys lol. Sad. It was funny when the Purple Tentacle turned so quickly with my Police Badge. But this game was taking way too long, having to switch discs and wait for loading, I had to call it quits it's way past our usual time, and finish the last tiny bit tomorrow. That's its biggest fault: incredibly slow and limited by its time, tho with NES adventure games contemporary to it there really is no excuse. Nonetheless, it was just too clever and good a Feel to completely dismiss.

Could be fun trying different character situations, could also be very frustrating figuring this out without a guide getting to the end without the Card Key or something. Anyway, I returned to this the next day (so a third play session indeed) and turns out I was right at the end, everything was just taking so long last night! Best not to play for over an hour at a time, play it in reasonable chunks. And at last the ending screen and a great C64 SID played!

Completion: Main Story with Bernard and Razor as the side characters Playtime: ~4 hours

Maniac Mansion is a quirky point-and-click game from LucasArts, loaded with colourful characters, many strange and unexpected incidents, misplaced items, and rooms and traps for you to trial-and-error your way through. You know what kind of game I’m talking about. It has many different endings depending on what paths you choose, what items you find and what NPCs you interact with. You pick a group of 3 characters out of 7 possible, with each having different abilities and special endings to them.

Personally I wouldn’t dream of playing this today, blind, like an asshole…so I did guide/walkthrough as I played it and had the music slowly drive me insane. It has a fun story and some goofy dialogue, but I say it’s only worth checking out if you’re an amateur gaming historian or you’re looking to play all the games like me.

[3] / [5]

Interesting game. It's the Ur example of point-and-click games, pretty much started the entire LucasArts-style of games single-handedly and therefore has a ton of games that are like it but no other game is quite like it really. Maniac Mansion is its own beast. A cool little insight into a world that doesn't make any sense but it has a bunch of charm. A unique style and really neat characters make it worth playing. The story is... uh.. a meteor causes a guy to go crazy and a girl gets kidnapped? That's about it. The puzzles are pretty out there and I don't know if anyone would have the patience to figure out the entire thing nowadays but they're far more logical than your usual Sierra stuff of the era.

A pretty foundational game that gets buried behind games like Monkey Island these days but it's worth a shot to see where the whole SCUMM thing got started.