Day of the Tentacle
Just one of the many old great adventure games from LucasArts. DotT is the "sort of" sequel to Maniac Mansion, one of the really old LucasArt (Lucasfilm back then) adventures. The tentacle in the title had a small role in the first game, and has now moved up to take the title role as evil-bent-on-ruling-the-world. The plot also features time-traveling toilets and the writing of the constitution as well as a great car ride during the introduction.
The interface is the same as in the other older Lucasfilm/Arts adventures: nine nouns, for controlling your character, and your inventory at the bottom of the screen. Your character, or characters in this case, is on-screen and is guided by you through the wonderfully wierd and cartoonish world. Puzzles are plenty and funny, but there's always logic in the solutions, as long as you have your brain connected you should be able to figure them out without having to resort to desperate trying of every object in the inventory.
Conversations are, as always, plenty and highly entertaining as well as clue-providing. And you thought it would be boring speaking to someone who is fast asleep or who has been dead for several thousand years. Well, think again (heck, you can even get some direction from these conversations!). Great stuff, in short.
Very good is also the fact that, again as in all but the oldest Lucas* adventures, nothing is irreversible. You can never get stuck in a way which forces you to restart, and you can spend your whole life trying to find sudden and violent death behind every corner (you can't get yourself killed, that's what I'm saying). If this wasn't the case, the conversations wouldn't be half as much fun. That was the case in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where selecting the wrong but oh-so-funny reply got you into a fight, often ending the game abruptly. Appearantly, even the designers noticed this, it was after Indy the "game design philosophy" paragraph turned up in the game manuals, stating that death would keep its face away from the corners. Not a game too late, I was almost put off Indy completely because of the stupid fights.
Hey, it's a LucasArts adventure, what more do you need to know? There are no black sheep in that family. Easy to control, good looking and sounding and highly entertaining. Just like all the rest of 'em ...
Oh, make sure you watch all the credits at the end of the game ...
