Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle

Who here remembers the first Maniac Mansion? No?
It wasn't a very popular game at the time, and quite frankly it wasn't all that good either.

When Day of the Tentacle came out, people enjoyed it because it god rid of that horribly pixelated look and obnoxiously large heads and got actual "cartoon graphics", which I thought was a big improvement.



The game's story is two tentacles, Green Tentacle and Purple Tentacle, drink some radioactive waste water and Purple Tentacle is all evil and "dominate the worldish" and stuff. So your job, as Bernard, Hoagie, and Laverne, is to stop him at all costs. Eventually, you have to turn off the "Sludge-O-Matic" which created the waste and go to yesterday to do it. But your time machine, thanks to Dr. Fred, gets broken and the 3 characters are sent to colonial times (Hoagie), Present day (Bernard), and in the future where the tentacles rule the world (Laverne.)

This is another Puzzle game, which requires VERY hard thinking. Believe me when I say this, because this game was almost IMPOSSIBLE without at least some help from a strategy guide.



The graphics isn't really much to talk about. Though since it's a 2D game, and it's cartoon style, you have NO idea what is able to be picked up. Since games like Grim Fandango and Monkey Island 4 are in 3D, they made 3D objects with 2D backgrounds, making it terribly obvious what is interactable. This game however, leaves you CLUELESS. As well, items can be sent back and forth through time, so you have tons of items you need to send to Hoagie/Laverne/Bernard, which isn't easy. The most BAZAAR things can be used to move forward in the game.

The music isn't something to talk about. They tried their best, but unless you have a good Sound Card it sounds very MIDIish and annoying. The sound is probably stolen from cheap cartoons. (SPROING, WOOOPWOOPWOOP, etc.)

Overall this game gets 1 Mushroom. It's a great game and is pretty funny, but unless you've won 8 Nobel Prizes and have an IQ of over 200, you won't get very far.

4 star(s) out of 5

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