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Maniac Mansion
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Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle is the sequel to the classic adventure Maniac Mansion. Manic Mansion tells the tale of a mad doctor possessed by a meteor from outer space. The game combines cartoon like animations with humorous dialogues that poke fun of popular pop culture. This sequel is no exception.
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Most notably, Maniac Mansion was one of the first games to capture the feel of a movie. The personalities of the games characters, along with the elaborate use of cutscenes creates a feel that previously was only found in movies. Creating a movie-like experience would become the focus of many modern videogames.
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Originally a computer game that came out in 1987, Jaleco brought the twisted world of Maniac Mansion to the NES and introduced a new audience to the game's oddball sense of humor. The story followed high school student Dave as he tried to save his girlfriend Sandy from the evil Dr. Fred who lived in a creepy Victorian mansion. Plenty of goofy one-liners and bad puns kept the mood more on the side of Scary Movie than Scream. Gamers could play as multiple characters at the same time and the game had the first use of cutscenes. It was an evolutionary step for games and a great story at the same time.
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In the PC version of Maniac Mansion, one can find a painting in the dining room and a statue in the hallway. In the LucasArts graphic adventure game "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," these same works of art can be found by Indy in the art room of the Nazi Brunwald Castle. The writing on the statue's plaque is ... identical in the two games.
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As is the case with many successful games, Maniac Mansion was ported to a number of systems over its healthy lifespan. With an initial release on the Commodore 64 and Apple II, future releases included an IBM version, and the game was later re-released in "enhanced" graphics version for the previous and a bunch of additional platforms. The most famous port was probably the excellent Nintendo version, developed by the Lucasfilm team (unlike the Japanese counterpart for the Famicom, which is a weird beast to say the least). It was the company's first NES project, and there's a pretty interesting story behind it, documented in an excellent article by the project's manager, Douglas Crockford, which you're probably familiar with. There's a lot of unique features in this version of the game, some of which you can learn about in the elsewhere in this article. The cartridge was an auspicious release for LucasArts but turned out to pretty much be the only example among the company's short string of NES releases that wasn't terrible.
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Visually, Maniac Mansion is decent (for the NES). The large characters are easy to distinguish and the mouth movement of talking characters is a nice touch. It's obvious that a lot of work was put into designing the mansion and the wacky objects within. A few NES-quality movies were added from time to time, giving visual aids to help advance the story. The only true downside was the walking animation. When you move to the left or right, it just looks a little bit on the cheesy side, but vertical motion is quite pathetic.
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Maniac Mansion