I can't really stress how important Maniac Mansion was to me as a kid. I mean, it's strange to think that an NES game would be my introduction to the adventure game genre, but it was the NES port that I first encountered. And so Maniac Mansion pretty much became my metric for what made an adventure game good. To a further degree, I guess LucasArts was my standard for a long time.
Though we did get a sequel in the shape of Day Of The Tentacle, the LucasArts games eventually stopped coming. In in the decades since, the adventure game has SUPPOSEDLY died. But in its wake, a new kind of adventure game was born thanks to Telltale Games. Telltale's early output was a little inconsistent, but by the time they got to The Walking Dead they had really hit their stride and perfected the modern adventure game formula. And we've seen other studios take a cue from Telltale, be it Dontnod (Life Is Strange) or Supermassive Games (Dark Pictures Anthology). The reason I bring up Telltale and the modern adventure game genre as a whole is because Thimbleweed Park is decidedly not that. Instead, it's Ron Gilbert's attempt to take everything he's learned over the decades and make a new adventure game that looks and feels just like those 80's LucasArts games that he was so praised for. To put it bluntly, if you didn't grow up playing Maniac Mansion and The Secret Of Monkey Island, then there's a fair chance that Thimbleweed Park will feel antiquated to you. If you're expecting a Telltale style choose-your-own adventure with quick-time-events, you're going to be disappointed. Instead, Thimbleweed Park feels like the closest thing we'll ever get to a Maniac Mansion 3. Although, it would have had to be called Maniac Town because this is a pretty big and meaty game. If anything, the length and scope of Thimbleweed Park is the most modern thing about it. Consider this: if you know what you're doing, Maniac Mansion is a three-to-four-hour game. Its proper sequel, Day Of The Tentacle can be tackled in about five hours. But Thimbleweed Park is easily a double-digit hours game. I'm not really commenting on whether such a length is a good or bad thing here. In fairness, all the modern adventure games like The Walking Dead or Life Is Strange are going for a dozen-plus hours. But the difference with those is that they're more linear, and they're episodic. In reality, you're really tackling a handful of two-hour experiences which tends to make it feel more compartmented. In those games, you won't need an item from Episode 1 later in Episode 5. To a degree, episodes in those kind of games feel like smaller stand-alone experiences. On the flip, Thimbleweed Park feels like it takes the blueprint of Maniac Mansion and supersizes it. The number of playable characters grows along with the story. As does the number of items (both necessary and not) to find, and to transfer between characters. There's honestly an argument to made that after waiting so many years for another game in the classic LucasArts tradition from Ron Gilbert that maybe more really is more. It means more game to dig your teeth into and relish. More town to re-explore several times over. For me personally, I guess I prefer the more stripped down mansion approach than the whole giant town approach of Thimbleweed Park. Maybe a population of 81 sounds small, but it is a lot of NPC's to meet and talk to. And there's a lot of stuff you can easily miss if you don't want to use a walkthrough, which I don't right now. But to be super fair, this is a me issue. A few years back, I'd have had plenty of time to get lost in Thimbleweed Park. Right now, being the dad of a toddler, I'm burnt out by the time I have time to devote to gaming. So maybe it's unfair to have gone into this expecting an experience JUST LIKE those older (and shorter) games. But as things went on, and I could see more and more items on my to-do list that still needed to be checked off, I just started to run out of steam. I did really appreciate the game, though. Everything is so authentic to the LucasArts style. The sprite work looks like how you remember Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island. The dialogue is spot-on. There's jokes about a corpse "pixelating." There's some amazing text flavor-areeno. There's even Grumpy Gamer style nitpicking of classic adventure games IN THE GAME. It's all so well done. It's just.. Too much, for me, right now.
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My history with the Tom Clancy series of games has been extremely limited. And yet, over the years I've found myself increasingly interested in it. Way back when I was in college – like twenty years ago, yikes! - I remember picking up the first Rainbow Six game for no real reason other than I needed a new game to play. I remember thinking it was cool, but also way too hard for me. I think when I grabbed it, I expected a first person shooter a la Doom with a more military theme. Instead, it turned out that Rainbow Six was way more tactical and slow paced, and I was too dumb and impatient at the time to really grasp that style of play.
I largely ignored the Tom Clancy games after that. But a few years back, I started reading about them. I guess I enjoy reading about games that I don't know a lot about. I like to broaden my horizons, or at least know what I'm missing out on. And something occurred to me. Maybe I'm completely off base here, but this is how I kind of view it in my mind. Basically, there's Metal Gear and there's Splinter Cell. The two series are sort of like unofficial sister-series. They had always competed with each other, but they couldn't have been more different. Both series are basically cinematic military games, right? But tonally, they're miles apart. But at a time, it seems like Splinter Cell existed to fill the void of Metal Gear Solid on Xbox consoles. Now, while Kojima's games were based on very ridiculous 80's action movie versions of war, Splinter Cell took its cues from Tom Clancy's very realistic novels. In that sense, both series are super interesting because they're different takes on the same thing. Of course Splinter Cell is only a piece of the much larger series of Tom Clancy games. And the more I've read about them, the more interested in them I've gotten. And I don't know exactly lead me to Ghost Recon Wildlands, exactly. But I was watching some videos of it recently, and decided I was ready to give it a go. Now I can tell you this, the Metal Gear Solid series is one that I really enjoy. And yet, I'm terrible at it. I put a pretty solid numbers into The Phantom Pain, and loved it pretty hard. But even with a strategy guide, I found it really difficult. Likewise, I beat Ground Zeroes and absolutely adored the game. But it was a really big victory for me, which is maybe sad given that it's such a short and simple affair. So with that in mind, I think I've always been a bit intimidated by the Tom Clancy games. Because in my mind, they're like Metal Gear, but way more serious and way less gamey. That said, my first impression of Ghost Recon Wildlands was extremely positive. I fired it up with trepidation. I wasn't sure if I'd like it, or if I'd even be good enough to get through the opening mission. But the crazy thing is this – it sucked me in fast. My first night with the game, I stayed up too late playing like three hours of the game right off the bat. It's just really compelling. If anything, Wildlands feels like Ubisoft's take on The Phantom Pain. It's a gigantic open world. It's bursting with missions, side-missions, and random stuff off the beaten path. And it tends to take the same approach of "here's your end-goal, go ahead and accomplish it however you see fit." As the first Tom Clancy game I'm putting any serious time and effort into, I've got to say that I'm impressed by this one. Wildlands has that classic Ubisoft open world thing going on. This is either a negative or a positive in your opinion, of course. When you start the game, you've got a pretty sizeable world to navigate. And there's a few scattered icons to investigate. Me personally, I mostly stick to the yellow stuff, since that's the story missions. But of course, the open world means that you'll head off the beaten path whenever something strikes your fancy. After a few hours, I killed my first cartel boss. And then you suddenly realize that this sizeable open world was just the tip of the iceberg. Suddenly, there's a whole overwhelmingly huge open world to go out into. The choice is yours to decide which direction to head next. This gigantic game could easily come off as tedious. The thing is, it's so well designed. The world is gorgeous to look at. And the sandbox holds everything you need for some great stories. I'm not talking about the in-game story. In fact, the story here is super grim and not exactly "fun," per say. I mean, this is a game about taking down drug lords. Outside of NARC, how fun could that subject matter be at face value? But the world itself creates all these opportunities for awesome anecdotes. It's miles away from the super silliness of something like Saints Row, or even Grand Theft Auto. But I've had some amazing moments right from the get-go. Some random things... Using the ability to have your squad take out soldiers you've tagged feels amazing. I love just hanging back, scoping out targets, and giving the order. I've watched whole camps of bad guys fall to this approach. It feels low danger, but there's still tactics involved as you don't want the hit to be witnessed, triggering the rest of the gang. Then there was the time I was on my way to break into a cabin to gain intel. The driving in this game can be pretty sloppy, especially depending on which vehicle you're in. Right outside the road to the cabin, I swerved, and hit a car head on. It happened to be full of patrollers who were instantly on to me. The gave pursuit, so I aborted the cabin mission for the moment, and sped off up a windy mountain road. Eventually, I hid my damaged car in some woods, car-jacked another ride, and made my way back to the cabin undetected since I was in a completely different car. These are the kind of awesome moments that really make Wildlands so compelling. And the real hook is that these moments are near constant. Something ese that's immensely gratifying in this game is the night vision goggles. I mean, it's such a simple thing to add. And yet, it makes such a huge difference. For one thing, it adds to the aesthetic. Like, when everything turns green, it feels like "oh yeah, this is a Tom Clancy game." It just has that cool look to it. But more importantly, in this age of dynamic lighting and uber realism, it totally bothers me when things get so dark at night in a game that I can't even see where I'm supposed to be going. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game that comes to mind, where I was having a good time, but the game was so dark that it actually kind of ruined things for me at times. At any rate, the more I played, the more I really got sucked into Wildlands. I stole a car; I rescued a doctor; I did a whole bunch of missions. One that really stuck out early on was a mission where I had to blow up a boat, and get the heck out of there in thirty seconds, lest I be blown up with it. Exciting stuff! Or how badass I felt when I infiltrated an entire base – in the daytime – without ever getting spotted once. I'm infamously terrible at stealth, so this was a big deal for me. I used my sniper rifle, and orders to my squad to take out everyone before they even saw us. I made my way up through the hideout and came in behind one last guy who was just chilling on the couch unaware. I hit him up point blank from behind, grabbed the intel I needed and hauled it out of there. It's interesting, because many missions are quite similar on a superficial level. You grab something, or destroy something, or rescue someone, or whatever – but the tactics of it all are constantly influx, and I'm loving it. I also love that there are actually beats in the game that are throwing me for a loop. A big example (and major spoiler, maybe?) is that the second drug lord I went after was this young up-and-comer who had taken over for his grandfather. So I spent all this time in his province completing missions and obtaining intel, and finally made it to his mansion. A whole lot of gunfire happened, and I finally rushed in and made up to his bedroom for the big showdown, only to find that he had hanged himself. I mean, that’s some unexpected video game stuff right there. Who expects to enter a boss fight only to find that the boss is already dead? Was Monster Party (NES) the last time this was done? It's pretty awesome and surprising. Later in the game, I found something amazing that I didn't even know existed prior to playing it. There's a full on Splinter Cell mission in the game. I don't mean it's LIKE Splinter Cell. I mean it's an actual crossover featuring Sam Fisher. At first, I thought this was amazing. I was excited. I love this kind of shared universe stuff. And yet the mission itself proved to be a bit too hardcore for me. Up until this point in the game, Wildlands was relatively smooth sailing for me. Sure, I had my moments of panic, but I was always able to reassess a situation and find a way to move forward. But not here. The mission in question is called "Operation Watchmen," and it was brutal for me. The big brick wall is the fact that a necessity to complete the mission is to (A) not be detected, and (B) not kill anyone. I put in about a half-dozen attempts and found this to be near impossible. I tried many different routes into the enemy base, and got detected no matter what I tried. Oh, and there's a time limit. To be fair, it's a pretty generous one, but still. I literally timed out the mission on one attempt. It's bittersweet, though. On paper, this should be the coolest mission in the game for me. But in execution, it was pure frustration and I eventually gave up on it. But that's just one small piece of the game. The open world is so huge, and there's so much to do. By my own calculation, I've only gotten through about an eighth of the story, which sounds slight but this is a damn big game. And while I can't imagine I'll see it through to the end, that's par for the course for me. I just don't have the time nor attention span to stick with gigantic open world games like this for as many hours are actually required. But that doesn't really matter. What matters is that I've learned to love a Ghost Recon game. I've grown even more attached to these Tom Clancy games. And Wildlands is a rather incredible experience. It's a gigantic sandbox, full of amazing moment-to-moment gameplay and intricate systems. It scratches a very specific itch for me. Like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, this is a game that I really loved to spent time with and will mostly dip back into over the years, but I have no real delusions that I'll find the time to beat it. But that's okay, because as long as I'm getting hours of fun out of the game, then it's certainly served its purpose as far as I'm concerned. |
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