It's no secret that Maniac Mansion is kind of a big deal to me. Thanks to the NES port, I discovered the game at a young age, and it was my introduction to graphic adventure games. As such, it became my standard, setting my expectations for adventure games to follow. The next graphic adventure that I played? Lucasarts' own The Secret Of Monkey Island on Sega CD. So yeah, you could say I have a type.
We always had computers in our house in some capacity when I was a kid. I cut my teeth on the Commodore 64 before I was in kindergarten. And I kept that thing well into the early 90s even after we had upgraded to a 386. And so I dabbled in DOS gaming plenty until we finally got a full-on multimedia machine around 1996 or so and I was exposed to the world of CD-ROMs on PC. But I didn't play the Maniac Mansion sequel all those years ago. Certainly I wanted to, but this was before you could just buy everything on the internet. This was before a real deal digital distribution. This was the days where you were stuck with whatever you could find on the shelves of Radio Shack and Circuit City. Plus, I was a broke teenager at this point and any spare funds I had were being used to save up for Playstation games. The sad truth is that I didn't actually get to experience Day Of The Tentacle until it was remastered in glorious HD in 2016. But y'know what? It was worth the wait. At the time, my wife and I were sans child. My wife knew how much I adored the original Maniac Mansion, and so she and I spent a couple of nights together playing through Day Of The Tentacle Remastered. And we loved it. We did the whole game with no walkthroughs or hints. It was awesome. Just the two of us taking our time to figure things out. She even kept a little notebook of ideas that we had about what to do next. Day Of The Tentacle takes place five years after Maniac Mansion. The Purple Tentacle drinks some toxic waste behind the mansion and becomes uber evil and decides to take over the world. Our old pal Green Tentacle sends a letter to Bernard to ask for help. So Bernard and his new friends Laverne and Hoagie head back to Edison Mansion to save the day. Bernard is the only returning playable character from the original game. You might remember him as the nerd. My wife remembers him as the one that looks like me. Laverne is some kind of weird manic dorky girl. She's a very comedic character, though some of her over-repeated voice lines can wear out their welcome. "Yoo-hoo, Mr. Tentacle guy..." is one I could do without hearing again honestly. And then Hoagie is a silly overweight roadie who talks with a kind of slow surfer dude burnout drawl. The plot is simple. Purple Tentacle drinks some toxic waste behind the mansion, grows arms, and decides he's going to take over the human race. Green Tentacle warns Bernard, and hilarity ensues. It turns out Dr. Fred has been working on time machines that look a lot like the devices from Cronenberg's take on The Fly (and this is acknowledged in game). While Bernard remains in the current day (and able to roam around the mansion once again), Hoagie is sent back to colonial times and Laverne is sent to the future where Purple Tentacle rules a dystopia. The ultimate goal of the game is to get everyone back home in current times, and have Dr. Fred sign a contract that would net him royalties from the original Maniac Mansion game along with the TV series that it spawned. In case you're forgetting, that was a real thing. Maniac Mansion was a show that aired for three seasons back in the early 90s and was full of SCTV alum and a young Kathleen Robertson. The show had very little to do with the game, but it's weird and silly and I appreciate that it existed. Beyond that, I love that the game references it head-on. I mean, that pretty much makes the show cannon. Right? In the past, Hoagie will steal George Washington's teeth, help Ben Franklin fly a kite, have Betsy Ross design a new tentacle themed kite, and so on. In the future, Laverne will dress up the mummy of Ted Edison and enter him in a human contest while pretending to be a tentacle herself. In the present, Bernard will explore the Edison mansion again, which feels the most like a true sequel although the mansion has been completely redesigned this time around. Perhaps the most brilliant inclusion is the easter egg of the original Maniac Mansion being completely playable on an old computer in the mansion. It's still playable even in the HD remake, although nothing was touched up for that version. Which is fine. I for one am just thrilled that buying Day Of The Tentacle on Playstation 4 still nets you a copy of Maniac Mansion as a bonus. Of course back in the day the two-for-one was probably even cooler since the game wasn't all that old at the time. At any rate, Day Of The Tentacle still holds up even thirty years after release. I still prefer the quaintness and simplicity of that original game, but it's hard to argue that Day Of The Tentacle isn't the better game as far as scope goes. The humor is top-notch and the puzzles are fun, funny and ridiculous. The remaster is a re-release done right. There's so much love put into it, where all the revamps look, sound and feel great, but the press of a button can instantly give you the old school version of the game. Plus there's even a developer's commentary you can listen to as you play, which is a device that needs to be adopted into more re-releases. As I've said, these old Lucasarts games are really important to me. So I'm not saying anything surprising here. But Day Of The Tentacle is an honest to goodness classic. And I'm really glad it's so easily accessible all these years later.
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