Not science fictional, Lucasfilm Games/Lucasarts’ The Secret of Monkey Island is a fantasy game that takes place in the Caribbean during the 17th century. It follows a young man who wishes to be a pirate and claim a fortune. Postmodern anachronisms, puns, and tongue-in-cheek game advertisements for other Lucasarts games makes this an interesting and enjoyable game to play from the early 1990s.
As I mentioned in my last post, Sam and Max Hit the Road is another fine game from the heyday of Lucasarts PC gaming in the early 1990s. I remember playing this game on my 486 DX2/66 at my grandparents’ house when I stayed with them the Summer of 1994. Sam and Max are two private detectives, a dog and an insane rabbit, who scour the United States for a carnival’s missing frozen big foot. Based on the comic book by Steve Purcell, Sam and Max Hit the Road is perhaps the most irreverent of the Lucasarts SCUMM games.
Like the other fine games from Lucasarts at that time that used the SCUMM game engine, they brought together humor and a tightly crafted narrative that gave gamers enough room to explore without being confined to a game-on-rails. The Monkey Island series is another example of these strong PC games (more next time!).
LonelyAdventures gives us a walkthrough of the classic SCUMM (script creation utility for Maniac Mansion) game from Lucasarts, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. In the early days of PC multimedia gaming, SCUMM provided a way to have an exciting game without needing a lot of PC power.
The Fate of Atlantis follows the programmatic of the first and third Indy movie installments–Nazis seek mysterious powers of the ancient world and Indy has to stop them.
I think that the most recent Indy film, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull would have likely been a better game than a big screen film. Games like Fate of Atlantis are engaging and fun, because the player has to think through scenarios as the protagonist while figuring out how to further the narrative.
After you watch the first video above, you can watch the full game in this playlist.
One of my favorite games for PC is Star Wars: X-Wing by Lucasarts. Actually, the main force behind my wanting a PC at the time besides the fact that my Commodore Amiga died was knowing that a game like X-Wing was coming out. I had already spent months studying how PCs work and how to build one for myself that I settled on the components that I wanted, but I had one custom built by a local computer shop in Brunswick.
In the video above, MaliciDWildman takes us through the beginning of X-Wing, and he has a full series of the missions available in this playlist.
Slashdot.org reports that Sony and Lucasarts announced the end of life for Star Wars Galaxies, the massively multiplayer online game set in the Star Wars universe. December 15, 2011 is the day for Galaxies and the accompanying collectible card game (aka trading card game). Many reports of the uneven execution of Galaxies kept me away from the game. Now, I wish that I had devoted some time to try it out for myself. Unfortunately, I don’t think that I have the spare time to try it out before its servers go silent. Read more about the shutdown here.
