Udvarnoky

Last Crusade is the last SCUMM game where dead-ends are possible. You should be fine though if you do what you've been doing, which is saving often and more importantly in multiple slots. It's far more linear than the two previous games. EDIT: Be sure to download the Grail Diary! I believe Steam provides the unabridged version as a PDF.

Yeah for some reason the Steam version has PC speaker sound, not even MIDI. And the FM-Towns version has full CD audio, I believe.

Being from the South, I sure as eggs know what a Cracker Barrel is. I'd probably be in agony walking through one of those gift shops as an adult, but the butterful, eight trillion calorie breakfast waiting beyond would surely motivate me through that endurance test.

My understanding is that Stuckey's were fairly ubiquitous on I-10 when my dad was a kid. Before there were golden arches at every interstate exit, Stuckey's was basically your pit stop on cross-country trips for gas, food, useless trinkets and of course candy pecan logs. I don't think the few Stuckey's that remain are particular representative of what they were like in the chain's heyday.

Congratulations! I'm glad you enjoyed the game as much as you did. It's way easier to appreciate when you can avoid the cruel gotchas. You also seem to just like adventure games, which is great, and it's kind of delightful to sort of participate in your exposure! One day you ought to try different character combos and see the various endings of the game. I will say though, I think the nuance of the "multiple paths" is a bit overstated. Maniac Mansion is every bit as complex and sophisticated as it's often regarded, but I've come to realize that it's due to its general non-linearity rather than the character combos. At the end of the day, that just comes down to the method of bypassing Purple Tentacle, which each character has a particular means to do. The exceptions are Jeff, who can merely repair the phone (which Bernard can also do), and Dave, who's useless and mandatory. And Razor and Syd are duplicates. Here's the exhaustive rundown of the different possibilities for getting into the inner lab based on the character and the different endings, if you're interested. Brace yourself for this wall of text: Bernard can obtain the radio tube from the old-fashioned radio, repair the radio in Dr. Fred's bedroom and phone the Meteor Police. They snatch the meteor and leave the badge behind for you to show Purple Tentacle and intimidate your way past him. This is the solution you used. Michael can develop Weird Ed's "battle plans." These will appear if you intercept Ed's package and then give it to him, making you his ally. At this point a roll of film will appear on the front lawn. Using the sponge of developer fluid, Michael will be able to develop the prints in the red room. After giving the developed plans to Ed, he will show up on your behalf when you confront Purple Tentacle. Razor and Syd can play the piano. Record their song on the blank cassette tape in the music room and play it for Green Tentacle in his bedroom. This will inspire Green Tentacle to drop his demo tape. Mail it to Mark Eeter and the eventual result will be a recording contract. Show it to Green Tentacle, and he will function the same way Ed does in the Michael scenario. Syd and Razor can also microwave the hamster, just as a bonus. Wendy can retype the meteor's manuscript. Mail the improved text to Mark Eeter and the eventual result will be a publishing contract. Show it to Purple Tentacle and he will stand aside so that you can show it to the meteor. Except for the scenarios where the Meteor Police take the meteor or you've got the publishing contract, the player will be left to deal with the meteor. You can pick up to the meteor and throw him in the trunk of the Edsel (taking the right exit in the meteor room will cause the character to emerge in the garage via the secret slab). Use the yellow key in the ignition and the meteor will be launched into space. The NES version offers a fun, additional version of this scenario: send the Edsel into space without putting the meteor in the trunk. After the cutscene, the game will return to the player with the garage area half destroyed. This opens a hole in the gate to the pool area (which the game had sealed at this point for whatever reason), thus allowing the character access to the mansion again. Racing against the clock, you can carry the meteor all the way up to the den and feed him to the man-eating plant! In either case the game ends happily on the porch just as you saw in your version. If you complete the game having gotten Dave killed in the process, the same scene plays out the same way except Fred apologizes that his mad, insane plan "cost your friend his life." The Wendy ending is unique and fun because after you present the meteor with his contract the game throws to a talk show where the meteor, now a successful novelist, is an interviewed guest. The reason why I called the Bernard/Wendy combo the best one is because it allows for a double ending: if in addition to giving the meteor the contract you call the police ahead of time, the talk show scene plays out as described and then the police shows up to snatch the meteor away anyway! The consequence of only Jeff being without a way to get past Purple Tentacle is that it's possible to complete the game with any combination of kids - you got lucky by picking the combo you did because by failing the grab the package you lost out on the Wendy scenario, but still had the Bernard one to fall back on. Had you been able to do the mailing business, you would have had use for the envelope. The original versions of the game offer a particularly awful dead-end here: by simply opening the envelope, it becomes ripped and useless. Bam. The puzzle to steam open the envelope in the microwave is difficult enough to figure out; the idea of being able to screw yourself simply by doing something as intuitive as opening the envelope is ridiculous and probably the worst bit of design in the game. Which is probably why the NES version addressed it: instead of allowing the player to rip the envelope, the character will just say, "A quarter slipped out of the envelope" when you try to open it. Phew!

Yeah, you're on your way.

The pool water is distinct from tap water for reasons you learned when you climbed down the ladder. Just keep it away from the microwave! Wrong room - you're referring to the library. The living room is the one just before it, with the couch and the chandelier.

I'm also going to say there is one more item in the living room for you to find. Get it.

Opening it was equally correct. The solution to the puzzle was using the Hunk-O-Matic twice, as it was for the garage door. For the grate, an alternate solution would have been to use the tools on it. Perhaps temporarily shutting off the power will be necessary for you to accomplish something, though... You don't. Start thinking about other uses that jar could have. (You should be able to remove it from the microwave after a bit of time passes.) There is one "character" you haven't interacted with yet. He lives in the den (the room with the typewriter and the fireplace). Consider what's above him. And forget the stamp. That ship has sailed.

The only Kickstarters I've given money to so far are Double Fine Adventure and A Vampyre Story: Year One. There have been a ton of video game Kickstarter projects that I have watched in captivation and was stoked to see succeed and which I will likely buy after release (Leisure Suit Larry remake, Shadowgate remake, Massive Chalice, Armikrog, etc.) Mostly I've just been happy enough to stand by and watch magical things happen for games that wouldn't have existed otherwise, content in the knowledge that I would have a second opportunity to support them down the line.

And that's where the serendipity of selecting geeky Bernard will save your bacon.

A question for you, Zeus - I'm assuming that at this point Ed's package would have arrived. Did you intercept it before he got to it? If you failed to you're not screwed, but it does remove a certain avenue toward your final solution that would allow us to know what hints to give.

Correct, the phone is simply an alternate and more convenient way to enable a kid to explore Edna's room. Only Bernard and Jeff are capable of repairing the phone.

Probably much more. It's hard to say really since almost the entire geography of the game is more or less available to you from the off - this is one of those games that lends itself to speedruns because if you know what to do there's nothing impossible about clearing it in 20 minutes. Additionally since you happened to choose the most useful kid combination in my opinion (and I'll elaborate when you're done) there are at least two completely distinct solutions for the last major riddle you will face. Puzzle-wise you don't have a whole lot of distance left to cover, but some of what remains might prove to be doozies. Relevant spoiler if desired:

No, he's not screwed. The old batteries are deliberately useless, and the new ones are needed.

This forum has contained good posts and bad posts. This is a great post.

They did raise a stink, but only after the fact. Hamster in the microwave was to be removed from all subsequent printings. Since there was only one printing in North America, all US cartridges have the feature (a prevailing misconception is that it's some kind of rarity), but the PAL version has it removed. The character will instead say something humorous when you try to use the hamster with the microwave. Crockford's article is pretty famous, and as he states the graphical stuff in the submitted prototype that Nintendo demanded removed was nonetheless featured in the game's Nintendo Power preview. A ROM of that prototype is floating around the internet, by the way, for the curious. I also own some other magazine preview that must have been provided assets taken from an even earlier version of the port, because a screenshot of the arcade room features "KILL THRILL." In his article Crockford indicates that this would have been self-censored to "TUNA DIVER" before they even submitted it to Nintendo. EDIT: I had forgotten that I had actually uploaded scans of these previews to Mojo among other miscellaneous magazine clippings. They were originally from my ancient Maniac Mansion fan site. http://mixnmojo.com/media/galleries/Maniac-Mansion-Press'>Check 'em out.

Okay, here's the real spoiler you need right now.

I think Star Fox suffered from a little bit of accidental identity crisis starting with that Zelda-esque game. I haven't played it - by all accounts it's quite good for what it is - but it underwent the Super Mario Bros. 2 journey of being built as a completely different game before Nintendo decided to slap the Star Fox characters on it. And to be fair I didn't play the DS game that was supposedly more of a return to form.

The potential established by the first two titles is inescapable, though. The flying missions in Star Fox: Assault, what few there were, I remember being grand. There's exactly zero reason why Nintendo couldn't make a great Star Fox game. For some reason I feel the need to insist that I'm not against the ground-based missions in principle. But if they're going to comprise fifty percent of the game or more, they shouldn't pale so agonizingly in comparison to the air-based stuff.

The reason you've heard about microwaving the hamster is because Nintendo's desire to have it removed gave it a certain infamy. It's not a puzzle solution, though - just something random that you can do if you have Syd or Razor on your team. You get killed if you show the results to Weird Ed.

A few. It's the dead-ends in this game that are problematic, not the death scenarios, which are fairly reasonable and foreshadowed to the point of being downright groundbreaking in a genre where it was not uncommon for you to instantly die by walking off the wrong side of the screen or something. Most of the deaths are basically humorous "rewards" for deliberately trying something stupid, though whether that's fair in a game where you pretty much have to try everything with everything is debatable. I'm even more unsure of what to think of the bizarre Tentacle Mating Calls death scenario. Zeusthecat, saving often and in multiple slots as you're already doing is pretty much the most effective hedge.

Yes I can attest to them being terrible though the first one I have a soft spot for because it was very brief unlike the wide-open and overwhelming (as I recall) sequels. And of course my friend more or less had all the answers for me at school from when his older brother had beaten it. Like I would have known "Narnia" at that age otherwise. (Lord, I'm only just kind of fully appeciating how aggressively stupid that bit in the game was where the guy literally asks you some trivia questions.) EDIT: Oh man, and the part where you had to evade the mummy through trial and error that basically amounts to manipulating him behind a rock and obstructing his walk path! Heinous! EDIT EDIT: Okay my last update by holy smokes. If you want to buy Full Throttle or Monkey Island 3 you can go right to hell, but you'd better believe that the guy who made Hugo has 'em all updated for Windows and readily available! I notice he retitled the games and made them point 'n click.

I was the complete opposite. I could beat super tough NES sidescrollers at a callow age but Maniac Mansion completely bewildered me until I came back as an adult years later. I'm pretty sure once I accessed the top floor of the mansion that was the end of my progress. I'll never forget the impact that game had on me though. That world felt lived in, it had scariness and tension, and there was Pepsi in the refrigerator. Video games didn't have those things. The closest story I have to what you related about the pirated games was my friend handing me a hand-labeled floppy disk of Hugo's House of Horrors in elementary school. I'm pretty sure that was my exposure to the Sierra interface which that game lifted wholesale and I'm sure quite unlawfully.

Just as an aside, the old LucasArts hint books were works of art that contained all kinds of great content and were actually worth the money. The character-narrated walkthroughs were wonderful, and the UHS-style hint sections were incredibly exhaustive and insightful. Reading the Last Crusade hint book exponentially increased my appreciation for that game because it revealed so many alternate solutions to puzzles that I was not even aware of. Fuck that game for still having dead-ends, but I'll tell you what: it was very impressively designed otherwise. And I'm one of them - Maniac Mansion for NES was my adventure game gateway drug, and it's a brilliant port. It's also got a few dashes of bizarre original content. Your remark about Dead Cousin Ted actually reminded me of the fact that because they had to replace Edna's phone sex dialog, the replacement dialog actually kind of does delve into Ted's backstory by implying that he had an unfortunate operation and the Edna was unaware of or had not accepted his death! Of course DOTT sympathetically "retconned" this to have the gag implying that Ted was a mummy that has been around for centuries.