Category Archives: Retro Reviews

Maniac Mansion Review

Note: The screenshots posted on this page have been scaled up a little from their tiny native resolutions as well as had their aspect ratios corrected to proper 4:3 dimensions as they should have looked on CRT monitors originally. For posterity’s sake you can also click them to view the “pixel perfect” originals.

“Maniac Mansion!”

Introduction

In my last review (The Hugo Trilogy) I mentioned my fondness of old adventure games and Maniac Mansion is perhaps one of the most important adventure games of all time. Maniac Mansion was first developed by LucasArts (then LucasFilm Games) all the way back in 1987 and was one of the company’s very first adventure games. It was also the first game to use the much loved SCUMM engine which would go on to power just about all of future LucasArts adventure games – SCUMM, in fact, is an acronym for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion. Being the first SCUMM game also makes it one of the first “point and click” adventure games. It’s also notable for being widely spread across different platforms, even showing up on the Nintendo NES of all things, albeit censored. As an NES game it’s gameplay and themes were fairly unique and undeniably influential.

“Man, Weird Ed is one dedicated peeping tom.”

As for my part I never actually played the game when I was a youngster which may help explain why this review is much more analytical in tone than most of the other Maniac Mansion reviews floating around the ‘net. My first exposure to it was probably seeing an advertisement for it in an old gaming magazine. The ad was primarily just the box art, but it was intriguing nonetheless. I also distinctly remember reading about the ability to microwave a hamster in a walkthrough published in an old Gamepro or maybe even Nintendo Power. I was in awe of how many different, seemingly complicated actions the character could make… and a game where you could microwave a hamster? Come on, this stuff was a young boy’s dream! I even recall talking about this amazing hamster scene with another kid at school, who claimed to have owned the game and zapped that poor little guy a time or two himself.

The next time wasn’t until Maniac Mansion’s sequel Day of the Tentacle was released in 1993 which was right around the time I first got hardcore into PCs. It seemed like everyone had Maniac Mansion fever and there were a million magazine articles, BBS posts, etc. about both the new game and the original. This great wave of hype is what reminded me about the game and eventually inspired me to finally play it.

Gameplay

Beyond the innovative SCUMM engine, which I’ll talk more about under the Controls section, I actually feel like Maniac Mansion deserves quite a lot of credit in the gameplay area. Most 2D adventure games feature a linear progression of screens via puzzles with only one solution, finally culminating in a single ending. Not only does Maniac Mansion feature multiple endings but there are multiple paths to take throughout the game, and even multiple ways to solve the individual puzzles. For a game that is so often considered a prototype for point and click adventure games very few have followed suit in this respect, sadly.

Unlike most adventure games in which the player guides the protagonist through screens solving puzzles to unlock the next series of screens and puzzles, Maniac Mansion immediately plops the player down into a large, open area which they can explore more or less freely. Sure, there are still items to collect and puzzles to solve, and you bet some of these puzzles allow the character to advance to new screens, but the entire setup feels very freeform in comparison.

“Foreshadowing a future review? I think so.”

Beyond the obvious positives to this such as the sensations of freedom and choice, unique player experiences, and a high level of replayability there are also some negatives.

First time players won’t have much of an idea of what to do next or even what their goals are beyond rescuing the main character’s girlfriend. Like I said, you’re simply dropped in front of the mansion and told to have at it. While a lot of the puzzles reveal themselves in time others are much more obscure thanks in part to how widely dispersed items and clues often are. Almost every puzzle has at least some kind of clue suggesting its solution but most, though logical, are incredibly vague. Of the items the fact that many are red herrings doesn’t make the whole process of discovering and solving puzzles any easier either. Let’s also not forget that many of these individual puzzles can be solved in almost any order, further muddying the water.

Here’s an example of annoying red herrings and vague solutions. There’s a drawn out chain of puzzles towards the end of the game in which one of the steps is to feed a Venus Flytrap radioactive water in order to get it to grow up to the ceiling so that you can reach an otherwise inaccessible trap door there. Logical, eh? Still the Venus Flytrap becomes a deadly man eating plant after it’s growth spurt and climbing it ceases to remain such a novel idea. The solution to this puzzle is to pacify it by giving it a can of Pepsi. Why a Pepsi? Who knows! There’s a variety of other food and drink in the house, much of which are of the worthless red herring variety, yet it’s only Pepsi that satisfies it enough to keep the giant man eating plant from devouring our character? Alrighty then.

“Speed limits in space? The future is depressing.”

Indeed, I would imagine that most people that played Maniac Mansion without the aid of a hint book or some other walkthrough either didn’t beat it or spent hours upon hours experimenting through dozens and dozens of playthroughs. Restarting is definitely something you might find yourself doing in Maniac Mansion – unlike most future LucasArts adventures you can suffer from instant, trial and error deaths, getting tossed into the dungeon, and other setbacks such as missed, one time opportunities to acquire certain items or using them the wrong way and wasting them. You can even become stuck unknowingly unable to complete the game due to losing an item. The game is challenging – even an adventure veteran like yours truly felt lost time and time again the first time I ever played it.

Eventually the player will probably reach a point in which they’ve gone through a lot of work acquiring all kind of items but aren’t much closer to rescuing their character’s girlfriend. By then, however, they’ve hopefully noted several clues from all kinds of sources pointing in several seemingly unconnected directions about how to put the pieces together and how to proceed. Once you solve the last few puzzles, or at least know what they are so that you can restart and focus better on how to solve them, the game seems much, much simpler.

There’s another interesting layer that I’ve yet to mention. The player controls not one character but three. You only control one at a time but can switch between them at will. This leads to some puzzles that require more than one character and, perhaps more importantly, some opportunities to do some multitasking by having one of your characters, say, distract an NPC while another raids the room the NPC was in, all while a third waits somewhere strategic for some other event to go down.

“I hope his plans involve a face lift, a makeover, or something. Yuck.”

The twist is that while the majority of the puzzles in the game involve collecting items from the game world and using them in conjunction with the environment or each other in typical adventure game style, only certain characters have the ability to use certain items in certain ways. Of course, keeping with the precedence for being vague the game never makes this exceedingly clear. You can pick 2 out of 6 characters at the start of the game. While this means some characters are the only ones who can complete some puzzles, puzzle chains, or even entire paths no single character is ever required to beat the game. Again, there are multiple ways to reach the end and often enough multiple ways to solve individual puzzles.

Still, a little challenge isn’t always bad, right? Ultimately I think Maniac Mansion works best as a game you sink a huge, huge amount of time into experimenting with. A lot of people probably had a ball with this game when they were kids with tons of free time but it’s hard to imagine myself playing it that way these days. If you decide to take the easy way out I’d highly recommend you shy away from detailed walkthroughs and instead look into more obscure hint guides such as the UHS program with it’s multiple levels of hints to point you in the right direction rather than just bluntly telling you what to do. This way the exploration and experimentation facets of the game will stay intact without you having to spend your whole childhood figuring out how to get into the Dr. Edison’s laboratory.

Story

A meteor crashes down near the mansion of Dr. Edison. Dave leads a search party consisting of his teenage friends into the mansion in search of his kidnapped girlfriend Sandy. Meanwhile Dr. Edison appears to be holding Sandy in captivity in order to hook her into an insane looking machine to do something with her brain. This is B movie comedy sci-fi/horror type stuff. Boxed copies of the game come with a poster that has some more interesting tidbits on it, mostly serving as vague hints, that add slightly to the background. That’s about all we know as the game starts and little else is learned throughout the course of the game. Not unlike the last batch of adventure games I reviewed (The Hugo Trilogy) Maniac Mansion doesn’t have much of a plot to speak of, rather it relies on setting up a scenario and a setting in which it takes place and we’re left to explore this environment on our own.

“Breaking and entering…”

That being said Maniac Mansion does do quite a bit better when it comes to presenting an interesting setting than the aforementioned games. The Edison mansion is filled with odd characters such as Dr. Edison’s sex starved wife and the infamous sentient tentacles and other strange attractions like the nuclear reactor in the basement. Maniac Mansion also occasionally uses cutscenes to advance development a bit letting you learn more about the inhabitants and their situations. You’ll also learn more about them through the puzzles themselves as several of them involve having to work with these characters in order to progress – by the time the game ends you’ll definitely have learned (a little) more about what Dr. Edison is up to. Unfortunately player characters themselves are barely fleshed out at all beyond what you’re told about them on the character select screen.

There is little conversation outside of this cutscenes since the game doesn’t feature an option to talk to other characters. The game is also sorely missing a “look at” type command which would have offered many, many more opportunities for witty dialog. Despite this the game still manages to be quite funny with its dark yet quirky characters and numerous little humorous touches. Still, I can’t help but concluding that in the area of story it falls quite short in comparison to later LucasArts adventures.

Controls

The SCUMM engine chops the screen up into several parts. On the top we have various messages, more often than not descriptions of events taking place. In the middle, occupying most of the screen, we have the animation window that shows us our pretty graphics. Just below that we have our command sentence text, below that our list of commands, and finally our list of items.

The characters are moved around the screen by clicking where you want them go. It works well enough most times though thankfully there aren’t any crazy movement puzzles to put the movement controls to the test in Maniac Mansion unless you count some of the occasions in which you might be trying to frantically run from NPCs.

The rest of SCUMM works by attempting to emulate old text parser games by letting the player “build” their text commands with their mouse, more or less. For instance, instead of typing “use key in door” you might pick the “use” option from the command, or, more accurately verb list, then pick the key from our item list, inventory, or, again to use SCUMM terminology, noun list. This will write “use key with door” in our command area, the command executing.

“Two tentacles square off. Man, that was weird to type.”

This might lose me a few readers but I’ve never claimed to be a big fan of the SCUMM interface in general, despite the many amazing games that use it, and I actually prefer Sierra’s SCI engine which takes us even further away from the old text parser days. SCUMM did improve, no doubt, but this is its first implementation and it has several issues.

First of all, as mentioned above there is no “look” verb. Virtually every adventure game, text and point and click, spews a huge amount of dialog out about items, environments, and characters. Not in Maniac Mansion! This is a real disappointment as I can only imagine how hilarious some of these descriptions might have been. Similarly, and again already noted, Maniac Mansion is also lacking any kind of “talk to” verb so no conversation trees in this game!

Pixel hunting for items that can be picked up or otherwise interacted with is also much more difficult in this version of SCUMM. Instead of just being able to roll your mouse over anything you have to choose the “what is” verb to identify them. This can be especially tedious in the game’s many darkened rooms.

There’s also the fact that there seem to be way more verbs than needed. Do we really need to differentiate between “open” and “unlock”? If you’re going to open something that’s locked you’re going to unlock it in the process, right? “Turn off” and “turn on”? Why not just have a single “Turn on/off” command? Really, almost all of these commands could be whittled down into a single “use” verb in my opinion.

Later SCUMM games address all of these complaints and even go on to make other changes, such as making the inventory graphical, but this is the first one and it sure beat typing.

Although I’m not reviewing the NES version here it is worth mentioning that the controls of the NES version are the same save for the fact that the digital pad is used to control the mouse pointer. While not quite as quick or as accurate as an actual mouse this usually works well enough.

Graphics

This game has been ported all over the place (notably the other big players at the time, Amiga and Atari ST) but since I’m concentrating on the PC version those are the graphics I’m going to talk about. The PC version actually came in two distinct varieties.

The first, EGA version which was released in 1988 came more or less directly from the original Commodore 64 version. The graphics are simple and blocky with strong colors thanks to the limited 16 color palette. The character sprites are actually fairly large even if they are simple looking. Personally they kind of remind me of the way Terrance and Philip and other Canadians from South Park look. 😉 Animations are extremely simple featuring only a couple of frames for walking, for example.

“The original version.”

“The enhanced version.”

“Maniac Mansion Deluxe.”

“The NES version.”

The later “enhanced” EGA version released in 1989 features very similar artwork with much more detailed sprites and a better use of the color limit. This version is a definite improvement over the original one though it isn’t a dramatic departure. Probably the most remarkable thing about the upgrade is that the characters sprites have much more personality thanks to them remaining relatively large, allowing for more detail. While the enhanced version definitely isn’t as pretty as later VGA adventure games with their hand painted backgrounds and colorful sprites it does seem to possess a charm of its own.

While I’m at it I’ll also mention the NES version yet again. The NES version of Maniac Mansion’s graphics are entirely distinct from any other version of the game that I know of. Literally every sprite is different and the screen backgrounds are completely redrawn as well, sometimes radically. Putting them side by side, other than the art style changing the sprite and backgrounds are all scaled down and condensed as well. While some people might actually prefer this version it probably falls somewhere squarely in between the original and enhanced EGA PC versions in my opinion. As an aside there’s also a version with more manga inspired character sprites for Japanese audiences… bizarre!

Sound

Both PC versions of Maniac Mansion make similar limited but careful use of the PC speaker for sound. Quieter and less harsh than a lot of PC speaker sounds the effects are used sparingly but fairly effectively – we’re talking little things, such as the ticking of a clock, the clicking of a button being pressed, doors opening and closing – you get the picture. These stand out, when present, thanks to the lack of any ambient background sounds or any sort of soundtrack. There is a short intro song and some other, more interesting sound effects such as when the piano is played, but for the most part PC speaker use is tastefully conservative.

“Indeed, Dr. Fred.”

The NES version, as you might imagine, has radically different sounds. In addition to sounding different effects are used a little more frequently and with more variety. The biggest difference about the NES version, however, is that it actually does feature a background soundtrack. Each player character has its own theme song that loops while you’re controlling that character. It’s a pretty neat feature and the tunes are varied and decent though they’re all a bit too short, looping too frequently for my tastes.

Old Age

As usual I played both versions of the game on my dedicated gaming 486, much of the time without worrying about disabling my internal cache or artificially slowing down my machine further via any other method – as far as I can tell Maniac Mansion is free of CPU speed timing related bugs. Maniac Mansion won’t play nicely with any modern OS however so DOSBox, which it is apparently 100% compatible with, is needed.

Alternatively, SCUMMVM is a similar program that can be used to run all of LucasArt’s SCUMM games (and some others) and has been ported to just about every platform out there. If you’ve ever heard whispers of people playing adventure games on their Sony PSPs or Nintendo DSes this is what they were using to do so. I’ve personally yet to try SCUMMVM but I’ve heard great things about it. Apparently you can just drop the SCUMMVM executable in your game’s program directory and run it instead of the original executable file – much easier than tinkering with DOSBox for most people, I’d think.

Legally acquiring Maniac Mansion can be difficult as LucasArts hasn’t made any of its back catalog available for quite a few years now for some mysterious reason. The easiest way to get your hands on it would probably be to track down a copy of the NES version, which isn’t too rare – eBay has a dozen or so at the time of this writing for between ~5 and 15 dollars, many of which include the manual and packaging. Another option is to acquire Maniac Mansion’s sequel Day of the Tentacle – As a very generous easter egg the entire Maniac Mansion is playable from within the game on Ed’s computer. Day of the Tentacle is a little more rare but can be found on eBay for only around 20 dollars when it shows up and is an amazing game in it’s own right.

Update 3/2016: Day of the Tentacle Remastered is now a thing and available legally on various platforms. Like the original version it includes the original Maniac Mansion as an easter egg.

Finally, the easiest way to acquire Maniac Mansion is to not worry about acquiring Maniac Mansion at all. Instead, seek out Maniac Mansion Deluxe. Maniac Mansion Deluxe is a freeware fan remake of Maniac Mansion in which the entire game was painstakingly recreated using the excellent and widely used Adventure Game Studio. All of the graphics from the enhanced version have been touched up, recolored using a 256 color palette and an infatuation with gradient shading, and reanimated. Maniac Mansion Deluxe also barrows the updated SCUMM interface from Day of the Tentacle meaning less/different verbs, a graphical inventory, and a graphical character swapper. It also adds background music and new, improved sound effects amongst many other features.

“Maniac Mansion Enhanced.”

“Maniac Mansion Deluxe.”

Perhaps the best thing about Maniac Mansion Deluxe is the simple fact that it is actually a modern Windows program meaning it should run on newer PCs running newer operating systems without the need to toy with extra programs or settings. The AGS engine itself offers some other added modern conveniences. For instance, my LCD monitor doesn’t support scaling up a tiny 320×200 VGA resolution screen however with Maniac Mansion Deluxe I can choose to scale it up to 640×400 (or 640×480) which my monitor will gladly run in full screen. You can, of course, also use this feature to run the game windowed without the window being amazingly tiny. Newer AGS games offer a broader range of configuration options, such as more scaling choices, but what Maniac Mansion Deluxe provides should be sufficient.

I can’t speak for how accurate of a recreation Maniac Mansion Deluxe is exactly as one would need to play through it exhaustively to know if every screen and puzzle was correct but from what I have seen it appears to be a faithful remake with just a few minor additions and changes.

The manual and other documentation is only needed for getting around the copy protection in the enhanced PC version of the game, otherwise it is fairly useless. I’m sure this can be cracked out once the game is installed however. The included poster does have some interesting background information and subtle clues, as I mentioned earlier, but nothing you need. Still, you can find it and a million walkthroughs all around the ‘net thanks to this game’s hardcore cult following.

Sequels and Related Games

I suppose you could say that most of the SCUMM games are at least somewhat related to Maniac Mansion. Still, as mentioned various times before now, LucasArts followed up Maniac Mansion with an actual sequel, the excellent “Day of the Tentacle”, in 1993. I’ll save the details on that for a later review!

Closing

Maniac Mansion certainly isn’t a perfect game but what it does differently, and indeed what it did first, earns it the great reputation it has in the realm of classic games. As the introduction game to the SCUMM engine just about everything innovative it does in that respect has since been improved upon – there are other games I’d recommend over Maniac Mansion as a demonstration of SCUMM. As an adventure game, however, it is fairly unique in it’s non linear, open design. True, I’d probably recommended a more linear, story driven game to an adventure game neophyte but if you’re already a big fan of old school point and click adventure games and somehow have yet to play Maniac Mansion than you should definitely check it out if not for its historical relevance alone. The impact this game made, both on its fans and the evolution of PC gaming, cannot be denied.

Hugo Trilogy Review

Introduction

If there is one genre of games that makes me extremely nostalgic it has to be the old, all but dead, genre of “graphical adventure games” that thrived on personal computers of all sorts and even hitting the occasional console in the mid 1980s to mid 1990s. When most people think of graphical adventure games they typically only think of the classics from Sierra and LucasArts but there were plenty of others out there of varying quality. The Hugo series (Hugo’s House of Horrors, Hugo II, Whodunit?, and Hugo III, Jungle of Doom) by Gray Design Associates, while far from one of the best, certainly had a large audience and long legs.

For the first year or two that I had my first “IBM compatible” PC I would often talk my parents into buying me inexpensive shareware and budget titles at various stores around our town. There was no way I was going to talk them into buying me a $50+ retail game on a whim but these cheap games? Sometimes that actually worked. Occasionally the games were even decent to boot. Of all of these often regrettable purchases I recall that several were published by the same company. Indeed these green Personal Companion Software boxes seemed to be just about everywhere that had computers for sale and over time I stocked up on several of them including at least one other title that I plan to review in the future. Getting to the point, this is how I first met the titular Hugo.

“The entire plot of the first game.”

Most people, I suspect, met Hugo a different way. The reason for the large audience and the fact that people still seem to play the games to this day is that, as was fairly common at the time, is that GDA originally released the Hugo trilogy as shareware. Unlike the majority of shareware titles, however, the Hugo games weren’t crippled in any way – there were no time limits, they weren’t missing any kind of content, there weren’t even annoying nag screens. These were the full games! It honestly seems like an odd move to me as the titles might as well of been Donationware though perhaps that was the intention from the start. And we thought we had it good getting the entire first episodes of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom for free!

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Hugo games to me is that they were all created by one guy, David Gray. One guy managed to expertly emulate Sierra’s AGI classics. As someone who started learning to program just a few years later this seemed like quite an admirable accomplishment to me and still does. David Gray’s company, GDA, went on to release a fourth Hugo game in 1994 – this time resembling Wolfenstein 3D and again coded from scratch. I’m stumped over why this guy isn’t still out there coding awesome games.

The Hugo games weren’t my first adventure games, not by a long shot, and they’re definitely not my favorites but at the time I had all but written off graphical adventure games that maintained a text parser and these games really helped me begin to appreciate them again.

Gameplay

The gameplay is typical of the adventure game genre. The player guides the protagonist from screen to screen solving puzzles, the majority of which concern how to progress to the next screen. A great many of these puzzles involve collecting items from the game world and using them in conjunction with the environment or each other, sometimes in fairly creative ways. Like I said, typical adventure game stuff.

As with many other adventure games, particularly Sierra’s, points are awarded for certain actions, mostly pertaining to solving puzzles, and a total is displayed to you at all times to give you a clue of your progress. Many of these points are optional so it is entirely possible to beat the game without reaching the total. This, I always imagined, was there to provide a hint to players that they missed something and encourage them to attempt to explore and experiment more in subsequent playthroughs. I’ve never been someone who cared a great deal for “one hundred percenting” a game myself so I rarely pay too much mind to these scores.

“No, letting the mutant dog fuck your head isn’t actually the solution to this puzzle.”

The puzzles are most often fairly logical despite sometimes feeling a little abstract though there were a few cases while replaying the series without the aid of a walkthrough for this review in which I did indeed get stuck.

During the first game, for instance, I reached a room with a killer beast of a dog in it. If I entered the room he attacked me instantly. Along the way, however, I had picked up a piece of meat and what seemed to be a dog whistle. The whistle, when blown in the adjacent room, would summon the dog who would, again, attack me. I concluded that I needed to put the piece of meat on the floor and call the dog but no matter what I did the dog would ignore the meat. I experimented with this for what seemed like an hour before finally figuring out that I needed to simply enter the room the dog was in initially and quickly toss him the meat – the whistle served an entirely different purpose. Still, one would think if the dog was interested in the meat in one room he would be interested in the meat in another and it seemed more logical to me to distract the dog in a room other than the one I was trying to explore. Hmph.

A more frustrating thing about the games that was often a problem across the entire genre was the whole “oops, you missed that” thing. That is, finding out towards the end of the game that you missed grabbing a crucial item near the beginning of the game and now have to backtrack. In many cases backtracking might not even be possible – hope you have plenty of saved games! These kinds of conundrums can certainly be designed around but it isn’t surprising to see them in lower budget titles.

A silly example from the first game of getting caught in one of these situations is that early on you enter into a room with a character in it and an item on the table. The character eventually shrinks you but only temporarily. It wasn’t until after this scene was over that I tried to get the item on the table since the presence of the character seemed to take priority. I couldn’t get the item no matter what I tried as somehow I couldn’t reach it. I tried to position my character in numerous ways but eventually gave up. This item, of course, ended up being critical near the end of the game. I later discovered that I needed to pick up the item during the short time that I was in my shrunken state. I had to resort to an extremely old save and replay quite a few sections because of failing to recognize the puzzle at the right time, missing my only opportunity to get that crucial item. Doh.

“As I entered his basement I was immediately impressed by the scope of his rock collection.”

The games, particularly the second one, are pretty bad at pointing you in the right direction by giving you decent clues about what items are needed and where they might be found. In fact at times items seem to be pretty randomly dispersed through the game. In the third game there is a point at which, having exhausted all possible item uses and screens, the solution only lies in finding a hidden item by walking into the exact, out of the way spot in what would otherwise be an unremarkable area. This felt less like a puzzle and more like luck – I didn’t feel clever when I finally found the item, just annoyed about how stupid the solution ended up being.

The infamous Sierra style sudden deaths and other game ending events that are often only avoided by trial and error do occur in Hugo as well. Thankfully the ability to save and load your game at any time, as well as maintain a slew of saved games concurrently, helps to assure that you’re rarely too screwed over by this type of thing providing you have the discipline to “save and save often.”

What is more troubling is when these kinds of puzzles don’t actually result in any obvious problems for your character. There is an infamous puzzle in the second game that involves your character crossing a bridge. You must cross the bridge in order to proceed yet doing so usually results in you dropping an item into the creek you were crossing, ruining it. You can still pick the ruined item back up giving you the impression it still has some value but indeed it turns out to be a game crucial item that must remain undamaged. Even sillier is that what seems to be a scripted event in you dropping the item actually turns out to be a really horrible movement puzzle.

“The luxurious Château de Trace.”

Not so much a note about the quality of the puzzles in the game but still worth a mention is that there is an odd puzzle late in the first game in which an old man quizzes the player on a variety questions completely unrelated to the game. This might throw a lot of people off since some of the questions are fairly dated and somewhat esoteric in the first place. Apparently a lot of other people complained about this as well as the answers are in newer versions of the manual. The second game humorously mocks this puzzle by setting your character up for a repeat scenario only to have her interrupt and subdue the old man.

All of that being said if you enjoy graphical adventure games than you’ll be right at home with the Hugo games as you’ve most likely ran into and eventually learned to accept all of these annoyances decades ago.

Story

The setup for the first game, Hugo’s House of Horrors, is that Hugo needs to search a creepy looking mansion for his girlfriend Penelope who went missing after going there on a baby-sitting job. That is pretty much the entire story as, until the game actually ends, there is no real advancement in the plot. Though it might not have much to do with the story stuff does of course happen: you’ll get shrunk by a mad scientist, stumble upon a gathering of horror film villains, fight off a swarm of vampire bats, and fend off a mummy. While that list might sound impressive, this first game, even taking into account the time spent on the harder puzzles, is incredibly short.

All of the rest of the narrative elements of the game, from the setting to the characters, are ultimately very shallow. It is as if the author knew he wanted to make an adventure game but lacking a story instead settled on a genre he could easily barrow common themes from. On the bright side this comes across as intentional camp with the game even occasionally poking fun at itself. It definitely is humorous though usually in a much more subtle way than its Sierra and LucasArts counterparts – rather than every description and piece of dialog being hilarious I found myself more often chuckling at the bizarre situations I’d get Hugo into.

“My SJW senses are tingling!”

The second game in the series, Hugo II, Whodunit?, quickly replaces Hugo with Penelope as an Agatha Christie like murder mystery unfolds. In her quest to discover the identity of the murderer Penelope will seduce crusty old gardeners, wander aimlessly around massive hedge mazes, meet Doctor Who, summon genies, and slanderously accuse Hugo’s family members of murder left and right. As with Hugo’s House of Horrors it seems that the author simply picked an established genre and went with its tropes for content. This time he went with murder mystery instead of horror.

Hugo II, Whodunit? has even more of the self aware humor than the first game and is often less subtle about it. There’s also more humor period. One moment from Whodunit? that had my chuckling was when Penelope summons a rather unimpressive genie. Not only does he immediately demand food from Penelope but no wishes here – her only reward is him forcing open a stuck door in a decidedly less than magical way for her.

Unfortunately Whodunit? also suffers greatly from giving even fewer clues on where to go and what to do leading to some fairly abstract, if not totally illogical puzzles. That difficultly is compounded by the fact this is easily the longest of the Hugo games and features the most total screens. On the flipside the murder mystery story of Whodunit? is perhaps the most intriguing of the series with some actual plot development and even some twists. Nothing too spectacular but an improvement no doubt.

The third game in the series, Hugo 3, Jungle of Doom, finds Hugo and Penelope crash landed in a South American jungle and Penelope bitten by a poisonous spider. Hugo has to find the antidote and along the way kill indigenous people, drown elephants, bust some ghosts, and rock a sweet Tarzan impression. A tiny bit better on the plot development than Hugo’s House of Horrors but just as short, if not shorter.

At the end of the day the stories of all three games are just excuses for some fun, static settings to explore which will probably suit a lot of adventure gamers just fine. There are plenty of other adventure games out there with great narratives and excellent characters – these aren’t them. Still, it all works in an a way that harkens back to the earliest text adventure games. It’s less about the story or the characters and more about the puzzles and the experience losing yourself in an imaginary world to solve them.

Controls

All three of the Hugo games play exactly like clones of Sierra’s early AGI engine games. That is, you move your character with your keyboard’s arrow keys as you might in some other type of graphical game, yet all of your other interactions require typing commands into a text parser as you would in a text based adventure or interactive fiction game. Sometimes positioning your character exactly where you want them can be a tad bit annoying but for the most part you adapt to moving around rather quickly.

Your character’s “hitbox” can seem pretty oddly proportioned but there are few movement related puzzles in which you’ll ever notice thankfully. When you do run across them such as in the aggravating Venus Flytrap puzzle in Whodunit? you’ll be cursing up a storm though.

“Well, we might have crash landed but at least you haven’t been bitten by a poisonous spider.”

The text parser seems to be fairly generous with its synonyms not requiring the player to be as overly accurate with their terminology compared to some other, similar games. Occasionally the action picks up and given that this is a text command driven game sometimes moving quickly means frantically trying to type in a command and slap enter which can be pretty challenging, if not frustrating. Luckily across all 3 games these moments are relatively rare and a normal, leisurely adventure game pace is more frequently kept.

One of my only complaints about using this kind of a limited text interface, other than those moments of frantic, do or die typing I mentioned, is that sometimes you find yourself having to do a lot of typing with very little feedback. It can be pretty annoying having to type out several separate commands just to perform what is ultimately a simple task such as opening a door with a key. I’m sure this is one of the reasons that these kinds of games were quickly replaced by the point and click variety. I’ll talk more about text parsers when I review an interactive fiction title later down the line.

Graphics

The graphics of the series closely resemble those of other 1980s 16 color EGA adventure games. This isn’t really a compliment though, considering that the games were released in the early 1990s. The sprites and corresponding animations are universally simple, some might say bad even but I’m trying to be generous. 🙂 The background art has a bit more range though – many of the backgrounds show interesting perspectives and feature details which you can tell probably took a little time while others seem to have been completely uninspired and quickly hacked out. Jungle of Doom, with it’s abundance of lush jungle foliage, sports the best and most consistent backgrounds owing largely to another artist having contributed them.

“Alright, which one of these bastards gets it first?”

One could simply say “it’s EGA so it sucks, what else were you expecting?” but it isn’t quite as simple as that. The art in these games, while similar, lacks the cartoony stylization of many LucasArts titles and even the detail and refinement of Sierra titles. That being said, it is EGA so what were you expecting? 😉 Chances are if you can stomach any old EGA games you’ll be able to handle the Hugo series.

Sound

All three games use loud, harsh sounding PC speaker music and sound effects and do so at a minimum to boot. Music pops up only on occasion, such as in the first scene of the first game, and doesn’t ever stick around for very long. Sound effects are practically nothing more than beeps and blips and there aren’t many of those either. I’d suspect that many people simply preferred to play with the sound turned off.

Old Age

As usual I played all three games on my dedicated 486 gaming PC with the internal cache disabled (slowing it down to low end 386 speeds) and had absolutely no timing issues. I did briefly try to play the games without slowing my machine down and didn’t run into any obvious problems. I’ve not tried to run the games via DOSBox though all three have apparently been 100% supported for quite a few versions now. The games are also reported to be fully supported by ScummVM.

The un-crippled shareware versions of the games are readily available on many DOS and retro gaming sites. Here’s one, for instance. You can also purchase all three games, along with their Windows ports (which add MIDI music, real sound effects, and point and click controls – no I haven’t tried them!) from their original author’s site.

Update 8/2014: GOG.com now sells the Hugo Trilogy! They appear to be pre-configured to run in and bundled with ScummVM though they may be the Windows versions, if you care.

“At least one of these plants has GOT to get me high.”

Text file manuals come with both the shareware and full versions of the games though they’re not really needed. There are also numerous walkthroughs including spoiler free versions available for all three titles all over the place. GameFAQs is probably a good place to start.

Sequels and Related Games

As mentioned, GDA went on to release another Hugo game called “Nitemare-3D” which aped Wolfenstein 3D instead of Sierra adventure games. I never played this one as my main attraction to the Hugo games was the fact that they were adventure games. Still, Nitemare-3D is said to be more puzzle-y in nature than most of the FPS games from around that time. This game, along with the others, was also ported to Windows later.

Closing

The Hugo games aren’t spectacular but are fundamental graphical adventure games that should provide either fun trips down memory lane for people who loved Sierra’s old AGI games and their imitators or unique experiences for those who haven’t ever played anything similar. Each of the games can be completed within a couple of hours at the very most and since, unlike similar games, you can get them all for free without resorting to abandonware sites I’d suggest you check them out if they sound at all appealing. Just be prepared for what you’re getting into if this type of game is new to you.

The Hugo engine includes a feature called the “Boss Button” – a hot key that instantly pauses the game and swaps you out to a DOS prompt. Apparently David Gray got caught making games at work so often that he felt the need to help the rest of us avoid getting caught playing them. 😀

A-10 Tank Killer 1.5 Review

“A-10 Tank Killer v1.5!”

Introduction

Until relatively recently the simulator genre was one of the few, along with adventure gaming, the Western style RPG, and various styles of strategy, that really helped separate computer gaming from console gaming. Back in the day sims, especially flight sims, were damn near everywhere! It was almost as if there was some unspoken rule that even if you weren’t into sims you probably had to own at least one to consider yourself a real PC gamer. Not wanting to stand out from that crowd too much I naturally owned several.

One of the first PC flight sims that I really got into and one of my all time favorites to this day was Dynamix’s 1991 release of A-10 Tank Killer v1.5. It’s hard for me to remember exactly why it was that I picked up A-10 Tank Killer. One reason was most likely that I was fairly fond of the Warthog, having grown up on and around a couple of Air Force bases that they called home. Another may have been my fondness of Dynamix at the time, due almost exclusively to The Adventures of Willy Beamish (which you can bet I’ll be reviewing here later!) Perhaps the great reputation of Dynamix’s Red Baron played a role in my decision process. In any case at some point in the early 90s I ordered the game from a used PC game trader (as I often did, being a broke kid) and the rest is history…

“Flying close enough to the ground to part Saddam’s hair.”

A-10 Tank Killer v1.5 is an updated re-release of Dyanmix’s 1989 version of the original A-10 Tank Killer (hence the v1.5 part!) inspired by the success of their aforementioned WWI flight sim Red Baron. I may have some of the details wrong but I’m under the impression that the flight model was lifted from Red Baron into v1.5. The sound was also updated along with, probably most notably, the graphics being updated to full VGA. The game also included a new campaign based on the Gulf War to go along with the two previous Cold War Europe inspired ones.

I don’t remember being particularly fond of the game the first time I installed it and gave it a run through. I’ve always found it fairly hard to get into flight sims and most of the ones I’ve adored I’ve latched onto for odd reasons. In the old days the most common reason was pure boredom inspired by a tiny game library and not much else to do – I’d often experiment with games, trying even ones I didn’t like over and over again, I’d try to learn new things and develop my skills, I’d even make weird little meta games out of them. For that reason sandbox type games were perfect for exploring, fooling around, and otherwise wasting time in and most flight sims were, at least on some levels, sandboxes. A-10 had a couple of extra things going for it as well: it was relatively easy and it was painless to pick up and play in short bursts. These were the main two factors in me becoming hooked.

“Ahh, so this is why they paint these things green.”

The game was easy in part because of the nature of the beast: The A-10 is one of the last few military attack planes that is still flown the old fashion, by the seat of your pants way without tons of computer assistance. It’s also fairly slow and specializes in attacking mostly ground targets. Couple those points in with a not so sophisticated flight model and what appears to have been an intentional preference for fun over realism and you’ve got a pretty easy game that, while filled with plenty of action, still feels more or less like a sim. Sure, there are challenges if you want them – some of the individual mission objectives can be quite difficult to complete and as is often the case in flight sims landings can be challenging.

“Fill ‘er up.”

As for the pick up and play factor while the game feature campaigns it also easily let you skip the punishment and play each of the missions in all three of the campaigns individually, tweaking the difficulty and skipping the briefing, load out, and take off sections if you wish. You can have the game land for you after you complete all of your objectives and you can even enable what were basically cheats in the form of an invulnerable air craft and unlimited munitions – both of which helped make learning to effectively play the game the right way a cinch!

“No sarcastic comment needed – this picture is just freaky.”

After more or less figuring the game out and being fairly satisfied that I had gotten enough of my money back out of it my brother (who rarely games) either saw me playing or just out of the blue asked me to show him how to play Tank Killer. This sparked off what became almost a tradition in my household – when we were particularly bored, lounging around on a summer’s day, we’d plug in the flight stick, fire up A-10 Tank Killer, and spend hours taking turns flying the same mission over and over again. By the time we had more or less stopped playing it we managed to literally master several of the more interesting missions. I still vividly remember burning away hours playing the last of the Gulf War missions, Coupe De Grace, attempting to blow up every last enemy unit on the map and land back at base unscathed. I also remember some daredevil stunt attempts through canyons and under bridges. What started off as just a way to kill time eventually grew into an addiction.

“No one retreats through my sector!”

Gameplay

The gameplay is simple: Each mission starts off with a quick briefing about your objectives, selecting your aircraft’s munitions load out (there’s not a ton to choose from and a “recommended” option is available) and finally sitting in your cockpit preparing to take off. Once in game you can reference your map which shows you most of the enemy positions. You can select a position to make it your waypoint which makes flying to it much easier although you typically do start relatively close to the action. There are often scripted events in the form of changes to your objectives with new units showing up on your map, etc. usually explained through quick pop up text boxes representing radio messages from your co-pilot or the HQ but for the most part the missions are fairly static.

“There always seems to be a hell of a lot more red than blue around these places.”

Targets include tanks and other ground vehicles, buildings and runways, helicopters and (rarely) other aircraft. You’ll need to use the right kind of munitions for the right kind of target which is where the load out you selected comes into play. You can, of course, always use you’re A-10’s famous Avenger cannon which is actually easier to use then you might think. I’m not sure exactly how the game mechanic used for it works but usually a wild spray in the general direction of an enemy unit will blow it to smithereens if you’re close enough. If you’re not quite close enough then lining up your crosshairs just perfectly and successfully squeezing off a deadly burst is a highly satisfying experience.

Your biggest threat (besides flying so low to the ground so often that you may often become inspired into feats of pure piloting jackassery) typically comes from surface to air missiles and other anti-aircraft weaponry. These are usually highlighted on your map once discovered, along with an approximate visual of their effective range. You also have flares and chaff countermeasures if the situation merits their use. You can also sometimes take out enemy air threats by moving in and out of your own friendly anti-aircraft zones of fire. True to life your A-10 can take a fairly large amount of damage but once you’ve been shot down it is mission over.

“Pixel versus blocks!”

“Ahh, missile versus trucks!”

“Should have dropped a cluster bomb.”

The Campaigns themselves are nothing more than the individual missions played in order with your score and other statistics being persistently tracked. If you die or heinously fail a mission then that’s it, you have to restart the campaign. Your mission scores are based not only on objectives complete but also on individual kills which means the leader board system fairly interesting as you’ll often encounter many optional targets and some of the objectives themselves can be ignored or not fully completed without failing the mission outright. This can lead to some fun score battles with other players as it definitely did between my brother and I. If only we had real time online leader boards back in the early 90s!

Controls

Another factor relating to the ease of this game that I haven’t already mention specifically is the controls. Unlike a lot of flight sims this one thankfully doesn’t have a necessary function assigned to every key on the damn keyboard. It has enough, sure, but for the most part you’re not really given anything out of the ordinary: Some camera controls assigned to your function keys, a way to pick and cycle through munitions types, and a few basics like landing gear control and countermeasure deployment. Again, I suppose this is a combination of the aircraft in question and also a fun over realism design choice coming into play. I definitely approve!

“Buzzing around enemy air fields is slightly more enjoyable after all of these things are gone.”

Joystick wise the controls are, again, very simple but this is more of an age factor than anything else. The game supports joysticks of course but only makes use of two of your available buttons – one to fire your cannon and one to fire your selection under-wing munitions type. The actual stick control is, like most games of the era, pretty rigid and low resolution but it works well enough with the limited flight model and is generally a easy and fun to use. The game also supports rudder and dual joystick support (a horrible, silly feature) though I’ve personally not dabbled with either of those due to not having the appropriate hardware handy.

I supposed it is worth mentioning that along with the new VGA and flight model updates they also decided to throw in mouse for most user interface operations which was pretty unusual for a flight sim game at the time. Using the mouse isn’t at all required, in fact I often forget I can, but it is definitely helpful when I do remember.

“Sadly this dude’s hair is actually one of my more enduring memories of the game.”

Graphics

A-10 Tank Killer v1.5’s graphics were pretty good for their time, consisting of first and third person 3D polygon graphics and lots of digitalized pictures for various interfaces and cut scenes. They don’t age amazingly well, with the low detail of the naked polygons aging a bit worse than their bitmap and more sophisticated 3D counterparts, and of course some of those (at the time) astounding digitalized pictures look pretty damn cheesy today. Still, I think the graphics hold up fairly well considering the game’s age and if you’re nostalgic for old school VGA graphics then this one will definitely hit the spot. At the time, though, I was definitely impressed.

“Boooooom!”

Sound

The sound isn’t anything too special for a game of this period with A-10 making effective use of the Sound Blaster with the occasional decent digital sample for sound effects. The introduction theme music is cool and believe it or not this v1.5 version of the game supports the famous Roland MT-32 for music. Listening to that introduction theme via my MT-32 definitely impressed compared to my memories of the old Adlib music (as usual!) and inspired some fun swapping back and forth between Adlib and MT-32 sound for comparison. It may also be my imagination but it seemed as if when using the MT-32 I was hearing more varied sound effects, some possibly being generated by the MT-32 rather than the Sound Blaster.

“Proof that I didn’t pirate this game – at least not originally…”

Documentation

A documentation category? Weird, sure, but manuals of old PC games are sometimes worth discussing all by themselves. The manual for this game, as was tradition back in the late 80s and early 90s, was a fairly good read. While it wasn’t a massive tome like some other simulator game manuals it does contain plenty of information about the A-10 as well as section on the various munitions available to you and the enemy vehicles you’ll be encountering on the battlefield.

Old Age

As far as playing this game on a modern PC goes apparently the 1.5 version doesn’t have nearly as many slow down issues as the old original release does. Still, there are definitely some issues. The biggest thing I ran into was not being able to take off due to some odd issue relating to speed and/or acceleration. After managing to take off or skipping the take off sequence entirely I also run into the much smaller issue of the on-screen text cycling far too quickly. Even forcing it to the slowest speed in the in-game options will make it fly by without enough time to read it. After experiencing those two issues I decided I needed to go ahead and take action meaning I never really got the opportunity to witness any more machine speed related bugs though I definitely suspect there are more present. As usual playing it on my dedicated 486 gaming PC required disabling my internal cache to get it to slow 386 speeds in order for it to run both smooth and correctly as opposed to using various slow down utilities which made the game run far too choppy to be enjoyable.

I’ve not tried to run the game via DOSBox though it is apparently 100% supported in the last release version. I’ve read several form posts that seem to suggest it’s easy to setup and plays fine that way.

“So few bombs, so many people who need to be bombed.”

The game used to be part of Gametap’s service but doesn’t appear to be available there any longer so getting a hold of a legal copy might not be so easy. It isn’t highly sought after however so you might be able to nab it off of eBay or elsewhere without breaking the bank.

Scans of the manual and reference card are available from Replacementdocs.

Sequels and Related Games

Besides the aforementioned original A-10 Tank Killer and Red Baron games, Dynamix actually released an official sequel dubbed Silent Thunder: A-10 Tank Killer II in 1996. Unfortunately I never played this game but it looks fairly favorable and similarly arcadey from what few reviews and other information I’ve been able to find on the title. There are, of course, many other unrelated A-10 simulators out there as well.

Closing

If you’re a fan of old school flight simulators or the A-10 Thunderbolt in particular and think you can stomach the 15 year old plus graphics and sound then I’d definitely recommend you give A-10 Tank Killer v1.5 a try – It has a small learning curve compared to many flight simulators, can be played in short bursts, can be very casual and fun or as challenging as you’d like to make it, and has a comparatively large amount of replay value.