[06] Now, This is the Game of a Carpenter

For the last few entries, I have been excited about writing this post.  Finally, the first graphical adventure game, which from this point on would become my favorite genre.

Then, I started playing the game, and realized I had no reason to be excited, because this game wasn't very good.  But this blog is a blog of firsts, of memories -- if I was writing simply an adventure game blog, I would skip this game for the much, much better follow-up entry in this game series, Fate of Atlantis.

But that's getting ahead of myself.  First, let's set the stage.  Another game I copied from my friend Troy came on a bunch of floppy disks and had a seemingly-important, very large manual, the grail diary.  To be fair, if I had seen the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade yet, I'm not entirely sure.  But it would definitely become one of my all-time favorites.

This is the companion, of sorts, to the 1989 cinematic gem by George "Star Wars" Lucas.  Set in 1938, Dr. Indiana Jones goes off in search of the biblical Holy Grail, after his father was lost on the same quest.  Some of the historic locations include Hitler's Germany, a scenic Italy, and more.

In replaying this game after some time, I planned to run the CGA/EGA version, but sadly, I decided I couldn't stomach it.  I think this is why I gave up on the game very early back in that time.  Well, that, and the fact that I didn't have access to a BBS to get a walkthru yet.  Nor was I yet a subscriber to QuestBusters, and their incredible hint pages each month.

I might have cheated by not playing in CGA, but it's worth it.

So I suppose I should explain my disappointment with this game.  After all, many reviews are quite favorable.  Some of what I say is retrospective.  This game was released around 1989 (later for the VGA release) but, being released the same year as Leisure Suit Larry 3, the sound and music leaves something to be desired.  LSL3 not only supported the Roland MT-32, but embraced it with the longest (at the time) game soundtrack to date.  Indy 3 barely supported more basic sound cards, but with much less polish.  Considering the orchestra-quality music for this game was already perfected for the movie, it was a little disappointing.  

As a movie adaptation, they made a great effort to add some alternate solutions and pathways.  But at the end of the day, it's still an adaptation.  If you've seen the movie, the game can only do a couple of things:  it could copy the movie exactly, and you'd wonder why you bothered playing it; it can deviate from the movie, and perhaps do things out of character or that might conflict with the cannon going into a future movie.  They avoided that problem by adding in alternate solutions to problems that are trivial when viewing the characters.

Originally, the game wasn't meant to be an adventure.  The design documents proposed at the start were more of an action game (which you could check out in The Art of Point & Click Adventure Games by Bitmap Books) and later, it would be split two ways, with LucasFilm Games (later LucasArts) designing an adventure, while an outside company was contracted to make an arcade game simultaneously.

Still, disappointment with music and creativity aside, the SCUMM game engine was improved upon from the previous efforts, and while not yet as polished as it would be for the sequel, it was getting there.  For example, as in the earlier titles like Zak McKracken, the keyboard shortcuts for the verbs were mapped in order to the keyboard, starting from the left and across.  But in later SCUMM games, they became relevant and easy to associate and remember (like, O for OPEN, Y for PULL (as in, YANK) or L for LOOK.  No thought needed.

Speaking of Zak McKracken...

 The in-jokes that are a trademark of nearly every LucasArts adventure were out in display.  Look around the professor's office, and you'll find a hyperkinetic rabbity thing, or references to aliens working at the phone company.  When I first played the game, these went over my head, but I later appreciated and adored these drop-ins.

This is one of the rare LucasArts titles where you can die (although not the best-known death scene, I suppose).  But that is, of course, keeping in the spirit of the original material; Indy is in grave, life and death situations in every movie.

A puzzle where we need to feed a dog meat to get past it... we'll never see this puzzle in a LucasArts adventure ever again, will we?

Of interesting note is that they wrote the game based on the original script of the movie, and in separate offices.  So when the final cut of the movie was finished and released to the theaters, some things that ended up on the cutting room floor made it into the game.  Notably, the very start of the game in the gymnasium.

Break that fourth wall, why don't you, Indy...

Of course, Indy would wear his hat into the ring

Practice for later in the game, if you choose not to avoid most of these confrontations (there are ways)

Also, some scenes in the game and movie would serve a form of, shall we say, premonition...

Fly, yes.  Land?  No.  And if you search online, you'll have trouble keeping track of which article refers to which plane incident, since he has had so many.

There are multiple endings to the game.  In fact, so many that I'm too lazy to type them all out, so I'll copy & paste from a blog post:

(1) Pick up the grail, give it to the knight; Indy and Elsa leave with Henry and Marcus.
(2) Pick up the grail, walk out of the temple, a chasm opens under you and you die.
(3) Pick up the grail, give it to Elsa; OR just wait and she'll pick it up herself; OR try to walk out and she'll also pick it up. A chasm opens under Elsa and she dies.
(3A) now you can walk out; Indy leaves with Henry and Marcus.
(3B) or you can pick up the grail with your whip and give it to the knight; Indy again leaves with Henry and Marcus.
(3C) or you can pick up the grail with your whip and walk out, and a chasm opens under you and you die.

Choose wisely, Junior

Again, I didn't completely dislike my return to this game.  When I went to start playing for this blog post, I had found that I already had the game on my computer, in ScummVM, with saved games in 2015.  Apparently, I had gotten all the way through, and yet I had forgotten this -- in my mind, I had never had the patience, which I suppose is a testament to how forgettable this is when you've played the sequel.  I promise -- we will get there someday in this blog.  But even though I'm not going strictly chronologically, I know there's a few (very many) places we need to go first.

For example, in the next post, we won't be listening to the arresting sound of the Police, but we will spend at least a few minutes with Rockapella.

Update (10/19):  I've had a couple of people email me, letting me know their disagreement with my overall "blah" review of this game.  But I realized I had forgotten to reference a much more researched blog, that also agrees with me, if not thinks less of the game than I.  The Digital Antiquarian is an excellent read, and is more and more becoming the go-to research starting point for computer (and gaming) history.

Lucasfilm Games’s one adventure of 1989 was a similarly middling effort. A joint design by Gilbert, Falstein, and Fox, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure — an Action Game was also made — marked the first time since Labyrinth that the games division had been entrusted with one of George Lucas’s cinematic properties. They don’t seem to have been all that excited at the prospect. The game dutifully walks you through the plot you’ve already watched unfold on the silver screen, without ever taking flight as a creative work in its own right.