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Grim fandango ost flute8/18/2023 During a particularly odd sequence that involved anchors, I managed to find the solution through brute-force trial and error, even though I wasn't sure what I was doing or why even after I succeeded. Like many adventure games of its era, Grim Fandango's puzzles run the gamut from clever to bizarre to stupid. The inventory system is a bit unwieldy: The only way to access the items you pick up is to watch Manny take them out of his coat, one by one. You have to manually save your game, and while that shouldn't be a problem since you can't really die, the two or three times the game crashed for me made it a bigger concern. You can polish the hell out of a beautiful car with problems under the hood, but Turtle Wax doesn't fix the engine. Some of the more technical issues feel jarring to modern gaming sensibilities, in ways that no amount of dynamic lighting can fix. Of course, there are problems, the kind that plagued so many games at the time, the kind that perhaps didn't seem like problems when we had nothing to compare them to. It's a minor complaint if anything, posterity has made it even more apparent how jaw-dropping the art direction is, from its colorful *Dia de los Muertos-*inspired parades to its soaring airships and art deco architecture. (Rim shot.) There are moments when the characters feel too crisp compared to the softer look of the backgrounds. Visually, Manny is much sharper-and not just when he's wearing a tuxedo. You have perhaps heard talk about Grim Fandango's soundtrack, which is famously excellent the remastered version has been rerecorded by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and its mix of jazz, bebop and mariachi has never sounded better. Eventually, you have to interrupt her if you want the game to proceed, but it's fun to watch the things you don't say-in a sense, the things your character is thinking-unfold as a dynamic and literal subtext. As she yammers on from anecdote to anecdote, the four dialogue options at your disposal change, offering thematically appropriate barbs for each insipid subject she chooses. At one point, you end up trapped in a rambling conversation with a woman who has an item you need. While LucasArts had clever dialogue down to something of an art by 1998, I was struck by how Grim Fandango played with those conventions. Although a combination of short memories and clickbait bombast can produce a statistically impossible number of "most" and "best" proclamations around videogames, I'm not exaggerating when I say that Grim Fandango has the snappiest, smartest, funniest dialogue I've seen in any game, ever, before or since. By the time I was in my late teens, as far as I was concerned adventure games had always been the most important and impressive genre of computer games, and they always would be.įirst, the good news: Even now, there's a lot to praise about Grim Fandango, and praise effusively. As I got older, adventure games only got better their graphics, stories and puzzles became more sophisticated, their worlds more immersive. I came of age in the era of adventure games some of my earliest memories involve sitting a keyboard and typing commands like "look at frog" into the text parsers of Sierra games. It's a bit of an understatement to say I adored Grim Fandango. Schafer's current company, Double Fine Productions, has resurrected Grim Fandango over 16 years after its original release, with updated graphics, better lighting, and a highly enjoyable director's commentary. A slick, brilliantly-scripted fusion of Day of the Dead mythology and hard-boiled noir, Grim Fandango was directed and scripted by Tim Schafer, the man who also helped give us The Secret of Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle and more recently, Broken Age.
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