| Product: |
Grim Fandango (PC) |
| Date: |
03/06/03 (400 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: Cheap, Suitable for all ages, Funny, witty, original
Disadvantages: Older game, so may be hard to find, SOme may find it frustrating rather than challenging
Grim Fandango is a 3D graphic adventure game brought to us by Lucas Arts, those lovely people of Star Wars fame. It was released upon an unsuspecting public back in 1998 in PC version (which is the one I am going to be rambling on about) and later made an appearance on the Playstation1 (which I have yet to find a copy of to play, so sorry, no comparisons here). It is a game I came to quite by accident, being lent a copy of it after expressing a liking for this genre of game - as ever a master of impeccable timing, I had only discovered them when they were beginning to die out. I am aware that many people will have something of a blank expression on their faces at this point, so I shall start by covering....
- What is a graphic adventure?
A graphic adventure is a third person game - that is, you are watching the character you are playing rather than seeing the world through their eyes - that evolved from the old text adventure games that some of you may recall from the 1980s. In a graphic adventure game, you have a rich storyline that your character can only progress through by collecting items and gathering information to solve puzzles. So, rather than running around and shooting people as so many current games demand, you are instead presented with the opportunity to think your way through a game, linking disparate pieces of data together to find the solution to a mystery.
Graphic adventure games look quite different to modern games, rather primitive and basic to some eyes, I am sure. In your typical game, you have a series of locations that you can visit, but one location does not "scroll" or merge into the next; that is, the camera does not follow you as you walk through the door or pass from one location to another. Rather, they are presented as a series of "stills" that you can explore individually (e.g. within a house, you may have a bedroom and a kitchen to explore, and each of these rooms will have one, o
r at the most, two static shots for you to move within). Within each location, you might have characters to talk to, who can help you or give you information if you ask the right questions. There may also be items to pick up and important points to notice. Some links in these games may be easy to make (such as using a key on a locked door), but others require quite a bit of thought and detective work to crack.
Good examples in the graphic adventure genre (other than Grim Fandango) are the Monkey Island series, the Discworld games and Broken Sword.
- The setting for Grim Fandango
Our hero throughout Grim Fandango is Manny Calavera, a grim reaper working in the Department of Death in the Land of the Dead. The Land of the Dead is populated, well, by dead people who have yet to make it through to the bliss of Ninth Underworld. It is Manny's job to collect the newly departed from the land of the living and act as a travel agent of the afterlife to guide them on their journey to eternal rest - those clients who were good in life can take a short train journey directly to the Ninth Underworld, while the ?poorer? ones must undertake a four year journey of redemption on foot to gain admittance. But something is rotten in the Land of the Dead. Manny can never seem to get the most virtuous souls, so he is struggling to pay off his debts to the Department...and cannot embark on his journey to the Ninth Underworld until he has done so. It is your job to help Manny untangle the conspiracy that threatens his very salvation.
- System requirements
To play the PC version of Grim Fandango, you will need:
- Windows 95 or 98
- Pentium 133 or faster
- 4 speed or faster CD ROM drive
- 32 MB RAM of memory
- Microsoft Direct X 6.0 must be installed
It has been noted that with Grim Fandango being a few years old, it struggles to work on fast PCs (by which I mean better than Pentium 2 - 400....no sniggering
at the back, please). If you find this a problem, there is a patch than be downloaded from:
www.lucasarts.com/products/grim/grim_spotlight .htm
- Gameplay
The gameplay for Grim Fandango is pretty typical for a graphic adventure game. The appearance on screen is deceptively simple - all you get is Manny standing in the location, with no toolbars, life indicators or gauges of any kind cluttering up the screen. This is mainly because you cannot die in this game...you are already dead, remember? You move Manny around the location with the arrow keys on your keyboard (which takes quite some practice if you are used to new fangled PS2 controllers, I can tell you), and give instructions using the following keys:
- I to look at the inventory of items you have collected
- E to examine an object Manny is holding or looking at
- Enter to pick up or use an object
- F1 to bring up a list of options such as saving or viewing recent dialogue
To play then, you need to slowly walk Manny around his location - when he passes something he can interact with, his head will turn to look at it. You can then examine this point or object, and try to use it or pick it up by pressing "enter". Manny will give you a commentary on what he sees, passing on information and descriptions of objects to you for your information. If you find a new object it will go into your inventory when you pick it up, and you can try to use it on any point that Manny can interact with, by getting the object out and pressing enter whilst Manny is looking at whatever it is you want him to try and use it on. If there are characters in your location, you can talk to them by approaching them and pressing "enter". A list of things Manny can talk to them about will then appear on your screen, and you can guide the conversation as you choose. Thus, you gather information and objects and use them to progress the storyline onwards by solving puzzles.
Grim Fandango eases the new player in gently, with Manny only having access to a couple of locations and objects in the opening section of the game. This means the information you have to process is limited - and the clues to your first actions are easy to spot. This is effectively your training for the rest of the game, which does get quite a bit harder from then on. Later clues vary from mildly taxing to downright fiendish!
- My opinion
Visuals - Grim Fandango looks like a cartoon, but a rather stylish cartoon. It is an eclectic mixture of Mexican themes (drawing heavily on the Day of the Dead for inspiration) and film noir. So while the graphics appear "blocky" and unsophisticated in parts to those of us more used to playing up to the minute games, the sheer ingenuity of the visuals means you hardly notice it. 8/10
Sound - The sound in Grim Fandango amounts pretty much to the dialogue between characters (which is shown in text on screen as well) and the background music. It neither needs nor uses sound effects, and keeps things simple. Most of the speech is easy to hear and understand, and music where used is relevant (e.g. Mexican pipe music, film noir style piano) and adds to the atmosphere of the game. 7/10
Lifespan - For all its apparent simplicity, Grim Fandango is a huge game and you can expect to be playing for a long time if you want to complete it. This is partly due to the large number of locations to explore and the impressive list of characters to interview. But mostly because some of the puzzles take so damn long to figure out! It took about 3 weeks of regular play to reach the half way point, and it is not going to get any easier now. So I would say several weeks to months depending on how often you play it and how many times you cheat by using Google to find a walkthrough. Grim Fandango can be a highly addictive game if you enjoy solving mysteries. 9/10
Playability - Very
easy to pick up the controls, making it suitable for gamers of all ages and experience: even those who find they are not quick enough with the controls to get anything out of action games. Absorbing and frustrating in equal measures! 8/10
Originality - How many times have you played a Mexican film noir style game in the Land of the Dead? 10/10.
Overall, I love Grim Fandango - I don't know how I missed it when it first came out, but I am very glad I have found a copy now. As a genre I enjoy graphic adventure games because they are so refreshingly different from what has become standard game material these days. You can?t die or fail. Nothing you can do will screw up the game and force you to play and reply one bit sixty times before you can make progress. There is no blood, gore or violence. And you get something that really gets the grey matter working. Some people may find Grim Fandango and its kind slow and frustrating, but personally I enjoy being able to take my time and love being challenged by the puzzles. And you know what else? You get a thoroughly original and often hilarious storyline, good character development and a generous serving of wit as well. Over the past couple of years you would have struggled to get that from a film, let alone a PC game.
What about disadvantages, then? Well, kiddies of the broadband generation may well dismiss Grim Fandango as being primitive in graphics and awkward to control with a keyboard. But my technical advisor informs me that this was cutting edge stuff for this kind of game at the time of release - and I can tell you that it was certainly an improvement on the controls of the earlier Broken Sword games. The only real niggle I have is that in places it is awkward to navigate Manny through a doorway because of little glitches in programming. But this is more of a nuisance than a real problem, and the patch I referred to earlier sorts out most of these little errors.
>
Overall, recommended to gamers of all ages who like
to think.
- Details
Grim Fandango was produced in 1998 by Lucas Arts (www.lucasarts.com) and is available on PC and also on PS1. I am unsure if the PS1 version is still available (unless you find it second hand somewhere), but the PC version can be bought from the manufacturers for $14 at:
www.lucasarts.com/companystore/grim/
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For more about graphic adventure games:
http://dc.mobygames.com/featured_article/secti on,58/feature,13/
For more on Grim Fandango:
www.grimfandango.net
For a walkthrough and FAQs:
http://www.game-revolution.com/games/codes/pc/ grim_fandango.htm
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