Grim Fandango Update

Offworld just posted up a peice on custom made Grim Fandango figures by Ian Reekie. Click on the link for more photos.

http://www.offworld.com/2009/04/grim-fandango-toys.html

Grim Fandango

The graphic adventure game Grim Fandango was released by Lucasarts in October of 1998. Developed by Tim Schafer this was the first

game to utilise Lucasarts’ GrimE game-engine, which was a version of the Sith Engine used in Star Wars: Dark Forces 2 adapted to the adventure genre. It was also the first adventure game from Lucasarts to make the move into semi 3-D.

Grim was seen by Lucasarts as a final attempt to revitalise the adventure game (which was a major factor in Lucasarts rise to success in the game industry) at a time when gamers were moving away from the genre and it’s commercial viability was on the wane. Tim Schafer had just come off Full Throttle, his first solo project after working on earlier SCUMM ad

venture titles, and was entrusted with the ambitious project.

Schafer’s game took inspiration from three main areas: Aztek culture, art deco and film noir. These distinct inspirations melded together to give the game a very unique artistic style and provided it with a personality that made it stand out from the other titles at the time.

The game’s plot centres on Manny Calavera a worker in the Department of Death in the Land of the Dead. It’s Manny’s job to get the recently deceased through this purgatory by offering them travel packages to their final destination. Those who have led more virtuous lives make the trip on the Double N Train, taking only four minutes, while the more sinful souls must make the trip on foot which takes four years. While processing Mercedes Colomar, a newly arrived soul, Manny discovers corruption in the system, finding out that tickets for the Double-N are being diverted from the deserving souls to the criminal underworld in the Land of the Dead. The story unfolds from here over a four year period, each year moving the location and story to different places.

Going back and re-playing Grim Fandango now is quite a pleasant experience. The move to a semi 3-D viewpoint (a la the Resident Evil series) and the coherent art style has helped it stand the test of time visually. The story still stands up well and makes me wonder how the standard of storytelling would be now if graphic adventures had continued to this day. The puzzles are challenging but not frustrating. This being one of the last true adventure games I suppose all the streamlining of earlier titles played in it’s favour making it an eminently playable game over ten years after it’s release.

If you play and enjoy Grim I would recommend the new Telltale Games adventure series such as Sam & Max, Bone and the upcoming Wallace & Gromit game. Many of those who worked on Grim and other notable adventure games moved onto Telltale and have kept a lot of the spirit of those games intact.

Grim Fandango is still relatively easy to track down online, although EU and UK eBay prices seem to be substantially lower than the US ones.

Links:

The Grim Fandango Network and Grim-Fandango.com

http://www.grimfandango.net/

http://www.grim-fandango.com/

Both of these fan sites have a wealth of info about the game including walkthroughs, artwork, behind the scenes material and even a demo for you to sample. Well worth checking out.

Tim Schafer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Schafer

http://www.doublefine.com/

Tim Schafer’s Wikipedia page gives good information and links about his other adventure games and Double Fine, his new company’s site, will keep you up to date on his upcoming game Brutal Legend.

Installation on XP/Vista

http://www.grim-fandango.com/compatibility.php

Grim-Fandango.com has an excellent section which will help you install the game with as little Windows compatibility issues as possible. I found that these tools allowed me to play the game with practically no issues at all.

What is the Edge 200?

The Edge 200 blog gets it's name from the UK video game magazine Edge who recently celebrated their 200th issue. To commemorate this milestone issue 200 was shipped with 200 variant covers celebrating important games past, present and future.

From Asteroids to Zelda and everything in between the initiative was a true celebration of videogames. The collection of covers can be found at the link provided below for edge-online as well as a wallpaper containing all of the 200 images.

The aim of this blog is to revisit and discuss the games contained in the Edge 200 with a new post on average once a week. I aim to play or re-play portions or all of the games I cover in the blog so times between posts may vary depending on the games themselves. An awful lot of these games may be unknown to many of today's gamers (myself included) so I will be trying to put up links to other resources such as reviews, fan-sites, etc to help give additional background on the games and to give them a grounding in terms of what the industry and society was like at the time of release.

If anyone is interested in me addressing a particular game as a matter of priority, or would like to be involved in any way please feel free to contact me at any stage.

Links:

Edge 200 Cover Gallery

http://www.edge-online.com/features/edge-200-full-cover-gallery

Disclaimer:

I would like to make it clear that neither myself nor this blog have any affiliation to Edge magazine and I'm simply using the games listed as part of their issue 200 as a starting point to examine videogame history in more detail. That said it's a damn fine magazine and if you're not picking it up already you really should. Subscriptions should be available on their site and usually have good free gifts for new subscribers so please check it out if you're interested.