I was bored this weekend. As a tribute to Tim Schafer releasing the original puzzle/design document for the film noir game, Grim Fandango, I did some sketches of my own. These were based off ripped off some of the concept artwork by Peter Chan in the released document.

Update: Tim Schafer retracted the document!

Manuel Calavera

Manny and Meché

The document is an amazing 72 page treat, and includes many puzzles and sub-plots that did not make it into the final game. Possibly my favourite part, apart from the artwork, is the comment on the final page.

To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you!

If you haven’t played Grim Fandango, you’ve missed out of one of the finest and last great adventure games ever released, and not only that - an excellent film-noir story. It was one of the few games that were produced in what I think was the unfortunate end of the adventure gaming era. It is a title that a lot of people missed, even if you were looking for it on the shelves of Electronics Boutique at the time. It is also one of only a hand-full of games that I have felt genuinely moved by, and it is shocking that a story like this could be ignored, forgotten or lost.

The file was released as part of Grim Fandango’s 10th anniversary. If you would like to know more about Grim Fandango, see the escapist’s fantastic article, written this year.  N. Evan Van Zelfden of the Escapist has been quoted, in what I think summarises the difficulty marketing the game, as saying:

No other game has come close to its perfection. Once, I told a videogame magazine editor I considered Grim Fandango the finest game ever made. “Yes,” she replied, “But I enjoyed playing Half-Life more.”

I’ll leave you with a quote from Mr Schafer that explains why the final puzzle piece is not revealed in the document.

“We didn’t have the last puzzle designed when I wrote that document, so I wrote two nonsense paragraphs and then overlapped them in the file so it would look like the final puzzle description was in there, but obscured by a print formatting error. That way I could turn the document in by the deadline. As if anybody was going to read it all the way to the end anyway. Ha ha. Obfuscation triumphs again! I delight in Evil!”

Oh god no! Brink’s dead!

Maybe I should contact someone?

Or maybe just one more game of asteroid lander. I love this game.

OH YEAH! COME ON! You hear that Brink? … Brink?

A necessary post about the fantastic game from Valve, Portal. To start off on a bad note, it’s disappointingly short, and pretty easy. The game and the advanced levels were completed a matter of hours after I received the Orange box through the post last week.

Now for the good; the different, interesting but yet simple, game style make the game so incredibly playable.

It’s fun and rewarding to spend a few minutes using the portal gun to try to jump over something and then realising a way of using momentum more effectively and flying to the goal. Momentum being conserved through portals, making them a fantastic ways to propel yourself. I wont say the game is physically realistic, I mean, there is a ‘portal gun’ voiding any realism on first glance, however, there is some loyalty to physics in motion and aspects of weight in the physics engine. Combining this with the abstract Portal device makes a wonderful mix that is very fun to play, making you think differently about the possibilities of moving yourself around and achieving the solution.

The puzzle elements never got to the point of frustration either, and the touches of humour lighten the mood and blanket the fact that there are you are almost alone in the ‘Apature Science’ laboratory.

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