12/15/2023 0 Comments Thimbleweed park maniac mansionThis was a pleasant surprised since I have wanted a sequel to MM even if it is indirect Day of the Tentacle can be seen as an indirect sequel to Maniac Mansion, afterall. Because the Maniac Mansion characters are shown in the game without any name or character design changes, it is likely that Ron Gilbert got the okay to use the characters with permission by Disney.Īnyway, with Sandy and Dave being characters you can interact with, as well as the various mentioning of Maniac Mansion, makes me think that Thimbleweed Park is a spiritual sequel that exist in the same universe as Maniac Mansion. Even Leonard, who I initially mistaken as Bernard (the face design is that of Bernard from MM VGA) is said to be Bernard's cousin in the game is Leonard the same individual seen in Sam and Max: Hit the Road? I was also shocked to see that Ed and Edna (who you can dial her number in the game and hear her voice Edna sounds similar to the voice actress from Day of the Tentacle, which is a nice touch considering that Ron Gilbert had no involvement with DOTT) have a cameo appearances in a flashback since I would assume Disney/LucasArts be strict in allowing Ron Gilbert to use the characters I knew that the creators of the Quest for Glory game tried to make HeroU connected to QFG, but had to sever the connection due to Activision owning the rights to the old Sierra series. I wasn't surprised that the game had references of the meteor (Wanted poster in Sheriff's office), but I was a bit surprised that Sandy and Dave are characters in the game. But that's the joke.I am surprised that the game is chalk full of MM references. Also in many cases, something like the talking tube-based tron machines would have required a warehouse full of tubes to actually operate, each. Tubes went out of style in favor of transistors long before the 80's (circa 1960's or so), so the tubes in the game are extremely anachronicistic. If anything is "wrong" from a technical level that makes no sense is the tube tech. Those are just a few things that you don't expect developers to have thought through.īut that's fine, none of these really remove you from the game too much. If you read the notebook you actually get a better idea of why they are there before Chapter 4. The more obvious one would have simply been "Where is Ray's car?" How do two "feds" get to a podunk town by Bus anyway? Many small towns in the US would have either a Bus or a Rail station, but even though we saw a railway (it's even the background on steam) there is no station. 7-digit dialing was still in use in the 80's. 4-digit phone numbers is obviously a way to hide what area code is used. This can also be handwaved by saying that the hotel is state-of-the-art (The patent for mag-stripe hotel locks was filed in 1984 but not published till 1988) The locks shown in the game are identical to the mag-stripe cards, however Mag-stripe cards weren't popularized at this time either. Electronic Door locks, these are definitely out of place. Hotels in the 80's were the first to adopt touch tone phones because it allowed for recieving voicemail. If Franklin was meant to call anyone, there should have been a speakerphone somewhere to manipulate (eg the Penthouse) rather than the hotel room phones which couldn't be left off the hook. All the other characters pick up the phone, but Franklin's Ghost does not, yet all the calls still go through. Where I think a mistake was made was with the Hotel, specificly with Franklin. Again the 80's was when people started switching from Rotary phones to Push button phones. We can handwave this aside and say it's a sattelite phone, as Inmarsat was available since 1979, and makes more sense when it doesn't work in a few locations. This is meant to resemble a Motorola DynaTAC, but small cities would never have had cell service in 1987 (many still don't.) Given that there is a Radio Station in the game, a Radio Station is a much less complicated thing. That said, there's a few accuracy/holes in some of the 80's things. Some of the breaking-the-forth-wall bits is an 80's/early 90's video game thing (Particularly Monkey Island and Space Quest) so if you've played these games, it's kinda expected. So anyone who actually played Maniac Mansion would have instantly known the solutions for those inventory items. Most of the references in Delores Flashback were call backs to Maniac Mansion, which makes sense at the end of the game. I actually didn't read any of the Kickstarter stuff or blog (I wanted to be surprised more than anything.)
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