Celebrityscraps

There was a time, about a decade ago, when LucasArts was best known not for its thousands of different Star Wars games, but for its graphical adventure games for the PC. Most all of these were very good, but some were so extraordinary that they remain uniquely remarkable to this day. The Monkey Island Series, Grim Fandango, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis….. all are classical masterpieces of their time that can still kick the crap out of anything Lucasarts is shovelling out of their doors today, however we must not forget the piece of art that is Day of the Tentacle!!! It is one of the funniest, wittiest, most charming, and most inventive adventure games ever made and it still makes me laugh! *use hamster with freezer* — GENIUS!

It also features one of the greatest video game villains ever: Purple Tentacle, whose name is self-explanatory. Purple Tentacle takes a sip of some toxic sludge, grows a couple of stubby arms, and turns incredibly evil. Nerd Bernard, spacey scientist Lavern, and portly surf dude Hoagie unwittingly free the tentacles from their master, all hell breaks loose…sort of. In short, the freakish Dr. Fred ends up dumping Hoagie 200 years in the past and Lavern 200 years in the future in a pathetically failed attempt to have the three friends undo the damage they caused. It’s up to you, at that point, to play as all three of the characters in their respective time periods, flushing items back and forth through the future via a toiletlike time machine and eventually thwarting Purple Tentacle’s plans.

Day of the Tentacle is continuously amusing if not laugh-out-loud funny to watch and listen to. The game’s exceptionally good voice acting stands out even to this day, and the excellent character animation and bizarre cast of characters–including the mummylike Dead Cousin Ted and none other than George Washington–make the game as memorable as they come. LucasArts pioneered a brand of adventure game in which you could never die–you would just get stuck for a while if you couldn’t figure out a puzzle–and Day of the Tentacle is a perfect example of this carefree, frustration-free style of gaming. This is a genuine classic–very few games have matched or exceeded the quality of Day of the Tentacle’s production.

Quite simply D.O.T.T. Rocks!