One Sick Psi Guy: Retro gaming at its best!!

I've been feeling all nostalgic ever since I got my new copies of two classic Lucasarts games - Sam & Max Hit the Road and Grim Fandango. Both are from a dying genre known as adventure gaming which unfortunately has since lost its charm to 3-D shooters and MMORPG. Don't get me wrong, I love a good 3D shooter but have a soft spot for adventure games that need more thinking and less trigger happy mouse action.

I remember playing S&M back when I was in Form 2 or 3 when it came on 7 floppy disks and ran in DOS (ahhh ... configuring EMM and XMM memory just to start programs). It was one of the larger games to be released because of its increased resolution and full colour graphics which was unheard of way back then. Heck! Windows only came on 6 diskettes so you can see what a big deal it was.

I saw this exact game in a Times warehouse sale last year and it was actually the original box set release. It was complete (with manuals and quickcard), pretty battered and not torn but it was only the diskette version. I was soooooo tempted since it was only RM5, but in the end I didn't get it 'cos of the risk of faulty diskettes (and also the fact that I don't have a working floppy drive -hee hee)

The version I now have is a 2007 re-release of the game for modern platforms and even runs in Vista and XP. Even better is that it is the enhanced CD talkie version in which all characters now have spoken dialog AND comes with the soundtrack to the game (woo hoo!!).

I've never played Grim Fandango before but I've heard various comments about the game. It was probably one of the two games that Lucasarts released in the adventure game genre in 3D. The entire game is played with either the keyboard or a joypad in comparison with S&M which is played with the mouse. It still has a pretty big fan base and just had a write-up as recently as 3 days ago in The Escapist!! (view article here) So it seems that a lot of my time is now going to be devoted to retro gaming and reminiscing of DOS days.