Maniac Mansion

The Good
The teenage humour and the friendliness of the game. You can die, but not easily. The real challenge is the quirky problem solving. For this game, the point and click, verb choice system is at least as good as the popular text parser system. The original version's graphics seem quite simplistic, even for the time, but it's interesting having an adventure game where the average person is quite large/tall i.e Sierra's adventures had long had quite a small average person size. I thought that while the problems' solutions were far from obvious and obviously quite silly, it's fun solving them and you can laugh with the game. The game has multiple successful endings giving it replayability, but I think the game is fun to replay even when aiming for the same ending.

The Bad
I think there could have been a few more pointers to guide you through the game, there's one particular part that had me completely stuck and I was a little annoyed when I found out the solution and what we the gamers were expected to figure out on our own. The problem could be quite easily fixed though.

The Bottom Line
So it's a fairly early point and click game, coming after ICOM's MacVenture series and after some of the Japanese point and click or menu choice adventure games (e.g Enix), but I think it's up there with others by LucasArts e.g LOOM and the Monkey Island games.