Maniac Mansion

aka: MM
Moby ID: 714

NES version

One Great Game, and the first of the SCUMM era of Lucasfilm/Lucasarts games

The Good
A lot of creativity went into this game. Ron Gilbert had a lot of ideas on his first big project as a designer and creator. With his plan he needed to create the SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) engine so that people could interact with the game. This was innovative at the time it came out. There is no time limit to defeating this game, unlike many games that were out at the time.

There are 5 ways to beat this game, depending on who your other 2 characters are, another feat that was new for the time this game was released.

The sound is excellent in the NES version, one of the best sounding games in the NES, and the NES version your characters actually move faster.

The Bad
there are some items in the game that are entirely useless, such as broken bottles of ketchup or tentacle chow.

After playing the Commodore 64, DOS and NES versions, I would like to note they all have their tradeoffs.

Commodore 64, it takes forever to load in between screens (no wonder when it loads it has a small white snail on the target icon.

The DOS version has bad sound (DOS was primitive at the time, there was no sound blaster yet).

The NES version, while it is the best version of them all, the problem was Nintendo forced them to remove a lot of things from the game to make it cleaner. They had to remove the playboy calender, the nude statue, the Star Wars Poster, the surplus body parts, get rid of the Kill Thrill arcade game, change the Muff Diver Arcade game to Tuna Diver. A lot of the language had to be changed, such as "boy the meteor is going to be pissed" had to be changed to "boy the meteor is going to be maaaad," or Edna saying "How silly of me... I should have tied you up to my bed" had to be changed to "I have half a good mind to talk to my husband," or you can wait until the police arrive." Cousin Ted in the shower there is writing on the wall that says "For A Good Time - Edna ????" That had to be changed to "Call Edna ????" (the ???? are numbers). The only thing they didnt change was the fact you can microwave the hamster because Nintendo caught this after they were manufactured the cartridges (but it was taken out in the European version).

The Bottom Line
Great adventure game, you cant miss playing this game if you havent already done so. This is the king of Adventure games, and many games are modelled after the point and click that was designed under this game.

by Scott G (765) on July 27, 2005

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