Hi all,
Over the past few days I've been browsing Wikipedia looking at their info on
old NES games I used to play or watch my siblings play. There are quite a few
games that I'd forgotten about but was reminded of during my search for others.
One such game was Maniac Mansion, developed by Lucas Arts originally for the
computer but later ported to such systems as the old NES. Just a little while
ago I got to thinking about how easy or hard it would be to create a game like
that for the blind gaming market. Technically it might be fairly easy since it
uses a point and click, menu-based style of gameplay like in the Bavisoft
games. You click a verb and then an object or person. You might have the usual
verbs like take, use, talk to and stuff like that. So you'd click, let's say
Use Toilet. If you made a logical combination you would perform the action.
But Maniac Mansion was very much a humorous title. The premise was that a mad
scientist, Fred Edison, lived in a mansion with his wife Edna and his son Ed.
Twenty years ago a sentient, alien meteor crashed near his house and took
control of his mind. It decided to use Fred to invent a machine to steal the
brains of the young people of Earth. That's where you came in. You played as
Dave, a college kid out to rescue his girlfriend Sandy from the Edisons'
mansion. But you couldn't do italone, so you enlisted the aid of two other
friends, whom you'd choose from a roster of six at the start of the game. Each
characer had his/her own strengths, weaknesses and even their own plot, which
made the replay value of the game extremely high. On your quest you could meet
all the whacky characters who called the mansion home. It was extremely puzzle
oriented but at the same time there was all kinds of weird stuff you could do
just for fun. One infamous thing was the ability to steal the hamster belonging
to Ed and microwave it. ou could then give it to him. Of course since he would
ultimately prove to be your best hope for completing the game, you probably
wouldn't want to do that. Personally I liked the idea of playing doorbell
ditchers with him.
But I got to thinking that it'd be neat if someone decided to create a game
similar to Maniac Mansion. We've got plenty of the Interactive Fiction style of
game, which certainly seems to fit what Maniac Mansion is, but nothing quite so
enjoyable. So I thought I'd start this thread and see who all remembers that
game and what the general feeling would be about an audio game in tat same
style.
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
---
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