26 April 2008

Dotty about DotT

I want to play Day of the Tentacle again now! I know I have sung its praises before but io9 has now reawakened my desire to replay games I used to play when I was ten-ish. DoTT wasn't as witty as Sam and Max but its quirks were fantastic and yes, even ten years later when The Ex bought me a copy of DotT and an emulator so I could use it on my laptop, a lot of the charm was still there, even though I was annoyed to find that I could still remember how to solve a lot of the problems, like exactly which kit the two other characters had that Laverne needed to make a mummy win a tentacle beauty contest 200 years in the future! Yes, really!

I think I learned more about the early days of US history (from the Founding Fathers on) from one of the characters in DotT (Hoagie, on whom Garth in Wayne's World is surely based) than from anywhere else, other than the game Colonization and from the tapes of the Bernard Cornwell novels to which Papa used to make us listen.

OK, so maybe I didn't/wouldn't get all of the SF in-jokes (indeed, most of those listed on the io9 post went completely over my head), but DotT is still a wonderful game and I miss it deeply. Colonization, Civ II, Sim City 2000 and Sam and Max too, for that matter. My ailing laptop is so jammed full with music, photos and porn that there's no way I could get those games to work now, even if I did find the emulator software (if it is software at all...).

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