24 (2001 - 2017)

Season 1
Watched the first episode. It's so funny how it felt super-slick at the time but now it feels really dated and low-budget. It's still awesome, though. Jack Bauer is already off the reservation within the first 15 minutes, Xander Berkeley has slimeball set to 11, and the big Mandy twist is still great.
The stuff that surprised me most were how flat the lighting is and how small and cheap the sets are, plus it's shot on really grainy film. It's not what I think of as slick telly in 2021, but back in 2001 I remember it feeling like a Michael Mann movie. Also, the painfully millennial haircuts and fashion choices don't help!

I finished 24 S1. I remembered that they have some silly padding towards the end - Terri getting amnesia and Kim endlessly getting into random trouble while on the run - but I'd forgotten how irrelevant almost all of Palmer's storyline is. All the stuff about his financial backers trying to blackmail him etc ends up having zero effect on anything. Even Sherry blowing David's fake death doesn't matter because the mole already told the baddies about it. The only time he has any effect is when he's interacting directly with Jack, otherwise he and his family could have been cut out completely!

Looking forward to S2, though, I think this is where they perfected it. (Oh, except there's more silly padding in one of the storylines - Kim endlessly getting in random trouble again, with cougars and killer hillbillies etc).

Season 2
Three quarters of this season are absolutely masterful. The way they slowly ratchet up the tension and tighten the screws all the way through, how they flip-flop your sympathies for characters etc, it's brilliant. The only issue is the remaining quarter - again, Kim getting into random trouble, except this time she's not even relevant to the plot. You absolutely could lift that entire thing out and it would only leave a couple of small moments in the other plotlines not making sense. It's like a parody someone would have made of 24 at the time. I thought they slapped a macguffin in there to tenuously tie it in, but I guess that must be in S3.

One of the fun things re-watching is realising how many actors from LOST were in this first.

If people are looking for a fun 40 minute show to watch one episode a night (or week if you can bear it), and don't mind a general gung-ho pro-US pro-military outlook, then I recommend it, for at least the first two seasons!

Season 3
From here I don't remember as much stuff, as I've only watched each subsequent season once each. What I remember from S3 (though some of it might be from later seasons):
It's crap. Like, almost as bad as S6. They dump the Max/Mandy/Palmer cliffhanger stuff from the end of S2, which I was really pissed off about. Jack is an addict and has a tattoo (that Sutherland got in real life to save himself days of his life in the make-up chair over the following seasons). The first bit is Mexican druglords, then it switched to a silly Brit baddy. Chloe! There's an action scene with some helicopters (I remember Dan getting annoyed at people misusing the phrase 'jumping the shark' to refer to it!). I think Kim works for CTU now? She's dating some guy called Chase or something, played by James Badge Dale, who is basically a young Jack Bauer and gets his hand chopped off at the end. Jack has a cry in the last (amazing) scene. Palmer's brother shows up, and is a bit annoying and doesn't look anything like him, and Palmer starts making dodgy moral decisions which feels very out of character. There's a CTU guy who seems to be a mole but isn't. Jack is forced to execute Chappelle. I think Tony gets shot in this one, maybe in a shopping mall - I remember Dan saying "oh no, Tony's not a field agent, he's fucked!" as soon as Tony got sent out! Can't remember if the annoying Edgar or Chloe's annoying husband show up., I think they're later. And I think the Shohreh Aghdashloo family are next season, not sure. I think Nina Myers comes back, maybe Sherry does too? And they both get a 'kiss me to prove you're evil now' moment with Jack/David, which is hilarious.

Gahhh, I forgot how bad  Kim's  hair is in this one, it looks like a costume store wig.

Finished S3. It's not quite as bad as I remember it, just a huge comedown from S2. They don't have a silly Kim-gets-in-trouble storyline, which is great, but unfortunately they don't replace it with anything so the season feels a lot less epic than the first two. Also, the David Palmer storyline has returned to being almost completely disposable - outside of its interactions with Jack's story, all it does is have David make a load of bad decisions/moral choices, and decide not to run for a second term. I don't know what they were going with this - maybe Haysbert wanted out, or they were setting up a 'Palmer as baddy' story that got abandoned? Even in the CTU storyline there's pointless wheel-spinning, though, like Tony getting shot and seeming like he's not fit to work but then he just is. The villains are crap too - Mexican druglords are always irritating and boring, and the evil English baddy is too cartoonish. There's some effective stuff though - the virus in the hotel is really scary, the whole Chappelle execution thing is great, and whenever CTU are chasing down a baddy it's always really tense and well done. Plus the last scene with Jack crying is brilliant, I'm still angry at Sky for making a joke out of it in subsequent ads for their service.

Oh, I forgot to say, Chloe is hilarious. Now I know that I'm going to grow to like her, I can enjoy her insanely irritating personality from the get-go. It's like they dropped a character from The Office into 24, it's amazing.

Season 4
I barely remember anything about S4 (maybe spoilers for later seasons too): Arnold Vosloo is the baddy and manages to evade capture a lot, General Grievous style. Uh, is the terrorist family in this one? I can't even remember if the Shohreh Aghdashloo family are the same ones as the Kal Penn family. And I know at some point a bunch of big characters get bumped off but I think that's S5. A nuke goes off in suburbia at some point. I think that's S5 as well, though. It's crazy how little I remember after S3, I guess the dip in quality meant I was putting less mental energy into watching it from that point on so stuff didn't get absorbed as much.

Gahhh, so far they've reused two actors in different roles and it's now really glaring because both actors have since become a lot better known! Was it really so difficult to find new actors in LA?!

Finished S4. As I remembered, this is solid entertainment, but also just 'more of the same'. There's no flab on this one, but enough storylines to stop it feeling anaemic, which is great. But the main issue is that it's getting stale, CTU in particular - the endless powerplays, tech talk, furtive glances over monitors. And this is another season about Muslim extremists with a nuke, more shootouts in LA warehouses, the occasional helicopter etc. They've really honed their craft, they're just not doing anything new with it.

I'm hoping my memory of S5 being really strong is also correct!

Season 5
Finished S5, it's still really good. It is a little samey again at the start before it reveals its true set-up, but once it gets there it's great. (Future season spoilers) Chasing evidence against a corrupt president allows for a bunch of different scenarios than the usual 'terrorists with a WMD', though they have some of those here too. Gregory Itzen and Peter Weller are great, Mike and Aaron get stuff to do, Buchanan and Chloe form a little team, CTU becomes a more hostile place when Homeland Security take it over, and there are a bunch of cool setpieces like the exploding gas refinery and landing a passenger jet on a freeway. It doesn't do anything revolutionary, but it changes it up enough to feel fresh and it just has a bunch of great stuff in there with no filler. The only negatives are that it takes a little while to get into gear, and there's a bit of set-up for the dreadful S6 going on that taints it a little if only by association - Chloe's awful ex-husband (didn't need to be introduced in the last two episodes, Chloe could have done everything herself), Jack Bauer's evil brother (played by Paul "Pull My Crane" McCrane, who looks so little like Kiefer Sutherland that I can only assume the brother thing was invented after he was cast, between seasons), the return of Tzi Ma (I don't remember his story being too bad, though, and they don't just bin this cliffhanger iirc, so it's fine).

Onto the absolutely awful S6 :(

Season 6
Ha ha, okay, I was wrong, it does drop the China prison thing within the first ten minutes. I think Tzi Ma comes back in a later season, not sure, but right now it feels so clunky. Still, I'd forgotten Stephen Merchant was in this season! Also, I swear this show keeps changing its mind as to which of Sutherland's real tattoos Jack has as well - I'm sure they've gone from showing it to putting make up over it or vice versa like 4 times now.

This is also the season that has Kal Penn, a 30 year old Indian man, playing an Arab high school student (who is also a terrorist, of course). Oof.

Just finished. Very bad. The criminal mastermind from last season turning out to be Jack's brother, and then Jack's dad showing up and then also turning out to be bad, is all so silly. Then that gets dropped for most of the season for some run-of-the-mill Muslim terrorist stuff. Most of the season is incredibly repetitive of previous ones, in fact - they even pull out the 'woman has to act normal for five minutes with the man she's found out is a baddy so CTU can get some info and instead she attacks him' gag again, TWICE.

Also turns out Stephen Merchant was just doing a wordless five second cameo :(

Season 7
Almost done with S7. They've now re-used 4 actors, 3 of whom are Middle Eastern, all with relatively prominent roles. It's so shoddy! To be fair, they are at least a season apart and only get a few episodes at most each time, so I wouldn't blame anyone for not noticing (in fact, I doubt I did at the time of the original airings, but then I didn't notice the white guy getting re-used either!). And I know a lot of long-running tv shows re-use actors. But 24 is set in LA, it's not like they're out in Canada running low on local US actors or anything, and it's also a bad look for a show about terrorists to be treating Brown people as interchangeable.

Finished S7. It's okay. There's some great action - better than Falcon & Winter Soldier tbh - and some cool stuff going on, like Evil Tony. But even though they've changed the city and got rid of CTU, replacing it with the FBI, it's mostly all the same stuff. Again it feels pretty linear, it doesn't have that 'three equally awesome storylines' thing that it does when it's at it's best. It pulls the 'okay, this is the real baddy behind all the previous seasons' thing which doesn't really tie together (and yet meanwhile they've got a dangling evil conspiracy from S2 that they could have tied this into but instead that continues to be unresolved while they pull some SPECTRE shit here). And the ending feels weirdly unfinished - I can only assume they were planning to directly pick it all up next season, but they don't have a great track record with doing that...

Season 8

It's pretty bad so far. Really cheesy, like if they handed the show to Donald P Bellisario and he renamed it "CTU 2030". CTU has a drone camera guy and his introduction was him using one of the drones to spy on a woman in a bikini, while saying "Well, that doesn't suck." Just awful. Also, they expositioned away the last season's ending with a couple of lines of dialogue, of course. This particularly cheapens a huge chunk of the previous season where Jack was infected with a nigh-untreatable disease and was dealing with his regrets and conscience and stuff before he went. Don't pull that shit unless you're going to actually kill him or at least give some weight to his recovery, rather than taking ten minutes over it. And they start this season by giving Jack a super-happy ending which is clearly going to get ripped away from him very quickly. Feels a bit cruel.

Finished S8 - it mostly calmed down from the initial silliness into regular rote ol' 24 with all the regular beats. They pulled the 'give Jack a happy ending then tear it away' thing a second time this season, which makes it all feel very soap opera - especially as his true love was someone he'd spent probably a total of 10 hours in the company of in his entire life. The change to New York doesn't really make any difference either. It does some cool stuff - Chloe as head of CTU (though that isn't as big a change-up as it could have been), and bringing Logan back as a serpent pouring poison in the president's ear works great - Itzen is note-perfect throughout, giving 50 different shades of slimeball, and the sequence where Jack abducts him from his motorcade is dynamite. But the ending is rather abrupt again, and no doubt will be cleared away within the first episode of the final season

Onto the final 12-episode season, set in London, with Chloe in her final form as a Lisbeth Salander style emo hacktivist! (Then I'll try that Legacy sequel/spin-off series.)

Die Another Day

Me: I hope that with the move to London, 24 will take the opportunity to do some different stuff!

24: OPENING SHOT - "EAST LONDON MOSQUE". OH AND PUT SOME OF THAT MUSLIM SINGING IN THE SCORE.

Me: groan

Yayyy, the recurring characters 'some of Jack's tattoos' are back!

Best thing about the UK setting is hearing Jack and Chloe say "pub" a lot.

Finished it. Disappointing. Even with only 12 episodes it still waffles on and does all the same stuff again. It's cool to see Jack doing action scenes in London streets, but Chloe's makeover is superficial - she's still just 'running comms' even if she's doing it from the pub - President Heller is bland - even though they give him Alzheimer's it doesn't have a single effect on the story - and even though they're in London, they have a CIA base there which is CTU in all but name. The fridging of Jack's love interests continues and the series is left on a cliffhanger that will never be resolved. The only thing that can be said for it is that the action is still really good, and overall the show is still... fine.

Legacy

First episode was pretty good! Almost all the same old stuff, but done well with some cool action and it's good having a lead who isn't a CTU person (though I'm sure they'll do the post-S1 Jack Bauer thing where within a couple of episodes he's so necessary to foil the villains that CTU give him enough authority and resources that he may as well be a CTU agent).

Finished 24 Legacy! It was okay but very quickly became the same old stuff, as expected. Having a new lead didn't make much difference, he pretty much just turned into Jack Bauer immediately. It was cool having Tony show up as a mercenary with... maybe not an entire heart of gold, but at least a ventricle. Though he doesn't get much to do, and there's no real mention of who broke him out of jail, how he feels about the conspiracy he never got to dismantle etc, so he may as well have been a new character tbh. There was an entire subplot for the first half that could have been reduced to a two minute scene without effecting the rest of the show (the old 'terrorist cell with family drama and a kid having second thoughts' standard), but everything else was pretty well interconnected. It's good to see some Black people on the show, even though they're all either drug dealing gangbangers, ex-drug dealers (the protagonist!) or villains. And there are non-villain queer characters for the first time, they're heroes in fact, and they're not even queer coded or stereotyped (as far as I could tell, anyway)! Bit of an underwhelming way for the franchise to go out, though. Would be cool if they could do a movie or a videogame to tie up all the loose ends, combine the main series with Legacy, and dish out some happy endings.

Lost Horizon (2010)

An Indy Jones knockoff adventure by the Secret Files devs, this starts off fairly well - after a firefight with some mystical-macguffin-hunting Nazis, you get a little tutorial putting a disc into a plinth in an ancient Tibetan temple and getting magically teleported away, then it cuts to 1930s Hong Kong with a musical number in a nightclub and you switch to playing a scoundrel in trouble with the Triad, causing distractions and then getting knocked out and thrown into the harbour waters in a leaky wooden box. They've gone with hand-painted background art for this one, which can clash a little with the 3D model characters but is a big improvement on the soulless 3D renders of Secret Files, even if the art direction is fairly bland overall. Unfortunately, the writing is terrible. It's clunky as hell (as with SF, it seems at least partly due to a bad translation job), it's full of on-the-nose exposition dumps, and every conversation is three times as long as it should be. This is compounded by bizarrely slow dialogue delivery from the VAs.

Some other weird stuff:
The first puzzle as the scoundrel is 'hassle a woman into letting you buy her a drink'. That's it, just keep harassing her until she finally gets up and leaves. It doesn't help you achieve anything, and the game moves straight on to the Triad stuff once she goes. It's utterly bizarre. I guess maybe she'll show up again later and there'll be a Han/Leia thing where eventually you manage to wear her down into falling in love with you.
Hilariously, they seem to have cast one guy to play all the English dudes and he can only do one voice, so they all sound exactly the same. Whenever you get two in a room talking to each other, it's suddenly incredibly difficult to follow the conversation because you can't tell which one is supposed to be speaking!)

So, I think I'll keep playing until the moment I get stuck or my brain melts out of my ears from the interminable conversations.

Okay, giving up on this. Before I could get on the plane to Tibet, I needed to get a map. The only person I know who could help is an ex-employee, but I don't know where he lives, so I go ask the bartender, who tells me to ask one of the customers, who needs a photo of the guy, which I have in his personnel file (but not his address apparently) in my safe, which I can't remember the combination for so I keep it written in my wallet, but it turns out I lost my wallet in the harbour and some kid has fished it out but won't give it back to me before I help him catch a bat, but the bats won't come out unless there are some flies, so I have to distract a guard at the consulate by winding up an alarm clock then putting it in a bin so I can get a ball out of a tree on the consulate lawn and then combine the ball with a tape measure (??) and then hang it off a rod to distract an alley cat so I can use some bellows with some flies without the cat yowling at me and alerting the Triad, then use those flies with the lantern next to the kid.

To be fair, Fate Of Atlantis has Indy get up to some pretty stupid stuff, and this isn't Gabriel Knight 3 levels of abstruse (I figured it all out easily). But it's also unimaginative, rote adventure game stuff, and I'm skipping through every single line of dialogue as well, so at this point there's no reason for me to be playing it outside of genre fan compulsion. So I'm giving up and returning to BTTF.

Weirdly, the crappy translation was by a guy who has done some well thought-of stuff (Penumbra, Talos Principle, etc) and had a lot of buzz around him only a few years later. So I have no idea what happened here!

Rating: nicer presentation than their earlier games, but the same bad writing, VO and puzzle design

Telltale's Back To The Future series (2010)

I have played these before, and I didn't think much of them, but I'm a big enough BTTF fan that I'm curious to try them again. I'll probably go heavy on the walkthroughs, though! I'm really hoping that GOG have the version with the Thomas F Wilson re-recording of Biff...

Nnngh, it's not the TFW version. I was moderately optimistic, as they had the Boen re-recorded version of TOMI. It's frustrating because if you watch a comparison of the two, it's ten times better with TFW's line delivery.

Okay, so this opens really nicely, it all feels very BTTF, they've got all the sounds and music and props and iconic locations, and your first puzzle is humiliating Biff, then the DeLorean shows up. Great stuff. But then it's straight into 'giving Einstein a shoe so he can lead you across town to the person who owned it 50 years ago' and all of a sudden it's feeling very silly and Telltale and not very BTTF at all. Also, it doesn't look awful but it doesn't look great either, it's still got those 2010 Telltale low-ish-res textures and models.

So, while this may not look awful, it does look pretty bad a lot of the time. Really low-res textures right up in your face and camera angles that show all the seams. Plus the UI is ugly as fuck and it's all over the screen the whole time for no good reason - there's Inventory, Hints, Goals (despite me turning those last two off in the settings), and even Story So Far, just cluttering up the top of the screen. The only explanation I can think of is that with such a big IP they wanted to reach non-adventure fans and maybe even people who wouldn't normally play games at all, so they didn't want to hide any buttons away.

The story is a bit more on track now, even though it does just feel like the least imaginative take possible at this stage  - Doc is once more stuck in the past with only a short time before he gets killed, but this time it's the thirties! And Biff and George do the diner scene again but this time it's in a soup kitchen! And so on. Also, sections of the original score is just slapped onto any scene seemingly without any real thought about whether they're suitable or not. I get it, they've got the BTTF IP, they want to do the stuff that people remember from those movies, but it's all fairly rote at the moment. 

It is awesome to have Christopher Lloyd voicing Doc, though, and he does a really good job here. Plus the Marty soundalike and the teen Doc soundalike are really good.

Finished ep 1. I spent most of it solving stuff without understanding why, and there was a very annoying sequence where you have to listen to Doc's dialogue for clues as to which lab stuff to use and press it in the right order, which it makes you do FOUR times, in a room that is slightly too big to see all of them at the same time and where the particularly crappy character movement (worse than TOMI for some reason) really fucks you over. One of those things where it's inexplicable how it made it through QA. The ending was kinda cool, though, it captured the BTTF action sequence vibe well (especially as I remembered the one irritating thing about it, a tricky to spot item that you can only see from one specific camera angle). But then right at the end it got very silly and had a Tannen in an out of control car careening into a big empty field, right in the middle of which there just happens to be that same D Jones manure truck. It's like a satire of bad fan service. But they cut away a couple of seconds before he hits it, presumably for budget reasons, so it's really unsatisfying anyway. And then Marty and Doc go flying through the sky in their rocket bicycle and utterly coincidentally land two feet from the DeLorean. This game is constantly in flux between being a good BTTF game, a really lazy BTTF game and just a bog-standard early Telltale game.

Lorewise. stupidest thing so far is their excuse for the DeLorean still existing - when it got hit by lightning in BTTF2, that created a clone DeLorean and sent it to 2025. The only error I've spotted is that they give Principal Strickland the first name Gerald, when his office door shows his initials as SS in BTTF 2.

It ended with a really good cliffhanger, but then cut straight to a "in the next episode' spoiler reel, UGH. The cliffhanger did genuinely make me want to play the next one, though, even though iirc it spends the whole thing in the 30s again before doing more interesting stuff with the remaining episodes.

Yeah, so episode 2 is a bit of a step down. The very start is pretty cool, where you're having to dodge the you from episode 1, and you have to save your grandfather's life before you fade out of existence. Otherwise... the 30s again, nothing particularly interesting going on, solving stuff without knowing why, silly Telltale non-BTTF puzzles and story (some guy whose mood and life decisions can be manipulated by changing the song he's listening to, 1920s Doc essentially inventing a flying car), some really clunky storytelling (seems to be a combination of bugs and just not having time to put the proper amount of polish in), and that bloody manure truck AGAIN basically spawning in magically just in time for Tannen to fall off a roof into it.  And much like with TOMI they reuse character models a bunch - with BTTF, of course, that's not so much of a problem as many members of a family are played by the same 'actor' as per the movies, but it's a shame that they also do it with various other characters where that doesn't apply. They fluffed the cliffhanger too, so it's less enticing than the previous one, despite ep 3's set-up being a lot cooler.

Okay, ep 3 isn't great either. It's got a really strong premise (Edna Strickland has married Doc and together they've created an Orwellian police state where everyone has to follow old busybody rules) but they barely do anything fun with it. The first thing you're supposed to do is break lots of rules so you can meet this alternate Doc, which should be really satisfying but instead just boils down to lots of tedious puzzles. The stuff with Doc being frosty and even scary, and with Biff being brainwashed into either being super-nice or a zombified thug, is good fun, but that's about it. The episode is really short and ends really abruptly, though. I guess they thought of 1 & 2 and 3 & 4 as a couple of two-part chapters, rather than four individual ones. It's a shame that they didn't do a strong new set-up each episode.

Ugh, okay, ep 4 does one little bit in the Orwellian '86 and then it's back to the 30s again. At least we're at the high school instead of the town square this time, but still. Also, I'm starting to remember now that they do some weird drama stuff with Edna and questioning whether Marty has the right to change the timeline back and stuff - it's the same overloading of an IP that they did with TOMI. That hasn't happened yet, though.

Oh, okay, it doesn't actually take place in the school, just out on the lawn, and the rest is in Emmett's lab. I remember now why Telltale had a reputation, at least until The Walking Dead, of their episodic schedule and budgets often scuppering their games - they do tend to feel rushed and cheap quite often. The puzzle design on this one was infuriating too - I consistently knew what I was trying to do and what all the components were, but I couldn't figure out how to get there because the structure was so fiddly and the signposting so muddy. And yeah, it does this weird thing where you're trying to break up teen Emmett and teen Edna, and suddenly Orwellian Emmett flips from 'yeah, she's super evil, let's wipe this version of me from existence!' to guilting you out about it. I'm not sure if the game is just setting up antagonists for the finale or if I'm genuinely supposed to be questioning my madcap actions on an ethical level. It's all very unsatisfying either way. Just a bunch of strange decisions being made with the basic set-up of 'the further adventures of Marty and Doc'.

I'm going to play the last episode, mostly because Michael J Fox cameos in it, but I'm going to hint-system my way through it as soon as I hit a stumbling block.

Whoof, finished, and that got pretty embarrassing by the end. It starts off promisingly with the 'science of the future' expo setting, but you don't actually get to mess about with any retro-futuristic stuff, outside of 'a phone' and 'a flowerpot with a recording device in it'. Then it moves onto a sliding doors puzzle, a dialogue puzzle that I just clicked through without thinking, an Escape From Monkey Island/Gabriel Knight 3-level sequence in a field where you have to get someone to remember a bad thing they did by putting a mop on a cactus to remind her of someone she saw and a sign on a toilet to remind her of a building etc, and the finale which is just the same as episode 1's with a reskin and some irritating 'get the cursor to stay in the same place for a few seconds' minigame x 3. By this point, none of their time-travel logic makes any sense at all, never mind by BTTF rules, so they just give up and go 'oh no, it's all messed up, you fly off to fix it, to be continued!'

The stuff with feeling bad for Edna and alt Doc kind of just went away again, not sure what was going on there.

Genuinely frustrating that they had the IP, the co-creator, the actors, all this stuff, and this series is what they did with it.

Rating: the occasional high point, but mostly rubbish

Machinarium (2009)

I played this before about ten years ago or so I guess. It still looks gorgeous, the presentation is great, and it's got enough meat on the puzzles to make it feel more like a game than a toy, which the other Amanita releases I've played have felt more like (not a bad thing, but I do tend to lose interest as soon as I can't immediately figure out in what random order I'm supposed to click on all the things on the screen). I am already stuck on like the third puzzle, though, and I remember now one of the few problems with this game is that because the cursor only goes into interact mode with stuff near your character, you're never sure if you're just missing a hotspot. (The other problem I remember is all the damn minigames.)

Further through with this (about 75% I think), and yeah, basically the presentation is top-notch, the regular puzzles are mostly good except when you don't realise something is interactive or whatever, and then all the tile puzzles and pipe puzzles and shit are infuriating lazy padding. It actually made me play like four rounds of just basic space invaders. Even the fucking hint system is a drawn-out minigame. 

Okay, done. I suddenly had a flashback to watching the Broken Age documentary as they were still early in the process of making the game and Tim getting a few different showbiz mates in to talk about what adventure games are like nowadays, and the Amanita guy comes in and tells Tim that he doesn't think you really need inventory and dialogue etc etc, and I was there groaning to myself, thinking "please do not listen to this guy, Tim!"

As lovely as this game is, and as fun as it is when you're making smooth progress, the only real obstacles are UI quirks and minigame fluff. The very last puzzle in the game is listening to a tune of 9 very similar notes in one room, walking for ten seconds over to another room and trying to recreate it. It's a very dull final puzzle, for one thing, but also it's extremely difficult for people who don't have particularly sharp musical ears. They even put some audio filters over the original tune to make it even harder to compare.

Overall, I think my opinion of this game has maybe dropped a little bit. If its atmosphere weren't so strong, I don't think Machinarium would be half so well thought of.

Rating: gorgeous but slight, with some very irritating elements

The Blackwell Convergence (2009)

I didn't realise when playing the previous one, but apparently it was originally going to be in this game as playable flashbacks, which would have been really cool. Dave said something in the commentary about budget, so I guess he needed to sell it for $10 separately to justify the scope.

Anyway, this game has a character from that one (which was set in the 70s and featured Rosa's aunt and her time with Joey) show up, which is still cool.

It looks really nice, the art is great. It has rain effects too, though they're not half as nice as TGP's (which came out on the exact same day)!

It's gone back to having portraits, unfortunately, though they feel a little less jarring here, perhaps because they're bigger and maybe have more animation to them. Also, the cursor doesn't flip to an egg-timer when stuff's happening, but it doesn't get hidden either.  The VO technical quality seems a little better, though there's still the occasional rough edge. The music is as impressive as ever, and at its best it feels like an Angelo Badalamenti score, but there's some hissing on at least one track, and it's often slips a bit far into muzak for my taste - it doesn't quite have the bluesy feel or the modern slickness to it of the previous two entries. It might be exacerbated by the fact that there's no volume controls and the music is a little too loud in the mix.

It also has the same issue of starting off pretty slow - the first things you do are push a paperclip under a door, pick a lock with a paperclip, find some papers in a desk drawer, save a ghost, look at your calendar, look up an address on your computer, go to an art gallery and chat with people. After that it starts to pick up, but as a start to a game, it's hardly breaking into a warehouse then finding a time-stick then getting into an argument with Hitler...

Joey remains an utter prick. I genuinely do not like him and I hope he starts to warm up fairly soon! 

Finished! Seems like there's some 'Joey is evil' plotline brewing, but I wish he'd be a bit more charming in the meantime. Loved the Evanescence style credits song! Now to watch a video of the dev commentary...

Tales Of Monkey Island (2009)

I wasn't a big fan of these when I first played them, so I might not last very long.

Thoughts on the first ten minutes:
Earl Boen! Hooray! I think it was only the first episode that it was tricky to get the Boen version of for a while, so it's good that they sorted it for the GOG version.
They're definitely putting more effort into the cinematic presentation than EFMI.
It does look better than EFMI as well, but... not by much. They were still scuppered by the suits wanting to get the games on Wii (hence Club 41 being exterior only - the name is an in-joke about how they weren't allowed to have episodes compress to anything more than 40 meg!), and they just haven't managed to get the desert island setting looking as good as Devil's Playhouse or Wallace & Gromit, it looks pretty fucking cheap. And I haven't even got to the reused character models yet!
The budget/space issue also extends to having multiple dialogue options but the same clip getting played whatever you choose. It's like that 'Guybrush has a host of rude options and decides not to say any of them' gag that the older games did, but without that framing and happening regularly.
The tone is still very Saturday morning cartoon. Guybrush talks a lot and makes really bad quips. I can't remember if it was Sam & Max or EFMI or both that I said this about, but it's just over-written. Every exchange could do with ending a line or two earlier.

So, I've been given my first proper puzzle and it is literally 'go do some piratey stuff'. Some journo won't give you info you need until you provide him with material for pirate news, so... go do pirate stuff. I don't know if they're trying to be post-modern, but it feels rather unengaging and lazy to me! (I realise that this is essentially what SOMI does, but that's the start of the very first game and it's still doing the 'Guybrush is playing at being pirate' thing, so it's much more suitable, plus, y'know, it's all done a lot better!) 

Small note about the tutorial puzzle: it's a complete rip off of the BTDT 'start at the end of an unseen adventure with all but the last step of a convoluted puzzle completed' thing. BUT it does have a 'put the Mentoes in the soda pop to make it fizzy' puzzle on a pirate ship, so I guess we accidentally ripped that off for LOTCG and now we're even?

Oh, I forgot to say as well: the dated humour from Escape is still in here. Guybrush's pink ship gets an appearance, 'male pirate wears pink frilly underwear' is a joke unto itself, and the Voodoo Lady is codenamed "Deep Gut" and when Guybrush is told a closet contains her underwear he reacts with revulsion and the hotspot changes to "the scariest closet in the world".

Okay, finished episode 1. Not awful just very bland. There are two irritating map puzzles, and almost the whole thing is just you wandering around this ugly-ass Master System looking desert island interacting with idols. Also geez the writing, it's all fart jokes and hand puns. Stuff that Dan and I would be embarrassed to put in a game, and it's not like we're above toilet humour. I think these get better as they go, but oof this is a bizarrely lacklustre way to kick off your big-name series.

Played about half of episode 2, it's definitely better. It has a nice sunset skybox (even if you can see the seams in it!) and the merfolk island is more interesting visually even if the rest of the locations are repeats of the island from the first one. Also, the story has got started now, and I like the merfolk, they're cool.
The puzzles are a bit better too, no bullshit so far. The only annoying thing is that I got stuck on a couple of things at the end of my play session, so I took a look at UHS and it turns out both things were due to bad signposting.
It does have a bit that I remember Dan liking, where you have to coach human LeChuck through solving an adventure game puzzle. It's no different mechanically to doing it yourself, but it's a fun little joke.

Okay, finished ep 2. It is better than ep 1 but it does still have some bad signposting, some padding, some navigation problems. Really, it all just needs a bit more polish. I think a Skunkape remaster would solve a lot of this series' issues and push it up a lot higher in the pantheon. Sort out the inter-screen controls (possibly the biggest problem with the two episodes so far has been puzzles based around walking through the jungle, with Guybrush coming to a halt on entering every screen, lots of blind spots, irritating diagonal paths etc), improve the textures and lighting, add some new models and some more dramatic camera angles and, if they dared, maybe even cut out some of the bullshit. They could fiddle some stuff around and perhaps get Dom in for a few new lines of dialogue to sort out the signposting issues. Just a few licks of paint here and there would make the world of difference. Can't fix everything, of course, but it'd make it all a lot more bearable.
On tone, I think I felt the morning cartoon vibe a little less in this episode. The writing's still not half as sharp as it needs to be. Also, there's this weird thing now where everyone fancies Guybrush, and there's this pirate hunter who's also a massive fangirl of Guybrush's. This is all very different from what the series has done so far where everyone thinks Guybrush is a joke and a liar and an overall goober. I appreciate that they're trying new stuff out, and maybe that after Guybrush has had so many adventures he would gain some renown. But it also just feels a bit weird and the game overall still treats him like a useless idiot who keeps failing upward.
Oh, also, Guybrush seems to be unironically low-key sexist a lot of the time, and his fangirl comes off as quite young which creates some... Roilandy vibes, especially when Guybrush decides to pretend she's his wife to get out of some problem. Nothing cancellation-worthy, but it feels a little uncomfortable sometimes.

Finished episode 3. I think this is thought of as the best of the 5, and it's... okay. It doesn't have as many irritating navigation issues (especially once you've figured out the exit points of the main level, and it has some clever puzzles. It does still have some laborious mechanics around those puzzles (the face-pulling contest especially), a bunch of minor bugs, and a need for like 10% more polish in the cutscenes and editing and such. The writing's still not great - the characters are archetypes like 'stoner surfer' and 'nerd' and what have you (released a short while after we did jock and nerd cavemen in TGP except ours was done well, obv), and it's still over-written. Murray is okay but feels like he's wheeled on for fan-service, they don't really do much with him except repeat his greatest hits (from his ten minutes of screentime in COMI!).
Also, more fat jokes aimed at the Voodoo Lady, and after getting his young groupie to pretend to be his wife Guybrush then tricks her into feeling up the creepy nerd. This is 2009 and it feels like a Porky's movie. I know BTDT and TGP have a handful of problematic moments but at least it was always made clear that D&B were being pricks and the only women manipulated into getting it on with nerds were literal cavewomen being attracted by fire!

So, I was playing episode 4 and it was pretty good. You have to defend yourself in court against a bunch of different allegations and find different ways to get yourself out of each one, it's nice and tight and the puzzles are moderately clever. Then it goes back to jungle maps AGAIN, and my enjoyment was immediately dampened. Thankfully, it crashes whenever I try to go into the jungle, so I'm going to take that as my cue to stop playing these episodes. They're fine, just about, but still hanging around at the bottom of the franchise with EFMI. (I haven't really given RTMI a proper chance yet, maybe it won't be quite so abhorrent as my first half hour of gameplay with Dan suggested.)

So I think I'll skim through a playthrough of the last episode and a half then move on. The only other observation I have is that this whole Morgan storyline really feels jarring. They're just going for straight drama and it's quite embarrassing to watch them trying to do a touching death scene and then a furious revenge story with Guybrush bloody Threepwood. It's like when Toy Story started putting ballads in about how sad it is to be an abandoned toy and shit, the established tone just can't support it. And also, frankly, I don't care about Morgan. The 'previously on' told me that she and Guybrush had become friends and I was like "Really? I don't remember that happening, she was just kind of there."

Watching through now. There have been a couple of vaguely transphobic jokes about the merpeople - Guybrush referring to them as 'sexually ambiguous' in an othering (and kinda incorrect) way, and then LeChuck saying they weird him out (granted he's the villain but it feels like the game is on his side with this joke and it just comes out of nowhere). Again, it's not like there are huge cancel-worthy elements here, there are just... a lot of moments Skunkape would probably be cutting out of a remaster!
Finished watching. Oof, a really weak ending (this franchise isn't very good with them!). Just lots of back and forth with boring voodoo macguffins, and a load of story elements that bog it down and don't get paid off. Elaine doesn't like that the Voodoo Lady is always giving Guybrush quests and that's why she was pretending to trust Lechuck and also engineered this whole sponge thing maybe, very unclear. Morgan's whole deal was that she thought Guybrush was a fearsome pirate then realised he was a weenie and fulfilled her pirate hunter contract on him but then on a dime started to feel guilty about it because she respected him for dealing with situations, and also she fancied him and her jealousy partly motivated her to capture and deliver him but also she respected his commitment to Elaine and she didn't even like him anyway so why was she jealous and.. whatever, she gets killed by LeChuck, and in the afterlife mostly regains her self-esteem kind of and helps defeat LeChuck. The Voodoo Lady is maybe evil and has been manipulating LeChuck and Guybrush through all the games, but then probably not and she's just dealing with fates and stuff that can't be easily explained, also unclear as to where Guybrush stands on that now. So they defeat LeChuck and hooray the end, very abrupt. But then post-credits, Morgan delivers LeChuck's spirit to VL who sends her back to the land of the living as a ghost so she can continue to be a pirate hunter (even though she can't touch anything and this seems to deflate her character arc such as it was) and it turns out maybe the VL is evil but also we have no idea why or how because... that's the end.

Basically, I think they got far too into the weeds with MI lore and their fanship of it, trying to deconstruct it and explain it and add a bunch of dramatic underpinnings to it. The two things fans seems to really like about TOMI are Morgan and the Voodoo Lady intrigue and I just don't think either one worked at all.

Rating: Some good moments, but heavily compromised

Zak McKracken And The Alien Mindbenders (1988)

It's a bit more accessible and interesting than Maniac Mansion, to which it's a sibling game in the same way Loom and Monkey Island or DOTT and Hit The Road feel related. Having said that, I know that it's very easy to dead-end yourself early on yet not realise it for a long time, plus I'm already stuck! So I might check a walkthrough and play a bit further, or I might just consider this "played" after five minutes and maybe just skim through a playthrough video. It's a shame it didn't catch on as much and get its own sequels - a DOTT-level series of sequels about a reporter uncovering weird cases could have been fun, even if Hit The Road did cover very similar territory. I'd definitely like to play remasters of this and MM at least, with lovely graphics, all the dead-ends taken out, and a better UI.

Decided to skim a vid after finding out two of the things stumping me were a pixel hunt and 'do the same thing three times until you get a result'!

Rating: interesting but inaccessible