THIMBLEWEED PARK |
In 2017, Telltale Games with Lucasfilm game designer Ron Gilbert released this - Thimbleweed Park, a modern graphical adventure done i n the old VGA graphical adventure style, and released on Steam. In Thimbleweed Park, you play as a pair of detectives sharing the name "Reyes" looking to investigate a murder mystery in Thimbleweed Park.
The big deal with it was it was the first original game developed by Ron Gilbert and several other familiar faces, and it hearkened back to the style of those Lucasfilm Games such as Maniac Mansion and Zakk McKraken, but ran on modern hardware, but looked like the old games from the DOS days (kinda sorta, a little more colors than the VGA pallet normally allows for, it's a bit like this website, a good mix of modern and vintage in one shot). I remember PC gamers making a huge deal of this when it came out, and then it just sort of tapered off. The truth is this game was based around nostalgia for the old DOS classics Ron made with Lucasfilm Games in the late 80's and early 90's. Some of us have an easy time accepting making new memories with similar - but not the same - source material (like myself), while others.... Nostalgia can be a real b*** because no matter how hard you try to "recapture" that moment in time you so desparatley want to relive, it's never the same as it was before. Even if it is the same, your feelings towards it will be different. I think Thimbleweed Park fell prey to this. Everyone was expecting a Monkey Island 3 or Maniac Mansion 3, and what they got was a mix of modern and old together, because they NEEDED to do that to capture a modern audience outside the limited bunch of late Gen X and Millennials that would want to buy a game that looked like an old 256 color MCGA Graphical Adventure from 1990, but a franchise cannot thrive upon this alone. But I have to hand it to telltale and terrible toybox, and that's that they at least are trying to do the most difficult thing, find a good balance between "Retro" and "modern". The problem is, kids today would not like how it was then, and people my age want to feel like we're 10 again, sitting at our older sister's collegate 386, listening to Top Gun, and feeling those feelings of then never-beofre-seen photorealistic detail on a computer screen - because today it DOES look dated, and you cannot bring that back.As Good as it Gets IMHO - My Experience |