Day of the Tentacle is the Best-Designed Adventure Game Ever

The more recent news with Tim Schafer and the rest of the folks at Double Fine is a Full Throttle remaster and the Psychonauts sequel they’ve crowdfunded. While these are both very awesome things, let’s not let that overshadow the truly important, groundbreaking, earthshaking game that Double Fine released last year: Day of the Tentacle.

Okay, so it’s just a remaster of one of Schafer (and Dave Grossman)’s older Lucasarts titles so maybe it already finished up all its earthshaking when it was originally released in 1993. But perhaps you made a huge mistake and missed the game back then. Heck, some of you might not have even been alive for the original release, which is kind of a valid excuse, I guess.

But even if you did play it back then, this is an adventure game well worth revisiting because it’s one of the only well-designed adventure games in existence. With the sharp increase in fans-turned-indie-developers as well as the popularity of Telltale’s episodic titles, the adventure game genre has experienced a recent resurgence. It’s too bad so many of the games are poorly designed.

Joe’s E3 Odyssey

This is something I wrote on Tumblr back in 2014 about how depressing I find the Electronic Entertainment Expo. It was largely just a long-winded way for me to link to past videos I’d made about E3, but I also think it’s some of my better, sadder writing and I tend to share it on Twitter and Tumblr every year because I still feel the same about all of it. I just now decided it might as well go here, too. Enjoy!

I guess E3 2014 is next week, huh? You may not know this about me, but once, approximately 48 years ago, I made videos about video games. In theory, I might even do it again one day! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I went to E3 last year. I had a horrible time. I’ve been to E3 three times now and have found each time less enjoyable than the previous. The first time I went in 2002 was because I could and it was supposed to be lots of fun and it’s like the Mecca of Gaming or whatever, yeah? I was rather young, with my head certainly not full of wonder, but at least there was still a great deal of ignorance in there, so it seemed like a good idea, like a thing I’d theoretically enjoy, being a gamer and all that.