Getting stupid. I wonder if I'm getting stupider. Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders came out in 1988, when I was 11 years old. It seems impossible to believe that at the age of 32 I can have become worse at games. And yet while my memories of playing Zak Mak when it first came out are extremely hazy, I certainly don't remember getting stuck quite as often. What I do remember is that I really enjoyed it. I've since been told by those who should know that this cannot possibly have been true. So I've gone back to find out. LucasArts is much heralded as the company that refined the point-and-click adventure into something more coherent and fair than those of its rivals at Sierra Online, Westwood, and so on. However, while this may have eventually become true, it certainly wasn't in 1988. It's hard to believe that much of Zak McKracken came from the same studio that went on to create Monkey Island, and of course the greatest of them all, Day of the Tentacle. And yet so much else feels like a prototype for those games to come. Alongside random deaths, the ability to play yourself into a dead end, and some extremely primitive storytelling, are also multiple-character puzzles, an elaborate plot, and a great deal of familiar daftness. Read more... article      retrospective      zak      mckracken      alien      mindbenders      All