I tend to agree; The system requirements are far too high for what the game delivers.

It has that written-in-visual-basic feel to it that NWN had back in the day..

I think DoubleFines's biggest problem is they don't have an equivalent of LucasArts managers giving them boundaries to work within.
Some of the most innovative games were created to defy limitations imposed on them; Without those boundaries you get Daikatana syndrome.

I honestly believe this game in its current form could have been written to work in Win2k on a GeForce2.
It has *no* reason to need the WinNT6 kernel or graphics cards of this calibre!


The main reason I'm not more annoyed is that the stuff that does work is wonderful; The remastered music is ace, although there seem to be a lot of incidental iMUSE motifs missing (e..g. when the pigeons get scared off the roof).
The enhanced cutscenes look really good, althouhgh a bit jarring as I have to play the rest of the game in Original mode :(
The commentary is the crown jewel tho - A joyful addition, giving me new content and real reasons to play through the game again rather than just going through the motions. (I played this so much back in the day I practically memorized every line! XD).
It's really fun seeing into the minds of the creators, hearing about the compromises they had to make and ideas that didn't make it in for technical or time reasons, not to mention how the came up with stuff (Who knew dying cassette tape could make such appropriate effects!).



BTW, if you read this Double Fine, I think you should sell a squishy Glottis plushie! ^_______________^

"From now on, we soar! Like eagles! Yeah... LIKE EAGLES! ON! POGOSTICKS!"

I agree with you, and if they had released a version of the game that had exactly what you described it would have pleased me. The thing is, the people with machines that support OpenGL 3.3 aren't the lucky few; *we* are the unlucky few. People have been blaming me for not having a "decent enough for gaming" PC, because, apparently, having a GPU older than 4 or 5 years is having an automatically "ancient" one.

People have been right when they say this is a 90s game and the amount of tweaking they did hardly justifies the minimum requirements they're asking of computers, in order to run it. I'm very happy that they even released this gem in this day and age, and I don't care much about the graphics or the aspect ratio or whatever, Grim Fandango is one of those games that stands the test of time, it looked gorgeous even in its original form, and the music, art direction and dialogue are timeless, but it saddens me to know that we are the minority of "obsolete" PC gamers and our voice counts for nothing. Double Fine could have done things differently, that's for sure, but I don't blame it on them, I think this is all a consequence of the "PC MASTER RACE" mentality, that keeps pushing this notion that video gaming has to be a very expensive hobby, and that if you're 7 years behind the tech curve you're already out of the game. The game was developed with the PS4 and the Vita in mind, and I understand that those platforms run on more advanced hardware than what I have, and since OpenGL is directly linked to DirectX 10 -- which current-gen machines support right off the bat --, it's obvious the game is going to need it on those consoles. They could have done a better job at porting the game to the PC, that's all. Just by looking at the game, I'm sure it would run on my computer, if it wasn't for this ludicrous OpenGL mandatory crap. But why should they care? Most gamers have post-2010 GPUs, we're the few, not them.

What I was saying was that, even though I am sad for myself and others in my situation, I commendate the fact this superb title is once again available for purchase (even though, on a side note, from most twitch streams I've been watching, younger gamers don't seem to care much about the game, and abandon streams immediately because the game "looks old" or is just "another point & click adventure") and new generations can enjoy and own it.

According to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon and this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_8_series OpenGL 3.3 is supported since radeons hd 2000 and geforce 8 series. Both were released on 2006

The only exception to this is the intel integrated graphics, that added support more recently (2012)

Then why won't it launch on my laptop?

Why, even if I had Open GL, does the game refuse to work and my laptop deemed not powerful enough to run a game developed in the late 90s even if it was re-mastered?
I repeat: Why won't it run on my system? How come my laptop doesn't meet minimum requirements? Wheras the original, in Windows 98 compatability settings, with alternate launch menu and alternate setup menu runs good Albeit without 3D Accelerated support?

Just had another punch to the gut.

I relented and installed The Remastered version on my desktop computer.

Made it past the launch and the opening cinema played nicely, faster than the original in some respects.

But...

...Once the game proper began, I get Manny but a blank screen all around him. I'm basically walking him around in darkness. As if he's trapped in limbo.

I turn off the special lighting and the background is all orange. Still no other objects, nothing that resembles his office.

See how ridiculous this is? Now even my own desktop can't run it efficiently!

Jesus, this is a game from 1998! At this stage, I think I'll take the ugly, slow, choppy non-3D accelerated sprites of the original boxed version compared to "The Limbo of The Dead" Remaster.

This however seems to be an issue with many setups. Which is why there are a few threads mentioning it here, it is a pinned topic over at the steam forums, there is an item about it in the known issues and FAQ thread and there is a bug report about it in the Double Fine forums.

I don't get this bug, but maybe you could look there for suggestions (the most obvious being to *manually* update your card to the latest drivers available for it) and/or offer your specific problem's details to enable them to resolve it if needed in a future patch.

For your desktop it just seems you need to update your graphics drivers.
Intel has been notorius bad in keeping inline with opengl standard and having very buggy driver releases.
That it is opengl 3.3 is probably because of lighting effect especially in that time opengl gives better shader features the higher the version. Maybe even 3.3 has been chosen because it is a closer match to the playstation 4 coding which also uses a kind of opengl.

They can probably fix it by writing some special shader paths or disabling some lighting features for opengl 3.1 and they will probably add it if they are saying they are working for it for next patch.

Though expect many games from now on releasing without directx 9 render paths or lower then opengl 4.
Because windows xp is dropped there is no longer a need to support that.
Also 4 gb is the requirement because it is windows 7 any game requiring less then 4 gb on windows 7 is just invalid.
It's best having at least 4 GB when using windows 7.

I feel the pain too. I have a laptop with the Pentium b980 (released middle of 2012, BTW) using onboard graphics. It only supports up to OpenGL 3.1.

Kinda crazy they don't have options to disable the 3.3 specific effects. Did the API change that much between releases that it made that not a possibility? If there was, I'm sure my system is capable of the FLOP/s necessary to render the game atleast 20 fps. I managed to get that for the new Dreamfall game, and that seems more resource intensive than this.
It seems there would be no reason besides the way the game was coded that my system isn't compatible.

Oh well.. Guess I'll stick to ResidualVM and fan made patches (re: GF:Deluxe)

From my understanding the API changed a lot between 3.1 and 3.3, and 3.2 is basically 3.3 but with a lot of deprecated stuff intact. I'm no expert though.

I'm also a happy user, I'm glad I can play GF, I couldn't do it back in the day, and this is a great opportunity to play it at last.

But I agree the requirements are crazy, and the reasonings behind that I'm reading here and at the DF forum are even crazier. I've registered there but couldn't post so I'll ask here for the requirements to be revised in hopes they read this forum.

I have 4 computers at home, and only one can run the game. That means I can only play at my main workstation. And this is just a remaster of an almost 20 years old game that my media center should be able to run so I could play the game in my TV. This is a bit disappointing.

Keep in sight that 15 years ago there were games a lot more demanding graphically than this remaster (say Quake 3, Quake 4, Quake Wars, Doom 3, etc.) and they used OpenGL 1.x!!! Those games still work today with current graphic cards and look as good or even better. People talk as if anything under OpenGL 3.3 should look like 8bits graphics. No!

The minimum 4GB RAM requirement is also very exaggerated for a game that old with very similar content and almost no action (no scroll nor fast sequences with lots of backgrounds/textures and sounds). It's purely almost content streaming. The same job than the original did, only with better textures in a game that uses very few of them.

In case DF doesn't want to lower the requirements they could at least provide the original game content so that we can play the original on all of our computers.

They've done a remaster that's pretty much the same than the original. Ok, it's a remaster, not a remake, but the requirements have been updated like the game had been remade with fireworks, and that's not the case.

It wasn't that long ago that there was a non-boxed, 2-CD version of the game that was readily available in bargain bins for $5. That's how I got my physical copy, and they are all over eBay. It's like walking into Walmart and digging through their $5 movie bins and coming across a few dozen copies of GF. In fact, that was exactly how it was except it was in most of the big box electronic stores. This was about 7 or 8 years ago if that, so this whole it's been unavailable for 15-years thing is a sly bit of marketing that has no basis in truth. The age of the game is irrelevant. They used OpenGL 3.3 which your graphics card or onboard video uses for the more modern features like the lighting system. They can incorporate it into Pong and if your hardware didn't support 3.3 it wouldn't start.

You don't have to buy a new computer to get around this inconvenience. You just need to buy a graphics card that supports OpenGL 3.3 and that is compatible with your computer.

The age of the game is irrelevant. They used OpenGL 3.3 which your graphics card or onboard video uses for the more modern features like the lighting system. They can incorporate it into Pong and if your hardware didn't support 3.3 it wouldn't start.

You don't have to buy a new computer to get around this inconvenience. You just need to buy a graphics card that supports OpenGL 3.3 and that is compatible with your computer.

It's a shame that I need a high-end modern computer to play a 17 years old game with some small changes. I wished the game had improved as much as the requirements have gone up.

Some companies don't seem to like customer requests or criticism. Anything wrong is in the customer side. The response to a simple and kind request is blaming the customer for not spending more money on computers. I have the same right to say: "spend more money on good development".

It's not just about not spending money on things companies say we should need because they say so, I don't like throwing garbage out just to buy more garbage that is more power hungry in order to do the same things that I did 10 years ago with whatever I just threw out. That's not ecological.

Why should we be arguing about this? If you don't want to care about us just ignore us.

Hi all,
I managed to run Grim Fandango Remastered on a my dell laptop with sandybridge processor and integrated HD3000 gpu using the latest live cd of Manjaro Linux 0.8.12 (xfce ).The Mesa libraries have support for OpenGL 3.3