Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

There are some things to love about this game: stellar music and sounds, an intriguing around-the-world adventure theme, and the opportunity to complete puzzles in multiple ways. These joys pale in comparison to three specific aspects of this game that make it nerve wracking and almost unplayable without heavy assistance of a walkthrough: 1) the money system, 2) the lack of context and guidance for puzzles, and 3) tedious, random puzzles. First, the money system. You have a budget in "Zak McKracken", which is fine (in principle). The problem is that the sequence in which you must travel to certain locations (and with certain items on hand) is not always clear, which means multiple trips to the same destination (at a hefty price for certain locations). You can run out of money, landing you at a dead end. Second, there is no "look" or "talk to" command, which often makes it difficult to capture the information you need to understand a puzzle and the order of completion. If you miss small details in conversations (e.g., the guru explaining what the blue crystal does), you have no way to ask for that information again. Finally, the third issue is the randomly-generated mazes in almost all locations. Is the only point to prolong play time? The mazes do not add to the user experiences and are, well, just tedious. This could have been a super game--what a great story idea! But as a final verdict, this is a game that requires rose-coloured nostalgia glasses to appreciate. I would not buy this game again, even on sale, as I don't feel like *I* actually played this game because I needed to rely so heavily on walkthroughs.

This was the only Lucasarts point'n'click I didn't play as a kid so it does not provoke the same nostalgia attached to it as the others, and I probably had quite high expectations going into it. This was the first game with the SCUMM interface and is a bridge between the era of super-hard interactive fiction games and much more user-friendly point'n'click adventures, and it shows. It's old school. The gameplay is quite simply, incredibly frustrating. There are no 'look at' or 'talk to' commands so most of the hints for more unusual puzzles are hidden in the newspaper and hint book provided as PDFs, rather than emerging naturally in the course of play. You have four player characters: two on Earth and two on Mars, and for most of the puzzles one character would be enough but you have to switch quite a lot between them because they interact slightly differently with certain items. Save frequently. If you take the wrong action and use up a necessary item, you can get stuck and be completely unable to complete the game. There are also the ever-frustrating mazes. But what really sucked the fun out of the game is that the two characters on Earth have to travel between about 10 different locations across the globe by buying plane tickets. If you take the wrong route, or have to retrace your steps to get an item, you can end up running out of money and having to return to an earlier save. It's the kind of game where you need a notebook and pen to hand. If you want to solve it without a walkthrough too much, I recommend writing down any numbers, code sequences, or diagrams you come across. You should also map out the locations and flight routes between them and make notes on what you find at each location so you can puzzle things out with going to and fro too much. If you stick with it, it'll be very rewarding, just don't expect the same experience as Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island.

Just to be clear, GOG hasn't updated this game to work in modern Windows. What they've gone and done is, they've used ScummVM, a sort of emulator, to support this old game. And that's fine! It works. But you should be aware of some issues. One, if you have a widescreen monitor, the game will stretch. It mostly looks okay, but you should try to run it in a window if possible. Two, mouse acceleration is insane, it will jump all over the place. Running in a window might help that. (This is with mouse acceleration disabled in Windows.) Three, and most importantly, there doesn't seem to be save/load/exit functions. In the Amiga version it was F keys. Here, press F5 to access ScummVM, which handles saving. It also has an autosave. After accidentally skipping the plane sequence, I found that autosave was just before that, so I just quit. I have many fond memories of playing this game when it was new. My father, a friend of his, and I were all trying to get through it. I was maybe 10. We'd get together and talk about our progress. I actually solved a couple problems, but mostly I got help from the adults. This was before the Internet, so we really had to solve everything on our own, and it wasn't easy. Now I'm 38, and my father (and his friend) have both passed, and I'm glad to play this game on PC. I've tried playing it other ways (emulators and such) but if you're here reading this, you probably know as well as I do that GOG games just work. I got it on sale, but it's worth full price. Just want to throw a tip out there. You have more than enough money to complete the game and make a few mistakes. There is a way to exploit the lottery, but I'll leave that to you to find. Hint: Bermuda. I will tell you that there are a bunch of ways to solve problems early on, and one of them involves buying the hat and nose glasses from Lou's Loans, putting them on, and then giving the phone bill to the phone company rep. "No charge for Brothers!" That'll save you $1138.

This is an affordable way to get the excellent FM-TOWNS version of this game, which is a really good job. However, please note that the audio is just provided as 128 kbps MP3s. The original audio could have been provided as FLAC files (at least as an option), because the original audio is lossless, but that's not the case here. And, although the original DOS version is provided as well, the original translations are missing. So it could have been a better job, GOG...

Why NOT include other languages ? It's fine by me be won't be able to have my son play it any time soon. A gem otherwise.