Grim Fandango Remastered

Where is the Soundtrack? You deliver Pic's and making of godies but no soundtrack?

Shame on you who give this game less than 5 stars just because the "remaster" part of it isn't drastical. It doesn't matter at all. It is Grim Fandango, the same story, same world, same characters, same magic. Stop whinning. Everybody should have the experience of playing Grim Fandango at least once before they die.

Despite some criticisms, the game is still amazing. Back in 1998 when it first came out, it was mind blowing, and after 20 years it's still great, just not as quite as awesome, and the cracks in the paintwork are beginning to show. I still highly recommend you play the game however, the story alone is enough to keep you driving forward, and when you do solve those at times frustrating puzzles, you feel like a genius. The game is critically acclaimed and held up as one of the best adventure games of all time for a reason...it really is up there with the best of the best. You can watch my full retrospective video here: https://youtu.be/jVor2fvOXQM

The game itself: it's Grim Fandango, it's well-revered enough that I don't need to sell you on that. One of LucasArts' last triumphant hurrahs in adventuring still stands high. The remaster: normally I'd advocate running originals in ScummVM or DOSBox as appropriate, because remasters usually ruin the consistency of the original art, or outright make it a mess of ugly redrawn Flash-grade spritework and blurry half-hearted upscaling. Grim's a bit different for three big reasons: 1) The original is harder to run, being Windows-era, and ResidualVM getting less attention than ScummVM. 2) The stylized low-poly models are intact, but the rendering is slightly improved, and they now mesh *better* with the pre-rendered backdrops. Remastered Grim is still a 4:3 game with some fuzzy cutscenes, but it's at least not worse than the original, unlike the godawful Full Throttle remaster. 3) Mouse controls! They're not perfect, and seem to have some dodgy hotspots toward the endgame where it can be easier to switch to keyboard/joystick for a moment, but this mostly fixes the original game's biggest pain point. (I don't know how it compares to the patch someone did for ResidualVM to attempt the same.)

It supports gamepads, but this "breaks" the game because with no mouse pointer to move around you will miss important hotspots and be stuck -and this from someone who had beaten it before. NO AUTOSAVE: unlike other reviewers the game never crashed on me, but maybe I was lucky. SOLUTIONS ARE A MIXED BAG -some are quite logical but others not, and sometimes the game seems to be designed to be purposedly obscure -like paths to important places being practicallly hidden, so you wander aimlessly wondering why you can't proceed. Other times they are convoluted, with the game giving no clue at all; or important objects get lost in the background. AT LEAST ONE RENDERING BUG in remastered graphics -in the first chapter, towards the end, the remastered version incorrectly renders an important object, making it virtually invisible. It happens in a part with a bird's eye view. REMASTERED GRAPHICS look nice, but since the original used pre-rendered backgrounds it's not as impressive as it could; however the character models are clearly improved, and for that it's worth it. Shown with the original's 4:3 ratio with an option to scale to widescreen, which distorts the image and potentially leaves important objects offscreen. GOOD WRITING, nice plot, and the mix of Day of the Dead traditions with film noir aged really well. CONTROLS: as I said, don't use the gamepad. Keyboard controls are improved -you can move Manny naturally, but "tank" controls are available as an option. THE USUAL FLAWS FOR THE GENRE: sometimes you correctly guess what you need to do but you can't do it directly, you need to talk to a character; other times you have to wait in position for other characters to do something, then act, with no clue at all. RECOMMENDED, nice adventure, not as illogical as others, but you'll probably consult a walkthrough a few times.