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LucasArts' Secret History #3: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Okay, so screw those guys. What does everyone else think?
Mojo readers have also played the game!
The first thing I remember about this game is how cool it was to listen to the Indiana Jones theme coming out of my PC's internal speaker. The second thing is that Grail Diary - now that was cool.
As for the game itself, I have no real memories. Did I enjoy it? Certainly as much as Fate of Atlantis, even if it was slightly less polished. But I never completed it - that damn Castle.
Anyway, it was clearly an achievement from the boys at LucasArts because it proved they could still make a fun, accessable and rewarding game even when given a pre-existing plotline to follow. It boded well for that Star Wars adventure game that never came.
I have this game, boxed, on 3.5 disks. I remember being stuck forever in the catacombs, not figuring out the plug thing. Then I got to a spot where I was stuck, don't know if it was stupidity, or a bug, but I couldn't get past a check point or something because I didn't have a paper or book or something, it was after the castle, after the blimp, I think after the book burning. I didn't have the inventory item, and I couldn't go back to get it. So I stopped playing. Till this day I have never finished the game. I loved what I did play, the handy little Dr.Jones diary manual that came with it. I remember carrying that around with me when I was little acting like Indiana Jones with my own grail diary.
Unfortunately i missed this title when it came out, not for lack of trying though. Unfortunately there were several different releases with the same name :( We had heard great reviews of the game but lived in relative obscurity (read:one had to travel 3-5 hours on a ferry to get to town) and as such hardly knew any better when we tried the Nes Action game port and were greatly disappointed :P
Several years later in my push to aquire all the LEC titles I realized how very wrong we were back then. While it was no Monkey Island (:P) it was definitely a fun (and often frustrating) title. I dont know how many times i made it through the catacombs in Venice and realized that i forgot whatever i needed to open the gate to the Knights tomb or the wine bottle, or to grab all the books in the library, etc.
Im also pretty sure i have some sort of mental condition that requires i go down every other path than the correct one in most the mazes in this game :P
Indy 3 is really the missing link between the interface used in Zak/MM and The original interface for SMI, the slightly offset character sprites are introduced to give Indy more of a 3D'ish look than say the limited front-on or side view of Zak or Dave (a look LEC returned to for loom but abandoned from SMI on). Also introduced is the dialog tree that we have all grown to know and love, a pretty major staple of most interactive storytelling in games ever since. It should probably get a pretty big metal for that.
All and all it is a great game and a very fun take on the movies, Id recommend it to both hardcore Indy fans and LEC adventure fans alike.
I just completed this game yesterday, as I was anticipating the Mixnmojo Indy 3 retrospective. I love that your articles are making me go back and play the LucasArts adventure games that I have forgotten about. :) When I started this, I thought that I had completed it before, but as I got towards the end I realized that this is one of the only two LucasArts adventures I never completed (along with The Dig, oh and Labyrinth: how about a retrospective of that? I'd love to see how many people would go back to play it. You thought that you weren't getting a lot of comments for the other LucasArts adventure games. Six reader comments would probably be a lot for that one :) ).
I am a huge fan of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as it is my favorite movie in the trilogy. When I saw LucasArts Classic Adventures, I just had to get it. I bought it for Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island, but Indy sealed the deal. I wish I still had that collection, I loved reading the manual. It had a reprint of Henry Jones' Grail Diary in it, which was a great read for a girl like me who adored the Indiana Jones series. As for the game itself, it has a lot of great merits on it's own. This game introduces the ability to pick what you want Indy to say. It adds a lot to the game play, as finally you feel immersed in the game, rather than feeling like a simple spectator. It sticks to the plot line of The Last Crusade very well, but it diverges just enough to make you feel interested.
The reason that I never completed the game until yesterday is the same reason I never completed Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders until years later: mazes. The underground caverns were simple enough, it was like The Secret of Monkey Island, where you had a map you could use, but you could just as easily blindly navigate the maze and find what you needed. I don't mind that type of maze at all. However, the castle maze was irritating. Not only did you have to navigate blindly through corridors, you also had to keep switching between uniforms, as the guards would fight you if you walked by in different clothes than you wore when you first met them. The fighting was also a big turn off for me. I never could beat anyone with much more than a nudge of life left, and when you came up to your next fight, you still had the same amount of life as your last fight. This meant that I had to save and load often in order to be able to select the right conversations with the guards that would let me pass them without a fight. This "save early, save often" mentality was more like a Sierra game than a LucasArts game.
But, now that I finally did complete it, I'm glad I did. The story is solid, and follows the movie remarkably well. But, even more than that, the game is funny. It is loaded with a lot of injokes. I find the injokes in LucasArts games adorable. They keep me going back to see what I might have missed. There are a ton of references to other LucasArts games in Indy's office and in the art room in the castle. I laughed out loud at the Zak McKracken reference in the library where Indy reads about a book that is "all about Caponian and Skolarian culture", and then looks at the camera and says "huh?". This game also introduces two injokes that will be spread throughout the other LucasArts games: the "I'm selling these fine leather jackets" line, and the cameos by Sam and Max. How can you not love that? :)
I'm probably one of the few people who aren't completely enamoured by Indiana Jones, having never even bothered to see one of his films. That said, I did enjoy playing Fate of Atlantis, and if I remember right, after that I played Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Or before that, I don't remember. The reason I don't remember is that, after having fun beating up Nazis for a while (that was in this game, right?), there was a puzzle that I got stuck on, and there may have been a bug as well, so I just stopped playing.
If I were dishonest, I'd just download it and replay it, but I'm not, so I won't. As a result, about the only sensible thing I can say about this game is that I appreciate that it's perhaps the catalyst behind propelling the LucasArts adventures to greatness, if only for the classic line "I'm selling these fine leather jackets."
I never had a chance to play Indy and the LC the ADVENTURE game when it first came out. I still just had a lowly C=64 back then and had to settle for the ACTION game. Which little 14-year-old me liked, despite it being hard. But I wondered at the screenshots of the point- and-click adventure version. I had Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken for the C=64, why wasn't I getting Indy? Anyway, by the time FoA came out I had migrated to PC and I loved that, but never got to play Last Crusade until ScummVM came around. My verdict? I really liked it. The 14-year-old me would've LOVED this game had he gotten to play it. It does a very good job of "extending the fantasy", as they say, giving players something a little bit new and a chance to relive the movie at the same time.
The only part that drove me nuts about the game was finding those damn books in the Venice library. I'd been stuck there for hours, then stopped playing it for what was probably weeks, and then played it again and got through the sequence so quick I don't even remember what I did.
The Last Crusade was my very first adventure game. I can't remember the exact year but I was really young back then. Since English isn't my native language I was a bit too young to understand the game so my dad used to play it and I would watch.
Remember the part where you open the coffin and find the skeleton of the crusader? That part messed up my tiny mind completely! The combination of the very spooky sound effect and the amazingly detailed close up of the skeleton scared me so bad that I'm still having nightmares about it sometimes! No kidding. Maybe once a year or something I have these strange dreams of the catacombs. Not too scary anymore but it's quite interesting.
I don't find the game scary anymore of course and playing it today is a very nostalgic experience for me. It's not a perfect adventure game and Indy does fight like a cow but I could never review it objectively. I really like playing it and that's all that matters. I'm just happy my dad never got past the Castle Brunwald. He surely would've 'chosen poorly' and seeing Indy's head explode would probably have made my young mind a complete trainwreck!
I first played it a couple of years ago, (I know, shoot me). I really liked the game, it was sweet to be able to play through the movie. The only thing I didn't like where the action sequences. That's why I never made it out of the castle Brünwald. All and all a nice game, but Indiana Jones and the Faith of Atlantis is way better!
I remember going around to my best friend’s house when we were eight, and him showing me this game where you could box people, and walk around, and there was this house where everything was a mess. We played around a bit but couldn’t work out what to do next. Then I told my friend that I had the film that the game was based on on video back home. I was a hero! My friend and I trouped back to my house and watched the film so that it could give us clues on what to do next. It didn’t help much, but we both enjoyed the film immensely.
I love this game. It's so underrated! With a slightly better interface, improved dialogue trees and fighting system, it would have been one of the LEC greats!
One of my favorite adventures of all-time. Sure I have a lot of those all-time favorites when it comes to LucasArts, but this one is special. Because it has a Sam and Max totem pole in Dr.Jones’ office. But also because it’s Indiana Jones to begin with and I’m a bit of a sucker for the leather selling archaeologist. On a purely professional level of admiration of course.
When I played the game I must have been about seven years old, and I remember watching a recording of a televised broadcast of the movie as game-film comparison in hope of finding hints how to proceed within the game. Of course the movie didn’t give any more clues than the game itself on which slab to smash in the library of Venice.
The game has no real flaws in the puzzles or action scenes as far as I experience. I’ve even heard of legends who, after lots of practice in the ring at the gym of Barnett College, could beat up and win in a fight with the ticket guy from the zeppelin.
I always liked the Indiana Jones games, especially the adventures. Looking forward to the completion of that fan-game that’s in production!
Hooray!