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Studio: |
LucasArts |
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Designer(s): |
David
Fox |
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Part of series: |
—— |
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Release: |
October 1988 (DOS) / 1990 (FM Towns) |
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Main credits: |
Programmers: David Fox, Matthew Alan Kane Music / Sound Effects: Matthew Alan Kane |
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Useful links: |
Complete
playthrough (180 mins.) |
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To
paraphrase The Smiths, "some games
are bigger than others, some games’
fathers are bigger than other games’ fathers". Although David Fox, a
general computer and multimedia wiz who was one of the founding fathers of
Lucasfilm’s Game Division, was quite a key figure in the history of
LucasArts’ rise to prominence — it was he who designed and did most of the
work on Labyrinth, the studio’s
first and, some might argue, the most innovative and revolutionary
contribution to the art of the adventure game — the average gamer these days
is much less probable to run into any mention of his name than those of Ron
Gilbert, Dave Grossman, or Tim Schafer (even if, in recent years, he has
actually made a comeback into that world and rejoined Gilbert and Grossman on
such projects as Thimbleweed Park
and Return To Monkey Island). This
is not only due to Fox quitting the studio at an early stage, before it hit
its major artistic stride in the early 1990s, but also to the fact that his
second and last game for the studio, Zak
McKracken And The Alien Mindbenders, failed to live up to the high
expectations set by 1988’s Maniac
Mansion — or, at least, that’s how it largely seemed to critics and customers at the time. It is a rather
classic example of «the one that had to fall through the cracks» because something is always bound to fall
through the cracks, no matter how unjust it might seem to those willing to
lower themselves upon the floor and carefully re-extract it with nostalgic
pincers. Granted,
in the immediate aftermath of the technical and stylistic breakthroughs
introduced by Maniac Mansion it
would be difficult to expect an equally warm reception to a sequel (well,
technically it was a completely different story, but in spirit it might as
well have been dubbed a sequel) that, upon first sight, merely repeated the
formula of its predecessor, perhaps with a slightly expansive and more
ambitious approach that could, for the average player, feel more frustrating
than inspiring. Pretty soon, games like Loom
and the Indiana Jones series would
once again push that wagon forward, but Zak
McKracken, if you ever decide to play all LucasArts games in
chronological order, does give a bit of that «coasting» feeling — never a
good thing in the age of true progress, which is precisely what it was for
adventure games in the late Eighties. And
yet, in some ways Zak McKracken did
significantly differ from its surroundings, even if this rather becomes
clearer in retrospect. For one thing, of all the snarky tricksters and
miscreants in LucasArts, David Fox seems to have been (along with Brian
Moriarty of Loom fame) the most
serious of the lot. Unlike Gilbert and Grossman, whose chief interests, so it
seems, were in digital gaming from the very beginning, Fox was more of a
general computer expert, having written books such as Computer Animation Primer and Armchair
BASIC, and even opened (in 1977) what Wikipedia claims to have been «the
world’s first public-access microcomputer center». Later, after quitting
LucasArts, he would go on to design educational software rather than
straightahead computer games (that is, until he got back with his old pals
from the studio decades later). And it is said that his original design for Zak McKracken was a game that took
itself seriously — until Gilbert talked him out of the idea, for whatever
reason (perhaps he simply did not believe that the time was right for the
barely self-conscious art of video gaming to get serious, or was afraid that
Fox would turn the studio into a clone of Sierra On-Line). Even
so, despite Zak McKracken And The Alien
Mindbenders ultimately becoming yet another hilariously absurdist
creation cast in the image of Maniac
Mansion, the game still explored relatively serious topics; where Maniac Mansion was simply a
straightforward goof-off (at best — a smart parody of family-oriented horror,
sci-fi, and generic cartoons rolled in one), the main subject of Zak McKracken — that of the influence
of tabloid tripe on public conscience — had a certain modicum of social
relevance, not easy to properly assess unless you actually gave it some
thought, but if you did give it
some thought, you might even have made a case for Zak McKracken being a true «thinking man’s game» at a time when
even the most sophisticated adventure games were still essentially
re-enactments of fairy tale clichés or straight-up parodies of pop
culture. The problem is, back then people rarely evaluated games for their
actual content; immersion, user-friendliness, the overall quality of the
puzzles and, of course,
improvements in graphics and sound were so much more the rage — and on all
those counts, Zak McKracken did
well enough to earn a passable grade from the critics, but not enough to earn
their genuine admiration. In other words, the game’s flaws were more easy to
savor than its virtues. Nevertheless,
a small, but dedicated cult following did stabilize around the game,
protecting it from going down in history as a disaster and even producing a
couple of amateurish, indie-made sequels, for lack of an official one
(understandably, after Fox left the studio, nobody ever cared about
resurrecting Zak McKracken the same way the studio cared about resurrecting,
say, Guybrush Threepwood). The typical retro-verdict that I see these days
around the Web is along the lines of «well, it’s a pretty hard game, but if
you can get around its mercilessness to new players, it’s a fun enough romp
with some educational value to it». Which may be good enough for obsessed
retro-gamers and absolutely condemning for everybody else — but even if you
have never played Zak McKracken and
never intend to play Zak McKracken,
this does not necessarily mean you won’t get anything out of reading about Zak McKracken. So here we go! |
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Content evaluation |
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Plotline On the surface, the basic plot of Zak McKracken all but mirrors the story of Maniac Mansion — just like in that game, here we deal with a
supernatural alien intrusion, the ultimate goal of which is to achieve world
domination through indoctrination of the victims. However, in Maniac Mansion that aspect was not
particularly well thought through, and the entire line of the Evil Meteor
possessing Dr. Fred, the Mad Scientist, was merely a plot-serving goof
without any implications. The game’s story was just an (admittedly funny)
parody on the battle of Absolute Good vs. Absolute Evil, and all that mattered
about it were the isolated scattered jokes, gags, and (of course) puzzles. Fox
took his duties more seriously. First of all, as an early pioneer of
«edutainment» software, he made sure that the game would be far more
expansive than its predecessor. As a journalist working for The National Inquisitor, a tabloid of
poor reputation but rich circulation, Zak McKracken will have to travel all
over the world — from San Francisco to London, from Egypt to Mexico, from
Kinshasa to Tibet; he will have a chance to get lost in The Bermuda Triangle
and even grace the planet of Mars with his appearance. Although all of these
locations are represented in facetious, «tabloid-style» mode, Fox had clearly
done his research on everything associated with paranormal activity — the
Pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, Stonehenge, witch doctors, shamans, pretty much
everything and everyone that has ever attracted the attention of
sensation-seekers, and his tale unwinds in a fun world mixing cultural
authenticity with tabloid fantasy. The influence of Broderbund’s Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?
is undeniable, though Zak McKracken
is not really here to test your knowledge of geography: its chief focus is
exploration of popular cultural mythology rather than historical trivia. Second,
the game’s main plotline is, in a rather sly (and, for that period, extremely intelligent) manner,
somewhat metaphorical of the general human condition. According to the
story, the evil alien race of «Caponians», having taken over the intercommunication
monopoly of «The Phone Company», are launching a plan to subjugate humanity
by constantly transmitting a special «Mind Bending» signal, designed to
lower the intelligence level of everybody subjected to it. It is up to Zak
and his friends, freelancer Annie Larris (possibly named after David’s spouse
and work partner, Annie Fox) and two Yale students, Melissa and Leslie, on a
spring break vacation to Mars, to set things right by getting in contact with
the other alien race («The Skolarians») and gathering enough clues to
construct a super-device that will neutralize the harmful effect of «Mind
Bending» and ruin the evil guys’ plans. The
irony here is, at the least, two-fold. On one hand, the «Caponians» are a
good excuse to poke some well-protected fun at the overall sad state of
affairs in the field of human intelligence. At the very start of the game, if
you make Zak sit through a TV report of what’s going on, you get quite an edgy warning of "If you’ve been feeling increasingly stupid
lately, you’re not alone!" — which is somehow even more comforting
to hear today than it was back in 1988. On the other hand, the plight of Zak,
a disillusioned truth-seeker just aching to break out of the vicious circle
of sensationalist tabloid fantasies, ultimately leads him to realize that it
is only by fully and relentlessly embracing such fantasies that humanity can
be saved in the first place. In other words, fire must be fought with fire:
only the most fantastic and stupid strategies of action can help eliminate stupidity
and get the world back on track. This
is, in all honesty, such a fabulous concept that I only wish it could have
been better realized at a latter age; unlike Maniac Mansion, which, I believe, is fine just as it is, Zak McKracken is literally screaming to be remade with a bigger
budget, more detailed script, sharper and less laconic dialog, and fuller
character depictions. As it is, plot- and moral-wise the game is but a tasty
shadow of what it could really have been even in the soon-to-come age of Day Of The Tentacle, let alone today.
The entire story, including all the cutscenes, can be condensed into about
half an hour; the rest of the playtime will be occupied by your trying to
crack its puzzles and navigate its endless mazes. It’s got enough time to
poke fun at news of two-headed squirrels, golf-loving gurus, diplomated witch
doctors, Martian aliens, and, of course, The King (what’s a good game without
at least one Elvis joke?), but it does all that in a pretty telegraphic
style, which undermines its satire. As
with Maniac Mansion, one could
argue that the game’s pithiness is a source of charm in itself — if hilarious
absurdity is the name of the game, why spoil it by adding unnecessary detail
or, even worse, by attempts at expanded logical explanations of what is going
on? The only problem with that is that Maniac
Mansion had a perfect amibition-to-realization ratio: all the action took
place inside one single location, with a fixed minimal number of characters
whose goals and personalities could easily be established with just a handful
of cutscenes and dialogs. Zak McKracken
goes on an ambitious sprawl instead, taking you from one location to another
without bothering to seriously invest into any of the places or people. Even
the educational content is fairly limited — beyond learning the names of
cities such as Katmandu or Kinshasa, or seizing the overall difference in
visual style between Egypt and Mexico, you don’t really get to enrich your
knowledge, and, in fact, the game would hardly be recommendable for kids, not
just because it is too difficult or too laconic, but also because it
deliberately messes up fact and fantasy, which is hardly a great educational
strategy. (Years later, Sierra’s authors would come up with a good way to
separate one from the other while designing Pepper’s Adventures In Time, but that would already be a whole other
age). That the plot does not follow any clearly defined
logical strategy is probably not a valid accusation for the game, whose
absurdist nature calls for absurdist moves on the part of the protagonist —
in order to find all the missing pieces for their magic artifact, Zak and
Annie have to blindly grope around several different corners of the world
(which can be quite a financial strain on your limited resources), just as
often relying on their intuition as their counter-intuition. Sometimes,
however, it does go wildly over the top, when Elvis (or, at least, a pretty
darn good resemblance) is revealed as the leader of the Caponians, or when
the spiritual link between the Holy Men of Nepal and the Congo takes on the
form of a golf club; these ideas, naughtily sarcastic as they are on their
own, probably fried the brains of many a game reviewer, eventually hurting
sales and ensuring the game’s future status of «cult favorite». In the end, though, almost every element of the plot
makes sense: Zak McKracken is a
brilliantly well thought-out post-modern fable on the average person’s mix of
cultural stereotypes and superstitious (I wanted to write ‘religious’, but corrected
myself before it was too late) beliefs. And it’s well worth playing just to
get to that bit at the end: "CONGRATULATIONS!
YOU HAVE SAVED THE WORLD FROM STUPIDITY!", followed by "The people of Earth rapidly regained their
former level of intelligence... and traded in good karma for the latest food
fad: two-headed squirrel burgers!" Somehow, more than 30 years since
the release of the original game, there is still some sort of bitter
prophetic ring to those lines. Perhaps we are still waiting for a real-life
Zak McKracken to save the world from stupidity, so that we could all go back
to our two-headed squirrel burgers instead of having to take in all that
crazy shit the modern world keeps throwing at us, eh? |
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Puzzles On the puzzling front, Zak
McKracken has very few differences from Maniac Mansion: it uses the same interface of about a dozen
different verbs, most of them combinable with a variety of complements =
objects that Zak can pick up during his travels, and most of your time will
be spent trying out the various combinations — sometimes randomly, because
this is a batshit-crazy LucasArts game that typically requires batshit-crazy
LucasArts-style logic to get by. If you’re one of those «oh I hate adventure
games because they offer insane, logic-defying puzzles» kind of guy, Zak McKracken is definitely not the game to try and change your
state of mind. One thing that makes Zak
a definitely more difficult, and at times frustrating, experience compared to
Maniac Mansion, is its sprawling
nature. The Mansion was pretty big, but it was still a single location with
all of its floors, corridors, and rooms combined. If you wanted, you could
divide it into three chunks and set each of your playable characters to watch
over one of them, which made things clean and efficient; a couple of playing
hours later, you’d have the overall layout of the whole thing nicely settled
in your head and it would be easy to work out which elements and objects in
which part of the house relate to each other (or not). By contrast, the
universe of Zak is quite gigantic,
consisting of multiple disparate locations that can only be reached by taking
plane rides that (a) take small, but valuable chunks of your time and (b)
even worse, cost quite a bit of money that you can run out of. Forget to
obtain a useful item in San Francisco (like, for instance, a pack of bread
crumbs!), travel to Lima and watch yourself get fucked as you are hopelessly
stuck on your mission and don’t
have a single penny left in your pocket to travel back home and pick up the
required thingamajig. Indeed, Zak McKracken
is not only one of those very, very few LucasArts games that can be brought
to a halt by the player dying — any
of the four playable characters can get into a small handful of situations
where they expire and the game needs to be restarted or restored — but also
by the player getting stuck in an unwinnable situation, something that
contemporary Sierra games were frequently accused for. To move around, Zak
and Annie need money, and while there are
ways to replenish your credit card, they come relatively late in the game;
besides, it is theoretically possible to get stuck in some remote location
without the means of purchasing your next ticket or to make a quick buck anywhere in the vicinity. Additionally,
while trying out different solutions, you can lose important objects that are
necessary to complete vital quests — or, at one point, Zak can get stuck in a
jail cell in Katmandu without any ways of getting out (Annie can help, but
only if she has the financial means to get to Nepal and a necessary implement to call the shuttle to the airport from
her San Francisco apartment). All of this goes so blatantly against the established LucasArts
strategies of pleasing the player that I can only explain it by the
chronological factor: back in 1988, the laws set out by Ron Gilbert were in
the early stage of application and did not require being fully shared by all
the other designers. The (relative) underperformance of the game, compared to
Maniac Mansion, probably convinced
everybody that the Gilbert way of doing things was the way to go, and no other LucasArts game after Zak McKracken would dare inconvenience
the player in any such manner. That said, taking good care of your save files
and keeping a sharp eye on the state of your bank account is not that hard to
do, that is, once you figure out that you actually need to do it: with most of the classic LucasArts games luring
you into relaxing, it’s easy to forget that a few of the early ones do demand
that you keep your guard up. A bigger problem than getting stuck because of doing something
wrong might be getting stuck because of not knowing what to do. After you
have properly explored San Francisco and met up with Annie to learn of the
impending catastrophe and the one possible solution to prevent it, you are
essentially placed in free-roam mode — and the game is pretty harsh on you
when it comes to getting actual clues on where to go next, instead of blindly
groping around the world in classic «go-I-know-not-
whither-and-fetch-I-know-not-what» fashion. You do get some clues — which, every once in a while, require a bit
of outside knowledge; for instance, connecting the dots on a cave painting
reveals the image of an ankh, which logically suggests that your further
adventures will have something to do with Egypt, provided you know what an
ankh is (and even if you don’t, neither the game itself nor the accompanying
manual will ever insult your intelligence by offering an explanation). But it
is more likely that most players will just keep on randomly putting Zak on a
plane to whatever location, only to discover, half an hour later, that you
are not in possession of that one
particular important object you need to crack that location’s task and have
meaninglessly wasted your money on two plane tickets (or more, as some
destinations can only be reached through a connecting flight). Adding to the number of frustrating bits about the game’s design
is its accursed system of mazes
(ugh!). Mazes will be waiting for you everywhere — in the African and South
American jungles, inside the Egyptian pyramids, and even inside the Martian
ruins. Now in most adventure games, mazes are merely the cheap equivalent of
a proper puzzle when developers run out of budget for designing something
more creative, tasking the player with finding an additional piece of paper
and pencil for several minutes of brainless tedium — but Zak McKracken actually does it worse by mixing a few real,
fixed-design mazes with «pseudo-mazes», a set of randomly generated images
where you should not memorize any paths, but rather just allow your character
to wander and blunder until he randomly falls upon the blessed clearing.
Since the game never warns you about which of the two maze types you are
about to encounter, you may end up writing out maps for one-time only ghostly
apparitions, and not writing out
maps where you really need them. Honestly, while not particularly tragic, the
maze system in Zak McKracken is
simply one of the most stupid and annoying bits of design in the entire
history of LucasArts. The actual inventory-based puzzles, by comparison, are
relatively simple; nothing stands out as particularly challenging or, for
that matter, particularly memorable. Some of the challenges have alternate
solutions, or (sometimes) can be performed by different characters with
slightly different results. Some objects can be used differently; for
instance, you can make regular use of the knife you find or you can bend it
out of shape, eventually allowing you to make a profit and get an extra joke on the subject of modern art as well. Some
puzzles require cooperation, similar to the tactics employed in Maniac Mansion (e.g. one character has
to hold down a lever while the other goes through a door, etc.). All in all,
not a lot to write about. The main challenge of the game is to really
familiarize yourself with the scope of its universe — oh, and to watch out
for those precious hotspots, of course (arguably the easiest way to get stuck
is to miss some tiny pixelated area on the screen that contains the proper
object to interact with). |
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It may be a bit random, but remembering that the game came out
in 1988, I can’t help but be reminded of yet another title from the same year
where you had to deal with a protagonist pulled out of the relative chic and
comfort of West Coast civilization and plunged into a world of exciting,
dangerous, and bewildering adventure — Sierra’s Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking For Love, with the game’s first act taking
place in Los Angeles rather than San Francisco. The contrast, held up by the
plot, the graphics, and the suspense, was quite striking — and at the same
time, the game humorously played on all the similarities between life in L.A.
and life on the tropical islands of the Pacific, poking intelligent fun at
globalization and commercialization (which most players and critics probably
missed in their avid hunt for smut, smut, and more smut). In
some ways, Zak McKracken does the
same, as Zak discovers the influence of the modern world on many of the
locations he visits — from the African witch doctor’s diploma from «Watsamatta University, Master of Cranial
Diminishment» to the interiors of «The Friendly Hostel» all the way up on
Mars. However, on the whole the game remains stuck in the same kind of zany
parallel reality as most of the classic LucasArts titles, and its style is
more reminiscent of a comic book than a comedy movie. Dialog throughout the
game is sparse, terse, and minimal (as compared, for instance, to Al Lowe’s
totally unstoppable verbosity — often brilliant, but sometimes verging on obsessively
annoying), and its attention to detail is... well, let’s say, sporadic: every
once in a while, there is something random out there just for the sake of
humor, but it feels tacked on just so there’d be at least something of the «world-building»
variety and not directly and strictly related to the plot. As in Maniac Mansion, there’s a suspicion of
the game designers still being stuck way too much in the «text adventure
game» mode, where the very nature of the game prohibited the writers from
piling up too much detail. (One
good illustrative example: in both Zak
McKracken and Larry II, players
find themselves aboard a plane with a rude and obnoxious stewardess
explaining flight rules. Dialog from Zak:
"If we lose cabin pressure, oxygen
masks should appear. But don’t count on it." Dialog from Larry: "Oh, and if during our flight those cute little yellow masks happen to
drop down from their overhead compartments... why, just ignore them. Lately,
those practical jokers in maintenance have been substituting nitrous oxide
for the oxygen again!" Feel the difference in style? To be fair,
though, the humor level in both these takes is quite comparable, so the
less-is-more principle applies fairly well to Zak McKracken on occasion). Even
so, Zak McKracken is still a unique
experience in its own way. There was always something disarmingly charming
about Maniac Mansion’s minimalism,
which, of course, stemmed not from any kind of intentional designer
philosophy, but from the limitations of its age — small budget, tiny staff,
rudimentary technologies, first experience — and for all the innumerable ways
in which Day Of The Tentacle would
have it beat five years later, it would do so at the inevitable expense of
that laconicity. Zak McKracken,
however, arrived just in time to recapture that atmosphere and apply it to
the world at large, rather than spend it all on one particular location. Now
you have Zak arrive in Peru and find an «Ancient
Incan Bird Feeder: Fill Only With Dry Bread Crumbs», because why the hell
not? Besides, some people might actually get tired of drowning in waves upon
waves of LucasArts’ patented humor in later games — Zak McKracken, by using it sparingly, comes across as more of a
real puzzler than an excuse to crack off as many jokes as possible,
regardless of quality (yeah I’m lookin’ at you Curse Of Monkey Island!) Finally,
as in Maniac Mansion, there is a
bit of tension and suspense here — after Zak receives the ability to transmogrify
into the spirits of birds and animals, the Caponians begin to sense his
presence and you have to remember to quickly clear out of recently visited
locations to prevent yourself from being captured. Capture never leads to
death (just a temporary round of brainwashing that eventually results in Zak
getting back to normal), but it still delays your progress, so getting
captured is never a good thing (actually, it’s worse than what it was in Maniac Mansion, where getting thrown
into the dungeon only meant that you had to activate another member of the
party to get you out — here, you get automatically transported back to San
Francisco, meaning you will probably need to spend a large wad of money on
your next airplane ticket). That said, given the overall hilarious appearance
of the Caponians (who prefer to masquerade as a cross between Groucho Marx
and Super Mario), the threat of capture makes you more fidgety than terrified
— there’s really no space for proper «nightmare fuel» in a LucasArts game,
even despite all the actual nightmares that Zak has to go through every time
he goes to sleep. |
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Technical features |
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Graphics
One big advantage, however, that Zak McKracken holds over Maniac
Mansion is that it was lucky enough to be eligible for re-release on the
Japanese market for Fujitsu’s FM Towns computing systems, which had native
VGA resolution with 256 colors and used CD-ROM technology, allowing for
better audio. Of course, back in 1990 only the Japanese buyers, or those
lucky enough to own an imported model, could enjoy the game in such a
revolutionary format; today, though, when everything back from the 20th
century is only played through emulation software, the FM Towns version is
just as easily playable through ScummVM as the original EGA version, and for
retro-gamers, it has pretty much replaced the original (for instance, it is
the FM Towns version that is being sold on GoodOldGames as the default
option). It’s not exactly a stupendous upgrade, and there are a few
graphic perks to the enhanced DOS version that the FM Towns one somehow lost
in transition; careful comparison of the actual frames shows that some
details have been cut out or smoothed over, and sometimes the simple colorful
vibrancy of EGA gives out a brighter and cozier vibe than its shade-of-grey
replacement in the VGA version. On the whole, though, the FM Towns variety
unquestionably offers more depth to the experience, and I can easily confirm
the recommendation as first choice, with the enhanced DOS and the Amiga
versions lagging not far behind. As in Maniac Mansion, the
verb-based interface continues, unfortunately, to eat up about a third of the
screen, making the game’s locations unroll as a sort of narrow scrolling
tapestry — also the same principle as in Maniac
Mansion, except that this time around, you really spend most of your time
either in the open air or inside mazes and corridors, so the scrolling is
pretty much ubiquitous. The art style is relatively generic and perfunctory,
but the images do their job well enough — the Pyramids do look imposing, the
red Martian desert does look mysteriously haunting, and the Katmandu temple
area does look rather outrageously gauche and tourist-ey. Not really sure
what else can be said here. |
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Sound This, even more so than the
graphics, is where the FM Towns version really comes to life. The DOS version,
like Maniac Mansion, was only
accompanied by PC speaker support, so it stayed silent for most of the time,
and when it didn’t, you most certainly wish it would — the opening music
theme and the few sound effects scattered throughout have hardly aged well
when represented by bleeps and beeps, to put it mildly. With full CD-ROM
support, however, the 1990 version was able to feature a full musical score
(unfortunately, no speech), and although the main theme still sounds terrible
when converted to MIDI (like one of those «kick-ass» electronic dance
compositions in the opening titles to Eighties’ police dramas and porn
flicks), the rest of the soundtrack is not too shabby. Well, actually, it is
pretty shabby, because the dynamic musical segments usually play like
forgettable elevator muzak. But the bits that are more ambient in nature play
pretty darn well, nicely reflecting local styles (with expectable sitars in
the Katmandu section, congas and bongos in the Central African section, and
swirling psychedelic flutes in the Egyptian section). From a purely audio
perspective, the best segment would probably be Mars, with haunting gusts of
wind adding to the overall spookiness of the desert and mystical ambient
soundscapes resonating across the corridors of the huge Martian maze. If the
main musical accompaniment to the game cannot be said to have properly
survived the judgement of time, the sonic ambience of it is atmospherically
admirable even today. Playing the game on mute during those segments really
takes away an entire dimension, which is ultimately the reason why the DOS and FM Towns versions play like two
different experiences. |
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Interface
While
there is absolutely nothing wrong with two or more games running on exactly
the same version of the engine — Sierra did that in droves, though,
admittedly, their business model allowed them to pump out far more product
over a year-long period than LucasArts — it’s still a little symbolic of Zak McKracken’s downfall: for all the
different vibes it gave, things like that only reinforced the general feeling
that it was really just an unimaginative clone of its predecessor. For quick comparison,
already the year after that Indiana Jones
And The Last Crusade would at least diversify the interface with a
choice-based dialog system (not to count all of its questionable, but
imaginative mini-games), and then along came Loom with all of its painfully-ahead-of-its-time features... next
to these advances, Zak does feel
like a clone when it comes to pure gameplay. Fortunately for it, innovation
in gameplay mechanics is just about the very last parameter on my mind in
calculating the overall enjoyability of a gaming experience! |
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Verdict: Definitely not enough to save the world from stupidity,
but does at least give you something to think about. It is difficult for me
to make an unconditional recommendation for Zak McKracken & The Alien Mindbenders. On the technical
front, it is such a blatant imitation of Maniac
Mansion that it hardly has any place in the history of video game
evolution. On the «fun» front, it can be confusing and frustrating even for
the seasoned retro-gamer — not only because it is a rare case of a LucasArts
game where you can unexpectedly die or, worse, get stuck in a dead-end
situation, but also because of its seemingly austere approach to clues and
ugly mazes. It’s really easy as heck to build up a condemning case here and
state that, for a brief while, the studio «lost its way» before the next wave
of successful innovations came along. And yet, at the same time, I still
feel a bit of genuine fondness for the universe built up by David Fox — a
more expansive, meaningful, and mature take on the absurdist realities of Maniac Mansion. I like how the mundane
and the surreal, the entertaining and the educational, the idealistic and the
sarcastic bits intertwine with each other; how the game, while never
officially taking itself seriously, subtly implants the almost religious idea
of everything in the universe being connected by the same laws and patterns; how
it tries to go beyond the pure, unadulterated parody of Maniac Mansion to deliver subtle hints at the
less-than-satisfactory state of humanity (note that the game action is officially
set in 1997, a mere decade into the future). That tiny cult of Zak McKracken
fans that still persisted until at least the 2000s (the German fan game Zak McKracken: Between Time And Space
was released in 2008 and remastered in 2015), I am sure, owes its existence
to pretty much the same feelings, rather than any formulaic admiration for
the game’s mechanics and «fun factor». Perhaps — who knows? — that
intermingling between Fox and Gilbert did, after all, result in compromising Fox’s
original vision, and perhaps Zak McKracken
could have come out even better, had it adopted a more serious tone. One of
the most common criticisms of LucasArts, after all, is that the studio was
never able to produce anything but sheer goofy comedy (Loom being just about the only exception to the rule), and
theoretically I could see somebody like Fox diversifying its portfolio. But,
first of all, this is just speculation, and second, it’s just as possible
that the game would have devolved into pedantic and insipid «edutainment»
instead. As it stands, Zak McKracken
is the kind of game that invites you, every once in a while, to stop and
think about its content rather than just concentrate exclusively on beating
its puzzles and getting the final achievement of «saving the world from
stupidity» without bothering to think about the metaphorical implications of
your actions — or, at least, about the true nutritional values of two-headed
squirrel burgers. |
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