Grim Fandango Remastered Ps4
Grim Fandango Remastered Xbox One
Grim Fandango Remastered

Grim Fandango is a great game with amazing story line, concept and voice acting! The music in Grim Fandango Remastered seems to have improved (I guess?) from the original, but the 3D character. Grim Fandango Remastered and other Double Fine games do not appear to have 64 bit support. Last time I played I seemed to have run into the same bug as I did now, except I'm not absolutely sure if it is a bug. I wasn't sure what I did last time so I reloaded a save from Year 1. Searching online for Grim Fandango Finger Puppet/Marionette. Jan 31, 2015 I dunno the budget or time allowance for it but i have to admit that the remaster of gearboxs acquired ip Homeworld which has 2 games looks alot more remastered than grim fandango. They had similar time frames too. I wonder why they didnt redo all.

Comedy is one of the most difficult things to convey in video games. This is partly due to the pacing. A great deal of comedy is about timing, and when the audience is in control of how fast things play out, comic timing can be finicky and unpredictable.

Maybe that's why adventure games seem like the perfect place to make people laugh. In the days before The Walking Dead, point-and-click adventure games acted like coin operated dialogue machines. Input a puzzle, and a ready-made bit of conversation dispenses in capsule form—perfect and unaltered by the player's actions.

Tim Schafer is often credited with being one of the funniest people in video games for good reason. It could just as easily be said, however, that he was one of the first to recognize adventure games' inherent usefulness as a comedy tool. Grim Fandango was the last adventure game Schafer worked on as part of the now-defunct LucasArts, and its commercial failure represented the end of a golden age for the genre, cementing the game’s legend in certain circles.

Grim Fandango’s near-mythical stature has only increased by the fact that the game has never been re-released or ported to modern hardware since its initial release. Scarcity makes the heart grow fonder, in this case, and so the adventures of protagonist Manny Calavera, Meche, and Glottis through the Land of the Dead have become the perfect candidates for this new 'remastered' edition.

Graphical and pacing hitches

It doesn't hurt that this Day of the Dead-inspired comedy has an art style which translates well into today’s higher resolutions. Grim Fandango was coded in an era where polygons were actually recognizable as such: characters are blocky, flat, and monochromatic, obvious even under the new shaders, retouched textures, and sharper corners of the remake.

Most games of the era suffer when upscaled to hi-res displays, but Grim Fandango was smartly (or perhaps unintentionally) future-proofed against this kind of issue. The game’s piñatas, skeletons, and the Land of the Dead's bureaucratic concrete are already flat, while the pulpier, art deco backgrounds never needed to change at all. What Remastered does is remove any jagged aliasing, and it sharpens the colors in such a way that makes the game appear more 'true' to its target aesthetic.

Unfortunately, there is a significant selection of graphical bugs that mar what would otherwise be the definitive version of this 17-year-old classic. Held objects float with gravity-defying stubbornness, for instance, and whole chunks of character models seemingly dislodge themselves momentarily during conversation. These bugs are all the more distracting now that the game is being rendered so much more crisply and cleanly. It’s hard to focus on a line’s humorous delivery when the character delivering it has a mouth guard floating two feet in front of his teeth.

Grim Fandango also suffers in retrospect thanks to nearly two decades of advancement in video game pacing. 1998 wasn't just a time of low-fidelity graphics. It was also a time when players had a lot more patience for adventure game puzzles—or at least I did.

The thing is, Grim Fandango is slow. You'll walk into a room, fill Manny's infinite inner pockets with pseudo-random trash, and leave, only to return and repeat the process multiple times if you missed some important cue and need a fresh batch of expended items. All the backtracking and the guesswork is made worse by all the just-longer-than-I'd-like animations: climbing, walking, and even unfolding Manny's reaper scythe all slow things down just a tad too much for my tastes.

Since Grim Fandango didn’t have highly expressive faces to help sell a scene, it made sense for the game to have broad, sweeping movements to convey the characters’ personalities. Add that to the plodding, often esoteric puzzles, though, and there are some lengthy pauses between depositing that kernel of effort and receiving the capsule of a joke.

Just be sure to save after every long pause. For whatever reason, Grim Fandango Remastered has not added the kind of autosave feature that’s become practically standard for games in the last few decades. That usually wouldn’t be much of an issue in the relatively consequences-free world of an adventure game, but occasional game-freezing bugs make frequent manual saving a necessary chore. Grim Fandango's dialogue may be fun, but it's less endearing when you have to backtrack through 45 minutes worth of those long animations just to get back to where you were.

Humor and heart

That said, when those jokes do land they're still seriously amusing. Grim Fandango is a wonderful example of Tim Schafer at his finest, and the game will bring warm chuckles to anyone who’s played The Secret of Monkey Island or Psychonauts. The humor and heart is audible in every exchange, whether it's with an angry, dead clown channeling Jack Nicholson or an elemental spirit raised for the sole purpose of supercharging town cars.

The space between the exchanges is filled with a pulp-action spectacle on a scale that seems all the larger for the fully-realized world it takes place in. There are rules and borders to the Ninth Underworld, and even though those rules are ridiculous and broken as quickly as the characters can explain them, they give a sense of space that makes you care for the world’s inhabitants.

Much credit has to go to those characters' voice actors, whose deadpan delivery sells the insanity. Their lines, along with the game's music, have also been remastered for Remastered, and this comes off sounding as good as the game (usually) looks.

There’s also a director's commentary that can be turned on with the press of a button, featuring Schafer alongside programmers, artists, animators, and designers talking about the individual inspirations that led to various choices in the game's design.

The commentary isn’t unwelcome, and it's often quite an interesting look into how a passion project like Grim Fandango comes together, but it just isn't particularly well-implemented here. Once activated, you're treated to a several-second blurb about pneumatic tubes or a particular mural. Leave the scene showing that particular object, however, and the commentary stops, meaning you have to stand in place and wait for the commentary to finish before move on to the next scene.

These and other 'remastered' elements of Grim Fandango Remastered aren't perfect, but neither is the original game, as it turns out. Its ponderous pace often gets in the way of its stellar personality, in fact. That doesn’t mean you should shy away from a slice of gaming history, though. When the game does hit its marks, it's with the same verve that its legacy promises.

The good

Art and personality have aged well, even after 17 years
Music and voice acting sound better than ever
New director's commentary, while stiffly implemented, is very interesting
The snappy dialogue: 'Did you kill much when you were alive?' 'Very little.'

The bad

Slow pace and obtuse puzzles weigh the dialogue down
Bugs ranging from visual to game-breaking mar what should be the ideal Grim Fandango
No autosave feature

The ugly

I spoke to an elemental handyman whose cheeks exploded into his own mouth for a moment.

Grim Fandango Remastered Ps4

Verdict: If you can survive the rough edges, it’s a great chance to finally see what all the fuss is about or relive an adventure classic.

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