#SCUMMVM MANIAC MANSION FULL#
Over the years it evolved with the games that LucasArts released, introducing sleeker, icon-based versions in games like Full Throttle. In other words, even if LucasArts had wanted to dispense with the interface for some reason, doing so would have been extremely difficult. In fact, when you click on the screen, the first thing SCUMM does is figure out whether you clicked above or below the line that separates the game world from the interface. The game world literally sits on top of the interface. When you look at a LucasArts adventure game, the verb-object interface isn’t an overlay as you would find with most modern game UIs. They were also kind of stuck with it, because the interface was hardwired into the SCUMM engine. It was simply much more efficient, especially with games that the player could explore through looking at the screen rather than reading from it.īut the reason LucasArts continued to use the verb-object interface wasn’t just because it worked. This included LucasArts’ main rivals Sierra, who used it for games such as Gabriel Knight. Within a few years, nearly all adventure games had ditched command-line interfaces in favour of what eventually became known as “point ‘n’ click”. Maniac Mansion’s interface was hugely influential both inside and outside LucasArts. The silly red herrings, the replacing of vanilla “I can’t do that” command rejections with varied, witty responses, are all examples of taking the limits of adventure games in the late eighties and framing them as an integral part of the experience, making these small 2D worlds feel fuller and freer than they ultimately are. In a way this is a hallmark of the broader LucasArts adventure game template. Maniac Mansion is more honest with the player about the limits of their freedom, while also making those limits feel more expansive than what has gone before. It’s a remarkable bit of systemic sleight-of-hand. It immediately demonstrates all the possibilities open to the player, presenting them in a positive way, whereas playing a text adventure involves a slow chipping away of everything that’s not possible until you hit on the correct solution. But the way it is presented has the opposite effect.
Rather than pull the wool over the player’s eyes with a potentially infinite number of commands as a text adventure would, Maniac Mansion confronts the player with everything they can do in the game from the start, amounting to a total of fifteen verbs. What’s strange about verb-object interface is that it is in effect a limiting of the player’s possibilities.
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