A Lucas Arts game created by many of the same people who did Monkey Island and other Lucas Arts adventure games. It has excellent graphics, humorous writing and scenes that don't get weak over time. The Maniac Mansion gang travels through time with the Doctor's time machine to try and defeat Purple Tentacle. They're accidentally split up, though, so Hoagie hangs with the Founding Fathers, Bernard pokes around the mansion, and Laverne goes to the future.

A LucasArts adventure game, the sequel to Maniac Mansion with a cartoony style and a mouse-driven interface. After Purple Tentacle evolves with the aid of some wacky green toxic sludge and hops off to take over the world, Green Tentacle sends out a distress call via hamster to his buddy Bernard from the original Maniac Mansion. Bernard's two friends join him to help foil Purple Tentacles foul schemes and to complicate things, are then stranded in time by a malfunctioning time machine, which needs a new very expensive diamond to work, not to mention the problem of plugging the Chronojohn in two hundred years ago. A fantastic game, namely, one that involves both wind-up chattering teeth and the phrase milquetoast.

While Day of the Tentacle is more famous than its predecessor, especially to the late-comers of the adventure game frenzy of the late 80's/early 90's, it is not nearly as massive in scope or as brilliantly designed as the game that came before it - Maniac Mansion.

Day of the Tentacle took the premise of a mildly scary, dark-humored adventure game, and turned it family friendly. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. It makes for a more 'pleasant' gaming experience - although it seems to negate all the horribles that were going on in the last game.

The thing that was a genuine disappointment to most Maniac Mansion fans was that Day of the Tentacle had a very rigid design structure. While a lot of the puzzles could be solved out of order, there was only one solution to them, and only one ending that could come out of it. Whereas Maniac Mansion had a gazillion different solutions (you could choose to play eight different characters, and - legendarily - you could beat the game with any combination), and a hitherto un-counted number of different endings.

But in what is, in my opinion, a brilliant strategy move, Day of the Tentacle included Maniac Mansion as a game-within-a-game. Go to Weird Ed Edison's room and use his computer. WHAM. And they even removed the copy protection.

Shh, people - don't let everyone know that you can rename the .DAT-file in the MM-directory on the CD to .EXE, and use the game without booting DOTT first! *looks around nervously and hides*

A LucasArts point-and-click adventure game that was loosely a sequel to Maniac Mansion (it was released after Ron Gilbert left the company). It involved a small game environment (like its predecessor), a cartoony graphical style that was a departure from the previous SCUMM titles, and some of the most tortuous adventure game puzzles ever written (made all the more complex by the time-travel premise).

I think Alchemy's writeup misses the point somewhat. Maniac Mansion was an excellently designed C64 adventure game, but if Day of The Tentacle had followed its approach (instead of adopting some of the techniques from subsequent - and better - SCUMM titles) I think it would almost certainly have resulted in a poorer game.

By concentrating on a smaller core of characters and expanding the game with a (genius) time-travelling plot, LucasArts were able to make the game more focussed (and make the game more friendly to beginners, and have vastly improved production values - the animation in DOTT is fantastic throughout). I also think that the emphasis in both games in the series is oddball, unpredictable situations rather than "horror".

The moral of this story is that things weren't always better in the good old days.

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