08.24.2010

Day of the Tentacle

This post is going up a bit later than usual because Comcast can suck my balls.

Many of the headlines on this website are references to movies or songs. Today’s, however, is also the title of an incredible LucasArts computer game from the early 90s. Day of the Tentacle was an old school adventure game, which focused mainly on talking to weird characters and clicking every conceivable object in the frame in an attempt to solve puzzles that progress the storyline. Truthfully, I wouldn’t be surprised if the sick amount of time I spent trying to figure out the game’s puzzles as a child is to blame for my ongoing obsession with tentacles and tendrils of all kinds.

And look, it doesn’t make me a nerd because I played Day of the Tentacle when I was a kid. What makes me a nerd is the fact that I was born in 1985, when cool video games where you could dismember people and swear didn’t exist yet.

dedleg tentacle Day of the Tentacle

Despite how low resolution the graphics were, they were actually really well illustrated — full of humor, style, and detail. Which was nice of them, considering how long you could get stuck staring at a given screen, hopelessly trying to figure out one of the game’s puzzles.

day of the tentacle1 Day of the Tentacle

day of the tentacle2 Day of the Tentacle

day of the tentacle3 Day of the Tentacle

Another big selling point? This shit had time travel. Time travel, tentacles, and uh… funny jokes. Who needs more than that, am I right? Sure, “funny jokes” doesn’t start with a “t,” so that kind of fucked up the thing I had going, but whatever.

day of the tentacle4 Day of the Tentacle

And of course, the choices you made in the past could affect the future (i.e. your present)… you know, just like in real time travel. Unfortunately, it seems nostalgia is the closest I’ll ever come to traversing the temporal superhighway. And I know it must get annoying for me to always gripe about how things from our youths were better than things are today, but come on, it’s kind of true.

2 Comments

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  1. J. Bisbee  ¦  10.42 PM  ¦  08.25.2010

    The best part of that video is the way it looks at its arms.

  2. JBisbee  ¦  12.45 PM  ¦  09.01.2010

    Day of the tentacle? Is that like the japanese new year’s?

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