Zak Mckracken remastered Mr. Fox?

[mckracken]

Zak Mckracken and the Alien Mindbenders is my favorite game from my youth. The totally silly and absurd plot merges in an awesome way 20th century myths into a very coherent statement and yet it's intangible dreamlike...In hindsight it has been quite the influence on my first novel I'm writing.

So, when I say remastered, I don't mean just port the FM towns version, but update the UI, maybe polish other aspects (dialogue) streamline puzzles, add more music etc.

[DavidBFox]

Thanks! I think Zak would be a more difficult game to remaster than some of the later ones... It would probably mean adding a bunch of special case animation (Zak had none), rewriting a lot of the dialog, cleaning up some of the dead-end puzzles, voice recording, etc. And of course, Disney owns the rights. I might be interested, under the right circumstances. But more likely I'd rather continue creating new games. Much more fun to create new material than revisit old games.

[mfahrnholz]

I think the only special case animations Zak had where looking shocked and (in case of the enhanced versions smiling)

Just curious why would you have to rewrite the dialogue?

As for dead ends, maybe just remove the money system(or have them astronamically high bank balances) because most dead ends came from running out of money for flights.

And if you would cast voice actors now who would you choose if you could anybody? And who might it have been back in the day if you could?

Zak had quite a cast:

Zak
Annie
Leslie
Melissa
Zaks Boss
Zaks Mom (Voice)
Lori Amore (the tv host)
Bakery Guy (?)
Lou from Lou´s Loans
Bus Driver
Devotee
Stewardess
Bum in Miami (could be the guy who does Willy, he´s great!)
Stonehenge Guard
Prison Guard in Katmandu
Ashram Guard
Swami Hollandwanda
African Shaman (forgot his name)
Biplane Pilot
The King (would have to do an Elvis impersonation obviously)
Smart Caponian (is he the same who takes you to the king on the spaceship I don´t know)
Dumb Caponian (the one who hung around the mindbeder too much)
Broom Alien
Skolarian Hologram

I count a cast of 24 with speaking lines (Maniac Mansion had a total of 17 but only 13 at most per playthrough). Sorry if I forgot anybody. Seattle, Peru, Mexico and Egypt are lonly places without speaking parts.

Personally the caponian duo reminds me of Cheech & Chong and the Stonehenge Guard and the Bakery guy both look like John Cleese (with the bakery guy having the french accent from Monty Python and the Holy Grail). And of course all the animal voices would be done by Frank Welker. And this will never happen but it´s fun to think about.

[mckracken]

Text (dialogue) is rather sparse and barebones isn't it? If you would remaster you would lenghten that in line with the original game's premise and plot.

But I suppose doing something fresh instead of a remaster is preferable.

[mfahrnholz]

That´s the thing, above I listed a lot of chracters, many of them have none more than 2 or 3 lines in total (in the original Maniac Mansion Wendy is almost completly silent) so I guess if you want to employ good voice actors you gotta give them a little bit more to do. Zak didn´t have a dialogue tree system either (that wasn´t introduced before Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade), so maybe that´s what David means by rewriting the dialogue.

[DavidBFox]

For both Zak and Maniac Mansion, which were originally on the C64, we had to limit dialog to 2 lines of 40 characters. That's 80 characters or half of a tweet. We sometimes would have several lines appear, one after the other, but it broke up the flow if there were too many. So, yeah, rewriting so there wasn't that limitation.

There were also no dialog trees in these games. Might be ok.

As for speaking roles... no idea at this time and I probably wouldn't want to go there now. Happy for you all to make suggestions (since this is likely never to happen).

[mfahrnholz]

Oh that goes without saying, I personally can´t even see how that would come about at this point, but one can always fantasize...

Still a talkie version of Maniac Mansion would be fun because that one had even less dialogue and speaking roles and you´d potentially had 3 characters already cast for Thimbleweed Park: Dave, Sandy and Nurse Edna.

[TangoBravo]

Originally posted by mfahrnholz:

As for dead ends, maybe just remove the money system(or have them astronamically high bank balances) because most dead ends came from running out of money for flights.

It is kind of fun to play the "adapt Zak McKracken" mind game... Zak could have an insurance from his newspaper job which always gets him back home. If he did not have to pay for a busticket there (maybe his cash card being also something like an Oyster card) he could get to the airport anytime and use some kind of voucher on the Bermuda flight. If he could simply transfer the money to the others, it should remove a dead end (there would have to be some kind of non-money-based puzzle to get the item for the alien King as well - perhaps some additional room to avoid the game getting too short, since ... well.. the mazes will have to go...).

The situation when Zak loses his verbs is brilliant. It kind of removes dead ends and encourages exploration and I think it would still go well with current designs (opposed to e.g. the character dying). Also it is an early example in game history when the actual controls become part of the narrative.

[mfahrnholz]

The mazes might have to go but if they do the entire place of mexcio becomes a non challenge (because the labyrinth is basically the only puzzle in that place), so I´m not entirely sure about that.

[TangoBravo]

True. There is room for new puzzles. Dialogues, maybe some measure for Zak to communicate with the others, to keep the universe plausible, and maybe more animals to control via crystal.

[mckracken]

Would it need more lines for the characters? Would it make it a better game? Definitely, because the setup of the story is fantastic. (an example that i keep thinking about is the way in which it pokes fun at disguises in fiction (movies especially) and how it 'unmasks' them as trope nonsense (which we somehow accepted after decades of exposure) with a fake nose and beard.

But writing those new lines would be delicate so as not to embellish something that wasnt there in the first place. (possibly lenghten gameplay for certain locations, if you have to)
If you have to keep mazes, incorporate them into puzzles, make them trackable, because there is no reason why a game character cant carry a pencil and a paper.

[tomimt]

Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded tried to ease up the money issue in it by having a down on his luck bum give Larry some more money for gambling if you ran out of money. But in the end it would have been better had they just made gambling itself a puzzle rather than just a dull minigame of slots and black jack.

Then again, Larry Reloaded also proved that the base design of the game was just far too dated to function today. In their case it would have been better to design the game again from ground up rather than try to rekindle old design as it was.

[Doesnotcompute83]

Originally posted by tomimt:

Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded tried to ease up the money issue in it by having a down on his luck bum give Larry some more money for gambling if you ran out of money. But in the end it would have been better had they just made gambling itself a puzzle rather than just a dull minigame of slots and black jack.

Then again, Larry Reloaded also proved that the base design of the game was just far too dated to function today. In their case it would have been better to design the game again from ground up rather than try to rekindle old design as it was.

Although I loved LSL1 when I was younger, I felt that Replay Games should have made a new LSL title over another remake since Sierra remakes tend to do worse than new Sierra games at the time. We would also have gotten closure with LSL 8. Oh well.

As for LSL Reloaded, I had a lot of problems with the game other than the puzzles. I do agree that the game felt dated and didn't like how they pandered to the Replay forum commentators and the kickstarter backers, which affected the remake.

[mckracken]

what i would like to know from which game on, Lucasfilm was not limited in terms of text? (back then you would have to do a floppy also)

I mean when you consider Thimbleweed and Day of the Tentacle (designed for the PC floppy) Thimbleweed got a TON more text. It makes sense on the c64, but for the PC did we get truncated games in terms of text on screen?

[TangoBravo]

There are different reasons for limits. On the C64 it was the resolution, which made text tedious because it had to be displayed in small chunks. The next limit was the space on the CD for audiorecordings. The current limit is probably the cost of the voice actors and the time to organize and implement their lines. The least limited might have been between low resolution and talkies, but then again, text also gets boring especially without voice acting. So I doubt there is any well-designed game which did not keep the text to a minimum in ratio to its function.

[DavidBFox]

Originally posted by TangoBravo:

There are different reasons for limits. On the C64 it was the resolution, which made text tedious because it had to be displayed in small chunks. The next limit was the space on the CD for audiorecordings. The current limit is probably the cost of the voice actors and the time to organize and implement their lines. The least limited might have been between low resolution and talkies, but then again, text also gets boring especially without voice acting. So I doubt there is any well-designed game which did not keep the text to a minimum in ratio to its function.

Between the C64 resolution and floppy space being an issue, we then had PC floppy space (Last Crusade was first on a PC but shipped on floppies and didn't have voice).

Don't forget the cost of actually writing the dialog, both in time and money, plus the time to bug test it all, plus the recording (which may be the most expensive part).

But it also has to flow. We had way more dialog in the game at one point, and some of the conversations just went on too long, so they were trimmed dramatically.