Several people have asked me why I haven’t yet said a peep about the new remastered edition of LucasArts’ classic adventure Day of the Tentacle – and there are actually only two reasons: it’s probably not going to run on any of my current computers (which is somewhat ironic!) and I simply haven’t gotten around to it yet. So, after my skeptical opinion about the new version of Grim Fandango last year, what’s my take on this one? In short, I think it’s awesome – from what I’ve seen in the Trailer, the Making Of and in some other Youtube videos, this is a whole different effort than Grim Fandango and more in the style of the two Monkey Island remasters that were made some time ago.

This means that the whole artwork has been redrawn from its 320×200 original, something which makes a lot of sense since the background and characters were originally hand drawn. There were actually some rumours that the sad remnants of LucasArts had tried to do a pseudo-3D version of the game shortly before they were bought up by Disney, although this upgraded 2D rendition is a much better approach and stays completely true to the original. The artwork is actually so precise that it looks like a pixel grid was removed and the voices and music were also remastered, but I think the original version is still one of the best adventures ever made. One of the reasons I’m not really rushing to get the new version which would probably fail to run on my old machines is that I’ve played DOTT at least three times from beginning to end in the last couple of years – once even on my Android tablet. So I’m not particularly keen on playing it again at the moment – but rest assured, I will go and play it at some time in the very near future, maybe when an Android version is going to be released!

Let’s hope that this is going to open the doors to more upgrades of classic LucasArts adventures – Tim Schafer has already mentioned that Full Throttle is in the works, but what I’d particularly love to see are remastered versions of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and maybe The Dig and Sam & Max Hit the Road. Given the legal problems that DoubleFine must have had getting the rights to DOTT, all this is highly unlikely… but with the enthusiastic reaction to both the new Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle, I think nothing is impossible right now. Disney should just release all the games into the capable hands of DoubleFine and then