5 ms·

I had no idea this game wasn't beloved. I played it at about the age of 9 and was obsessed. Above all I remember the strangeness of the alien world - for a kid

by sixo 5y ago

I had no idea this game wasn't beloved. I played it at about the age of 9 and was obsessed. Above all I remember the strangeness of the alien world - for a kid it was incredible.

jimbob45 5y ago
The book by Alan Foster was less of a companion to the game and more of a necessary crutch. Without it, the ending doesn’t quite make sense unless you really squint. It is a neat game though, I agree. It deserves props for introducing me to the word “pulchritudinous”.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  I also first heard "pulchritudinous" in a game, Sandy Petersen's 1991 space combat role-playing game Hyperspeed. As an adult of 36.
tracedddd 5y ago
I too adored this game, it was magical as a kid and quite scary at times for an overactive imagination.
- CobrastanJorji 5y ago
  Not just for an overactive imagination. I was a young teen playing that game, and everything else I'd seen before was comic mischief, and suddenly people in my point and click game are gruesomely dying, coming back to life but maybe evil now, losing limbs. That was scary stuff for the genre. I have no idea if the game holds up, but for who I was when I played it, it left a big impression. I thought the ending was really great, although maybe it'd have read as hokey if I'd've had another decade of Sci Fi under my belt.
AndrewBissell 5y ago
Yeah I similarly have pretty fond memories of the whole atmosphere of the game, although in retrospect I've mostly forgotten the characters and what they were like. Unlike with many other adventure games, I can't even recall a single one-liner. The fate of the alien civilization revealed at the end still has resonance to me in an age where people are talking about uploading their consciousness or living out the rest of eternity in some Ready Player Two digital-ethereal realm.
adamrezich 5y ago
I was just about to post the exact same thing. I played it a few years after release as a child, and was thrilled to find a single copy of the novelization tucked away in my local Borders. I liked Sam & Max Hit The Road and Day of the Tentacle more, because they were hilarious, but I thought The Dig was at the very least pretty great at conveying an utterly haunting sense of atmosphere, between the art and the soundtrack. this retrospective says the voice acting and character writing wasn't great, and I suppose it wasn't, but I wonder if it seems worse than it was specifically because, without basing the game around humor like all the other SCUMM games, the writers had to make A Serious SCUMM Game Script, and it's kind of hard to convey anything resembling serious drama in the SCUMM engine with VGA graphics. again, I was young when I played the game and read the book, but I liked Boston Low's characterization as the tough ex-military reluctant protagonist who spends most of his time on an alien planet alone, trying to figure out where to go next and what any of what he's seeing means, keeping a sense of sarcasm when talking to himself to mask his underlying feeling that he will probably never make it back home. the strategy guide had a "making of The Dig" section at the end, and now I'm going to have to dig my copy out of storage and compare its portrayal of events with the likely more cohesive and truthful story told here.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  found an online PDF of the guide, if anyone's interested: https://www.mocagh.org/lucasfilm/dig-cluebook.pdf https://www.mocagh.org/lucasfilm/dig-cluebook.pdf
dfabulich 5y ago
I think he's overstating the case. It's true that it wasn't a huge seller, and reviewers were kinda lukewarm, but my impression is that the reviewers were saying, "ho hum, another point-and-click adventure game, aren't these games over by now?" I furthermore think he's taking that approach because he himself doesn't like the game, which, if you know his tastes, should come as no surprise. The author's aesthetic for adventure games is that the puzzles have to be fair and solvable without hints. https://www.filfre.net/2015/07/the-14-deadly-sins-of-graphic-adventure-design/ https://www.filfre.net/2015/07/the-14-deadly-sins-of-graphic... I've argued with him in the past that this attitude closes him off from enjoying games that are pretty good but have a couple of unfair puzzles. (You can see the argument there in a comment thread on that 2015 article, and again recently on his Full Throttle article.) Thus, the key paragraphs from this article are when he points out that the alien skeleton puzzle is unfair (and, isn't it??) and the "alien control panel" (where you move the lens to the light source by programming a little robot, but there's no hint/clue what you're "supposed" to make the robot do). I think he's spot on that those puzzles are unfair, but, in his mind, that means the whole game sucks as a game. His criticism of the acting and plot are a matter of personal aesthetic, but I think I agree with him that Dig's ending is not great, especially when you consider what happens to the NPC five minutes before the ending.
- djur 5y ago
  Well, I like Full Throttle better than he does, despite the demolition derby, but I completely agree with him on The Dig. I don't think you can chalk his attitude up solely to that handful of bad puzzles. It seems to me like a lot of the people who liked it the best also had read the novelization, which makes sense -- my biggest problem with the game, and I think Jimmy's as well, is that the characters are mostly ciphers. I'm sure the supplementary material helped fill that in.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    Yeah, almost all of the characterization that hit the cutting room floor wound up in the novel and the game is far richer having read the novel. The characters do actually make a lot more sense given the descriptions of their thought processes in the novel. In some respects, The Digital Antiquarian's take here on The Dig actually is far weaker for mentioning the novel but not including it in the final review, especially when contrasted with the linked Loom review where the Audio Drama is lauded as being usefully central to the project and the understanding of it. That said, I'm in the group that read the novel first and found the game worse because of it because you could directly see all the holes of "this thing the novel described is probably a puzzle that got dropped at the last minute" and "this scene in the novel of great importance probably was a cutscene that was cut for time" and so forth. The Digital Antiquarian rightfully mocks OSC's somewhat hackneyed dialog and it is rare for anyone to wish the Alan Dean Foster dialog on a finished project that ADF did the novelization for (and I say that having loved many ADF novelizations nearly as much as the films), but The Dig is probably high on the list where the novel's dialog was far superior overall to the game's and it showed even beyond the internal monologues and characterization that couldn't make it into the game and/or were cut.

by sixo 5y ago

I had no idea this game wasn't beloved. I played it at about the age of 9 and was obsessed. Above all I remember the strangeness of the alien world - for a kid it was incredible.

jimbob45 5y ago

The book by Alan Foster was less of a companion to the game and more of a necessary crutch. Without it, the ending doesn’t quite make sense unless you really squint. It is a neat game though, I agree. It deserves props for introducing me to the word “pulchritudinous”.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
I also first heard "pulchritudinous" in a game, Sandy Petersen's 1991 space combat role-playing game Hyperspeed. As an adult of 36.

tracedddd 5y ago

I too adored this game, it was magical as a kid and quite scary at times for an overactive imagination.

CobrastanJorji 5y ago
Not just for an overactive imagination. I was a young teen playing that game, and everything else I'd seen before was comic mischief, and suddenly people in my point and click game are gruesomely dying, coming back to life but maybe evil now, losing limbs. That was scary stuff for the genre. I have no idea if the game holds up, but for who I was when I played it, it left a big impression. I thought the ending was really great, although maybe it'd have read as hokey if I'd've had another decade of Sci Fi under my belt.

AndrewBissell 5y ago

Yeah I similarly have pretty fond memories of the whole atmosphere of the game, although in retrospect I've mostly forgotten the characters and what they were like. Unlike with many other adventure games, I can't even recall a single one-liner. The fate of the alien civilization revealed at the end still has resonance to me in an age where people are talking about uploading their consciousness or living out the rest of eternity in some Ready Player Two digital-ethereal realm.

adamrezich 5y ago

I was just about to post the exact same thing. I played it a few years after release as a child, and was thrilled to find a single copy of the novelization tucked away in my local Borders. I liked Sam & Max Hit The Road and Day of the Tentacle more, because they were hilarious, but I thought The Dig was at the very least pretty great at conveying an utterly haunting sense of atmosphere, between the art and the soundtrack. this retrospective says the voice acting and character writing wasn't great, and I suppose it wasn't, but I wonder if it seems worse than it was specifically because, without basing the game around humor like all the other SCUMM games, the writers had to make A Serious SCUMM Game Script, and it's kind of hard to convey anything resembling serious drama in the SCUMM engine with VGA graphics. again, I was young when I played the game and read the book, but I liked Boston Low's characterization as the tough ex-military reluctant protagonist who spends most of his time on an alien planet alone, trying to figure out where to go next and what any of what he's seeing means, keeping a sense of sarcasm when talking to himself to mask his underlying feeling that he will probably never make it back home. the strategy guide had a "making of The Dig" section at the end, and now I'm going to have to dig my copy out of storage and compare its portrayal of events with the likely more cohesive and truthful story told here.

adamrezich 5y ago
found an online PDF of the guide, if anyone's interested: https://www.mocagh.org/lucasfilm/dig-cluebook.pdf https://www.mocagh.org/lucasfilm/dig-cluebook.pdf

dfabulich 5y ago

I think he's overstating the case. It's true that it wasn't a huge seller, and reviewers were kinda lukewarm, but my impression is that the reviewers were saying, "ho hum, another point-and-click adventure game, aren't these games over by now?" I furthermore think he's taking that approach because he himself doesn't like the game, which, if you know his tastes, should come as no surprise. The author's aesthetic for adventure games is that the puzzles have to be fair and solvable without hints. https://www.filfre.net/2015/07/the-14-deadly-sins-of-graphic-adventure-design/ https://www.filfre.net/2015/07/the-14-deadly-sins-of-graphic... I've argued with him in the past that this attitude closes him off from enjoying games that are pretty good but have a couple of unfair puzzles. (You can see the argument there in a comment thread on that 2015 article, and again recently on his Full Throttle article.) Thus, the key paragraphs from this article are when he points out that the alien skeleton puzzle is unfair (and, isn't it??) and the "alien control panel" (where you move the lens to the light source by programming a little robot, but there's no hint/clue what you're "supposed" to make the robot do). I think he's spot on that those puzzles are unfair, but, in his mind, that means the whole game sucks as a game. His criticism of the acting and plot are a matter of personal aesthetic, but I think I agree with him that Dig's ending is not great, especially when you consider what happens to the NPC five minutes before the ending.

djur 5y ago
Well, I like Full Throttle better than he does, despite the demolition derby, but I completely agree with him on The Dig. I don't think you can chalk his attitude up solely to that handful of bad puzzles. It seems to me like a lot of the people who liked it the best also had read the novelization, which makes sense -- my biggest problem with the game, and I think Jimmy's as well, is that the characters are mostly ciphers. I'm sure the supplementary material helped fill that in.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Yeah, almost all of the characterization that hit the cutting room floor wound up in the novel and the game is far richer having read the novel. The characters do actually make a lot more sense given the descriptions of their thought processes in the novel. In some respects, The Digital Antiquarian's take here on The Dig actually is far weaker for mentioning the novel but not including it in the final review, especially when contrasted with the linked Loom review where the Audio Drama is lauded as being usefully central to the project and the understanding of it. That said, I'm in the group that read the novel first and found the game worse because of it because you could directly see all the holes of "this thing the novel described is probably a puzzle that got dropped at the last minute" and "this scene in the novel of great importance probably was a cutscene that was cut for time" and so forth. The Digital Antiquarian rightfully mocks OSC's somewhat hackneyed dialog and it is rare for anyone to wish the Alan Dean Foster dialog on a finished project that ADF did the novelization for (and I say that having loved many ADF novelizations nearly as much as the films), but The Dig is probably high on the list where the novel's dialog was far superior overall to the game's and it showed even beyond the internal monologues and characterization that couldn't make it into the game and/or were cut.