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Jun. 25th, 2007 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
teddogSlow Monday. Wish it was over.
Also wished that I could have gotten the first episode for the rerun project up, but family drama happened. Anyway, it will be the Fans episode, because it's so darn cute. There. I said it. HA!
This makes me nostalgic. Aw... it's Maniac Mansion. Wait. In NINE MINUTES? How on Earth do you do that? All of the storylines use timers - with Bernard, you need to have to wait for the police, with Wendy, Razor and Syd you need to do the mail thing and with Mike... you had to wait for the mail again, but for a different reason. And with Jeff you can do nothing, because Jeff is a dead weight. When you're less useful than Hoagie, you have serious issues.
::watches:: Okay, apparently, it abuses a glitch of some kind.
I'll agree with Mr. Gilbert in the article. The timer in Maniac Mansion is pretty awful, although I would expand it to the puzzles too. They make the game extremely irritating. You need to do X at Y time, or else Z will happen and then you can't win, unless you count "winning" as "blowing everything up". It's only fun the first dozen times.
There's not much fic for this game series, but I DID try to write one that included elements from both games and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, which at the time I considered to be in the same universe. I did some funny math with Maniac Mansion and Day of The Tentacle and came to the conclusion that DotT pins the dates as 1985 for the events in Maniac Mansion and 1990 for the events in Day of the Tentacle. Zak McKracken was pretty much set at 1997. The plot was really, really messed up. Please bear with me as I explain.
Day of the Tentacle's storyline has a minor hero (Bernard) from the first game and two new charaters messing around with the flow of time. What we never see is how changes the events of 1985. The idea in the story was that there was damage done to the timeline, creating a split-off timeline that shouldn't exist. The timeline is so unstable that it's about to collapses in itself, which will have a cascading effect on any surrounding timelines. Sorta like dividing by zero.
In Zak McKracken, the human race has always been protected from a distance by an alien race known as the Skolarians. They're responsible for human evolution and as such, have looked after the early humans until their own spiritual journey brought them away from Earth. Before they left, they installed a protection system on Earth that humans would be able to access when they reach their evolutionary peak.
Well, in the fic, the time-mucking events prevented this evolution from properly happening. While the Skolarians could predict human change on a whole, they could not predict the actions of a handful of people could forcibly change the world and threaten time itself. Their problem is that while they have sworn to protect humanity, they have evolved to the point where they are outside of time itself and cannot physically return to the same dimension that Earth is in. They can, however, bring humans to their dimension and move them around the different timelines.
Our three heroes that the Skolarians pick are Bernard, Zak (a younger version than in the games) and Dave. Bernard, because he was one of the people who mucked with the timeline and as such, remembers what the timeline was before. Zak, because he was one of the few humans on the edge of the evolutionary change and has limited extra-sensory perception abilities. And Dave? Like in the first game, he's a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Their goal is to go back to 1985 and use their limited resources to change the events of the past, so that their timeline matches the original one they broke off of, which would result in their timeline being folded into the main timeline and ending the risk of a rogue timeline destroying... everything, really. The universe is cruel but efficient, it seems, and if two or more timelines match, it will self correct. However, in the process, they are going to remove themselves from reality and have to work around those that stand in their way, since Zak isn't the only character with ESP skills.
I never plotted further than that, although I would imagine that the bulk of the conflict would come from them trying to effect the events of 1985 without being discovered. Or, if they were finally discovered, trying to cover it up.
Of course, it should be noted that I came up with this insane idea in my first year of college and it never panned out. I've considered reusing some concepts in other projects, but nothing ever gels. Which is a shame, because I thought there were some interesting ideas in there. Note that I said "interesting" and not "really good". :P
There is a decent fic out there that looks at Dave and Bernard's relationship more in terms of canon. While I never agreed with how the rest of the cast was characterized, but the Dave and Bernard bits were good. I can't remember the name of the fic, but the plot involved them travelling to some place and having a tire blow out. The two struggle with their weaknesses as they try to locate a replacement tire.
I think I have it backed up in my backup files somewhere.
Also wished that I could have gotten the first episode for the rerun project up, but family drama happened. Anyway, it will be the Fans episode, because it's so darn cute. There. I said it. HA!
This makes me nostalgic. Aw... it's Maniac Mansion. Wait. In NINE MINUTES? How on Earth do you do that? All of the storylines use timers - with Bernard, you need to have to wait for the police, with Wendy, Razor and Syd you need to do the mail thing and with Mike... you had to wait for the mail again, but for a different reason. And with Jeff you can do nothing, because Jeff is a dead weight. When you're less useful than Hoagie, you have serious issues.
::watches:: Okay, apparently, it abuses a glitch of some kind.
I'll agree with Mr. Gilbert in the article. The timer in Maniac Mansion is pretty awful, although I would expand it to the puzzles too. They make the game extremely irritating. You need to do X at Y time, or else Z will happen and then you can't win, unless you count "winning" as "blowing everything up". It's only fun the first dozen times.
There's not much fic for this game series, but I DID try to write one that included elements from both games and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, which at the time I considered to be in the same universe. I did some funny math with Maniac Mansion and Day of The Tentacle and came to the conclusion that DotT pins the dates as 1985 for the events in Maniac Mansion and 1990 for the events in Day of the Tentacle. Zak McKracken was pretty much set at 1997. The plot was really, really messed up. Please bear with me as I explain.
Day of the Tentacle's storyline has a minor hero (Bernard) from the first game and two new charaters messing around with the flow of time. What we never see is how changes the events of 1985. The idea in the story was that there was damage done to the timeline, creating a split-off timeline that shouldn't exist. The timeline is so unstable that it's about to collapses in itself, which will have a cascading effect on any surrounding timelines. Sorta like dividing by zero.
In Zak McKracken, the human race has always been protected from a distance by an alien race known as the Skolarians. They're responsible for human evolution and as such, have looked after the early humans until their own spiritual journey brought them away from Earth. Before they left, they installed a protection system on Earth that humans would be able to access when they reach their evolutionary peak.
Well, in the fic, the time-mucking events prevented this evolution from properly happening. While the Skolarians could predict human change on a whole, they could not predict the actions of a handful of people could forcibly change the world and threaten time itself. Their problem is that while they have sworn to protect humanity, they have evolved to the point where they are outside of time itself and cannot physically return to the same dimension that Earth is in. They can, however, bring humans to their dimension and move them around the different timelines.
Our three heroes that the Skolarians pick are Bernard, Zak (a younger version than in the games) and Dave. Bernard, because he was one of the people who mucked with the timeline and as such, remembers what the timeline was before. Zak, because he was one of the few humans on the edge of the evolutionary change and has limited extra-sensory perception abilities. And Dave? Like in the first game, he's a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Their goal is to go back to 1985 and use their limited resources to change the events of the past, so that their timeline matches the original one they broke off of, which would result in their timeline being folded into the main timeline and ending the risk of a rogue timeline destroying... everything, really. The universe is cruel but efficient, it seems, and if two or more timelines match, it will self correct. However, in the process, they are going to remove themselves from reality and have to work around those that stand in their way, since Zak isn't the only character with ESP skills.
I never plotted further than that, although I would imagine that the bulk of the conflict would come from them trying to effect the events of 1985 without being discovered. Or, if they were finally discovered, trying to cover it up.
Of course, it should be noted that I came up with this insane idea in my first year of college and it never panned out. I've considered reusing some concepts in other projects, but nothing ever gels. Which is a shame, because I thought there were some interesting ideas in there. Note that I said "interesting" and not "really good". :P
There is a decent fic out there that looks at Dave and Bernard's relationship more in terms of canon. While I never agreed with how the rest of the cast was characterized, but the Dave and Bernard bits were good. I can't remember the name of the fic, but the plot involved them travelling to some place and having a tire blow out. The two struggle with their weaknesses as they try to locate a replacement tire.
I think I have it backed up in my backup files somewhere.
