Venture into a B-movie mansion to save your girlfriend in this fun and humorous point-and-click adventure game.
So, a strange meteor crashed at the Edisons and the mad scientist, Dr. Fred, of that weird blue-skinned family has kidnapped Sandy, Dave's cheerleader girlfriend, for use in ye evil plot to take over the world. It's up to you and two friends to save her by exploring the mansion that seems stripped right out of an old B-movie.
There were some great point-and-click adventure games back-in-the-day, and this was one of my favourites, despite there being some minor content changes from the original making it more kid-friendly, probably, knowing how Nintendo was regarding content back then.
At the start, you must choose two of six different characters to accompany Dave on his quest to save his girlfriend. These characters each have their own little impact on the game, and their own background music, too. The musicians, though, are all the same in terms of their game purpose, so it doesn't matter which is in your group when trying for a specific ending. You can beat it with any combination of characters, so there aren't any that are useless.
Playing the game is simple, you move your curser around and choose from a list of displayed actions what you'd like to do. While exploring the house, some events are timed or triggered by specific events, and the one problem with the weird cursor speed is attempting to flee. The cursor will start slow, then speed up as you hold the directional key down. However, if you play your cards just right, you can avoid this problem. You can also save your game at any-time, but you've got only one slot.
The 2D graphics aren't as nice as the other platforms it was released on, especially this fancy deluxe edition, but for the NES, it's good enough. It's colourful, cartoony, and the animations are nice. Not much to say. I do like the graphics better than King's Quest.
The game doesn't have too much in the way of sound-effects. The character's theme music pretty much dominates the game and after awhile it can get annoying if you don't like the music. Fortunately, you can turn it off.
The hardest thing for me to judge is the difficulty. It largely depends on how much experience you have with these types of games. I had a lot of problems when I was new to this style of game, often getting stuck and frustrated. I'd get caught a lot and my people would die. When I played through it again before writing this, it only took me a bit over an hour.
There's is a little bit of replay value in the game by trying for different endings, but the differences in gameplay are only slight ones. There are rooms, items, and puzzles that are only relevant to specific characters. Figuring them out for the first time will add some time to your experience, but seeing a different ending can be rewarding.
Maniac Mansion is easily a classic and a game that shouldn't be missed by genre fans or players interested in old titles.