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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure

 
Games: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure
 
  • Release Date: 1989
  • Genre: Adventure
  • Style: Third-Person Graphic Adventure

Game Description

Based on the film of the same name, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade pits you against Nazis, the Luftwaffe, mercenaries, traitors and spies in a race to locate The Holy Grail in an effort to keep it out of the hands of the world's archfiend, Adolf Hitler. This graphic adventure, released in 1989, is the precursor to the popular Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis.

In a departure from the early graphic adventures that required typing key words from a pre-generated list to advance the action on the screen, the LucasFilm, Ltd. designed interface required nothing more than a simple point-and-click of relevant words and phrases and eliminated the parser frustrations prevalent in the 1980s (e.g., early King's Quest games). The storyline is held together by short animated cut scenes that supplement the actions of the player-controlled Indiana Jones character.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, although based on the movie, gives the player the freedom to deviate from the movie's plotline so that the adventure isn't just a re-hash of the film. Gameplay evolves as you search out clues to help solve the dozens of puzzles within the game. A pre-printed booklet called the Grail Diary (belonging to Indy's father, Henry Jones) is inlcuded with the game to aid in finding the correct solution to the puzzles.

In a short version of the in-depth storyline, what begins as Indy's quest to find his father, who has disappeared while searching for the Holy Grail, turns into a race against time to save his father's life. Walter Donovan, a wealthy industrialist who nobly funds Indy's search to find his father, has ulterior motives and eventually shoots Henry Jones, knowing that act will spur Indy into quickly finding the Grail and its healing powers as his father's life now depends on it.

All action within the game is handled via point-and-click and the story unfolds in third-person perspective. The game is designed to be played and can be finished without any fighting whatsoever. For those who like to mix things up a bit a fighting option can be triggered simply by choosing to "throw a punch" from the possible responses when interacting with another character.

A unique scoring method is also available for those gamers who want a numeric goal to shoot for rather than just working their way through the game. The Indy Quotient (IQ) is a running point total that is added to as puzzles are solved, obstacles overcome, etc. It comes in two flavors, an episode IQ and a series IQ. The episode IQ simply keeps track of the points earned in your current game while the series IQ accumulates all possible points gained in games up to your current attempt. The total possible score is 800 and will require solving every puzzle, finding every meaningful object and getting past all obstacles.

Indy needs your help! Do you have the backbone (now where did we hear that before?) to leap into the fray and guide Indy to a happy ending in search of the Holy Grail?
~ Michael L. House, All Game Guide
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Wikipedia: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure
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Image:Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade-The Graphic Adventure.pngIndiana Jones and the Last Crusade
DOS cover
Developer(s) Lucasfilm Games
Publisher(s) Lucasfilm Games
Engine SCUMM
Platform(s) DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Macintosh, FM Towns, Amiga CDTV
Release date(s) July 1989: DOS, Amiga, Atari ST
1990: Macintosh, FM Towns[1]
1992: Amiga CDTV
Genre(s) Adventure game
Mode(s) Single player
Media 5.25" floppy disk, 3.5" floppy disk, CD-ROM

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure is a graphical adventure game, originally released in 1989 (to coincide with the release of the film of the same name), published by Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts). It was the third game to use the SCUMM engine.

Contents

Plot

The plot closely follows, and expands upon, the film of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. As the game begins, Indiana Jones has returned to his college, after reclaiming the Cross of Coronado. He is approached by businessman Walter Donovan, who tells him about the Holy Grail, and of the disappearance of Indy's father.

Indy then travels to some of the places seen in the movie, such as Venice and the catacombs, after meeting fellow archeologist Elsa Schneider. In the process he finds his father held captive in the Brunwald Castle, after passing through the mazelike corridors, fighting and avoiding guards. Then Elsa's double role is revealed when she steals the Grail Diary from Indy. After escaping, father and son pass through Berlin to reclaim the Diary and have a brief meeting with Hitler. Then they reach an airport, from where they intend to seek the Valley of the Crescent Moon, by Zeppelin or biplane. There are many action scenes, involving fists, and the biplane sequence above Europe, pursued by Nazi planes.

Several key elements of the movie—such as the Brotherhood of the Grail, Indy's friend Sallah, the Venice water chase scene and the desert battle (except for a small hidden reference)—were not included in the game.

Technical details

Last Crusade was one of the most innovative of the LucasArts adventures. It expanded on LucasArts' traditional adventure game structure by including a flexible point system - the IQ score, or "Indy Quotient" - and by allowing the game to be completed in several different ways. The point system was similar to that of Sierra's adventure games, however when the game was restarted or restored, the total IQ of your previous game was retained. The only way to reach the maximum IQ of 800 was by finding alternative solutions to puzzles, such as fighting a guard instead of avoiding him. This countered one common criticism of adventures games, whereby since there is only one way to finish the game, they have no replay value. Some of the alternative fights, such as the one with the Zeppelin attendant, were very difficult to pass, so the maximum IQ was very difficult to acquire.

The game was released in May 1989 simultaneously with the movie. It was available on the PC, Amiga, Atari ST, and Macintosh. A CD-ROM version was later released for the FM-Towns, with 256-color graphics, as well as a VGA PC version. The player has to enter copy protection codes similar to those of Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken at the start of the game. If the wrong codes are entered three times, the game goes into "demo" mode. When Indy is asked by Walter Donovan to translate the tablet, he makes a hilarious mistranslation, causing Donovan to throw him outside, ending the game. The 256-color versions of the game do not have the copy protection codes.

A replica of Henry Jones' Grail diary was included with earlier versions of the game. While very different from the film's version, it provided a collection of background information of Indy's youth and Henry's life. Later versions of the game came with a shortened version of the Grail diary. The diary gave Indy's mother's name as Mary, which was contradicted by subsequent canon.

Last Crusade was also the first Lucasfilm game to include the verbs Look and Talk. In several situations, the latter would begin a primitive dialogue system in which the player could choose one of several lines to say. The system was fully evolved in The Secret of Monkey Island and remained in all later LucasArts adventures, with the exception of Loom.

Reception

UK magazine C&VG gave the PC version a score of 91 %, praising the graphics, sound and playability and calling it "a brilliant film tie-in and a superlative game in its own right".[1]

Sequels

A second Indiana Jones graphic adventure, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, was released in 1992 for the PC, Amiga, and Macintosh.

See also

References

  1. ^ Rignall, Julian (September 1989), "Indy Adventure", Computer and Video Games (94): 62–63 

External links


 
 

 

Copyrights:

Games. Copyright © 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. Content provided by All Game Guide ® , a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure" Read more