The critical reception of this game was absolutely criminal and one of the first times I realised how disgustingly immature games "journalism" was.

Apparently, according to people who are seemingly so passionate about games they make their living writing/talking about them, games are simply a product of which value is determined based on consumer cost and length of what they arbitrarily define to be the core experience - even if the entire point of the game is not rushing through it once to see a fucking cutscene and move on with your life like disposable entertainment.

This shit hit Hitman (2016) really bad as well.

Windows version via DREAMM emulator with "simulated CRT" scaling (copying save data back and forth with a native windows install to get around crashes on DREAMM)

I was excited for this one, looking forward to Stemmle & Clark's follow up to Sam & Max: Hit the Road... I didn't really like it. It's interpretation of the world is weirder than Curse's, but it's wholly built on that. It's biggest crime is that, much like Curse, it devolves into rehashing the first game over and over.

It also ruins the GrimE engine - visually they developed a style for Grim Fandango that perfectly adheres to the low poly models - here? They just tried to directly convert Curse's style in late '90s CG... and it doesn't work. I did set up the latest version of the DREAMM emulator for this, and I gotta say, their new CRT filter is the best I've ever seen and it makes this game look pretty damn good, but it's a huge step down from Grim. The other thing is the controls, Grim was designed to be incredibly cinematic with no hud, apparently people found this confusing so they just chuck a menu on the screen with same keyboard controls assigned to less intuitive buttons. Ech.

Oh and the retcons at the end are even worse than the last game's, completely contradicting Monkey 1 & 2.

I kind of liked the insane Stemmle twists, but eh, it's not really Monkey Island. Which it shouldn't be anyway - but it is, so...

Shouldn't rate because I only played a couple hours but boring as hell. Mechanics are fine, at least in terms of the tutorial part, but the level design was uninspired as shit, and god the cutscenes were constant and northing interesting was happening in the slightest. Once it got to first proper planet I think I quit in like 10 mins or something because at least the on rails onslaught of troopers in the tutorial gave me something to do.

Say what you will about force unleashed, that shits exciting at the very least.

Definitely has it's problems but I couldn't help but love it. Fujibayshi & Mori crafted fantastic story from minor references in backstory text, offhand comments, minor aspects of illustrations and other little details from the series' previous entries.

Criticism is often directed at the games linearity and repetitiveness but I didn't find that to be a problem for me, Twilight Princess' sad excuse for an open world felt far more linear than the areas here, which all open up with various shortcuts through your first run, making the areas anything but linear on returns trips. as for those return trips, it doesn't feel very repetitive as most of repeat visits are spent in new areas or the old areas are completely transformed, and going through the sections of old areas quicker and easier than before gives a great sense of progression.

The motion controls worked well for me (even if they worked a bit better on the Wii) though I was constantly mashing y to recalibrate and having a bit of trouble in some of the later minigames, to the point where I gave up and used non-motion controls for one or two of them, which did feel like cheating. Either way, it's all worth it for that fantastic final boss fight.

As for the HD version, it's the best of all 3 (or 5, if you include the 3DS remasters) as it doesn't change the visual style at all like Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD (to a lesser extent) did, and doesn't change any aspect of the game design, only making slight changes to the more stupid annoyances of the Wii version (more of Fi's dialogue is optioninal/prompts are slightly more subtle, no text boxes every time you pick up loot) and adding the option of substituting the motion controls for joystick controls, which as I said earlier, feels like cheating, but it's obviously necessary and it was nice to have the one point I decided to play handheld.

it took me far to long to play this all the through, but I'm glad I finally did. I'm a huge fan Tim Schafer and 3D platformers are one of my favourite genres, so I knew I was going to like this, but I was still blown away.

As genius and creative as you'd expect from Schafer, and his collaborators from previous and subsequent projects bring their a-game as always.

I experienced a few crashes and a lot of minor issues, but for the most the part the game still ran pretty well.

The same amazing level design from the first two, but with more creative twists on the formula. It does start to, worryingly, feel a little closer to absolution in the third mission, but the linear, story centric parts (all fantastic) are all in the beginning and end of each mission, and from your second playthrough on, the cinematic openings are skipped by default (though you can change back to original starting location if you wish) and more mission exit options are given, allowing you to bypass the linear endings.

As an individual game and conclusion to the trilogy it's absolutely fantastic, as an entire package with the entire "World of Assassination" trilogy and all previous DLC, it's easily one of the greatest games of all time, and I hope it will be treated and remembered as such into the future.

No matter how many times I play this it never gets old, Ron Gilbert is an absolute genius and one the greatest designers of all time. Doesn't hurt he's got Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman co-writing and designing this one with him too.

This was my first time playing through the original 16-colour floppy version all the way, probably my preferred version now, though the added ambience in the CD version is welcome due to the lack of music through much of the floppy versions. The EGA graphics still look great, while the 256-colour version can look a bit bland at times and the special edition too far removed from the original art, though I can't really complain about the sound in any of the PC versions.