It is a very simple setup. First, tell the guard you are sick. Make sure to sound very ill, you might want to mention your stomach is hurting and that you may do something the guard, and everyone else in the cell with you, might regret. He will lead you to the doctor who will conveniently walk away. Take the chart from his wall. Don’t worry, he will never notice it is gone. When he comes back and you are placed once again the kennel, tell the guard that you really need to go to the bathroom. Once there, put the chart into the port-a-potty, which is actually a time machine by the way, and flush it down the toilet. In the past, you need to take that chart, give it to the lady making the United States flag and swipe the original stars-and-stripes design with the chart. She will get at work and before you know it, you have a tentacle-shaped national symbol which double cleverly as a disguise in the future.
One of the best moments in game history?
Day of the Tentacle is a game about allot of things, one of them is tentacles, another is history, yet another is about stealing things and flushing them down the toilet and hoping that they will somehow prove useful later on. What it is not about, is learning, but as it will soon be apparent, knowledge, like a lightning bolt or a robot uprising, comes when you least expect it.
In many ways, I have learned more from video games than I did in any class. I certainly spent more time playing and thinking about games than studying, doing homework, attending school, making friends, stealing wallets or whatever it is normal children do nowadays. There was one game, however, that I never owned yet played over and over again (accumulating absurd fees at our local rental store) and that was Day of the Tentacle.
I can now say, with some degree of confidence, that if it wasn’t for that game (and video games in general) I would not be writing in English right now. The product of sporadic parental trips to the United States, the few games we had were always in English, that mystifying Saxon language so different from my own, and so were the manuals, boxes and the little leaflets announcing ‘customer support’, which we knew had nothing to do with us from below the equator line. The first few games I ever played, like Mario or Street Fighter, required no knowledge of the language at all, but that all changed when Day of the Tentacle came along.
Playing a game that relies so heavily on dialog without understanding most of it is an interesting experience. I encourage people to try it, find a copy of a game you never played, in, say, Russian or Italian, and go through it. Seemingly normal challenges become nearly impossible, obvious answers are a product of chance more than rational thought and sometimes really difficult puzzles are made clear because you are not relying on previous knowledge.
For example, the Cherry Tree situation where you must tease George Washington into cutting it down so you can reach the port-a-potty/time machine caught in its branches. Not knowing who George Washington was and making very little sense of the dialog sequences but knowing vaguely what the word ‘cherry’ meant . I proceeded to click on whatever item I had collected, hoping one of them would make something happen. Once the red paint on tree made Hoagie paint the fruits, I automatically assumed it had something to do with someone in that place. I then walked about exploring every branch of dialog I could find with everyone around me until someone, the mildly familiar man with the white wig and wide smile, somehow cut the tree down.
While dialog trees were very difficult and time consuming, abstract puzzles, like the cat/skunk dilemma or
This scene is funny regardless of language
the hamster on wheel electricity generator were easier, I did not try to make logic assumptions because I had nothing to base them on, so approaches that would seem strange now made perfect sense then. It was also, more rewarding. They made me feel like I was accomplishing something beyond my level of knowledge and so I kept playing and playing and playing until one day, something clicked and those foreign words made sense and Day of the Tentacle was never the same.
It became a different game. It was no longer a series of colorful, cartoon-like situations and puzzles, it was still funny, yes, but from that point onwards, it was about enjoying the story and being moved forward by curiosity and not accomplishment. Once I had seen it through to the end, I no longer repeated the process, there was no reason to, I had seen all it had to offer. The game I played, the one that prompted me to learn English so I could be better at it, would never exist again and that is a pity, I suppose.
Day of the Tentacle was returned to its local rental store, roughly six months overdue, give or take a year or two. After the exorbitant fine was paid off, parental units made me promise not to rent that game again. Luckily, there were other titles on its shelves, namely one Full Throttle, Space Quest, Monkey Island…
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What’s up, I’m linking you. *shrugs* Really good stuff, lady.
I feel…I feel…LIKE TAKING OVER THE WORLD!!!!
Há, isso me lembra tanto nossas férias indo pra locadora…e esquecendo de devolver jogos…e indo pra locadora de novo. Será que o Myiazaki faria uma animação sobre a nossa infância idílica?