The classic adventure of teens and tentacles in an awesome game made years before dirty japanamation cartoons made it cool I mean scary.
This tape is hilarious and fun and hard as hell, and if you dump the pepsi down the kitchen sink you’re screwed and have to reset.
That’s why today’s review is the genius Maniac Mansion Nintendo Tape.
Maniac Mansion was the game where I went to move my guy and got mad because instead of making the guy move it made a mouse arrow move, and i had to use the arrow to click where I wanted him to go and then he would move. I remember being 11 years old and saying “WHAT” when that happened. This was a deeply confusing design choice to me. I was so mad. But the two dollars were spent and it was mine until sunday, so I parked it in front of my little 13 inch TV and stuck with it.
Let me tell you, I am glad I did!!! Because Maniac Mansion is a horror game, a puzzle game, and a COMEDY game all rolled into one! It has killer music, too. There is a song called DAVES’ THEME which is one of my favorite songs ever!! So cool. I would put the game on and let it sit there while I read books and jam OUT. And day dream that I was the one who saved Sandy except she was the girl I had a crush on and I was me and not Dave from the game.
So in Maniac Mansion Daves’ girlfriend Sandy has been kidnapped by the evil Dr. Fred, and he has her down in his basement and wants to suck out her brains I guess. There are a couple of intelligent tentacles who live there, and there is an evil meteor hiding out as well. The meteor is smart and he is the reason the Edison family are evil now.
In stories, meteors can be anything you want, because we don’t understand space. So it is a good idea to have them in your game.
You pick your team of three teens and then sneak into the Mansion using a key you find under the rug. See, in this game you have a set of menu commands to tell the teens what you want them to do. So if you want to check under the welcome mat, you use your arrow to click “pick up” then you click the welcome mat and if you are able to lift, it then it will move. If not it will do nothing. That is how you progress in this game. You pick stuff up then use it later in puzzles to open doors or help tentacles put out their demo tape to a record company. Normal puzzle things like that.
The problem is that the evil members of the family will toss you into their dungeon if they catch you or they will even straight up murder your a$$.
When you run out of teens it is GAME OVER for you and Sandy.
Another problem is that if you use an item wrong it can get used up then the game is unwinnable. So don’t dump the can of pepsi down the sink or you might spend an entire afternoon not being able to get past one part and have no idea why and feel like world’s biggest dum ass.
Did you ever find a gun wrapped in tin foil behind your house?
We did. You see, me and Byron had this hobby. Our hobby was on the weekends in 1988 we would walk down to the railroad tracks on the outskirts of town with his paperboy bag and collect railroad spikes that had come loose. You can usually find a lot of them in the gravel along the tracks. They’re old and rusted looking but still strong and usable. As we collected them, we would return to the woods behind our houses (the same woods you might remember from my bike path tragedy) and then commence to pounding them into this huge tree that was unclimbable due to not having any branches until the top.
It took a few weekends, maybe a months’ worth, until we had hammered enough spikes in to be able to reach the top. It was pretty high. But the cool thing about this tree was when you got to the top of it, there was a really flat part where the branches all radiated out , like it was made for sitting and chilling with your buds.
One Saturday Byron and I were down at the tree ready to hammer in some spikes when I spotted a thick square of tin foil. it looked like a shiny metal brick at first, but when I picked it up I realized what it was. It was just laying there behind the tree. I looked around and saw there was nobody but us down there. See, that big tree sat about ten feet away from a pond. No one ever went down there, we didn’t even know who owned it. But you could fish in it if you wanted.
Anyway, I opened up the tin foil brick and inside the many layers (must have used a whole roll of the stuff, damn) there was a real hand gun. Looking back now I would say it was a 9mm or something close to that.
Realizing I was holding an actual gun felt like what holding up the power sword in front of castle greyskull must have felt like to He-Man.
If you have never been a 11 year old holding a gun you found in the woods behind your house, then you wouldn’t understand. You feel like you are the strongest guy in the world. It was the first time I ever felt powerful. I guess that is pretty scary and I am sorry I said it. I wish there was a way to erase that but the delete button isn’t doing it and I don’t want to start my review over. So just ignore it sorry. I hate guns as a adult now.
I called out to byron who climbed down from where he was hammering in a spike and he saw I was holding a gun.
He flipped out “Where did you get that, is that real!!!” is what he yelled at me. I told him I think it is real!!!! It is heavy and does not feel like a toy. I handed it to him and he said he thought it was real, too. I explained where I found it and how it was all wrapped in foil.
We were still trying to figure out what to do with our bad ass new gun when we heard a voice behind us. “Hey what did you guys find?” It was Bill’s brother. We didn’t play much with Bill because he lived with his mom mostly in another town, but his brother Patrick lived across from us with their dad and he was like a senior and kind of a d!ck so we didnt’ deal with him much either.
We showed him the gun and he was surprised. He said “wow, someone just left a gun here?” and we said “I guess”
Well, he had a solution to our “what do we do” problem. He took the gun, wrapped it back up in the aluminum foil, then turned toward the pond behind our tree and threw it as hard as he could. It landed in the middle of the pond with a PLOP. He turned back to us and said “You guys would get in really big trouble if you told anyone you found a gun. So don’t tell your parents, and I wont tell mine either. I don’t want you guys to get in trouble. The cops might even come”
I said OK we won’t but Byron just walked away. He was mad and I wasn’t sure why. I followed him up to his house and we went to his kitchen where his mom was talking on the phone. She was always on the phone with some of the other moms on our block. They would usually discuss the moms and dads on our block that weren’t part of their circle. Byron immediately tells his mom. “We found a gun in the woods, then Pat came and said we would get in trouble if we told you, then he threw it into the pond.”
I was shocked!!! I always kept secrets, I couldn’t believe Byron would risk getting us in trouble with the cops like that.
She hung up immediately and told us to stay in Byron’s room. We could hear her call the cops and tell them what we told her. Then she hung up and called the other moms (we called their phone circle the “Nancy Spy network”) because they all had binuculars and would watch the neighborhood and then report on activity to each other. When Byron’s family got their first cordless phone he was mad because it meant Nancy could stand out on the porch with the phone in one hand and binoculars in the other and he was embarrassed. We knew our gym teacher’s wife was cheating on him way before he did. (he lived on the other side of the block) It was an affective network.
It did not take long to have a couple of cops, the entire neighborhood, and me and Byron and his mom back down to the scene of the crime. The cops asked us to describe where the gun landed in the pond and we told him, then their diver went into the water. It took maybe ten minutes before he found it. The cops thanked us and the group dissapated, it was weird seeing a big crowd of people down there in our hang out place, and everyone wanted to know “why the hell are there a bunch of rail road spikes pounded into this tree” and we were like “no idea”.
Turns out, Patrick was actually the bad guy! They questioned him after we told them what he said to us about keeping quiet and they found out it was a gun he stole from a house he broke into and robbed. He went away for awhile after that, and we were off the hook!
I should have known he was the villain all long because one time we were playing in the woods and he came up to us to show us his new “compound bow” by having me stand next a tree then shooting a “broad head” right into it. What a a$$hole.
That is why I give Maniac Mansion a 1/10!!!!! F@$ck you patrick!!!
guns are not a joke!!!!! please lock them up. then listen to this: