Indiana Jones Video Game Retrospective | A Complete History and Review

eventually age catches up with us all from the mightiest night to the lowest Pauper the professor in his office to the drunk at the bar we're all bound together in the forward March of time and no matter how hard you try eventually you'll catch yourself looking in the mirror and thinking God haven't I gone old [Music] I think this is why Nostalgia is such a powerful emotion because it's a way to temporarily halt that slide and transport yourself into the past to head back to a time when the world seemed fresher colors were more vibrant emotions felt more powerfully and life was rich with unfulfilled promise it's a comforting sensation but it can be equally Dangerous by constantly yearning for days gone by it's easy to lose your grip on the present and fall into an imagined past now in the world of modern media this is an even more powerful phenomenon as success gives birth to fans desperate to recapture that original excitement and companies more than happy to oblige to the great conundrum that plagues every major franchise how do you continue to make movies or games or Comics or books without eventually becoming derivative and falling back on Nostalgia alone well in June 2023 these are the questions that Indiana Jones and the dial of Destiny is going to attempt to answer 40 years on from the first exploits of our Action Hero archaeologist Harrison Ford is assuming the role for one final hurray a farewell tour that intends to send the character off into the sunset hopefully with the good wishes of fans both new and old it'll be the conclusion to a series that's lived in our pop culture Consciousness since the very concept began when the credits roll like the artifacts our hero tracks down Indiana Jones will pass into the annals of History so in order to honor this end of an era let's indulge in a little Nostalgia of our own and travel back to a time when Indiana Jones was a fresh Blockbuster franchise not only dominating at the box office but playing an important role in the growth of another upstart medium it might come as a surprise but our whip-wielding doctor has Left Behind quite the video game Legacy and so today we're going to find out if his unique brand of Tomb raiding Nazi punching and whip cracking has stood the test of time it's a mystery that's going to take us all around the globe from the dark recesses of Forgotten consoles to the glitz and Glam of the modern day all in search of those elusive clues that can explain what the future might hold for Henry Jones Jr This is Indiana Jones a lengthy retrospective and it's time to go hunting for fortune and Glory now before we start a few quick disclaimers and a word about today's sponsor firstly and most importantly this video is not a retrospective of the Indiana Jones movies and while I'll be discussing the circumstances around their creation and their critical and Commercial reception I'm going to go ahead and presume that you're already familiar with the plots of Raiders of the Lost Ark Temple of Doom the Last Crusade and the kingdom of the Crystal Skull due to that there will obviously be extensive spoilers for all four movies although knowledge of the films isn't actually required to appreciate the Journey of the Indiana Jones video games as they broadly stay in their own lane secondly this series unfortunately has a large copyright issue which is that almost every single game uses the John Williams Raiders March at virtually every opportunity now while the developers and designers had a license to do this I do not and so there may be moments in videos where alternative music has to be used in order to stop YouTube from taking my livelihood finally while this video will exhort positively detail the series long and storied history in the world of video games I won't be covering its mobile or browser outings as I simply don't find them interesting enough to discuss luckily there is more than enough to sink our teeth into without them so I imagine they won't be missed also before we get started a quick word about surfsharkvpn who have kindly agreed to sponsor today's video as you guys know I'm not usually too hot on paid promotions but having a VPN is pretty important these days and surfshark is not only a really good option but they've also got a great deal running at the moment if you use the code down in the description below you can get three months for free when you sign up and if you find it's not to your tastes there's a 30-day money-back guarantee so you're not even logged in considering just how rampant malware trackers and DDOS attacks are I think having a VPN to protect yourself is just common sense and considering every company is trying to harvest your data it's good to have something that gives you a little bit of privacy on top of that I think a lot of people don't realize just how many things you can use a VPN for everyone knows about accessing streaming services in other countries but you can use it to bypass censorship get Early Access by changing time zones avoid ISP throttles and best of all purchase games from other stores when they have Regional deals this may be an advert but I genuinely think that everyone should have one and a surfshark has such a great deal on at the moment and can be used on unlimited devices why not go for that one so the link is in the description below hope you find it useful and so with all that out the way let's dust off those Maps unfurl our whips and crack those Knuckles it's time to answer the call of Adventure and dive into the long and storied history of Indiana Jones [Music] Our Story begins with a Visionary a man who wanted to do things differently and in the process of breaking tradition ended up creating the blueprint that all future franchise building would follow I'm of course talking about George Lucas as the origins of the video game Adventures of Indiana Jones begin with the decision he took all the way back in 1976. Lucas was working on Star Wars despite the film going on to become one of the most important releases of all time during its production everyone from the cast to The Crew to the executives at 20th Century Fox who all thought they were making a box office bomb the only person who had faith in the project was Lucas himself and so this led to one of the most outrageous deals in movie history in exchange for wavering half a million dollars of his directorial paycheck Fox agreed to hand over a hundred percent of the Star Wars merchandising rights an asset that would go on to be worth billions now this explosion in value didn't happen by chance and was very much driven by Lucas who saw creating additional merchandise as not only a great way to earn some extra money but a ripe source of natural advertising that would create a feedback loop a fandom by the end of the 1970s deals had been struck with Marvel to produce comic books Kenner to produce action figures and ride teachers were producing novelizations Star Wars had grown from a lone Movie experience to the first multimedia Empire now along with being an imaginative filmmaker and Savvy businessman Lucas was also deeply fascinated with technology and as his influence grew so did his company lucasfilm which was made up of subdivisions each dedicated to a technological element of filmmaking there was industrial Light and Magic which produced visual effects Skywalker sounds which dealt in sound design and in 1979 he set up lucasfilm computer which contained a small team tasked with exploring the growing medium of video games now in the early 80s there was a single name that dominated the video game industry and that was Atari thanks to the runaway success of their 2600 machine they were at the head of this new entertainment Frontier and Lucas saw the perfect opportunity to blend his eye for merchandising with his interest in Creative new technologies in 1982 a developmental deal was signed between lucasfilm computer and Atari and out of this partnership came a host of successful Star Wars games like The Empire Strikes Back Return of the Jedi Jedi Arena and Star Wars the arcade game it was the birth of the movie Titan and this mutually beneficial relationship would set the stage for everything to come so with that context established let's talk about the man himself Indiana Jones funnily enough Lucas had actually conceived the character originally known as Indiana Smith in the early 70s and then throughout the decade had continued to develop the idea in a series of writing sessions with his friend Philip Kaufman influenced by the serial Adventures of characters like Buck Rogers and Zorro Lucas and Kaufman imagined an archaeological Professor Who moonlighted as a heroic treasure hunter battling the Nazis and attempting to keep historical artifacts in the hands of those who respected history now as the decade passed on Lucas became increasingly involved with Star Wars but by 1980 and the release of Empire Strikes Back he found himself with an opening to make Indiana Jones a film reality after enlisting Lawrence kazdan to Aid with the script Steven Spielberg to direct and a young Harrison Ford to Star as the titular hero Raiders of the Lost Ark quickly came together and when it was released in 1981 it took the World by storm given Luke's track record with Star Wars it should come as no surprise that Raiders quickly found itself on a similar path and within months of the film's release deals had been struck with Kenna Marvel and of course Atari now this brings us to the first ever Indiana Jones game Raiders of the Lost Ark on the Atari 2600 now I will freely admit that even as a lover of all of the obtuse and Lo-Fi charm that comes with very old games most Atari 2600 titles are a bridge too far the console is just so basic and while the Simplicity works for games like Pac-Man Space Invaders and Donkey Kong it's also home to a huge amount of inscrutable rubbish where characters barely resemble what they're supposed to and mechanics make little to no sense Raiders of the Lost Ark might be the poster child for this style of Atari design and while it was lorded on release for its creativity and complexity when viewed from the 21st century it's a rather more baffling video game that feels less like an adaptation and more like a fever dream it essentially functions like a Proto Adventure game where you have to collect items to use in certain places in order to advance through various screens and discover the Arc of the Covenant but thanks to the primordial graphics working out what to do and how to actually do it is almost impossible half the items don't do anything rooms aren't marked with doors there are soft locks and mandatory resets everywhere and most confusingly you have to play with two controllers using player one to move and player 2 to select your gear completing it only takes around 20 minutes but you could spend a lifetime wandering aimlessly if you somehow missed that this is a grappling hook or that these characters are supposed to be merchants or that you can parachute off of this specific block now in a strange twist of fate rages the Lost Ark would actually contribute to a pretty major moment in video game history if it was designed by Howard Scott warshaw who'd been assigned the job thanks to the success of his last game yar's Revenge which is another Kaleidoscope of abstractions that somehow captivated early 1980s Gamers this one-two punch led to him being placed in charge of atari's Infamous ET project a game that doubled down on warshaw's perplexing style and was released to highly negative reviews and widespread commercial rejection just six months later hundreds of thousands of copies were being poured into a landfill outside of El Paso Texas and as the rights to ET had reportedly cost as much as 25 million dollars it effectively bankrupted Atari and killed the American Home console Market in the early 1980s now despite the psycho drama going on Atari lucasfilm remained interested in licensing out their properties and luckily for them as the decade continued the video game Market began to widen by 1984 home computers were beginning to take off and in every territory keyboard controlled gameplayers and word processors were flying off the shelves in the U.S one of the most popular models was the Commodore 64 which at one point had managed to capture 40 of what was a very crowded market and it's here that we find Indiana Jones next pixelated Adventure in 1984 Indiana Jones in the lost kingdom was released exclusively in North America and despite the impressive work of its lone programmer Michael J Hansen Lost Kingdom once again illustrates that the industry probably wasn't ready for an adventure of real complexity at the very least we now have some backstory for what's happening on screen as before the game begins we get a very basic animated intro screen and a clutch of sentences that give everything some context while exploring an unnamed jungle Indiana Jones stumbles upon a castle that's unmarked on any map this is the lost kingdom and by heading inside and solving its Mysteries we can claim whatever treasure lies within now the game itself is not too dissimilar from its Atari foreber in the it's a puzzle game dressed up as an adventure and while you walk through the castle Halls on the very first screen every subsequent area is a self-contained challenge like this screen where you have to fight a monster before hitting bells in order to open a series of doors it's not exactly the most cohesive puzzle you've ever seen But it at least flows from A to B the problem is that most of the other screens are utterly indecipherable this purple set of shelves for example there are gems dotted around the map and you have to hit them in a certain order to switch them from Blue to White or something I couldn't work it out at all and ended up moving on to the next level completely by chance there's also this snow level where you pick up numbers and drop them into a pool of water you're obviously supposed to create some sort of code to unlock the door on the left but I have no idea how you're supposed to work out the correct code or if there are even any clues to help the player at all the problem is really that the Indiana Jones movies are surprisingly eclectic and while solving ancient Mysteries is certainly part of the formula they're just as much about Indie traveling the world getting into fights running for his life exploring the past and delivering quippy one-liners in this early age of video game design Simplicity Reigns Supreme and that just meant it wasn't really possible to make something that genuinely felt like rages the lost ark or the Temple of Doom now that being said this didn't stop people from trying and if you couldn't craft visuals and mechanics that directly reflected Lucas and Spielberg's action-packed movies why not just abandon both and stick with text you see the restrictions of the early video game industry had caused a parallel evolution in something called interactive fiction these were text only games that described the story and the world to the player before asking them to input commands in order to solve puzzles win fights and find their way around it might seem ludicrously restrictive but in a world where yar's Revenge represented the Pinnacle of Home console storytelling having to use your imagination was well worth accessing a slew of more complex gameplay experiences titles like Zork Planet fall Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and wishbringer were all big commercial successes and so it should come as no surprise that in 1987 Indy got his own text-based adventure game Indiana Jones and the Revenge of the ancient was developed by anglesoft for the Apple II and MS-DOS and while this might hardly even seem like a game by modern standards it represents quite a valiant effort to deliver excitement Intrigue and tension with only white text on a black background Revenge the Ancients is set in Mexico deep within the tepas Techo pyramid and revolves around Indie hunting for something called the mass attack power key it's a relic that can supposedly control the pulse of the earth and he's in a race against a Nazi Commander called plebenheim in order to claim its power as a representation of the franchise it's actually rather good and your conflict with plebenheim has you sneaking around a Nazi camp using a whip to swing on Vines and beating back poisonous snakes and of course solving ancient puzzles and hieroglyphic riddles I'd almost say this is worth checking out for anyone interested in not only the Indiana Jones franchise but for anyone looking to explore interactive fiction but sadly it's held back by one major flaw and that is that revenge is a bloodthirsty game probably in an attempt to give the game some Stakes anglesoft made virtually every single wrong command result in your death take a wrong turn you die pick the wrong verb you die hell even standing still can result in your death as the very first room fills with poison gas if you don't quickly get on with things it results in you having to save before almost every single action and that just sucks out all of the tension and excitement effectively forcing you to save scum for an interactive fiction game to work properly you have to be totally engrossed in the story as painting by asking you to constantly perform such a functional action it's tough to stay locked into indie's shoes the reality was that while Indiana Jones was certainly a burgeoning multimedia franchise very little of what was being created to go hand in hand with the movies really lived up to their fantastic reputation yes they were action figures yes there were comic books and yes there was a handful of video games but thanks to the minuscule resources at the time they felt less like an expansion of the character and more like the experimental adverts that George Lucas had originally seen merchandise as it would take a massive Leap Forward in video game technology and the explosion of another 1980s phenomenon for Dr Jones to get his first game worthy of his cinematic Legacy [Music] laughs given everything we've just spoken about you could easily think that video games in the early 1980s simply weren't that popular that was very much not the case in fact it was actually extremely popular but was all happening far away from people's homes crowded around a cabinet with a pocket full of quarters in the arcades during the late 70s there'd been an explosion of coin-operated game machines and thanks to the runaway popularity of games like Space Invaders asteroids Pac-Man and Donkey Kong by the mid-80s it was estimated that there was over 1 million active arcade boxes in the us alone now it wasn't just the most lucrative part of the industry but it was also the most ambitious and cabinet producers like Namco Sega and Konami were constantly trying to one-up each other with more advanced machines that would suck up even more money by 1985 the sorts of experiences that could be had standing around in a Chuck E cheese or till arcade were far outstripping those available with a console and controller and it's in this long lost world that we find Indiana Jones first true video game success story in 1984 Lucas and Spielberg released their much-anticipated sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom now while Temple received mixed reviews from critics who seemed to dislike its darker tone and focus on intense action and morbid imagery audiences viewed the film very differently just like Raiders before it Temple was a box office smash breaking records for ticket sales in an opening week and going on to be the highest grossing movie of the year the success of Temple of Doom guaranteed that the franchise was here to stay and with that came another wave of licensed merchandise there would be comics and action figures like before but now the video game tie-in held a lot more weight and while Atari still had the rights lucasfilm demanded something of considerably higher quality thanks to a series of failed follow-ups to the Atari 2600 and general appetite for Home console games in a post-et lull the only option was to take Indy into the arcade and thankfully that was an area where Atari still had some solid chops in August of 1985 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the arcade game began to appear all over North America and just like the film it was based on it was a big hit now a first thing to note is that for the time this is a great looking game and really pushed the boundaries of arcade graphics and sound design thanks to some Innovation from atari's development team in the previous year they'd created an all-new system board the Atari system one which was primarily meant to allow arcade owners to swap out games without having to purchase completely new machines it was a revolutionary idea but ironically What attracted players to these new cabinets was nothing more complicated than the improved Hardware inside of them thanks to a larger circuit board its games could utilize more complex Graphics much higher quality and much more varied sounds and were able to step away from the single screen experiences that had defined the icons of the arcade Golden Age this increased technical muscle means that Temple of Doom was the first Indiana Jones game that actually looked and sounded like the movies a huge improvement over the conceptual approach of the past we've got a title screen that uses the font from the movie's promotional posters we've got music that's made up of tracks from John Williams famous score we've got graphics that actually look like scenes from the film and most incredibly thanks to an onboard speech synthesizer Temple of Doom has an early form of voice acting that takes clips from the movies and replicates them in charmingly Lo-Fi fashion there's no imagination or interpretation required this is clearly Indiana Jones in action during the climactic scenes of Temple of Doom and converting this famous sequence into video game form is also the basis of the gameplay instead of trying to adapt the entirety of the movie the focus is entirely on the protracted action scenes that make up its back end and amazingly this converts into arcade score driven gameplay quite well it's split up into three sections a combat and platforming level where you have to save slaves and battle thuggy cultists a minecart racing sequence and then a sort of pseudo boss room where you have to to grab one of the Sankara Stones before molarom can capture you once that's done the game then Loops back around and gets a little harder with this structure repeating three times over before you end up on the Rope Bridge recreating the famous final scene of the movie that's quite a bit of complexity for a 25 cent game but frankly it's going to take a hell of a lot of coins to be as Temple of Doom is a very stiff challenge in the mind levels you can't actually kill anyone an indie's whip only stuns the cultists although you can knock them down a level if you hit them near a ledge on the flip side everything kills Indy in a single blow and while that's not so much of an issue in the early levels it becomes very hard later on the levels are pretty sprawling with cultists running all over the place mola Ram appearing to throw Fireballs the Maharaja using his voodoo doll and bats and snakes popping up everywhere and this is all while you're sliding down shoots and slipping off edges the minecart sequences are equally tough as you have to both fight cultists giving Chase and steer your way across different sets of tracks with some that result in almost instant death unless you've got lightning reflexes strangely the third sequence grabbing the Sankara Stone under the statue of kalimar is pretty tame by comparison while I think you're supposed to platform around the edge of the room dodging fireballs and whipping enemies you can usually just step onto the sliding door and NAB the stone right away now something I really like about template Doom is that if you do make it through the three cycles and see Indy Cut the Rope Bridge that's not actually the end of the game instead of chucking you back to the title screen there's a sort of high score post game where you have to collect golden statues in a vast version of the mine levels this goes on until you finally run out of lives and while that might seem like a strange way to end the game forcing you to eventually game over it gives Templar Doom an almost unlimited replayability where it's not just about seeing a digital version of the events of the film but also gaining bragging rights with a huge score all in all it's a pretty challenging but clearly well put together arcade game and if you happen to stumble upon a main machine out in the wild I recommend giving it a go there's all those countless deaths are going to be a lot easier to stomach if you don't have to pay for them now a temple of doom proving such a big hit in the arcades Atari wanted to capitalize on its success and what better way to do that than to Port it to every single platform in existence regardless of if they could actually handle it this led to an incredible nine different versions of Temple of Doom being released over the next four years and they are a real mixed bag on more powerful consoles like the Atari St MS-DOS systems and surprisingly the Commodore 64. the game somewhat translate although it's in much reduced form without anything like the graphical muscle and complex sound of the Atari system one board unfortunately that doesn't apply to the majority of these ports as on the MSX the ZX Spectrum the Amiga and the Apple II the game runs so poorly and looks so downgraded that you wonder why they even bothered clearly Indiana Jones Mania was strong enough for eager fans to look past any flaws and this meant for Atari the license represented a money printing machine that they weren't to let go of so let's jump forward to the late 80s where the video game landscape had changed once again in 1985 Nintendo released the NES in North America and thanks to the runaway success of games like Super Mario Brothers The Legend of Zelda duck hunt and excitebike interest had reignited in Home console gaming and every developer was scrambling to claim a piece of the pie the easiest way to do this was to take popular arcade games and reimagine them for Nintendo's 8-bit machine with successful ports like ghosts and goblins Contra life force and Donkey Kong Jr all proving that this strategy worked as Temple of Doom is both a recognizable and popular movie and had been a hit in the arcades it couldn't have been a better fit but surprisingly this is where atari's time with the license comes to an end you see at the time Nintendo's rules around producing games for their systems were pretty strict you're only allowed to release five games a year they had to be NES exclusive for two years after release they had to be published in Nintendo produced cartridges and they retained the right to veto any content that they didn't approve of Atari hated this structure and so their Home console subsidiary Tenga set about trying to get around the nes's lockout chip so they can produce unauthorized cartridges between 1988 and 1989 Tangen released 20 black cartridge unlicensed NES titles porting games like Shinobi afterburner Miss Pac-Man and even Tetris onto the console without Nintendo's knowledge obviously the big n wasn't happy about this and pretty quickly Atari was in court for copyright and patent infringement the result was The Recoil and destruction of the vast majority of these Black Label cartridges and among these was their port of India Anna Jones and the Temple of Doom now in order to not completely lose their investment the decision was taken to license tengen's creation to mindscape the company that had published Indiana Jones and the Revenge of the ancient and which held a legitimate Nintendo license this meant that in 1989 a second version of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released on the NES with mindscape licensing the title from tangan who are subsidiary of Atari who were licensing the property from Lucasville quite the crazed pyramid of agreements in order to get this game to Mark him now unfortunately all this effort to get around Nintendo's rules wasn't remotely worth it as temple of doom on the NES is substantially worse than its arcade counterpart obviously the NES was a far less powerful machine than the Atari system one and this meant a big downgrade in the game's presentation and sound the high quality audio and synthesized voices are no more the detailed Sprites and Rich pixel backgrounds are gone and along with them much of the sense that you're supposed to be playing as Indiana Jones if you didn't know that this was supposed to be based on template Doom there isn't really any way to tell and strangely the game's structure has also been reworked and now doesn't really follow the events of the movie instead of a cycle of a mind level a minecart level and then the Temple of Carly the first two have been blended into a single type and the third is absent until the very end of the game you now ride carts rescue slaves battle thuggy cultists and swing between Ledges all on a single screen called a wave you've got to get through 11 of these in order to finish the game now there's nothing inherently bad about these changes after all as we've already discussed plenty of NES arcade downgrades were a huge success the issue with Temple of Doom is that Tangen had tried to add more complexity to the gameplay and it takes the well-balanced Simplicity of the arcade game and tips it over into something quite frustrating we now have an inventory of items which you collect while rescuing slaves a sword a gun TNT and your web and you can switch between them in order to permanently kill cultists or unlock Extra paths it's a good idea in theory but the implementation is just horrific as you need to hold down select and a direction in order to change items the game's Relentless Pace never really allows for this and if you're on a conveyor belt or being chased down by a cultist there simply isn't time to switch gears and it makes the system feel a lot less useful or interesting than it should be even more annoyingly if you do somehow manage to get to the later stages you have to have a good stock of pistol ammo and TNT in order to defeat these crocodiles and form a bridge across the lava if you didn't do this and why would you know to conserve these items you simply can't finish the game and it's back to the start for another go round strangely this isn't the only New Concept that's been introduced as for some reason Tangen had added in the ability to jump which brings platforming into the equation along with a host of additional issues thanks to the semi-isometric perspective the jump functions really weirdly a standing non-directional jump will see Indy try to LEAP down a level and in order to jump to the side you have to sort of hold up and left or right which is pretty hard to get used to in the original arcade version you cross gaps by Swinging with your web while that's still present your interpretation of the level design is muddled by the inclusion of jumping and it leads to enormous constant cycle of falling off things or misjudging spaces that results in the loss of it continue it's just an unpleasant game to play and while none of the issues are so large that you couldn't overcome them with sheer willpower it's simply not worth the effort when there are so many better games on the NES even within the license space 1989 saw some real crackers released on the platform Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was competing with DuckTales Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman all classic 8-bit Platformers that managed to blend their license together with some genuinely creative game design the simple reality was that by the end of the 1980s Atari was well behind the curve and had long Fallen away from that cutting-edge technology that George Lucas wanted his companies and franchises to trade in with another movie on the horizon the future for the Indiana Jones franchise looked brighter than ever but it's time under the stewardship of Atari had clearly come to an end [Music] thank you the end of the 80s was a defining moment for the Indiana Jones franchise for two important reasons first it saw the release of the third film in the series Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade it was considered something of a return to form bringing back the globe trotting Adventure the Christian mythological story and a more light-hearted tone which all helped get the critics back on side after Temple of Doom's mixed reviews with Sean Connery cast as Indy's father Henry Jones senior it felt like the Blockbuster sequel that people had expected to follow Raiders and by the end of 1989 the franchise once again had the highest grossing movie of the year and multiple Academy Awards to boot this continued theatrical success obviously meant more video games which brings us to the second major development lucasfilm games would cease Outsourcing their franchises and would begin taking a much more Hands-On role in development while Atari had held the video game license for both Star Wars and Indiana Jones lucasfilm's own Studio had been tasked with exploring original Concepts and while they'd begun as a tiny group in a corner of Skywalker Ranch a series of very well received games had seen them grow into a globally renowned developer they started life producing titles like ball Blazer rescue on fractalus and the eidolon for home computers that found real success when they released Maniac mansion in 1987. it'd been conceived by Ron Gilbert and Gary winick who wanted to take the ideas of a pen and paper haunted house RPG and convert it into video game form this led to Gilbert creating the scum engine which took the complex command line gameplay of traditional adventure games and replaced it with a mouse driven verb system that was considered much easier to understand the first game to use this system was Maniac mansion and in tandem in the game's hilarious writing and Charming characters it received rave reviews and after following up with more well-received games like battle Hawks 1942 and Zack McCracken Gilbert and his small team were considered rising stars in the PC market so in early 1989 when Atari lost a lucasfilm license it made complete sense to let this talented team loose on one of the company's golden geese and with the Last Crusade due out in May of that year it was clear which one Gilbert and Coach should be working on developed in just a handful of months in order to meet this deadline Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade the graphic adventure is a phenomenal video game managing to both push the adventure game genre forwards while keeping the focus squarely on the source material of the film so let's start with how you actually play because to the untrained eye the Last Crusade probably looks rather strange it's essentially a slightly altered version of the movie where key scenes have been expanded into distinct zones where you solve puzzles talk to other characters fight Nazis bicker with your father and just generally play the role of Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade it's all done through a list of verbs along the bottom of the screen you want to pick something up you select pick up then click the item and then Indy will head over and carry out your command same goes for using an item click use then the item then the location you want to use it and really while you can click the screen to move Indie around these verbs are the true way that you interact with the game for those used to the immediacy of Super Mario or The Legend of Zelda this will probably seem both an intimidating and confusing way to control a video game but honestly it's nowhere near as bad as it seems once you learn a few key rules the first is to use what is to scan every inch of the screen as this highlights what you can actually interact with and the second is to just check every verb on every item as this usually results in some form of forward progress now obviously it's not quite that simple as this is a PC Adventure game and that means lots of puzzles lots of chains of items being used together and lots of lateral thinking to give you an example after Indie accepts the job of searching for the Holy Grail from Donovan he finds himself in the Venetian Library hunting for Clues with Dr Elsa Schneider in the film it's a short sequence where Indy smashes his way through the floor and into the catacombs below but in the graphic adventure it takes a little more brain power in order to find the underground tomb inside the library is a series of rooms with patterns of numerals on the floor and different stained glass windows above and you have to reference sketches in the Grail diary in order to work out which contains the passageway to the catacombs once you've got the right room you then have to identify the correct tile to smash and that's done by once again referencing the diary against inscriptions on the wall when you finally link these steps together and crack open the correct spot it's very satisfying but even if you can't get it right away you treated to these funny little scenes where a Nazi guard gets increasingly annoyed with Indy which is a clever way to use humor to lessen any frustration from failing the puzzle now that isn't to say the game is completely free from strange and esoteric mechanics later on when you're exploring the catacombs you need to free a torch from some caked on mud and the intended solution is to head all the way back to the cafe at the start of the level grab a wine bottle fill it with water from the fountain and then pour it over the mud in order to loosen the torch it takes a bit of backtracking but it's not entirely miscible that is Until you realize that you can't just pick up the wine bottle as the couple haven't finished with it yet no instead you're supposed to use look on it first which causes Indy to comment that it's a poor vintage and prompts the couple to throw it away I'm not exactly sure how you'd find this out without just clicking every button on everything in sight and that does lessen the sense of fairness in the puzzles it's a common issue in early PC adventure games but luckily these moments are few and far between in the Last Crusade in fact what makes the Last Crusade such an interesting experience is quite how much Gilbert and his team tried to mix up the classic puzzle-driven formula as throughout our hunt for the Grail we end up doing quite a bit more than just clicking verbs and looking for items early on in Barnett College were introduced to a new system for the scum engine that allows us to choose how Indie responds in the game's dialogue this ends up playing a very big role in the gameplay by speaking to certain characters Indy can learn information which will then pop up in later conversations and you can find alternative solutions to puzzles or avoid fights by talking away out of the situation in its most simple expression at the very start of the game you can speak to Marcus and find out about a new geology Professor who's been meddling in the Affairs of the archeology department and then later on you can tell a mass of students to go and bother him instead which clears the path between the hallway and Indy's office after just a few levels this dialogue driven gameplay becomes much more complicated and you'll be convinced missing a butler to abandon his post trying to trick Nazis into believing you're a jacket salesman or even masquerading as an officer and faking your way into a top secret vault Indiana Jones is charisma and charma one of the reasons he's such a beloved character with iconic one-liners and sarcastic remarks being just as much a part of the franchise as the high intensity action and lucasfilm games light-hearted approach to writing feels like a perfect match for this now that isn't to say that the Last Crusade is entirely non-violent this is actually quite a surprising amount of action sequences and even a fairly fleshed out combat minigame as a consequence of various choices you can make which range from accidentally revealing yourself to a guard to Simply deciding to throw a punch Indy will be thrust into one-on-one combat where you've got to try and block your opponent's punches and connect with your own it's not exactly great mainly thanks to the strange where it controls which is with the numpad nine six and three throw high medium and low punches while eight five and two block and you're supposed to time them so you can maximize Indy's punch strength and minimize the damage you take as you don't heal in between fights the biggest issue is simply having to use a numpad as thanks to the game's age you can't rebind the controls which meant I had to fish out an extra Bluetooth keyboard for whenever combat came up but even with that it just feels like an odd system and I found that mashing one button over and over was usually more successful than trying to stick and move thankfully it's entirely optional as through properly exploring your surroundings and gathering information through conversations you can avoid every single encounter and in fact doing so rewards you with more points that's right the Last Crusade has a scoring system while that might sound like an odd inclusion for a narrative driven puzzle game the way it's implemented Works quite well past the Venice sequence virtually every puzzle or obstacle has multiple different solutions and these all have a different IQ value or Indiana quotient this gives you more points for being more inquisitive and encourages you to experiment and explore the game's levels in Castle brand world where Indie attempts to rescue his father from the Nazis there are a ton of different ways to progress up his flaws while you can just fight everyone in sight there are two different disguises you can find a secret path on the outside of the building a security system you can deactivate and multiple optional items that can come into play in later levels in fact there are even entire zones that depending on how you play the game you might never even come across at the very end of the castle Brown mod sequence if you're captured the Nazis will take the Grail diary which forces the Joneses to head to Berlin in order to reclaim it and this causes them to come face to face with Hitler but if you found the fake diary back at Henry's house at the start of the game you can hand this over instead and this means you'll skip Berlin and head straight to the airport instead even here the path isn't linear as the game offers you multiple ways to progress you can board the Zeppelin either through force or buying a ticket or even stealing one and while this leads to a lengthy section where you evade Nazis and solve a few puzzles it's all totally optional in the Venetian Library you can find a biplane instruction manual and surprise surprise there's one sitting on the Airfield which you can then use to head straight to the Grail Temple even then there are more options as during the flying minigame it's possible to fail which causes you to crash and have to make up the rest of the way by car another totally missable sequence with unique characters and interactions if you know exactly what to do you can probably beat the Last Crusade in as little as an hour but the game comes into its own when you're pushing its boundaries and exploring every possible outcome my soul criticism is that while the game has clearly been designed to be enjoyed multiple times over this structure goes just a tad too far in the game's final moment the last area is the Grail Temple and things play out in much the same way as they do in the film Marcus Henry in India arrive to find Donovan and Elsa already there and Donovan shoots Henry in order to force our hero to retrieve the Grail now given this sequence is made up of three puzzles in the movie you'd expect this to play into the design of the game but strangely two of the three trials play out as cut scenes and the third is extremely easy asking you to step on the correct letters and not requiring anything like the complex chain of items from earlier levels really the entire sequence is built around Indie choosing which of the night's cups is the true holy Relic and this is where things get a little more complex and not really in a good way instead of just choosing the small wooden pot the game randomizes which chalice is correct the only way to work it out is to discover hidden Clues that are scattered throughout the rest of the game the first is hidden deep within the Venetian categories and while it's not exactly obvious you could stumble upon it by simply exploring every pathway we'll give that one a pass but the second clue is much harder to find and I'm honestly not sure how anyone discovered it without outside help at the start of the game you can go to Henry's house and up on the wall is a small painting of The Grail which Indy can take down and carry with him once you're in Castle bronwald if you're dressed as a servant you can give this painting to a specific God on the second floor which triggers a cutscene where Captain Vogel writes down the passcode to the Castle's hidden vault once you reach the third floor you can then take this code head back to the storeroom open a concealed passageway and inside is the rest of the information you need to identify the correct Grail now that doesn't sound so bad when someone explains the steps to you but when you're playing the game blind there's simply no way to know that these items or actions relate to one another and it's the one moment where the Last Crusade tips over into the kind of crazed Moon logic which is often levied at games in this style luckily in the age of high-speed internet it's not hard to get the information you need and once you grab the correct chalice we're rewarded with a delightful Lo-Fi Recreation at the end of the movie and even get a chance to give the Grail back to the Knight which feels in keeping with Dr Jones's respect for the mysteries of the ancient world Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade the graphic adventure was by far the most accomplished adaptation in the franchise up to this point somehow managing to twist the big budget Blockbuster into the restrained world of PC adventure games and have it feel completely at home it's not only the first game that manages to capture the film's sense of globetrotting exploration and Charming charismatic dialogue but it does this without losing its focus on Creative game design and really this is a fantastic starting point not just for anyone interested in Indiana Jones but for anyone looking to jump into this genre obviously reviews in 1989 were absolutely glowing and the Last Crusade ended up selling around a quarter of a million copies making it Far and Away lucasfilm game's most successful title and proving that the franchise would be in good hands moving forwards the only problem was that this only became clear after the game's release and so now we have to Pivot to a very strange set of games that arguably did ever need to be produced [Music] even before it sold a single ticket it was obvious that Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade was going to make millions at the box office and this represented a massive opportunity to cash in on the merchandising just like with Temple of Doom before it video games were a huge part of this but handing the responsibility solely over to lucasfilm games who despite their critical Acclaim had never moved big numbers well that presented something of a commercial risk now this was mainly because lucasfilm games were primarily a PC developer and while Maniac Mansion had been ported to the NES that version hadn't sold amazingly well as point-and-click adventure games really were at their best with a mouse and keyboard as Nintendo's Stranglehold on the video game industry only continued to grow the idea of missing out on this key Market was simply not viable so lucasfilm took the decision to commission another Last Crusade game one that would be more focused on mainstream platformer gameplay and can be ported to every console Under The Sun Also released in May of 1989 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade the action game was developed by tier tax designs a small Studio from Macclesfield in the United Kingdom now tertax didn't have much of a back catalog only having worked on three games before somehow Landing this job with one of them being the notorious Commodore 64 version of Capcom Street Fighter a port so unlikely and so poor quality that you can hardly believe it exists I think it's not unfair to surmise that the contract wasn't exactly high value and that's reflected in the game's credits which seemed to indicate that the Last Crusade was developed by a single programmer Mark Hague Hutchinson he was surprisingly go on to have a really successful career ironically joining LucasArts shortly after this project shipped where he'd work on a Spate of seminal titles like dark Forces and Rogue Squadron before eventually jumping ship to Retro Studios where he worked as as a key designer on Metro Prime it's quite the CV but the Last Crusade the action game is something of a false star that exists very much in the shadow of its graphic adventure sibling just like with Temple of Doom years before it was ported to almost every single platform in existence and depending on which version you end up with it can be a real eyesore the original development was done for the Amiga and Atari St and these look pretty nice with good colors detailed Sprites and smooth animations but dear Lord some of the ports that came later are downright disgraceful once again the ZX spectrum and amstrad CPC editions are monotonal nightmares which run a slideshow pace and amazingly despite this game existing to tap into the Home console Market the NES version looks horrific with utterly awful visuals that put the console's hardware to shame in total there are nine different ports released between 1989 and 1993. so for the sake of our sanity we're going to settle on what should have been the definitive edition the late 1992 Sega Genesis version which was developed by U.S gold the aim of the Last Crusade the action game was to produce a typical late 80s console platformer and that is exactly what we've got he plays Indie in a set of six side-scrolling levels all themed around scenes from the movie and with a controller that has just three buttons jump punch and whip there are no extra credits for working out how this is going to go down you lead between platforms Dodge spiky pits punch various goons fire against bosses and race against a timer to get to the end of each stage without running out of lives now considering this released in the same year as Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and 3 years after Super Mario World you'd be forgiven for expecting something more complex but what you've got to remember is that this is essentially an Atari game with a Fresh coat of Sega paint and while it looks very nice at a glance it's impossible to get past the subpar gameplay for starters it commits the Dual unforgivable platforming sins of having sloppy controls and poor hit detection not only does it feel borderline impossible to land a punch without getting hit yourself but you'll constantly be sliding to your doom or overshooting gaps with Indy's unnatural jumping art this might not be so bad if the stages were simple but they're filled to the brim with environmental hazards meaning one false move and you're usually dead it makes for a brutally difficult game where even a single enemy can cost you your entire health bar and I have no shame in saying that I had to resort to the prodigious use of save states to even make it past the first level I've got absolutely no problem with hard games and in fact if you've seen my other videos you'll know that I absolutely love them but it's difficult because of deficiencies in design rather than fair challenge oddly the Last Crusade the action game also seems to have some major issues adapting its source material there's no intro cut scene or text in between levels or any story of any kind which means it relies entirely on the player's knowledge of the movie and that really just makes the game feel like a Brazen caching especially in comparison to the lovingly written script in Ron Gilbert's Adventure game similarly confusing are the bosses at the end of the mind we fight against a Tomb Raider who's wielding a giant girder it's odd but I guess it's okay if you absolutely have to have an end level boss what doesn't work quite so well is the Native American Archer randomly fought at the end of the circus tray or this Goose stepping Nazi officer that you fight on the exterior wall of Castle brunald luckily the final stage skips the boss fights altogether although instead we're subjected to this utterly terrifying shot of Indiana Jones lifelessly staring out of the screen while we choose the Holy Grail it's enough to keep even the hardiest of players awake for weeks and is worse than any boss fight they could have ever come up with I'm usually loath to go in so hard on the games I review because I know that nobody sets out to make something unenjoyable given how majestically Hague Hutchinson would turn around his career I feel safe to say that this is simply just a case of an honest mistake with the project likely held back by inexperienced low budgets poor Hardware or any combination of the three the fact that it ended up on nine platforms is really more of a testament to the sheer popularity of the movie it's based on rather than its qualities as a video game and where this to be released without the franchise to piggyback on well we might never have seen Indiana Jones again [Music] don't worry the video hasn't reset and your eyes are not deceiving you there is a third Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade game not a port or a revision or a special edition but yet another attempt to transform Indy's hunt for the Holy Grail into something that would excite NES owners now there's very little information as to why this game exists but given it was released almost two years after the Last Crusade the action game I can only imagine that this was hastily cobbled together in order to make up for the low quality of tiertex's wonky platformer that seems to be backed up by the fact that the Last Crusade NES which is how I'll refer to this version going forwards was developed by taito Corporation who are a well-respected developer with a handful of legendary games under their belt back in the late 70s they'd released Space Invaders and almost single-handedly kick-started the arcade boom while they've been quickly overtaken by other companies they'd always put together quality games with the atcing the release of titles like Darius elevator action the Ninja Warriors and puzzle Bobble lucasfilm putting the Indiana Jones license in the hands of such a talented company should have resulted in video game gold and while it's nowhere near as bad as the console version of The Last Crusade the action game taito's interpretation might be one of the strangest experiences on the Nintendo Entertainment System instead of Simply using the movie as a thematic coat for generic platforming levels the Last Crusade NES is rather more ambitious with lots of different kinds of stages cutscenes that explain the plot and even an open-ended structure that allows you to choose your own path through the game it's a captivating approach and combined with some really nice visuals and a surprisingly good 8-bit take on John Williams score well on the surface this looks like the console action adventure that Indie has always deserved what makes the Last Crusade NES so perplexing is that all of these interesting ideas ideas are terribly executed making for a game that feels more like a half remembered dream than a thrilling adaptation let's start with that open-ended structure the game begins with Indy receiving his father's Grail diary in the post and then opening a telegram from Marcus Brodie alerting him that the cross of Coronado has been spotted in Portugal from here you can choose to either head to Venice to chase after your father or go after the cross which jumbles up both the prologue and the main story while somehow also ignoring Donovan who's supposed to be the Catalyst for the entire plot if you opt for Portugal you're thrust into this strange side-scrolling beat-em-up level where you have to fight 14 Sailors before claiming the cross and leaping from the ship's bow sounds relatively straightforward and it pretty much is in combat you can punch and kick with Indy busting out some Chuck Norris style roundhouses if you tap the right combination but honestly there's no strategy whatsoever and you really just Mash both buttons and hope to outlast your opponent once that's done we get another Telegraph this time from Salah who informs us that not only has Henry senior been captured by the Nazis and taken to Castle bronworld but Marcus Brody never turned up in its Kinder run which adds two more potential missions to the select screen now that's cool and all but considering we haven't been to Venice yet Marcus shouldn't know about the location of the Grail so what's he doing heading to escender run well the game doesn't explain it and it doesn't seem to care either anyway the Venice level is literally just the time sliding picture puzzle and rescuing Marcus consists of a very short series of fights on top of a tank in which he's inexplicably become trapped really only Castle branwold offers a proper dose of gameplay with another side-scrolling beat em Up level the this time in a maze of doors and balconies now while the castle itself is a pretty boring level it does lead me onto one of taito's more interesting ideas which is that failure usually doesn't result in a game over and instead either takes you to optional levels or asks you to carry on without key information take that Sliding Puzzle in Venice the whole point of it is to identify what the Grail looks like in order to select the Right One In The Game's final modes but if you can't finish it in time the game allows you to carry on and just take a guess the same thing is true during the tank and Castle stages where if you run out of lives the Nazis take the Grail diary which leaves you with the option to just push on without it or head to Berlin in order to get it back obviously you'll want to do this as it contains the clues you need to progress through the temple but you're arguably better off just restarting your game as the Berlin stage is one of the most outrageously challenging levels I've ever come across during the pre-level cutscene Indy reclaims the diary and so the level itself is framed as his Escape taking place as a top-down motorcycle chase where we have to leap over chasms avoid enemy Riders and slalom between obstacles the problem is that you can't see what's coming and just a single touch from the walls the obstacles the bullets they fire or the chasms will result in the loss of a life even more baffling is the forks in the road where if you pick the wrong option you're just dead and this makes it virtually impossible to beat even if you do manage to somehow avoid all the hazards thankfully there are checkpoints but for some reason this level is almost seven minutes long which makes beating it with just five lives a Herculean task so anyway the final zone is the Grail temple in iskender run which is another top-down stage but thankfully without a motorbike in sight you walk across letters that spell out Jehovah's name either with guidance from the diary or not and then you come face to face with the Knight and the only thing left to do is select the correct Grail now this might be the most disappointing part as even if you choose correctly the Knight won't let you take the Chalice if you haven't proven yourself worthy and surprise surprise this is done by finishing every other stage it makes that open-ended structure and lack of fail States completely pointless because everything is mandatory anyway it might as well have just happened one after the other which would at least made the story flow in a way that makes a little more sense in fact why does the Knight even care if you recover the cross of Coronado does he even know what it is why would it have any bearing on the quest for the Holy Grail it's just a weird adaptation that clearly started life as an ambitious Adventure game and then slowly shrank down in complex City and scope until all its good ideas had become Shadows of what they were originally supposed to be by the time you pour the holy Waters onto Henry senior who I might add we never even see get injured you won't have been playing for much more than 15 minutes even if we're generous and say it'll take double that time with resets or getting trapped in the motorbike level this is a full price video game that is only 30 minutes long in 1985 that might have been acceptable but in 1991 kids were locked onto the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis expectations had changed and the Last Crusade NES Falls very short a few clever ideas and a popular license simply weren't enough to move the needle and despite lucasfilm having multiple attempts the franchise was still floundering in the Home console market with the movie trilogy wrapping up and Spielberg Lucas and Ford moving on to Fresh projects the video games would require major reinvention if the series was going to continue this would mean taking a leap into the unknown and forging A New Path for the franchise [Music] thank you so while the Indiana Jones series continue to languish on home consoles thanks to the Last Crusade the graphic adventure it had a pretty good reputation in the PC market and fans were eagerly waiting to see what would come next well surprisingly the Last Crusade had only ever been intended as a one-off movie tie-in and so instead of Designing a sequel Gilbert and winick had gone back to coming up with their own ideas a decision which seems odd considering its commercial success but nevertheless gave us some incredibly influential games the first was Loom which was designed by another adventure game Titan Brian Moriarty and which Winnick handled the art for released in January 1990 Loom took the adventure game formula that the studio had become known for and twisted it into a complex fantasy story there was much more serious in tone and even shipped with a 30-minute Audio Drama that helped explain its detailed lore it was unlike anything else on the market but it would quickly fall into this shadow of Ron Gilbert's next game which released just six months later this was the secret of Monkey Island a game that needs very little introduction as it's essentially become the iconic face of the point-and-click genre Gilbert had brought in two younger developers David Grossman and Tim Schaefer who have both gone to have illustrious careers in their own right and between the three of them they crafted a game that was a real lightning in a bottle moment it had witty writing a unique aesthetic supremely creative puzzles and quickly became the darling of critics all around the world which of course LED Gilbert and his team to produce a sequel Monkey Island 2 lechuck's Revenge which released the following year considering that the studio had begun life in a quiet corner of George Lucas's home with just a handful of employees it was a truly meteoric rise and by this point lucasfilmed games had become one of the most important divisions in the entire company to reflect this there was a reorganization lucasfilm games industrial Light and magic and Skywalker sound were all rolled into a single autonomous entity LucasArts a new super division that was given its own office in San Rafael California and tasked with pushing their small video game business to the next level it was an exciting time but things actually got off to something of a bad start despite the excitement around the release of Monkey Island 2 it ended up selling quite poorly despite the Fantastic reviews Gilbert in his Studio had to change direction and take on some more commercially viable projects in order to make all the money that had been invested in forming LucasArts worthwhile one of these new projects was that much anticipated sequel to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade the graphic adventure but instead of Gilbert Winnick taking the lead it was placed in the care of Hal barwood now barwood is an interesting character for quite a few reasons for starters he knew relatively little about game development having spent most of his career as a film writer and producer Reid worked with Steven Spielberg on the Sugarland Express and have been in charge of the 1981 fantasy Epic Dragon Slayer in fact he was only working at LucasArts because he was a close friend of George Lucas who'd brought him into the expanding company as a writer and director off the back of nothing more than his deep passion for playing video games now originally the plan bin to have barwood adapt an unused script Indiana Jones and the Monkey King which was at one point going to be Indiana Jones 3. but incredibly he ended up convincing the team that the script was no good and that they should instead Focus all of their energy on creating their own entirely original story in order to make this a reality barwood was paired up with Noah faustein a talented developer who'd been the co-lead on the Last Crusade and together they quickly started designing a very ambitious experience that didn't just aim to build on lucasart's adventure game history but also produced the first Indiana Jones video game since those early Tech Space Adventures that wasn't conceived by George Lucas development took almost two years an astoundingly long amount of time for a game in this style but surprisingly the lengthy production went relatively smoothly with barwood learning how to program the scum engine and fasting able to come up with some very complex systems the only stumbling block was the name lucasart's marketing department wanted to call it Indiana Jones the next adventure but barwood fought tooth and nail for it to follow the conventions of the movies and in the end he won on June 1st 1992 Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis was released on MS-DOS Mac and the Amiga and almost immediately it became a runaway success garnering near Universal Acclaim and moving boxes like nothing else LucasArts had ever produced he would go on to sell over a million copies by far the company's most successful Adventure game and despite all of the incredible work done by Gilbert Schaefer winick and Grossman it was Hal barwood no and Indiana Jones that proved lucasart would be a success so the obvious question is what makes fate of Atlantis quite so good and why did this game sell so much more than Monkey Island Maniac mansion and even the Last Crusade well like any of the finest games the answer is quite a few different things so let's dive in and work out what exactly barwood and falstein put together the most obvious place to start is the presentation because one of Fate's strongest characteristics is just how much it looks and feels like a cinematic experience fave Atlantis was the first LucasArts game to use an expanded visual palette with 256 color options as opposed to Monkey Island's lowly 16. and this increased graphical Fidelity both improves the gameplay with interactable items more clearly rendered and of course reduces the need for the player to constantly use their imagination to fill in any visual gaps this emphasis on immersion is helped in no small part by the directorial hand of Hal barwood who clearly brings a cinematic Flair that isn't present in any other PC Adventure game we see a plane soar over the Azores Island before the camera pans across to the gameplay area there are caves that slowly get brighter as indie's eyes adjust to the darkness and those May sequences from the Last Crusade have been repurposed to show the sprawl of Monte Carlo or Algeria we even get an utterly captivating opening credit sequence where we're both introduced to the controls and our lead character as he crashes through the back rooms of Barnett College looking for a lost statue it's completely charming and the upgraded animations and presentation mean these movie influence sections can be fully realized in a way that they couldn't in the Last Crusade obviously for 1992 it's a stunning video game but the most important Improvement is in the sound as the fate of Atlantis has both a full soundtrack based heavily on the John Williams scores from Raiders and Crusade and in a first for LucasArts a fully voiced script now the music needs no explanation so instead we're going to focus on the voice acting which has no business being as great as it is unfortunately Harrison Ford was way out of the team's budget so instead Doug Lee an actor who'd only done a handful of cartoons and radio adverts was brought in to replicate Ford's deep tone this could have so easily ruined the entire game but Lee does a great impression and hearing our archaeological hero snarky with Nazis or try to flirt with his companion or Bluff his way out of a situation goes such a long way to making this feel like a true Indiana Jones experience outside of Lee the cast is a bit more of a mixed bag but for the most part the wonky performances actually add to the charm of the the game and really they're no more ridiculous than John Reese Davies playing Salah the Egyptian or Ronald Lacy's performance as her Arnold trot now while all that is obviously a huge improvement over the Indiana Jones games at the past it's the plot that makes fate of Atlantis feel so at home alongside Raiders or Crusade whether it was because of his friendship with Lucas or maybe just because of his background as a writer but barwood seems to really understand what makes for a good Indie Style Adventure and Fate has all the Hallmarks of the films without ever feeling derivative the premise is rooted in genuine historical mythology with the hunt for the lost continent of Atlantis taking the place of the Ark of the Covenant or the holy grail and barwood spent months researching and writing his script so that it felt like a natural continuation of the character the game is set shortly after the Last Crusade in 1939 and kicks off with Indy's office being robbed by a German officer called Klaus Kerner who steals an ancient statue of Unknown Origin while trying to track him down Indie becomes tangled up with Sophia hapgood an ex-colly who left the archeology profession to pursue a career as a psychic and Atlantean historian two concepts that Indie doesn't exactly have much patience for after interrupting her lecture the two discovered that Kerner has also ransacked hapgard's office and after a brief encounter with what Sophia claims is an Atlantean ghost the two set off to track down the Lost dialogues of Plato a real-life document that barwood has reimagined as a guidebook to reach the Lost Continent it's all just such a good fit for the franchise we got a race against a Machiavellian Nazi agent a mythological mystery that's rooted in some degree of genuine history a globe trying Adventure that takes us to Exotic locations and a female companion who isn't exactly too hot on Dr Jones it might be built on the scum engine but it's far more Raiders of the Lost Ark than secret of Monkey Island and for many fans this was the dream continuation after Spielberg and Lucas had finished up the trilogy now from this point we're thrust into the me of the game which has us choosing a location from a map and then diving into a Classic Slice of lucasart's point-and-click gameplay although there are some genuine quality of life improvements that make the puzzle solving slightly easier on the brain for starters you no longer have to click what is before you scan each screen as the game will highlight interactable items automatically the amount of verbs has been reduced from 12 to 9 which makes it a little more obvious how everything is meant to work together on top of this each location is considerably smaller than in the Last Crusade which might sound disappointing but it makes the puzzles easier to understand as you don't ever have to backtrack across 10 screens to find the items you need all in all we end up visiting something like 15 unique areas so in total the game is actually substantially longer but it's just laid out in a more thoughtful way that helps keep you immersed in the story probably the biggest addition to the gameplay is your companion Sophia hapgood who plays a big role in the puzzle solving and adds a massive amount of character to the game's events through conversations between her and Indiana for example in the Azores you need to convince an old antique dealer to trade an Atlantean artifact for the location of the lost dialogues the only way to draw him out of his shell is to appeal to his base instincts with Sophia and these moments are scattered all throughout the game always playing on the two characters disdain for each other in hilarious ways in algier you can ask Sophia to participate in a knife throwing show and when she refuses you can just push her in regardless and then later when you're deep underground you have to go through a whole puzzle sequence in order to convince her to leave a jail cell because she doesn't trust that Indie one drop the gate on her head their Dynamic is very well realized with Sophia never coming across as a generic love interest or Damsel in Distress and having her own motivations for wanting to find Atlantis now if fate of Atlantis was just this a supremely well written next iteration on the formula laid out in the last said well it would still be a pretty good game but what elevates it above its Adventure game appears is its unique structure which is something that fausting came up Midway through development and added on six months worth of work you see after a short section of globetrotting where Indie and Sophia travel between three Atlantean experts finding Clues to hunt down the Lost dialogues which as it turns out were back at barnac College all along we're presented with a choice that defines how the rest of the game will function Sophia asked Cindy how he wants to approach their Quest and you can reply with one of three options they can work together he can work alone or he'll dive into the action and each of these is a unique path through the story team wit and action and each plays out in a completely different way it's not only a great idea but very well executed and you'll want to play through the game three times in order to see all the funny moments and creative situations that the team managed to cook up for example the action path is heavily influenced by Temple of Doom with Indiana Jones acting as the vengeful Hammer of archeology using his fists and whip to Brute Force his way through most obstacles this route sees the numpad combat and the Last Crusade return and while it still as janky as ever there have been a few changes that mean even this system is a little Kinder for stars you heal automatically between each fight and most enemies have considerably less Health which means far less reloading and far more Nazi punching without any of the item or dialogue puzzles it's by far the least interesting path to take but even then it has unique moments that have their own charm it's campy and silly rather than intense and serious but even with the strange combat system it's well worth a look if you've already beaten the game now the bulk of the fun is found in the wits and team paths and it's pretty clear that barwood and falstein were at their best when they were coming up with clever item and dialogue puzzles my personal favorite is in Monte Carlo where Indy and Sophia are tracking an artifact dealer called Alan trottiere in the team path it leads to the sequence where Indy has to convince Monsieur trottier to come into the hotel for a seance with Sophia where they'll trick him into handing over one of the keystones that they need to access the Lost Island now first of all you need to speak to strangers until you can identify which one is trottier and then you get a little dialogue puzzle where Indy has to prove that he's not working for one of his Rivals answering questions about the content of Plato's lost dialogues once he's convinced he comes upstairs and you're given a choice of how to approach things you can go traditional LucasArts picking up items from different locations in order to impersonate in Ghost and scare trottier away from Atlantis or you can take control of Sophia and use dialogue to convince him that he's too old to make the journey now what's really cool about all this is that on the wits part Monsieur trottier appears at a completely different point in the game and sets up a totally different puzzle in that version at the algier dig site Indie intercepts a telegram from the Germans who as it turns out are planning to abduct trottier in order to extort information about Atlantis obviously we race over to Monte Carlo in order to warn him but he's kidnapped all the same and this throws us into a funny little mini game where the top-down City perspective is used to simulate a car chase you've got to run the Nazis off the road and rescue that hostage and in this gratitude trottier points you towards the location of the Keystone which allows us to carry on with our Quest most adventure games would be content with just one of these parts but barwood and falstein somehow managed to cram three into a single title and have all of them feel coherent and interconnected considering both had never directed a game before and Barbara didn't even know how to program at the start of the project it's an astounding achievement and well deserving of its critical reputation so regardless of the path you take eventually you end up in Atlantis and sadly this is where a few problems start to rear their head the culprit is this giant maze which takes the player agency in clever writing and swaps it out for some extremely complicated and rather nonsensical traditional point-and-click puzzle solving basically you have to visit every single room in this four screen maze find the items that work together in a massive sequence in order to both open the path to the inner sanctum and if you're on the wits or team path free Sophia from captivity we also get our first real dose of moon logic with a puzzle that makes almost no sense just outside of the inner sanctum is a giant octopus and in order to get it to move you have to combine a skeleton rib cage with a brat burst from a defeated Nazi and then use these to make a crab pot in order to capture one of the orange Critters and feed it to the octopus if you could work all that out without being told beforehand you're a wiser person than I am now as annoying as all that is it pales in comparison to the real kick in the teeth which is that it's possible to soft lock the game thanks to a mechanic which clearly wasn't properly tested all throughout the game India and Sophia find these Ori halcon beads a material which the atlanteans use to power their machines and use them in many puzzles that involve the ancient Machinery there's quite a bit of this in the Maze sequence so the game provides a room where you can replenish your stock of beads should you run out the issue is that one of the items required to activate the bead machine gets used up in a later puzzle and if you reach this final screen without any beads as I unfortunately did there's no way to go back and get any more which locks the game and requires you to go back to a previous save again if you're a seasoned Adventure Game Pro this probably won't happen and you'll relish the game throwing such complicated puzzles at you but for a more relaxed audience it's a change of pace that doesn't quite live up to the soaring highs of the rest of the game now luckily it's well worth pushing through as the fate of Atlantis has an extremely strong ending concluding in a way that feels very in keeping with the style of the movies in the inner sanctum Indian Sophia are finally captured by hair Kerner and a crazy scientist by the name of Dr uberman Who reveals that their plan is to harness the vast power of the orihalcum in order to create god-like beings for the third reich's war effort again it's deeply influenced by how Raiders treated the power of the Ark in that we're not really given concrete explanations for the supernatural Powers but what we do see is dangerous and shouldn't be tampered with lightly greedy for power Kerner is the first to step into the machine but as there remains some confusion about how this actually works he ends up being transformed into a horrible Goblin who immediately falls into the lava this leads to the final puzzle of the game a frantic dialogue with uberman where Indy has to stall and threaten and trick the scientist into using a hundred beads on himself overloading his body with power and destroying what's of the Lost Continent this little scene is just so emblematic of How Deeply bowed understood what makes Indiana Jones work for all Indies Action Hero chops and archaeological expertise It's usually the villains who defeat themselves the Nazis and Raiders were killed for underestimating the power of the Ark and Donovan's Lust For eternal life and riches led to him choosing the wrong Grail so to see karna and uberman fall for similar reasons gives the game an ending that feels deeply satisfying and more than deserving of its accolades is one of the best Indiana Jones stories Ever Told so if the question is why did fate of Atlantis sell so well compared to any other game in the franchise or even any other Adventure game for that matter well a simple answer is that it's just a supremely well designed and well-written game that two years that barwood and faustine spent honing their ideas and narrative was so worth it and not only display of Atlantis feel like something Lucas and Spielberg might have cooked up but it genuinely pushed the genre forwards taking the focus away from Hardcore puzzling and planting its flag firmly in the world of engrossing cinematic storytelling if you've even got a passing interest in pointing that games you'll absolutely love it and if that's paired with the love of the films it's almost guaranteed that you'll have an incredible time it's currently available on Steam and Gog and is virtually always on sale meaning there's very little reason not to dive into one of the finest Indiana Jones Adventures ever made the successor fate of Atlantis was an extremely important moment in the history of the franchise not only because it righted the Lucas ship and set them back on the path to International success but because it proved that the series could live beyond the films up until that point almost everything had been made in tandem with a high profile movie release but borrowed and faustein had shown that Indy had real potential away from the big screen Pandora's Box had been opened and for LucasArts the future of the franchise Lane taking Indiana Jones to new and exciting places [Music] thank you now before we move on from fate of Atlantis we've got another little curiosity to address and this was born out of lucasart still not being entirely convinced in the crossover appeal of their adventure games Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis the action game was released on the same day as its Adventure game cousin in 1992 on a whole host of computer systems the Atari St the Amiga the ZX spectrum and of course the Commodore 64 which at this point was over a decade old now it's developed by attention to detail who just like tear attacks before them were a small British Studio that only had a single game to their name 1990s night shift a puzzle platformer which had been published by LucasArts and featured cameos from Star Wars characters it was clearly thanks to this existing relationship that attemption to detail won the license as it certainly wasn't their developmental reputation which has once again resulted in a very wonky interpretation of a classic Indiana Jones game fate of Atlantis the action game opens with a slideshow of pictures that I think is supposed to show kerners stealing the statues but as there isn't any text there's no way to know without any prior knowledge luckily although it's hardly a good thing the story is completely irrelevant as the game just takes you from level to level without any further cutscenes and not a single line of dialogue in the entire game the focus is instead on the gameplay which takes the item hunting and puzzle solving and transforms it into an isometric action game where you hunt around large levels looking for whatever will allow you to progress and fighting off hordes of goons as they try to stand in your way honestly it's just a very strange game and makes almost no sense even when you know what's supposed to be happening first level is set in Monte Carlo but instead of tracking down Monsieur trottier and saving him in a car chase or conducting a seance you just have to play at gambling tables until you have enough money to buy a hotel room and all the while Indian Sophia are being attacked by the hotel's staff who have to be up with your fists and whip it's not exactly bad but you find yourself asking why they even bothered as well as subtitle indicates it's an action game it's hardly pulse pounding enough to appeal to fans of Doom or dude Nukem easily the worst part is how this horrific buzzing sound is triggered whenever your character pushes up against something you can't interact with thanks the isometric perspective you're constantly bumping into corners or door frames and this horrible noise is constantly playing again I have no idea why anyone would want to include this although given there's virtually no music and maybe four sound effects in total it's possible this was done just so the game wasn't completely silent anyway as you progress through the game the stages do have their own little quirks like a sort of attempt at stealth in the naval base and a maze structure in the submarine but really there's nothing here that hadn't been done better years before much like in the adventure game everything concludes on Atlantis but rather confusingly considering the entire point of the myth is that it's sunk below the waves here it's just a random Island and even has living natives as there's no text we never find out what any of them want or how they survived or how this has never been discovered and any chance of that is lost when Indiana Jones slot it's a bunch of orihalcon Beats into a machine in the inner sanctum and blows the island to Pieces rather hilariously the final screen of the game is a newspaper article that declares Indiana Jones has saved the world from the Nazi threat although I'm not exactly sure what level of journalistic Integrity the Byzantine Crusader is known for especially as it looks to me like he just exterminated a small island nation Jokes Aside it's obviously just not very good and considering the huge Legacy it's adventure game sibling left behind it should come as no surprise that this strange Port has been largely forgotten making absolutely zero impact with critics and selling terribly on systems that were largely already obsolete unfortunately for attention to detail they never managed to turn things around as after fate of Atlantis their next project was a deal with Atari to become one of the main Developers for their upcoming Home console the Atari Jaguar I'm sure at the time this seemed like a big break but the Jaguar ended up being a colossal failure and by 1997 attention to detail were on the verge of bankruptcy and were purchased by Kaboom Studios who themselves ended up going out of business in 2003 thankfully for LucasArts fate the land is the action games failure was something of a wake-up call and this odd strategy of releasing lots of different versions of the same game was abandoned from this point on free from the strange publishing strategies of the executives the studio moved into a second golden age that produced quite the spread of interesting Indiana Jones games foreign [Music] foreign but before we get to them we have to talk about the young Indiana Jones Chronicles in early 1991 George Lucas announced that he'd be putting together a big budget television series that would explore the early life of Indiana Jones and examine the events that made him into the character we see on film now the young Indiana Jones Chronicles is a dense subject and we could probably spend the entirety of this video talking about all the odd decisions and unique ideas that went into the production of that show so I'll try to keep things brief Lucas wanted the show to have an educational Edge and so the vast majority of the episodes involve Indie getting mixed up in some sort of major historical event again episode set in some Petersburg where he meets Leon Trotsky an episode where he serves as a translator the Treaty of Versailles and even a small mini Arc where he's serving with the Belgian Army at Simon Verdun during World War one that might sound exciting but generally speaking it's very slow paced and much more focused on dialogue and interpersonal drama with the swashbuckling action of the films rarely bubbling to the surface now despite that the show's budget was absolutely massive at almost 1.5 million dollars per episode and this was thanks to Lucas wanting to implement the grandiose production style of his movies this combination of extremely high costs and very Niche subject matter meant that despite huge initial interest from networks and audiences the show had an astronomical drop-off in viewership despite having two seasons commissioned out the door the young Indiana Jones Chronicles was canceled before it even aired all of its episodes now this has been helped in no small part by the baffling decision to air the program before Monday Night Football whose audience was very much not interested in historical drama and as the show began with a six-episode Arc that revolved around Indy as a 10 year old boy well the show was pretty much Dead on Arrival with the benefit of hindsight I actually think there's a lot to like about the young Indiana Jones Chronicles and as something of a history buff myself seeing Indie rub shoulders with Theodore Roosevelt T.E Lawrence and Franz Kafka has a certain kind of strange Appeal on top of that I genuinely think Sean Patrick Flannery does a great job of playing the young Indiana he's a man of action when it's needed but solves most of his problems with his intellect and the show really does try to paint a convincing picture of a man who grow up to be both a professor of archeology and an international tomb raiding superhero it's all on YouTube if you'd like to check it out for yourself and you really can't go wrong with any of the World War One episodes or The Treasure of the peacock's eye which plays like a mini version of Raiders of the Lost Ark but focused around Alexander the gray regardless of how the show ended up we're going to focus on the period before its first episode aired as excitement around what this series could achieve meant that of course a video game tie-in had to be produced the only problem was that in a funny reversal of Fortunes from when they were too small to be trusted with the license LucasArts were now far too big to take on such a throwaway project and so the job was outsourced to both jalico who'd handled the publishing and gray matter who would oversee development now for once this was a good choice as greymatter not only had experience with creating television licensed games but they had actually already made a good game in 1991 they had released Captain Planet and the Planeteers for the NES which adapted the environmentalist cartoon with surprising skill it not only played well but looked fantastic with well-animated cutscenes that told a proper story and really colorful detailed Sprites and backgrounds all in all it's just the solid NES game while it hadn't set the world on on fire with sales it had done enough to land them the job obtaining George Lucas's slow-paced historical drama into something that would work on a Home console now given the strange and often misguided adaptations we've seen so far this might come as something of a surprise but gray matters young Indiana Jones Chronicles is actually pretty good firstly instead of adapting any single episode or trying to replicate all of the historical discussion gray matter have just come up with their own young Indie story and it's exactly the sort of narrative that you'd expect to wrap around an action platformer everything is framed as a story being told by an old Indiana Jones which was a narrative device that the show used until for some reason George Lucas re-edited everything and cut out all of these parts essentially Indy finds himself in Mexico during the Civil War and gets mixed up with Pancho Villa trying to rescue Town folk who won't Aid the Revolutionary from here the rest of the game plays out as a globetrotting adventure that sees us hunting down stolen artifacts and then enlisting in World War One where Indy takes on a series of missions to thwart the German war effort in terms of character or gaining a better understanding of why Indiana is the way he is well there's absolutely nothing of value here but it's a perfectly competent adventure story that's told with nice cutscenes and paints a picture of what's happening during the levels really the main draw is the gameplay which is pretty much as traditional as you can possibly get levels are all themed around whatever location and he finds himself in and they're made up of platforms to LEAP between an enemies to fight now in each Zone there is usually some sort of unique mechanic like how in the cave level light slowly dim and you have to find torches in order to see where you're going or how you can ride a motorbike and later pilot a plane during the Battle of Verdun that same variety is found in the weapons as while Indie starts with his trusty whip all throughout each level you can find a host of different weapons which all have various strengths and weaknesses you use everything from pistols to grenades to Sticks of dynamite and each does feel meaningfully different which might be best suited to the level and you're going to have plenty of time to do that as young Indiana Jones Chronicles is seriously hard and you're going to be replaying its levels over and over until you know them inside and out your health is structured a bit like Sir Arthur and ghosts and goblins where a single hit is enough to kill you but you can find either a hat or a gas mask which gives you an extra life although this is going to feel pretty poultry in comparison to the odds you face game is full to the brim with gotcha moments bombs suddenly fall out of the sky platforms crumble Beneath You enemies gain new abilities and despite the game only being around 20 minutes long it's going to take you far longer than that as you painstakingly memorize every single Pixel of the game's eight levels now this might not be the same for everyone but a big reason I struggled so much is that the game's controls are surprisingly deliberate when you jump you can't quickly jump again or fire your weapon as you land and this is because young Indy has to do this leg bracing animation before he can act again this tiny mechanic means you have to know exactly what you're doing at every moment in the game with all those gotcha moments and enemies that pop out of nowhere it feels virtually impossible to be its levels through just reactions and reflexes it's certainly an odd Choice considering this was a video game tie-in for a television show that was looking to educate people about important historical events but there's nothing inherently wrong as long as you know what you're getting yourself into now sadly even though gray Mata had managed to craft a great looking and somewhat interesting game albeit one that is brutally hard it wasn't enough to break Indiana Jones Home console curse as by the time young Indiana Jones Chronicles was ready to release the TV show had already been canceled and any potential interest in this spin-off was long gone that might not have been an issue had it released in the midst of the NES boom but it came out in January 1993. almost two years after the SNES had launched even if it looked great by 8-bit standards it was up against Super Mario World and Super Castlevania 4 and frankly it didn't standard chance as for gray matter well they would continue to work on licensed properties over the next decade taking on projects like Ren and Stimpy the Terminator and James Bond before finally diving into the world of original IPS in 1996 they released the cult classic PlayStation Oddity Perfect Weapon which tried to capitalize on two major mid-90s Trends by combining the gameplay of Tekken with the level design of Resident Evil it's a funny little game in hindsight but it failed to gain any traction when they followed this up with the notoriously bad The Crow City of Angels in 1997. it was one failure too many and gray matter went out of business ironically young Indiana Jones Chronicles would end up being one of their better games but as it was attached to a spin-off nobody was interested in and released on a console that was already outdated the skill in the world of NES Platformers has sadly been forgotten by time [Music] thank you now young Indiana Jones wasn't the only young Indiana Jones tie-in game it's just like when the movies were releasing LucasArts wanted to make sure that they hit every major platform by 1992 Nintendo's Stranglehold over the Home console Market had come to an end in America and Europe and there was a new top dog called Sega an advanced 16-bit Graphics a host of popular arcade ports and a focus on the older teenage Market Sega had swept aside the NES outside of Japan and for every self-respecting license holder the Mega Drive was the place to be now while it's been largely remembered for Sonic the Hedgehog and Mortal Kombat titles like Disney's Aladdin and world of Illusion Marvel's Maximum Carnage and X-Men and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker were all major releases on the platform and this Reliance on outside IP was a core part of Sega of America's strategy so with this in mind you might presume that a young Indiana Jones Mega Drive game would be a project of high priority but alas what we've ended up with is something very subpar and absolutely not at the level that you'd expect from a Sega licensed game the first red flag is that instead of the license being given to a reputable Mega Drive developer like virgin interactive or Blue Sky Studios it was developed by Brian a rice Incorporated they've been set up in 1982 by surprise surprise Brian a rice and it started out developing religious education games for the Apple II and commodore 64. producing captivating titles like Israel's Golden Years early Heroes of the Bible and the boy Jesus amazingly this was profitable enough for them to expand into the world of commissioned ports and over the next decade they worked on a home computer conversions of games like space Harrier home alone and iron Helix none of these ports ever came close to matching The Originals which is why I'm not really sure what caused LucasArts to pick them for this job given the excitement around young Indiana Jones before it hit television screens and the mega drive's license friendly audience this was the perfect opportunity to swing for the fences but once again it seems that penny pinching had taken priority first let's deal with the name because instruments of chaos sounds more like a fancy RPG than a globetrotting historical Adventure while its influence by the way certain episodes of young Indiana Jones Chronicles were given pulp movie style titles like the Phantom train of Doom or masks of evil here the instruments refer to new technologies that the German Empire are trying to get hold of to turn the tides of World War One and it's up to Young Indie to travel the world putting a stop to their plans taken in that context instruments of chaos is actually pretty on brand now that's not to say it works from a marketing perspective clearly whoever put together the cover thought something similar as the title is dwarfed by text that reads starring young Indiana Jones I can't really blame them for wanting to make it obvious what this game is actually about so as I said the game involves traveling to different locations across the world and trying to prevent new weapons of war from falling into German hands takes the form of an action platformer with some light puzzle elements and while that might sound hard to get wrong instruments of chaos does a pretty good job of messing it up Indie both moves too quickly and too slowly with both his walking and running pace feeling unsuited for the environments you Traverse and this means it's very hard to avoid bumping into enemies which triggers a truly ridiculous knockback in other games that use this mechanic like Castlevania or ghosts and goblins you gain a few frames of invincibility which helps you recover but here there is no such Grace the slightest bump from a snake or bird will send you bouncing around the screen like crazy and you can even get trapped on top of enemies Poe going up and down until you're given the sweet release of death with such horrific consequences for taking damage you're encouraged to play very slowly and to also try and eliminate every enemy as they appear but this only highlights how inadequate young Indiana is in combat you start each level with a handful of bullets some grenades and your trusty whip but all three feel woefully underpowered and in the face of infinitely respawning enemies which each take multiple hits to kill it turns the game into a complete slog as grenades are often required to destroy objectives you can't really use them in normal combat and as your gun is quite hard to aim other than directly forwards you'll be using your whip through most of the playthrough and this is where the largest issue is found instead of having an attack animation the whip is built around a sort of pseudo-realistic swinging concept where in order to whip in a specific Direction you have to pull it back and then flick it forwards that probably doesn't sound too hard but in the heat of a battle when you're being assaulted from every direction and bouncing all over the screen it's laughably clunky and the hit detection is so poor that you'll often have no idea what you're doing wrong now thankfully on the main menu you can crank the difficulty right down and increase how many continues you have but this doesn't fix any of the core mechanics and instead simply means you'll have enough Health to brute force your way to the end of each level now on top of these gameplay problems there's also some very funky level design and while each to the locations that Indie visits are varied and distinct it's not always for good reason you see in India the first level is this linear combat Gauntlet through a market and then it segues into a puzzle room where you have to stand on an elephant and Hit Switches before it changes into an obstacle course and caps off the entire sequence with a big boss fight with the controls and mechanics it's not exactly good but it's a diverse spread of ideas it's clearly had some thought put into it now by comparison let's look at Tibet the first level is literally just jumping across a set of platforms that's Then followed with this odd level where you have to LEAP up to the top of the mountain then afterwards comes a tower or you just climb a bunch of floors with your whip and that's it that's the entire Zone where India maybe takes half an hour Tibet is over in less than five minutes and it really just feels like Brian a rice Incorporated weren't completely okay with the sort of flow and action platform that is supposed to have my own playthrough came to an end in Egypt where after an astoundingly annoying level where a sandstorm blows you backwards you end up inside of a pyramid maze level it's absolutely enormous compared to every other stage with what feels like 30 identical flaws that you have to pick your way through climbing disappearing platforms dodging obstacles and generally just running around like a lost sheep until the time expires after two hours and eight failed attempts I simply gave up and decided to watch the conclusion on YouTube which was equally as perplexing as the rest of the game the very last level takes place aboard A zeppelin in the heart of the German Empire but somehow despite the entire game revolving around us destroying their advanced technology the ship is still equipped with all of the weapons from each Zone anyway with the Zeppelin destroyed young India Center telegram congratulating him on winning the first world war and that's it the game Cuts over to the credits and we get to see the names of the poor souls who produced this mess now along with being the last young Indiana Jones game instruments of chaos was also the final outing for Brian a rice Incorporated who closed their doors not long after its release having failed to make much of an impact on the industry unfortunately the same can probably be said of the young Indiana Jones franchise in general as it's really left behind very little pop culture capital and honestly feels like quite a missed opportunity while the TV show had its problems drawing people into its slow-paced historically minded drama the video game tie-ins were a real chance to take the character into new places and through a combination of weird console choices or terrible Studio choices LucasArts somehow managed to drop the ball in a world where everyone from Mickey Mouse to Spider-Man and RoboCop had great video games it was absurd that Indiana Jones one of the biggest movie franchises of the 1980s still didn't have a big Home console hit luckily for LucasArts that run of poor Home console games would finally come to an end in late 1994 although it had little to do with their own work and everything to do with a small team of German developers that was building quite the reputation [Music] foreign so let's step away from Indiana Jones for a second and turn our attention to Cologne in Germany where a ragtag group of computer science students had formed a small video game company called Factor five with aspirations of taking on the world under the leadership of director Julian eggabrecht they had done just that and within a few years of forming in 1988 the company had grown into a sizable developer thanks to the international success of their turrican series originally it had been developed for the Amiga but its unique take on fast-paced Sci-Fi Action platforming proved to be popular enough for a Spate of sequels by the time Factor 5 had ported it to the Super Nintendo in 1993 turrican was a major franchise and they were a studio in high demand this success led to a lot of interest from Big Publishers including LucasArts and after flying out to California to meet face to face eggabrecht and lucasart's head of product Kalani streicher agreed a deal for the German to produce a game based on one of the company's licenses now as much as LucasArts were Keen to employ such a talented and up-and-coming Studio their history of publishing Home console games was not exactly Stellar so they handed oversight of the project over to JVC another International publisher who they had a strong relationship with you see JBC had overseen the Super Star Wars Trilogy which had been developed by Utah base Studio sculptured software the three games had been big hits combining devilishly challenging action platforming with a real life the Aesthetics of the movies and they'd given LucasArts a foothold in the 16-bit Home console Market the only problem was that just after the release of Return of the Jedi sculptured software had been purchased by a claim and were no longer free to take on outside projects this meant that JVC and LucasArts needed another development studio with a strong record in action platforming which was the motivation for that meeting between streicher and the idea was simple Factor 5 would take the proven formula of Super Star Wars and replicate it with Indiana Jones now this might conjure images of a pale imitation but the game that emerged from this partnership Indiana Jones's greatest Adventures would Mark a turning point not only for the subject of this retrospective but for LucasArts in general catapulting the company into the mainstream and delivering that long sought after action platforming classic so before I start gushing about what a fantastic job Factor 5 did let's get the bad stuff out of the way first the game is set up as a retelling of the Indiana Jones Trilogy taking us from the Peruvian jungles at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark through the Palaces and minds of Temple of Doom and finally ending up in the domain of the Grail Knight in the Last Crusade it's as straight of an adaptation as is possible to do and therein lies it's one weakness by 1994 we'd already seen the series potential for original storytelling and given fate of Atlantis received a special edition that very same year the lack of narrative ambition from all involved stands out like a sore thumb it ends up in that strange place that many licensed games find themselves as without prior knowledge of the stories there's almost no way to properly understand what's happening characters like Marcus Marion Short Round and Elsa are never given proper introductions and while it's clear that India is hunting for the Holy Grail or the Sankara Stones the focus is very much not on storyteller thing now fortunately for Factor 5 this is only a very minor criticism as Indiana Jones's greatest Adventures excels in almost every other area and can easily hang with the very best action Platformers of the 16-bit era for starters it looks absolutely incredible almost every Sprite is highly detailed animations are very fluid and levels are bursting with vibrant colors that flow over one another on complex multi-layered backgrounds while super turrican had been widely praised for its visuals the involvement of JVC who are much more experienced when it came to managing SNES projects clearly had a big impact and it's led to a game that looks as good as anything from Capcom Konami or even Nintendo themselves take the Cairo level in Raiders of the Lost Ark the level has a huge amount of vertical space and as you climb upwards the camera shifts to reveal a cloud-marked blue sky and a sprawling cityscape that Scrolls by as you leap between rooftops now what's cool is that if you head down onto street level the foreground fills with the outline of a crowd of people and it gives the impression of Indy fighting his way through a bustling Marketplace that both of these environments are found in the very same level Miss seconds apart is a testament to how confident both companies felt with the hardware and license and it's full of little touches which Elevate The Experience Beyond a simple action platformer obviously none of this was possible on the NES or the Commodore 64 which does make comparisons to past games a little unfair but it's hard to not think of this as the first Indiana Jones Home console game that really captures the atmosphere of exotic globetrotting doesn't ask you to fill in the gaps with your imagination now once again the game sound design plays a big role in doing that successfully and along with some wonderful Super Nintendo Renditions of John Williams scores we get a small amount of digitized voice acting at the start of each level you'll hear Harrison Ford's gravelly voice Proclaim let's go and all throughout the play A3 there are sprinklings of famous lines from the films like Henry senior calling Indy Junior when you find him or mola Ram appealing to Carly during their boss fight that probably won't seem that impressive considering full voice acting is now industry standard but on the tiny carts of the Super Nintendo this was seriously impressive stuff and really helps capture the essence of the movies now given that greatest Adventures released in 1994 a whole five years after the last Indiana Jones movie it was always going to have to rely on more than just imitation to get people interested and here Factor 5 have hit another home run on the surface it's very similar to the kind of Platformers we've already seen with jumping whipping and punching bombing the basis of the gameplay but here everything is designed with just a little more Flair let's start with the jump which is pretty much your primary verb and the mechanic that most of the gameplay revolves around not only is it extremely responsive allowing you to chain jumps really easily but you have a lot of control while in the air both of these tandemy levels can house complex platforming sequences as the player always has the tools to conquer them same goes for the combat which is surprisingly not just a case of mashing attack Indie starts each level with just his fists which are short range and very weak but you can quickly get hold of both a whip and a pistol which add a unique offensive options the whip has clearly been influenced by konami's Castlevania and it functions in much the same way adding range and some more power but at the cost of maneuverability as the attack has a multi-frame animation you have to be thoughtful about when and how you use it as mashing the attack button will leave you open more than it clears the way now the pistol offers a way around this as it gives you a long range weapon that allows you to pick enemies off from a safe distance but it comes with some major drawbacks not only is the pistol usually hidden away in an optional corner of each level but it's substantially weaker allowing you to put yourself out of danger but not invalidating the whip which Remains the strongest offensive weapon this Dynamic of player choice is made all the more interesting because there's a third weapon the grenade which comes with its own set of decisions to make these clear the screen of all enemies but can also do massive damage to the game's bosses clearing them in a matter of seconds if you have enough hoarded away this creates a constant tug of war between using the bombs to clear out challenging sequences or having a harder time with the boss fight and the way these weapons interact really makes exploration and experimentation rewarding which is something you don't always see in such a straight laced action platformer this base of extremely well-designed fundamentals and beautiful Aesthetics would probably be enough to make greatest Adventures a classic in its own right but where things get really interesting is in the set piece sequences that factor 5 used to mix up the gameplay now this is something that's become very common think of the obligatory turret section or car chase sequence that seem to pop up in every modern action game but in cartridge based 2D experiences well it was almost unheard that was with good reason storage space was limited so developers couldn't just include every single idea they had and thanks to the prevalence of arcade style design most Studios took a single idea and tried to execute it as well as they could this just makes greatest adventures all the more impressive because it is full to the brim with creative moments of the Twist and transform the action platform in gameplay and sometimes even step away from it completely early on during Raiders of the Lost Arc we get our first taste of this after an introductory level full of jumping whipping and avoiding obstacles we get a 16-bit rendition of the iconic Boulder trap now running away from something on screen is hardly that much of a mix-up but this is just the tip of the iceberg and each film gets progressively more ambitious with these little moments before long we're the one doing the chasing as Indie has to race after a wagon in the Cairo Market dodging attacks and Blasting the rider before leaping aboard and getting into a horseback fist fight later on there's a race to get to the top of Marion's Pub before it burns down fight against a Nazi officer while the tank you're on hurtles towards a Ravine and a level set in Shanghai where you have to avoid Chinese gangsters that appear in the foreground and try to gun you down there's even a stage that has virtually no combat the maharaja's palace near the beginning of Temple of Doom which instead asks you to search for Clues move statues and try to find your way out of this opulent maze it's absurd how much variety has been crammed onto a single cartridge but the cherry on top is Factor 5's use of mode 7 which comes up three times each in a distinct and creative way in Temple of Doom we slide down a mountain on a rubber dinghy weaving between trees and leaping over trenches and then later on we find ourselves in a mine car aiming a gun to shoot thuggy soldiers off the tracks and hitting switches to avoid falling off ourselves the only black mark is that the sequence in the Last Crusade a biplane level that replicates Indian Henry's escape from the Zeppelin is sadly difficult instead of Simply making it to the end of the area you have to shoot down 20 luftwaffe planes and as you can only fire directly ahead it's extremely hard to do this without taking damage yourself and you only need to be shot a couple of times before you come crashing down in a game over and this brings me on to the final point I want to make which is that for all these interesting design choices Indiana Jones's greatest Adventures is not going to be for everyone and that is because of its rather extreme difficulty even on the normal setting getting to the end of the game is a brutal task that asks for a huge amount of patience and repetition Indy dies in just a few hits from almost every single enemy and in turn they have huge Health pools often requiring four or five whip hits or ten pistol shots to go down this is why hoarding the grenades is so important because without them the boss fights can feel virtually impossible turning the Cinematic showdowns with bellock mola RAM and Donovan into jewels that would feel more at home in Castlevania or Contra on top of this some of the platforming design can get very punishing often taking place above instant death pits but also penalizing players if they take their time there's this one specific level at the end of Castle bronwald that has you swinging from window to window like Spider-Man and I don't want to admit how many attempts it took me if you go too quickly you'll overshoot your jumps but if you go too slowly the windows burst open and become impassable which means it's either Perfection or it's another attempt now this isn't exactly a bad thing and actually the ridiculous level of challenge makes beating the game a deeply satisfying experience but it's once again an odd Choice considering the game's prospective audience the movies had been released to mainstream success and with the video game industry growing every single year you'd imagine that an Indiana Jones game would be created to appeal to a broader Market not necessarily a casual experience but potentially pitched below the eye watering challenge that the greatest Adventures ends up at regardless of that minor gripe Indiana Jones's greatest Adventures is still a triumphant experience an extraordinarily underrated in the world of 16-bit action Platformers it's easily as good looking as anything else on the platform and between the huge Variety in levels and their creativity with which they're executed Factor 5 not only delivered the Home console Indiana Jones game The Players had always wanted but confirmed themselves as one of the Premier developers in the Western World while reviews were pretty positive and the game sold well the biggest reaction came from LucasArts themselves who were extremely impressed with the work that factor 5 had done especially given the circumstances surrounding the star of the project with Home console video games becoming increasingly popular and the company beginning to transition into more traditional genres like first-person shooters and 3D action games it was felt that factor 5 could bring something to the table that lucasart's more quirky Adventure game developers couldn't quite deliver shortly after the release of Indiana Jones's greatest Adventures another deal was struck between the two companies and this time it would tie them together in a much more permanent way in 1995 Factor 5 opened an American Branch based out of the LucasArts San Rafa fail office Molly would still be an independent company the idea was that they would work closely with the publisher in order to produce more high quality licensed games this would lead to the release of Star Wars Rogue Squadron third person arcade flight game that put players into the cockpit of an X-Ring fighter and was another smash here reviews were extremely positive with a raft of Award nominations and in 1998 the game was only outsold by Nintendo's legendary Ocarina of Time Factor 5 were clearly the real deal and while their future was largely defined by the success of Rogue Squadron the role that Indiana Jones Greatest Adventures played in their meteoric rise really can't be underestimated thank you [Music] so by this point you're probably wondering what happened to Hal barwood and the team which created Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis surely they hadn't disappeared into the background after a single successful game well barwood had actually been hard at work although not quite on the project that you might expect you see after learning how to program while working on his daily game barwood had really caught the video game design bug and wanted to create something wholly different to the Cinematic Adventure that put him on the map he'd always enjoyed the abstract Simplicity of games like chess and Stratego so in the aftermath of Faye of Atlantis he set about working out how he could marry the potential of video games with the accessible replayability of these kinds of board games eventually he settled on an interesting idea he would create a very basic game that could be broken up into design blocks and then by using a primitive algorithm these blocks could be rearranged into infinite possibilities creating a structured game that gave the player a fresh experience every time they turned it on Bard called it tools of the tingus trade and it was originally supposed to be a post-apocalyptic story about human survival and ancient lost technology internally Lucas Arts devs loved the project but the marketing team weren't so hot on it not only was it an unknown setting but the very concept was hard to Market it wasn't exactly a full price game like fate of Atlantis but it also wasn't quite freeware like Solitaire or Minesweeper eventually the conundrum became too much and barwood was simply told to rework tools of the Tinkers trade into an Indiana Jones game and the Hope was that this recognizable license would offer some security when it went out to Market so when Indiana Jones desktop Adventures finally arrived on U.S shelves in late 1996 it was a bit of an oddity and to make sure consumers were aware that this was not a typical video game LucasArts packaged its single floppy disk in a rather unappealing thin paper folder now unfortunately this plan did not work and critics absolutely shredded desktop Adventures for what they perceived as dated Graphics undercooked gameplay and an astoundingly short length now the problem is clearly one of expectations but I would never intended this to compete with the likes of Tomb Raider Resident Evil and Quake and those kind of comparisons are always going to be unflattering so thanks to this journalistic oversight it falls to us to judge it for what it actually is which is effectively a 90s PC version of a casual time sync game desktop Adventures is a simple experience in every sense it's controlled entirely with a mouse has very easy to understand mechanics cartoony bold graphics and takes place inside of a small desktop window that might sound odd but bar would thought of it as something that you played for a few minutes here and there probably at work in between assignments or on your lunch break and when taken within that context the windowed presentation makes quite a lot of sense as for the gameplay well it works something like the Game Boy or SNES Zelda games an action adventure that uses a top-down perspective and has you fighting enemies using items and completing Quests for NPCs never becomes anything more complex than using Dynamite to blow up some rocks or handing over a necklace in order to get a key you need but that's not to say it hasn't been thoughtfully designed that algorithm which Barr would came up with is the real star of the show and in many ways it's very ahead of its time you see while the game is built around 15 unique Adventures how those Adventures work and what the well world looks like is always completely different with the steps you take to finish your quest the enemies you encounter the puzzles you solve and the items you find all being drawn from a large pool of options now the packaging boasts billions of possibilities and while that isn't exactly true it's very impressive for 1996 which was a world without masses of procedural generation and almost nothing attempting to use it in this sort of way to return to those initial reviews of course this game doesn't hold up to the big PC releases of the day but if you imagine yourself in your cubicle counting down 30 minutes to the end of the day sneakily playing a little windowed game behind your boss's back well it's actually pretty great at what it's trying to be the problem is that both critics and consumers didn't really understand this and as Indiana Jones's desktop Adventures predates the Casual gaming Market Boom by almost 20 years it's unsurprising that it sold absolutely awfully now impressively Bard really believed in the concept and managed to convince the LucasArts directors to give him another shot this time with the Star Wars license this resulted in 1997's Star Wars Yoda stories which improved the engine and algorithm and added in some more gameplay Concepts just like desktop Adventures reviews were absolutely scathing but this time people were tempted in by the popularity of the license and Yoda stories ended up selling quite a respectable amount clearly barwood had become a forward-thinking and creative developer on top of his talents as a scriptwriter and with the success of Yoda stories it was time for him to step back into the world of traditional video games [Music] thank you before we talk about barwood's next project there's a little stepping stone that we need to land on before our story goes any further clearly given the success of Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis LucasArts wasn't going to let one of their key designers waste his time making infinitely replayable casual games and so it'll be no surprise to learn that barwood had also been working on a PC Adventure game follow-up this was going to be called Indiana Jones and the iron Phoenix and it would be set after World War II and involve a plot by a group of neo-nazis who are trying to revive Hitler with the use of the fabled Philosopher's Stone development was coming along nicely until the team received some terrible news publishing laws in Germany meant that any video game that dealt with a Neo-Nazi Revival would almost certainly be prevented from releasing and as Germany was the single biggest Market the PC adventure games iron Phoenix was dead in the water with the game far too progressed to start over lucasart simply canceled the project while the story was eventually given to Dark Horse who turned it into a successful comic series barwood and his team were left in the cold now while this was extremely disappointing it prompted some soul searching did they really want to be working on games that relied entirely on a single Market was the PC Adventure game genre potentially even going out of fashion in recent years the core LucasArts team had created some of the finest point and clicks ever made 1995 saw the release of Full Throttle and the dig the curse of Monkey Island came out a year later and then a year after that we got Grim Fandango which may well be the finest game in this style ever made the problem was that every single one had been outsold by the company's more traditional 3D console games like Factor fives Rogue Squadron and the third person shooter Shadows of the Empire Boward knew that this was the direction the industry was going in and thanks to the runaway success of core Design's Tomb Raider which Drew heavily on Indiana Jones for inspiration he knew that the franchise was at a real risk of being left behind now luckily others within LucasArts felt the same and the team that had developed in 1995 Five Star Wars dark Forces had been busy creating a 3D tool set that they hoped could give their future games a more Modern Edge with an engine ready to go and Tomb Raider already proving the formula but I would ask the board to allow him to make a game that focused on Jones action in 3D and unsurprisingly it was an idea that they were more than happy to sign off on aided by 3D engine expert Paul LeFevre a small team is assembled and with barwood acting as director designer and writer work began on Indy's first three-dimensional Adventure in May 1999 the project was given a title Indiana Jones and the infernal machine and it would release for Windows 95 and 98 later that year now while development had gone smoothly a strange situation had blossomed inside of LucasArts thanks to their experience with the platform Factor 5 had been tasked with porting the game to the Nintendo 64 but amazingly had been given an entire year to do this it meant that when the windows version was released barwood and his crew joined their German colleagues and simply continued working which meant that the N64 release ended up being substantially different it had a totally new control scheme redesigned levels improved music and the team even created a dynamic lighting system now given Factor 5 success full past you'd presume this would have guaranteed a big commercial hit but for some reason lucasart signed an exclusivity deal with Blockbuster this meant that infernal machine 64 would only release in North America and to make matters even worse 99 of the stock was held back for rentals with copies only available for purchase in very few locations this utterly baffling publishing decision meant that despite the game literally being conceived to capitalize on the 3D console boom infernal machine totally missed the bow and as a consequence has become largely forgotten despite it being a huge moment in the history of the franchise well today we're going to uncover its secrets and while you might not exactly call it a Hidden Gem it's certainly a hidden curiosity and well worth uncovering from its Dusty too Indiana Jones and the infernal machine starts off relatively inauspiciously with Dr Jones conducting a dig in the canyonland national park and quietly getting on with exploring the area and looking for lost treasures this Serenity is broken by the arrival of Sophia hapgood who borrowed felt was too good of a character to leave behind in fate of Atlantis and with her comes the central conceit of Indy's 3D Adventure hapgood is left behind her past as a psychic Atlantean researcher and is now working for the CIA as they wager Shadow war with the Soviet Union battling over ancient artifacts and lost technology obviously India isn't all that interested in the political type of War but this changes when Sophia lets him in on her latest Mission American intelligence has discovered that a Soviet physicist by the name of Dr vlodnikov has been conducting digs in the Kingdom of Iraq supposedly hunting for the Tower of Babel fearful of what he might discover the CIA sent Sophia to hire Indy and in tree by the promise of exploring ancient Babylonian ruins our hero accepts the job in Iraq Indy sneaks into the Soviet dig site and inside he overhears balodnikov discussing their plans the Soviet scientist has developed a theory that the Tower of Babel had been built by King Nebuchadnezzar in order to summon a being from another dimension that the Babylonians worshiped as the god Marduk this Tower was the titular infernal machine but after seeing the horrors that it brought forth the people rose up and tore it down all the remains of the Iraqi ruins that the Soviets now occupy and a faint rumor of four machine parts hidden by marduk's disciples they each form a key to reactivating the dreaded machine now the rest of the games built around this hunt for the four machine parts with Indy's Journey taking him to 16 exotic locations like the snowy mountains of Kazakhstan the Lush jungles of Guatemala an active Filipino volcano and everywhere in between all while fighting against alotnikov and his Battalion of communist foot soldiers as far as the setup goes I think it's pretty damn strong not only do we have a hefty amount of voice acted cutscenes which thankfully see The Return of the voice actors from fate of Atlantis but it's a story that feels at home within the Canon of the series barwood Once Again Nails the combination of historical action and fantasy mythology and his slightly older and slightly more battle-hardened version of Indie seems less phased by the crazy discoveries he makes which makes a lot of sense given the events of the movies now as for the gameplay it's pretty hard to avoid comparisons Decor designs Tomb Raider while I wouldn't exactly say it's a rip-off it's clear that barwood and his team were deeply influenced by the level design gameplay and structure of Lara croft's PS1 Adventures as we've already discussed it was these games that had prompted barwood to push for a 3D Indiana Jones but rather than being fueled by jealousy he found them to be a source of inspiration and is said in multiple interviews that Tomb Raider 1 is among his favorite games well it really shows an infernal machine with every level consisting of a familiar mixture of 3D platforming geometry based puzzles and a hefty dose of third person Gunplay for any other video game this would be pretty Brazen copycat Behavior but there's something about the Indiana Jones aesthetic and narrative the deftly sidesteps this issue after all what else could a 3D Jones game be if not exploring crumbling passageways pushing switches to deactivate traps and trading bullets with a totalitarian Army instead of focusing on these similarities we're instead going to look at how infernal machine sets itself apart as it actually does quite a bit to stand out from the tomb raiding crowd the first is the inventory system which is how you manage all of your weapons and puzzle items you see throughout the game Indy builds up quite an arsenal of guns and while he can use his fists and whip they're very weak in comparison to the submachine guns rifles Bazookas and shotguns that you can scan Savage from dead Soviets as only your trusty revolver has infinite ammo you have to balance quickly dispatching enemies with conserving Firepower and as far as 5th generation third person shooters go it's all perfectly serviceable nowhere things get interesting is how the rest of the items work as on top of weapons and ammunition you can find a host of healing and puzzle items that you also need to manage during your adventure that might not sound like much but it adds in a level of resource management that isn't usually present in 3D action Platformers and when you take damage or get into a fight you do have to think about what items you're going to use now this was clearly a conscious design decision as in between each level you'll visit Indiana's Trading Post which is a sort of abstract non-canon shop where you can purchase items using the money that you find in levels again it's hardly groundbreaking stuff but it all helps create a more thoughtful atmosphere where you're encouraged to explore every crevice of each level in order to find Rewards that feel genuinely meaningful this system is the basis of the second way in which Infernal machine stands apart from its contemporaries as in order to house all these optional items and puzzles and platforming sections and secrets the levels are absolutely gargantuan let me illustrate this by showing you the third level the tianshan river where India is hunting for a Buddhist temple that might contain one of the machine pieces you start off in a snowy Valley and have to do some platforming in order to make your way up to a Soviet base where you then thrust into a firefight with the guards once they're dead you have to head inside the building and crawl through vents in order to find a raft and make your way down a river which functions a little like an obstacle course back on dry land you then have to make your way up to a locked gate that requires four ancient candles in order to open to find them you have to head down the other side of the mountain fighting more Soviets along the way and then use the raft to explore a river maze that has four separate paths which each lead to a uni puzzle that houses one of the candles some are just working out the correct spot to LEAP to your prize but others are lengthy sequences of puzzle solving and platforming and by the time you've gotten all of the candles and returned to the gate the level will have taken well in excess of an hour to finish remember this is just the third level in the game and Tian Shen isn't even one of the larger zones later levels like the Palawan Lagoon Olmec Valley and the Miro pyramids can easily take two or three hours to complete with each containing many sections that would be levels in their own right in most other fifth generation games now this raw ambition is very admirable but it comes with a major downside and that is that with so much packed onto the cartridge infernal machine ends up delivering a wild collection of levels that really vary in quality when the focus is tight the gameplay can be really great there's a fantastic level in the second half set on a Soviet frigger and it starts out with Jones in the break having to break out and sneak around without any of his equipment once you do recover it the pace then shifts and it becomes an all-out fire fight as you race around the ship looking for items to unlock the different decks and fix up a Lifeboat so you can escape similarly there's a short level called Jeep track which funnily enough is based entirely around driving a Jeep and it is hilariously Bonkers you're blasting over ramps running down Soviets and even donuting down into a pit like some sort of crazed 1950s rally driver and everything ends with a Jeep on Jeep duel as you hunt for the level exit the problem is in the more traditional platforming and puzzle solving levels where thanks to their complexity they can often become quite a slog to play through the Shambhala Monastery is the worst example and is guilty of some absurdly obtuse design the goal is to summon the guardian of the monastery and in order to do that you have to ring a large Bell by activating a golden statue air the shuffles along a track and Strikes the instrument sounds simple enough well it's very much not first you have to climb down into the bowels of the monastery and complete a sequence of instant death jumps in order to reactivate the tower's Machinery then it's back up the instant death platforms where you have to solve a puzzle that has you pulling levers in one Tower running over to the other and then pulling a different lever at the exact moment that the clock hands on the floor hit the hour mark which finally activates the statue now none of this is signposted well and for me it resulted in a huge amount of aimless wandering and pressing switches until I ended up ringing the bell by sheer luck that desire to create levels with real depth and scale to them is nothing to sneer and when it works it creates some very memorable gameplay but the problem is that in the moments when it's not working infernal machine can be pretty unpleasant now that might sound like a big downside but unfortunately it isn't the worst thing about infernal machine it is a very janky game and suffers not only from some wonky controls but really loose grip on the hardware considering how fundamental platforming is to The Infernal machine formula jumping and climbing feel very un debate and it's clear from the first level that neither barwood nor Factor 5 really knew what they were doing much like in Tomb Raider you have to combine sequences of large forward leaps and vertical ledge grabbing but unlike Lara Croft Indy has to be dead straight to grab hold of anything and this results in a ludicrous amount of deaths from being just slightly off Target similarly that massive forward jump can be really unwieldy and while it's perfectly workable when you have lots of time and space if you're under pressure in tight quarters it feels like the game wasn't even tested now unfortunately there's little Saving Grace for the game's glitches which are particularly surprising considering Factor 5 was a very experienced studio with a history of technological Wizardry items and enemies constantly clip out of bounds assets pop in and loading issues arrive my game completely froze multiple times which is a killer considering how much progress this can cause you to lose in the game's massive levels the only theory for this instability that seems to hold any weight is that infernal machine made extensive use of the Nintendo 64 memory expansion pack and potentially some sort of error in the code might be causing memory leaks and this could be the source of the game's performance woes now if I'm being totally honest I could absolutely understand all of these issues being far too much for someone to get past and if we're trying to be objective there are certainly other games out there that do similar things with much more polish but the thing is there's just something Charming about infernal machine something captivating about playing it that goes be Beyond traditional measures of quality it's got memorable and funny characters the surprisingly interesting story and a level of ambition that's very hard to turn your nose up at I mean for God's sake there's a level that is entirely based around driving a mine car and while the game can barely handle what's being asked of it it's impossible to hate a janky game that's been made out of love rather than laziness now that might be an appropriate place to leave our review but we can't do that without talking about infernal machines final few levels once Jones recovers the final infernal machine part he ends up cornered between velodnik and habgood's employer the CIA agent Simon Turner and both parties demand that he hands over the keys to the power of Marduk clearly disturbed by their lack of respect for this ancient power Jones is conflicted but he ends up choosing Turner and habgood thanks to his history with the Soviets incredibly volodnik isn't all that concerned as he reveals that he's come to believe Marduk would likely destroy whoever awakens him in Revenge for the destruction of his Tower and with that Revelation Indy sets off to try and stop Turner and save hapgood this leads to a lengthy level inside of the Babylonian infernal machine that culminates with Turner managing to open a cross-dimensional portal and pushing Sophia in to act as a test subject obviously India isn't going to let that fly and he hunts down the rogue agent and puts a stop to the is nonsense now this is where things get really wacky as while Indie tries to reverse the portal and save hapgood he accidentally activates the machine and ends up falling through the gate into marduk's realm what follows is a level called the aetherium and it's one of the most kaleidoscopic fever dream style levels I've ever experienced in any 3D Adventure game let alone in an Indiana Jones title instead of platforming between crumbling Ledges we're swimming through tunnels of pure energy and instead of battling the forces of the Soviet Union Indy finds himself under attack by a host of inhuman monsters but the game previously had its feet firmly planted on the ground it concludes in the most abstract way imaginable with Indie using a device called The Tool from the beyond in order to open portals and travel between Dimensions the only thing that Mars this insane sequence is that in the PC version one of these portals would take you into the world of the curse of Monkey Island Within Indie assuming the guys of guybrush 3 wood and wandering around the barbershop It's a Wonderful Easter egg and it's almost criminal that it was cut from the Nintendo 64 version So eventually you come face to face with the demon god himself and in a move that I'm sure nobody would have predicted at the start of this review you bring him down by blasting the monster with energy leaking out of reality bending portals and then lashing him to death with your bullwhip after it's been supercharged with mystical demon energy it's completely unhinged and while it has almost nothing in common with the light historical fantasy of Spielberg and Lucas's Blockbusters I would be lying if I said it wasn't utterly captivating for all of infernal machines many and numerous faults this rainbow of inter-dimensional nonsense is one of the best moments in Indy's video game career and it's absolutely worth experiencing as for the game's Legacy well critics were pretty mixed on both versions with an average score of around a six or seven out of 10 depending on the outlet sales on PC were pretty respectable but that console deal with Blockbuster really hampered its wider reputation and ultimately infernal machine has ended up as something of a hidden curio it's not quite good enough to Warrant nostalgic attention but it's also not quite bad enough that it would develop any kind of infamy thankfully the PC version is available on gog.com and while it's certainly inferior to the upgraded Nintendo 64 version I'm simply happy that people are still able to play barwood's take on interdimensional Cold War era maximalist tomb raiding even if the adventure doesn't always run smooth all right [Music] now while there were substantial differences between the PC and Nintendo 64 versions of Indiana Jones and the Inferno machine these are nothing compared to the gulf between those games and the obligatory portable d-make over the course of the 1990s portable gaming had exploded in popularity largely driven by Nintendo's Game Boy which was reasonably priced had a great battery life and sported a huge catalog of quality games a quickly outsold virtually every Home console and thanks to a young install base that wasn't particularly fussy the portable Market became a gold mine for Publishers looking to turn a quick Buck by 1998 the original gray brick had been replaced with the Game Boy Color and its more advanced Hardware opened up the possibility for convincing console D makes a trend which saw popular games reworked to function in battery-powered 8-bit now that might sound cynical but this strategy produced some genuinely interesting games some companies poured real effort into their DMX but titles like Mario Tennis Metal Gear Solid and Harvest Moon all matching up well to their console counterpart even when it didn't exactly work these dmakes are often worth exploring for just how interesting they can be take rare's Perfect Dark for example a game that isn't remotely good but has impressive pseudo 3D graphics and fully voiced cut scenes or die Katana the ill-fated Nintendo 64 shooter which John Romero insisted be reimagined as a portable zelda-like Adventure game game boy colored d-makes are a treasure Trove of confusing Oddities and hidden gems so what's the story with Indy's own handheld glow down well its roots are unsurprisingly found in the Star Wars franchise as in the year 2000s LucasArts had struck a deal with THQ which allowed them to use the license When developing Game Boy Color games the first release out of this agreement was Star Wars Episode 1 Obi-Wan's Adventures retelling of The Phantom Menace where you control the young Jedi from an isometric perspective and battle your way through a series of linear action levels it's not exactly bad but it's also not exactly good and as this was developer hot Jen's very first release it's unsurprisingly a little rough around the edges the THQ this proved to be a bit of an issue as they'd signed a deal with the new studio for them to produce all of their Game Boy games moving forwards while this is purely speculation I think that they wanted them to sharpen up a little bit before using up more of their Star Wars contract therefore with absolutely no evidence to support this my theory is that this is what led to the creation of Indiana Jones and the infernal machine on the Game Boy Color now considering the rather ignominious circumstances that led to this project expectations that we might get one of those high quality or curiosity quenching demakes should really be tempered in fact infernal machine on the Game Boy Color is astoundingly Bland offering none of the Quirk or Charm found in its PC and console big brother it's effectively the core ideas from Obi-Wan's Adventures pasted over barwood's Babylonian epic we've got the top down perspective the light platforming and the Button Mash combat and just like before it's all a very uneven experience the most obvious issue is clear from the very first moments there's absolutely zero storytelling and the only context for anything that happens on screen is found exclusively in the game's manual although even then it's skeletal at best there's no Dr velodnick or agent Turner no musings about the nature of Marduk no explanation about the pieces of the infernal machine and Sophia have good appears just twice and has virtually no dialogue moments like the game's finale and introduction have been filed down to the point where they're almost funny with Indie greeting Sophia in his canyonland Camp before randomly attacking a Soviet base in the very next scene or Marduk dying with zero explanation as to what it even is this might seem harsh considering it's a Game Boy Color title but infernal machine released in 2001 the same year as luffia the legend returns Pokemon Crystal and Oracle of Ages and Seasons Nintendo's purple handheld was more than capable of weaving captivating tails and hot gen have very little excuse for their poultry serving now while the gameplay fares a little better it's still nowhere near substantial enough and again is missing most of what made the original interesting structurally it's quite a faithful adaptation taking you to most of the same locations and revolving entirely around that similar combination of combat puzzle solving swimming and platforming the issue is that it's just such a pale imitation and hot Jen has brought almost nothing creative to the table to make this stand out from the crowd take the combat instead of a wide arsenal of weapons that you have to carefully manage over multiple levels you just have a pistol and there isn't even an animation for firing it with hits only acknowledged by a distorted sound effect the same goes for the inventory and Shop which now only stock Health packs and Anti-Venom kits and to be honest after the first level you'll be maxed out both and never need to buy anything now Obi-Wan Adventures made up for its janky gameplay by funneling everything through tightly designed linear levels but here hotgen have opted to try and replicate the maximalist level design of the original game and it's a very poor fit for a handheld game levels like the Shambhala Temple and tomb of nub are once again structured as long series of complex puzzles that require lots of backtracking and while this is frustrating on the Nintendo 64. it's absolutely draining on the repetitive screens of the Game Boy Color the levels are just so drab to explore and for some reason there's absolutely no music whatsoever which means the soundtrack to your confused wandering will just be this repetitive crack that is supposed to be in these footsteps to be frank it's just not very good despite thq's hopes that hot gen would transform into a handheld licensed game Powerhouse the rest of the Studio's history makes Obi-Wan adventures and the infernal machine look like a relative High Point amazingly hot gen did return to the Star Wars license as their next project was the Gameboy Advance dma of Jedi power battles but somehow they managed to take this classic PlayStation and Dreamcast beat em up and transform it into a terrible isometric platformer from here they embarked on a rampage of mediocre licensed releases like Barbie pet dream Hot Wheels extreme racing and Matt Hoffman's Pro BMX for some reason all this gave them the confidence to attempt Home console development and in 2003 they released Batman dog tomorrow for GameCube and Xbox a horrific experience that's gone down in history as the worst Dark Knight game of all time astoundingly they are still in business although according to their LinkedIn page the company now only has two employees and it seems like they primarily develop games for the Apple Store and haven't made anything since 2013. now what's particularly frustrating about all this isn't the game itself but the way that LucasArts was happy to treat one of its Marquee franchises too many times Indiana Jones had been handed out to cheap and untested Studios or used as a pawn in some sort of strange publishing deal and this had resulted in a video game Legacy that had far too few genuinely good games away from the Fantastic work of Ron Gilbert Hal barwood and Factor five there was very little for fans to hold on to and as distance began to grow between the video game industry and the peak of Indy's popularity for the first time in decades it future began to look uncertain [Music] so either thanks to the mixed critical reception or the underwhelming sales LucasArts didn't immediately put out an infernal machine Sequel and instead barwood and his small team set about trying to carve out a niche of their own the next project was an original Ip RTX Red Rock which was a Sci-Fi third-person Adventure game that revolved around a war between Earth and a race of Martian demons called LEDs now while that game was set in outer space it built on a lot of the same open-ended puzzle platformer ideas from infernal machine but thanks to a challenging development process the finished product was not really very good it was released to Dreadful reviews only managing to Garner a measly 49 out of 100 on Metacritic and this led to the cancellation of both GameCube and Xbox pause and the dissolution of the development team at 63 years of age Hal barwood took this as a sign that his time in the industry was up and so in 2003 he decided to retire to a life of writing he'd still take the odd freelance job here and there but his time as a Hands-On director and designer had come to an end and if the Indiana Jones series was going to continue it would need to find a new Champion now 10 years earlier this would have been no issue but in the mid-2000s LucasArts were in a bit of a pickle and were struggling to find developers that could match up to the Studio's lofty reputation you see in 1999 George Lucas brought back Star Wars with episode 1 The Phantom Menace and this had been a major turning point in the direction of his video game company before this they'd been largely left to design games as they saw fit but suddenly they were thrust back into the world of regimented movie Titans and found that most of their seasoned developers weren't all that excited by this Prospect by the early 2000s almost all of their veterans had left the company with influential directors like Ron Gilbert Tim Schaefer Noah faustein and Brian Moriarty all leaving to either take jobs at rivals will start their own companies this lack of talent meant that many of The Phantom Menace tie-ins were pretty low quality lucasart's reputation as a creative developer quickly gave way to the view that they were more concerned with their bottom line now the flip side of this was that as the company became more focused on profit they expanded their publishing wing and began a large campaign of Outsourcing while their internally developed games tended to be quite poor these partner-developed games were often very high quality and returned huge sales this period saw deal struck with BioWare to create Knights of the Old Republic Raven software for Jedi 92 and Jedi Academy Sony Online interactive created and managed Star Wars Galaxies and all the while Factor 5 continued to work on the Rogue Squadron series which remained a big hit to the suits at the top the future direction of the company was obvious and involved heavily relying on outside Studios to fulfill the promise of their intellectual properties so this brings us to a Newport Beach Studio called the collective which is developed quite the reputation over the late 90s and early 2000s and was lucasart's next Port of Call in their vast publishing expansion now unlike Raven software or BioWare who had made their names working on their own project before jumping into the licensed scene the collective were adaptation Specialists who only worked on other people's IPS this might conjure images of cheap cash-ins or unambitious clones but what made the collective special was that their games were very high quality and they had a lot of clout with both critics and consumers in 2000 they released Deep Space Nine the Fallen an unreal engine-based third-person shooter that told an epic story of Intergalactic Civil War in the Star Trek universe it was a cult hit and thanks to creative decisions like having three unique campaigns and non-violent dialogue driven Bridge levels the studio started getting offers from all corners of the industry their next project Buffy the Vampire Slayer took them away from the PC market and onto home consoles although this proved to be no issue and they once again put out a licensed game that managed to do justice to the source material while also coming up with inventive gameplay this growing reputation meant that when LucasArts announced in 2002 that the collective would be working on the next Indiana Jones game there was palpable excitement as they seemed like a perfect fit for a series that was in need of fresh Direction with the developer using the same engine that they'd created for Buffy the Vampire Slayer development went very smoothly and just 12 months after being announced Indiana Jones and the empress 2 was released worldwide on Xbox PlayStation 2 PC and Mac now despite being a third person action adventure that contains a hefty dose of Gunplay puzzle solving platforming and exploration Emperor's tomb and the infernal machine have very little in common and both feel like distinct experiences that approach Indiana Jones from very different places let's start with the premise as instead of taking Indiana Jones further out into the cold war Emperor's Doom steps backwards and is set before a temple of doom which makes it the earliest story in adult indie's life now that doesn't mean this is an origin story as from the very first moment we see him Henry Jones Jr is fully formed as the action man of archeology that we all know so well he's got the Hat he's got the Whip and he's got a deep-seated need to see artifacts housed in museums the opening hour of the empress tomb doesn't really have all that much to do with the main quest and instead we play out a mini Adventure in Sri Lanka as Indie races a Nazi agent called Von Beck to find the idol of kuruwatu we'll get to the gameplay and structure in a moment but essentially Indie outsmart Swan back and returns to Barnett College with the idol where he dons its suit and returns to his day job now obviously that doesn't last long as into his office walks Chinese martial Kai tea Chan and his assistant Mei Ying turns out the idol that Indie recovered is one of the Lost pieces of the mirror of Dreams a fabled artifact that can unlock the Tomb of the first Chinese emperor it's a tantalizing opportunity for our tomb raiding addicted Professor but this job comes with a dose of urgency kaiti Chan believes that the Nazis are also trying to access the tomb as it's said to house the heart of the Dragon a mysterious black pearl that gives the wielder immense magical power so with the backing of the British and Chinese governments Indy sets off on the quest proper searching the world for the other mirror fragments and once again trying to stop the plans of the Third Reich in this regard it's somewhat derivative of past Indie adventures with familiar motivations and story beats but the real difference comes from how the game is structured and what you spend your time doing where previous games would be made up of 30 to 40 minute slices of Adventure taking place in lots of different levels and all stitched together like scenes in a movie the collective have opted to go for a more traditional structure you arrive at a new location and then spend quite a long time there doing all manner of things from basic combat and platforming to Unique set pieces that appear just a few times like stealth vehicle sequences or boss fights take Prague which is the first location that Indie heads to in his hunt for the mirror of dreams when you arrive the first few sections are a mixture of combat and platforming as you scale the walls of the castle before making your way through the Dungeons and up into the Citadel proper this then seamlessly transitions into an extended combat sequence where you're fighting waves of enemies using powerful weapons and battling through the courtyard which is Then followed by a long platforming section which has Indie scaling the walls of a library an opening hidden passageways it works like a Pacey and tightly designed linear 3D action game once you reach the top of the castle this structure gives way to a sort of Hub system where we repeatedly return to the same room and explore different areas that you unlock by solving a central puzzle it's a clever way of Designing the levels because it manages to make Prague Castle feel like a sprawling environment full of hidden paths and twisting interconnected corridors but it does this without causing any of the aimless wandering that plagued the massive levels of the infernal machine now the cost of this is that there are a lot of loading screens luckily the collective has tried to lessen the jarring transitions with little cutscenes that explain how India is moving from one area to the next and although it doesn't totally Save The Game's flow it's far better than nothing outside of the structure the other area where the collective have made big changes is in the combat which has been elevated to a level of importance that the series hadn't really seen before you see while fighting bad guys had always been a big part of the Indiana Jones film technological restrictions had meant that most of his games either skirted around or simplified Indy's more blunt Tendencies the PC adventure games had their numpad based combat but it was always optional and almost every single 2D platformer had been built around basic one-button actions even when the series had jumped to 3D infernal machines combat was one of its least developed ideas and outside of conserving ammo there were no deeper mechanics than locking on and trying to shoot first well Empress tomb changes all of that and combat now takes up the Lion's Share of the runtime with every level stuffed full of skirmishes that have a surprising amount of complexity it all stems from enemies that are pretty sturdy and can take quite a few hits to down you have to block and Dodge time and chain your strikes together and use throws and running attacks to try and get the upper hand as even two or three enemies ganging up on you can prove a formidable threat now this is great for two reasons firstly it perfectly replicates Indy's fighting all from the films as Joneses never presented as a superhero and usually ends up getting pretty badly beaten up instead of tearing through foes like James Bond or Superman he comes across like a regular person and the collective have nailed this sense of gritty realism that runs alongside all the Fantastical mythology now the second reason is more practical with much stronger enemies you're forced to engage with every mechanic in order to gain an advantage this turns the combat into something of a Sandbox where encounters are designed to have lots of different available tools and you have to improvise and think on your toes take the Hong Kong Restaurant where Indian Mei Ying have to fight off the host of Chinese gangsters they have the drop on you so you're grossly outnumbered and don't have any of your weapons but lying around the building are all manner of possibilities you can grab chairs and smash them over your attacker's heads pick up bottles from the bar and launch them across the room grab hold of your foes and throw them down stairwells or even catch them out and you use their own weapons against them there's just so many ways to approach combat and in every area there are little tweaks that keep the formula fresh when you're fighting Nazis they tend to carry guns which means the game plays like a third person shooter complete with a cover system but in the dusty streets of Istanbul it's a whirlwind of swords and fists and it's almost like a throwback beat em up with ammo that is just scarce enough that you can't always rely on your guns the combat is easily the best element of Emperor's tomb and having your MP4 run out of bullets mid fight or an enemy knock you down and steal your weapon is exactly the sort of chaotic fun that makes third person actions so engaging so between the interesting level structure the reworked combat and a serviceable Indiana Jones narrative Empress tomb has all the makings of a great game and really for its first half it is the opening Adventure through Ceylon to find the first Idol that meeting with kaiti Chan Begins the quest and then the subsequent Prague and Istanbul levels all add up to the highest quality few hours in this retrospective but after this something starts to go a little wrong you see Empress tomb has a mid-game Twist and this marks not only a large change in the storyline but a big shift in its gameplay design that is not for the better after exploring a set of ruins underneath Istanbul and finding the second piece of the mirror Indy is betrayed by his Chinese employers who as it turns out are actually in League with the Nazis and are working with his old enemy Von back to access the Tomb of the emperor luckily for our man Mae Ying reveals herself as an undercover police officer and the two quickly realize that they're gonna have to team up if they want to prevent a gaggle of fascists and gangsters and getting hold of the hard dragon now as far as twists go it's somewhat unoriginal especially in a series that has already used the employer is actually the villain trobe quite a bit now that being said my main disappointment is just that nothing really happens from here on out there are very few cut scenes and very little dialogue from this point on and while India has always been about treasure hunting and Nazi fighting his best Adventures usually have a human component either the dynamic between himself and Sophia or the reconciliations with Marion and Henry there's a lot of potential in a story set before the movies but the collective doesn't really do anything with this and apart from a few moments spent with Wuhan a minor character that dies right at the start of the Temple of Doom our Hunt For The Heart of the Dragon doesn't add much to the overall Saga of Indiana Jones now disappointingly it's not just the narrative that takes a downturn as there's a real drop in the quality of the gameplay after Indian Mei Ying decide to chase after Von back in the Pang line Lagoon instead of the interconnected levels filled with puzzles and platforming and large combat sequences with thrust into an awful run of stealth areas where before you're encouraged to get into fights and come up with creative ways to win now you're racing around trying to turn off alarms and every level revolves around nothing more than hitting a switch to open the door into the next Zone what makes this all the worse is that the environments are just so dull and I have no idea why a developer would look at all of the possibilities that Indiana Jones could take you to decide that he should be wandering around empty metal warehouses deactivating fans and operating cable cars now fortunately Indy does eventually escape from this base and manages to find kaiti Chan's Black Dragon Mountain Fortress but this change of environment doesn't really arrest the sliding quality the issue at the heart of this is that Empress tomb doesn't ramp properly now what do I mean by that well most games operate along some sort of ramp either an increase in difficulty deepening complexity or a story that quickens in Pace but almost every game in every genre is Unified by having something that keeps the player engaged after they've seen everything the game has to offer Empress tomb does not do this the fights in Prague Castle are essentially identical to the fights in the black dragon Fortress the weapons we use in Istanbul are the same ones that we use in the Nazi submarine base and outside of a few short turret sections and that terrible sequence of stealth levels the game ends up feeling very repetitive by the time you reach the home stretch now usually a developer would offset this with more complex level design or more cut scenes that Advance the plot but as we've just discussed Emperor's tomb does the opposite the story bombs out the levels become far less interesting and it all has the effect of making gameplay that was once thrilling start to feel a little stale it's unfortunate because the foundations of empress tomb are genuinely great and if you stopped playing the game after Istanbul you would think this was a stellar video game but ultimately it turns into a textbook example of too much of a good thing by the time I got to the games finale I was very ready for it to end and at only six hours long that isn't a good sign now ironically considering the Studio's rejection of Hal barwood's ideas Empress tomb ends up finishing in almost the exact same way as the infernal machine after falling into the ruins beneath the black dragon Fortress the grounded gameplay begins to drift off into the Fantastical before long we're wielding a magical Boomerang called the par Chang and destroying the disembodied spirits of the Emperor's Terracotta Army and he fights his way back into the Fortress just in time to see kaiti Chan attempt to sacrifice May Ying in a ritual to access the Netherworld and of course he leaps down and puts a stop to this madness unfortunately that's not in time to prevent an evil spirit from entering maying's body but then thrust into a boss fight against the Demonic Harpy monster where we have to avoid energy blasts destroy ghost spirits and shatter the deformed pieces of the mirror which have sucked us into this Dimension it's a Bonkers sequence of events but where infernal machine flew off the deep end in just the final level Emperor's tomb keeps getting crazier and crazier shortly after Indie frees May Ying he heads off into the Terracotta maze to hunt down kaiti Chan and here he runs into Von Berg instead of a traditional boss fight The Showdown takes the form of a kind of Crash Bandicoot style platforming Gauntlet with the German chasing after us in a massive Boring Machine ultimately it ends with the German crashing its tank into a pit this leaves Indy free to enter another portal which leads us into the underworld yes that's right the final handful of levels take place in the ancient Chinese underworld and what this is or why this exists is never explained we leap between ethereal floating platforms battle more ancient spirits and eventually end up in the empress throne room where despite his best efforts kaiti Chan ends up claiming the power of the heart of the Dragon now what does this power do well it summons a literal dragon and the final boss fight revolves around avoiding its huge attacks and supercharging the par Chang in order to defeat the Chinese traitor it's complete Madness and honestly I'm not actually that much of a fan of how crazy this gets especially given this is supposedly Indiana Jones first ever exposure to the supernatural things got pretty wild in the infernal machine but by that point our hero had seen magical Stones The Ghosts of the Ark of the Covenant and even an immortal Holy Night for him to pass into the underworld and fight enormous mythical creatures without so much as a second thought feels sort of out of character especially given that curiosity is one of his main character traits I think what gives this all a pass is that it's a much welcome change up in the gameplay while it might not mesh with the rest of the series it lifts Emperor's tomb out of that second half slump and honestly running away from Von Beck's Boring Machine wielding the par Chang and fighting interdimensional dragons is kind of fun it's Katie Chan's defeat the day is saved and our last cutscene is back in Hong Kong where Indie and Mei Ying who miraculously escaped the underworld leave to spend some quality time together an indie's accomplice talks about the nurachi job which is of course where we find our hero at the start of Temple of Doom ultimately I think Indiana Jones and the empress tomb is a bit of a strange game it has long sequences of real quality which have clearly been put together by a studio that knows what it's doing but for every step forwards there's an equal step back later on and that second half feels extremely undebaked funnily enough I think the demographic least likely to enjoy it a hardcore Indiana Jones fans as it's just so focused on being exciting that it loses sight of the other elements that made the franchise popular it needs a dose of humor some charm to go along with all the brawn and some slower paced moments of exploration to balance out all the endless brawling now that all being said if you ignore the wider context and just take Empress to tune for what it is it's a lot of fun even with the missteps at the end of the day Indiana Jones has always been about giving its audiences a damn good time and by that metric alone Emperor's tomb probably just about succeeds now when it was released reviews were slightly more muted compared to the collective's previous games both the PC and Xbox versions generally received around a 7 out of 10. with the PS2 Port thanks to its downgraded visuals scoring slightly lower it wasn't the home run that LucasArts had expected and compared to their Star Wars projects copies weren't exactly flying off the shelves on Xbox the game sold well under a million copies and on PS2 sales were even lower and that didn't bode well for future installments as it turns out in 2010 it was revealed that the collective had been working on a sequel Indiana Jones Trilogy and it was intended to pick up after Empress tomb and retell the story of the original Three movies according to a former developer the project went as far as a fully functioning prototype but when it was presented to LucasArts the publisher was unimpressed and thanks to the low sales of the collective's last outing it was never completed now surprisingly that didn't mean the relationship between the collective and LucasArts came to an end as they would go on to produce two further games together 2004's wrath Unleashed and 2005 Star Wars episode 3 Revenge of the Sith just like Empress tomb both have interesting ideas and something of occult nostalgic following but between further mixed reviews and limited Commercial Success this run of releases pretty much spelled the end of the collective's hot streak at The Cutting Edge of the industry their next project was an utterly baffling attempt to convert The Da Vinci Code into video game form and when it released to extremely negative reviews and diabolically low sales the company found itself in financial trouble and was purchased by Foundation 9 entertainment and reworked into double helix Studios ultimately despite his issues Empress tomb would end up outlasting its creators as it's still available for purchase on gog.com and Incredibly it was included as part of Microsoft's Xbox One enhanced program which means you can play it upscaled to 4K if you own a modern system for the mistakes that LucasArts made with this franchise and were about to make the one area that you can't criticize is their preservation effort and while Empress 2 might not be one of my favorite Indiana Jones games it's great that it's still out there waiting for people to make up their own minds [Music] thank you with lucasart's video game strategy now completely dependent on outside Studios our next Indiana Jones game comes from yet another partner this time it's one that should be much more familiar to Modern Gamers a San Diego Comic-Con in 2004 Lego Star Wars was revealed to an ecstatic crowd and it would Mark the beginnings of an extremely fruitful relationship between LucasArts and developer traveler's Tales When the game was released in 2005 it was a massive success and both critics and players went crazy for the Charming blend of light-hearted gameplay and tongue-in-cheek storytelling pretty soon it had been ported to almost every single platform available and by the end of the year Lego Star Wars had sold almost 5 million copies realizing that they had struck gold traveler's Tales immediately dropped all their other projects and switched to exclusively developing more Lego games coming out with Lego Star Wars the original trilogy in 2006 and then Lego Star Wars the Complete Saga in 2 2007 within just two years the Lego series had exploded from out of nowhere and had become a major force in the industry with sales numbers in the tens of millions and no sign of consumer fatigue the Lego series clearly needed to expand Beyond Jedis and Empires and LucasArts had the perfect Next Step in 2007 it was announced that not only were Travelers Tales be making the jump to the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 but they would be taking on the Indiana Jones license marking the franchise's first foray into the world of high definition now my personal relationship with the Lego games is a little peculiar and if you've watched my Lord of the Rings retrospective you'll be acutely aware of this before working on that video I'd actually never played a Lego game as despite being a huge fan of the franchises that were being adapted I'd always presumed that the games were being pitched a little younger than my tastes well much to my surprise when I played through Lego Lord of the Rings I enjoyed it quite a lot and found plenty to like about its goofy storytelling and quirky block building I'll stop short of calling myself a total convert because later on I played Lego The Hobbit and I didn't really enjoy it at all but my eyes had certainly been opened to the potential that these games have so given that Lego Indiana Jones is often referred to as one of the best games in the series and seems to have the review scores to back it up I was interested to see where it differed from the Lego games that I'd already played whether it was deserving of this glowing reputation well the first thing I was shocked to discover is that there is no voice acting famous scenes from the movies are still recreated the Lego series customary tongue-in-cheek approach but it's without any of the film's iconic lines instead of hearing the disembodied voice of Harrison Ford or Sean Connery everything is communicated by points Grunts gasps and over-the-top body language and while this might sound somewhat contrarian I actually found it pretty charming and preferred it to the voice games I'd already played where Lord of the Rings came across as a Bare Bones retelling of the source material Lego Indiana Jones Works more like a zany puppet show are you seeing familiar scenes and characters but it's all warped into this goofy reinterpretation now while the Indiana Jones films have their fair share of funny moments already it's impressive how Travelers Tales have managed to convert the more intense scenes without it feeling too sanitary for example we still see Donovan shoot Henry in the Grail Temple but now his legs and body pop apart instead of his face can taunting in pain he just seems somewhat annoyed at having to be carried around by Marcus it would be so easy for the shift to a more family friendly tone to gut the stories of all of their character but frankly this is a really enjoyable way to revisit the original trilogy and it's full of all sorts of Easter eggs and inside jokes even if you have the films burned into your brain it's impossible not to crack a smile when you see Indy and Elsa swapping hair to sneak into Castle brunswald or a crocodile wearing mola ROM's hat now what I will say is that without any dialogue the game is absolutely banking on you having outside knowledge in order to understand what's happening and if this was someone's first exposure to Indiana Jones they'd almost certainly have no idea what's going on for example in the Last Crusade the scene where Donovan explains the quest for the Holy Grail and The Disappearance of Indy's father has been reworked to the point of being incomprehensible and it means there isn't really any context for the rest of the adventure we don't know who the Brotherhood of the Grail are we don't know why the Nazis are trying to stop us and indie's father doesn't even get a proper introduction it's not that big of a deal but it is slightly odd considering that this game came out almost 30 years after the movies and likely would have been plenty of younger Gamers first exposure to Indiana Jones now the other change that surprised me is that the game is almost completely linear as clearly the series hadn't yet shifted to the open worlds which Lego Lord of the Rings and Lego The Hobbit were built around this was a delightful Discovery as I found that element really rather pointless filling both games with lots of dead space and pointless side quests that took you away from the fun of the film-based levels here instead of being booted out to an open world you return to Barnett College after every completed stage and this acts as your hub for you to choose your next adventure peruse or your unlockables or take on the game's optional content now this is not only very flavoursome as that's exactly what Indy does in between his adventures but it makes the game much more streamlined the amount of time spent wandering around is massively reduced you can quickly go from level to level which keeps the focus squarely on the things The Travelers Tales does best now along with the quirky cut scenes the level design and gameplay are another area where Lego Indiana Jones Excel and I can easily see why it's held in such higher claim as underneath its Aesthetics it's a tightly designed video game every level is obviously based around a scene from the movies but it's not just simple recreation in order to carve out proper chunks of gameplay almost everything has been embellished and there are lots of areas and zones we spend time in that we never saw on the big screen a good example of this is in Tibet during Raiders of the Lost Ark in the movie it's where we're introduced to Marion Ravenwood and Mage Arnold top and after a shootout where Indy comes to the rescue the plot quickly moves on and it's on to the next scene in the Lego adaptation however things take a little longer with the shootout reimagined as a two-phase boss fight or you first Chase hair taut around the building and then have to defeat a gunman hiding behind the Flaming bar that's not all though is once you emerge Victorious the action moves outside and you play through a sequence of snowy Ravines and Villages as Indian Marion platform puzzle solve and brawl their way to Freedom it's a clever way to handle the Source material as these new areas never feel shoehorned in but allow for gameplay variety without having to go wildly Off Script now a big part of why that works is that the moment-to-moment gameplay is a lot of fun for those who don't know in every level you control multiple people at once with different characters joining Andy depending on which movie you're playing through we just discussed how in Tibet you're accompanied by Marriott but throughout the course of the game you also spend time with everyone from Short Round And Willie to Elsa Marcus and Henry senior now on top of helping to smash up everything in the level and collect all the juicy Lego bits your Sidekicks also have their own unique abilities most of the game's puzzles involve different combinations of these to open the path ahead for example Short Round can pass through small gaps and get up to inaccessible Ledges while Willy can jump higher than anyone else and can unleash a howling scream which shatters glass as you can switch instantly between characters this mechanic works great but there are also abilities which are governed by tools that you have to find lying around in the level there are guns that help you in combat shovels which are used to dig up hidden items spanners which repair broken machines and very quickly the game becomes a big Mash of all these different tiny ideas now with 18 levels spread across almost 10 hours of gameplay I can see why someone might think that this has got the potential to get quite convoluted the reality however is quite the opposite Lego Indiana Jones is an extremely easy game and can be comfortably beaten by even a very young gamer puzzles are very forthcoming with hints there are absolutely no consequences for death and while there are plenty of unique abilities the game uses a prompt system to direct you to where everything links up this might sound so casual that it couldn't possibly be satisfying but honestly there's something to be said for how enjoyable it is to progress through a game that's only looking to reward and never punish personally I played through the game in little chunks finishing over the course of a week in 30 minute sessions after hours of writing recording and editing the small dopamine hits of picking up bursts of Lego bits or clicking all the blocks into place to solve a puzzle well they were almost relaxing and it became a lovely ritual to end my day with not everything that's a video game has to be mind-bending high art or demand real skill to engage with and the Lego games hit this sweet spot perfectly they're simple they're casual and they're a hell of a lot of fun especially if you're on board with seeing a funny little adaptation of a franchise that you love now if I had any criticism it would be that this way of interacting with the Lego games makes a lot of that optional content slightly unpalatable at least for me anyway along with collecting reams of bits in order to unlock new characters there are also a few secret missions which you can access by finding Treasures hidden within each of the game's levels there are three to unlock a mission where you play as young Indie the ancient city and the warehouse now the latter two are just large zones where the aim is to collect as many Lego bits as physically possible and it feels like a riff on Katamari damasi where you're racing against the clock to create as much Havoc as is physically possible it's certainly fun but for the Steep cost of having to find all 18 Hidden Treasures it doesn't exactly feel worth the effort which is in contrast to the young Indie Mission which is a fully fledged half an hour long level complete with its own cut scenes it's great fun but the only thing that's odd about this is that it really should already be part of the Last Crusade campaign and having to play through the same levels over and over again in order to unlock all this extra stuff feels a little bit like content gating so Lego Indiana Jones was another big hit for travelers tales and impressively it wasn't even the only game that they released in 2008. just a few months later they came out with Lego Batman and it received similarly good reviews and pulled in huge sales numbers which meant that between the two games it become abundantly clear that the Lego franchise was Far More Than A Star Wars focused one-trick Pony for LucasArts it was another big Outsourcing success story and it meant Our Hero's time in colored brick form was far from over but before we get to that we have to deal with lucasart's final attempt to take Indiana Jones into the AAA market and the calamitous aftermath that ended up killing the entire franchise [Music] thank you the Indiana Jones and the staff of Kings miniseries a Nintendo Wii PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS Trilogy that all share the same name make for a strange topic most fans are perplexed as to why they exist and many videos and articles get lost in confusion trying to pick apart their messy development history now it's not been pleasant but I believe I've managed to craft the definitive account so strap in and enjoy the tale of how LucasArts killed one of their most famous franchises one of the biggest misconceptions is that these games were created to coincide with the release of Indiana Jones and the kingdom of the Crystal Skull it's an easy mistake to make given all three were released less than a year after the movie cinemas but incredibly their Origins are actually found all the way back in 2004. that year LucasArts had taken members of industrial Light and magic and set up a new team that would be solely focused on creating a next-gen Indiana Jones game for the upcoming Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. in 2005 journalists were invited out to take a look at the fruits of their work and reports from Outlets like IGN and Gamespot were pretty positive with particular emphasis placed on the game's impressive physics and sandbox style gameplay a few months later at E3 2006 the game got its first trailer which showed Indie battling a clutch of goons while riding top a San Francisco tram and that cautious interest quickly grew into genuine excitement now the problem was that while everything looked Rosy from the outside behind the scenes development was going terribly and lucasart's new team was having a torrid time getting all their new technology to work together they'd license both the Euphoria physics engine and a digital molecular Mata engine and had unfortunately discovered that these two tool sets were basically incompatible progress slowed to a crawl and when the game missed its prospective 2007 release date rumors began to spread that the project was in real trouble things only got worse the following year development was set even further back as most of the team had to switch over and help finish Star Wars the Force Unleashed and while they did this Naughty Dogs Uncharted released a huge Acclaim and effectively stole indie's Thunder with Nathan Drake achieving everything that the team wanted to do in their own game morale quickly collapsed and after a further year of stagnant development LucasArts decided that enough was enough and shut down the project now this probably has you asking what all this has to do with the staff of Kings games well when the HD indie project was originally announced LucasArts viewed it as a major release and so they've contracted three companies to produce three ports in order to hit every possible Market these Studios have been given a loose outline of the plot and some information about the gameplay but otherwise had been left to get on with the job now by the time the HD version was being shut down these third-party developed games were nearing completion and this left LucasArts in something of a strange position in the end it was decided that in order to recoup as much money as possible they would go ahead and publish the games anyway and so in late 2009 three games all called staff of Kings they were all based on a game that had been canceled released on a set of decidedly last gen consoles we'll start with the Wii version as given this was a Home console release you'd expect it to be the most substantial of the three games well that's very much not the case as for some reason LucasArts outsourced this to artificial mind and movement a studio that you might recognize from my Lord of the Rings retrospective as they were responsible for the god-awful Nintendo DS version of Lord of the Rings conquest throughout the 2000s artificial mind of movement or a2m had become notorious for churning out an endless parade of cheap caches and their back catalog included GBA Classics like That's So Raven and Drake and Josh when it came to the Nintendo Wii their track record was no better and outside of a handful of High School Musical games they had very little experience putting together meaningful video game experiences expectations would have been understandably low but let me tell you it is worse than you can possibly imagine for starters the plot is both completely derivative and utterly incomprehensible exactly what you'd expect from a studio that had never produced a story driven game everything begins with Indie treasure hunting in Sudan and after a comically long tutorial that runs you through every single possible action in the game he eventually recovers a golden idol and promptly has it stolen by a rival Tomb Raider this is Magnus vola who Indy supposedly knows from University although he really is just a carbon copy of Dr Renee bellock from Raiders of the Lost Ark he's in the archeology business but money he's got no respect for the past and he's more than happy to work with Nazis outside of this we learn virtually nothing else about the character with the game happy to ignore Magnus and Indie shared history and frame the German as a cartoon villain who simply wants to do bad things for bad things sake now once we're done in Sudan the game Cuts over to San Francisco's Chinatown and with no lead in whatsoever we're suddenly trying to rescue a young girl who's been kidnapped and recovers something called the Jade Pearl what this is or why it's important is never established and things get even weirder when Indie steps aboard a theme park ride and ends up in a huge Cavern full of broken pirate ships that are all somehow beneath the city all this leads to Indie working out that his mentor Charles Kingston wants him to find his diary which contains the information needed to uncover the fabled staff of Kings the tool that Moses used to part the Red Sea in the book of Exodus just like how Magnus is lifted straight from Raiders this Revelation is just a repeat of the plot of the Last Crusade we've got a diary full of Clues an older Explorer that's obsessed with a treasure hunt and a clutch of German occultists attempting to stop us it's Indiana Jones on autopilot and while we travel the world hunting for the staff and visiting exotic locations even those don't feel completely right and I can't understand what the Himalayas or Panama have to do with Moses and the Jewish Exodus now as poor as all that is it's nothing compared to the experience of actually playing through this game the single biggest problem is that staff of Kings on the Wii is one of those motion control games that replaces almost every single action with an awkward wave of the remote everything from pulling yourself up over a ledge to running away from traps to using your whip and reloading your revolver are all done with various Waggles and thrusts and it is just draining the Nintendo Wii's controls are at their best when you're either doing smooth and simple Motions like in Wii sports or when the motion controls are paired with traditional button presses like in The Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Galaxy staff of Kings manages to be neither of these and instead tries to have complex and fast-paced gameplay that's entirely based around very specific directional waggling the combat for example has something like 15 different moves which are all triggered by waving the remote in certain ways and In the Heat of battle Indy almost never does what you actually want him to do similarly basic actions are just far too convoluted to whip across a gap you have to walk to a specific spot hold the B button draw the remote back and then Whip It Forward and instead of this creating a sense of immersion it just makes for busy work and slows the pace to a complete crawl it's at its very worst in the game set peace moment where a2m has tried to get Innovative with the controls and in the process has created some of the worst levels I've ever played firstly there are these shooting sequences where you have to aim your remote like a gun and considering just how many great rail Shooters the Nintendo we had you'd imagine this must be pretty good well it's all spoiled by the baffling choice to have reloading tied to a shake of the remote not only does this make it extremely hard to aim but it usually desyncs the calibration and this means constantly having to pause the game while everything reset as if that wasn't bad enough there are also some vehicle sections and every one of them is a total mess the Buy plane is probably the worst as they have you holding the remote upwards like a joystick except that without a set Dead Zone underneath you're constantly over steering it's almost impossible to correct oh and did I mention that the game is also full of quick time events usually asking you to wave both the nunchuck and remote like mad often coming completely out of the blue and almost always setting you back at the start of lengthy unskippable cutscenes if you fail on top of a host of game breaking glitches a terrible script that for some reason has Indy hardly ever speaking and some of the worst placement of checkpoints you've seen this side of Superman 64 and well it's just a horrible experience from start to finish now this is probably as Savage as I've ever been to a video game but it's hardly a unique Viewpoint upon release staff of Kings on the Wii was absolutely slated by critics getting a 3 out of 10 from Gamespot a 3 out of 10 from Edge magazine and An Almighty Zero from the AV club it was by all accounts a complete failure and so it fell to the other two ports to save lucasart's bacon now unfortunately the studio responsible for the Nintendo DS version was also artificial mind and movement and despite having produced 36 different handheld games since they formed in 2001 staff of Kings DS is only marginally better first I've really got to point out just how invisible this title is there's no dedicated Wikipedia or Moby games page there isn't a single speedrun registered on speedrun.com there's only a single playthrough uploaded on YouTube and only four professional Outlets even bothered to give it a review with Gamespot showing such little care that the article has been copied onto the page twice without anyone noticing story wise it's exactly the same plot although it's now told with Max Payne style animated comic book panels you're still looking for Charles Kingston's diary still fighting Magnus vola and still looking for the staff of Kings the biggest difference is found in the presentation which is now based on an isometric perspective with an automated camera credit where credit's due these environments are full of color and surprisingly well designed with lots of visual variety and some well animated set pieces that do look surprisingly good the DS has a pretty mixed history when it comes to fully 3D games but a2m clearly knew what they were doing and this looks much better than its sepia washed sibling now unfortunately something that is also carried over from the Wii is the terrible controls a staff of King's Diaz entirely revolves around the stylus movement is done by tapping on the bottom screen you pick up items and climb ledges by tapping on them you fire your gun by tapping on the screen and you begin to get the idea everything from swinging punches to whipping across a Gap are all done with swipes of the stylus and there's no way to rebind any of this to the DS's face buttons which go completely unused just like before I really can't work out why this was chosen over a more traditional control scheme it doesn't create a deeper level of immersion and it's hardly even a creative use of the console's potential like you might find in Trauma Center or Rhythm Heaven ultimately it just seems like a2m went in this direction because that was the gimmick of the console when you're having to blow against your DS to move fans or chicken scratch the bottom screen to be a boss you really have to question how much QA this project went through the sole redeeming idea is ironically part of the game that feels the most shoehorned in and has almost nothing to do with the source material of Indiana Jones the end of each level when Indy finds The Relic or clue he's been looking for the game will switch over to something called Cipher mode which is a totally separate game that's Loosely based on those tilting marble mazes you have to guide a water bead through a series of puzzles and despite being comically easy it's the only moment where it feels like the stylus control and gameplay are actually working in harmony obviously it's not a good sign if the best part of your game has nothing to do with the story it's telling and so I think it's safe to say that the lack of footprint on the internet means that staff of Kings on the DS was something of a flop so it falls to the PSP version to save the day and thankfully this was handled far away from the Bland inclinations of a2m funnily enough it was created by another Studio that featured on the Lord of the Rings retrospective Amaze entertainment who are responsible for Lord of the Rings tactics much like a2m they were handheld license game Specialists but the key difference was that a maze had a much better reputation over the years they'd worked on legitimate video game series like Spyro the Dragon and it even published a handful of games that got semi-decent review scores thankfully that ability to properly develop video games is on full show in the staff of Kings PSP P which is easily the best of the trilogy due to the PSP's lack of strange control gimmicks we're thankfully back to playing with a directional pad and buttons and after the hell served up on the Wii and DS this feels as smooth and natural as breathing you punch with the accent Square buttons you leap over gaps and pick up items with triangle and your gun is fired on the right shoulder button while this is as bog standard as is physically possible some games just don't need to step outside of what's expected and it actually makes the game feel functional along with the controls the other big winner is the storytelling as Amaze took the clever decision to include pre-level narration from India that helps flesh out the narrative and gives some much needed context to the locations we visit it's nothing in comparison to the Charming storytelling of fate of Atlantis or the bombastic nonsense of the infernal machine but it does tell a cohesive story that's worth paying attention to in this version Magnus is less of a comic book villain and is instead motivated by jealousy of Indiana Jones's Fame where before he was working with the Nazis in order to conquer the world here it has a more personal touch and it's far more engaging on top of this characters like Archie tan Charles Kingston and Maggie O'Malley are far better written and while they still exist to progress the plot we now get to see them banter and bicker with Indy which helps bring some of that Spielberg flavor into the proceedings now the most interesting change is how staff of Kings on the PSP is structured as it uses quite an unusual design that leans into its portable nature instead of spending large amounts of time exploring just a handful of locations the game is broken down into lots of very concise levels that focus on a single mechanic and only take a handful of minutes to complete none of it is particularly engaging in isolation but with each stage only taking two or three minutes to complete it chops its Adventure up into perfectly digestible chunks and keeps the Action Moving forwards at a Relentless pace you're always doing something different and for a console which was created for pick up and put down experiences this works very well now what helps is that the level design is generally pretty good and there are lots of fun little moments we have to use a catapult to destroy an ancient wall blast gangsters from the roof of a tram solve all manner of inventive puzzles and even brawl in a gym using the weights as weapons with cutscenes that play during the action that show indie or Maggie making sarcastic remarks it just feels like it was put together by a studio that actually cared about both Indiana Jones and creating worthwhile games that's also found in some of the game's other systems as Amaze had clearly thought about how to make staff of Kings more replayable and added in a host of reasons to revisit levels that you've already beaten you see before each Mission you're given a set of five optional objectives three under the category of glory and two under the category of Fortune basically for each you complete you gain a point and in between levels you can spend them on a host of up grades and unlockables the glory points work like a light RPG where you can increase things like indie's Health his damage or the effectiveness of his web the objectives vary from beating the mission in a certain time or finding a hidden treasure or defeating a certain amount of Nazis and while it's all very basic you find yourself wanting to see those objectives ticked off and the points rolling in the fortune points are a little different and you could spend those in Greater quantities to unlock different skins and extra levels there's even a host of cheat modes you can purchase and is surprisingly fun to go back and blast through levels with infinite ammo or invincibility now I'm very conscious that playing this directly after the Wii and DS versions might have influenced my opinion but honestly I found it to be a fun little game with a story that's competently told gameplay that feels natural and just enough creative level design it's the version that feels most like what LucasArts had originally intended and in a Trilogy that broadly crawls along the bottom of the barrel this is the one to play unfortunately staff of Kings PSP wasn't enough to save the series and between the negative press from the cancellation of the HD version and the horrific reviews of the games that did come out Indiana Jones found itself in a pretty bad place thanks to lucasart's scattergun publishing and development in the 1990s the series had never really capitalized on its potential and while games like the infernal machine and Empress tomb had their fans they were small cult titles rather than big mainstream hits with games becoming more complex and expensive to produce and competition moving into Indy's territory it would take real talent and desire to turn around the franchise and with LucasArts lacking either of those things the series simply ended staff of Kings on the Wii DS and PSP would end up being the last non-lego Indiana Jones games ever made a shocking conclusion to a franchise that at one point been at the very Forefront of creative and ambitious video game design now we'll conduct our post mortem in just a moment as we have one final stop to make a return to the world of colored brick building where hopefully Indy could reclaim some of his long-lost dignity [Music] thank you so at the end of our journey sees us back in the Cheery world of Lego as thanks to the release of kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008 there was suddenly a lot more Indiana Jones available for adaptation now to put it mildly Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is rather controversial and while it was a big success at the box office and reviewed pretty well fans were more mixed and it's become something of a black sheep accusations were Rife that Lucas and Spielberg hadn't really nailed the feeling of the original trilogy and between the ramp and use of CGI characters that struggle to replicate their past charm and a plot that ends up going full-on sci-fi fantasy a lot of the Indie faithful were left wishing that he'd stayed in the past in my own opinion I don't think it's that bad of a movie really it's a perfectly serviceable Adventure Blockbuster but it just lacks that special something that made Raiders Temple and Crusade so Timeless apparently Spielberg hadn't really wanted to return to the series and Ford and Lucas were constantly at loggerheads about the sort of story they should be telling and I feel like that comes through in the finished product where the original trilogy bristles with creativity and charm kingdom is all a little stilted and feels like it was made to satisfy fans and Executives rather than its creators now regardless of the debate about its quality it was a major commercial success and given this had come from the mind of George Lucas you'd expect it to have generated a wave of licensed video games just like the Star Wars prequels had earlier in the decade well surprisingly that was not the case and the situation surrounding a potential video game tie-in had actually got very messy indeed as LucasArts were still supposedly working on the HD game that would become staff of Kings they had no capacity to begin development on another title and with Outsourcing deals already struck for the three ports there was a real risk of Indie overload if they commissioned another the only reasonable option seemed to be including Kingdom in Lego Indiana Jones 1. as its development lined up with the film's release but amazingly this was prevented by George Lucas himself you see during Crystal skull's production he'd become incredibly paranoid about the plot leaking online and so everyone involved in production was forced to sign very robust ndas and licensed Partners were given minimal information with which to work on their merchandise without imagery or a script to adapt travestales had no choice but to stick to the original trilogy and this meant that while an Indiana Jones game did come out in the same month as Kingdom of the Crystal Skull the two releases had very little to do with one another it was clearly an odd move and almost immediately fans and journalists were asking after an expansion pack that would cover the new film or speculating about Lego Indiana Jones the Complete Saga well at E3 of that year traveler's Tales decided to give the people what they wanted they announced a full sequel Lego Indiana Jones 2 the Adventure Continues which would not only be covering Kingdom of the Crystal Skull but would remake the entire original trilogy bringing all four stories together on a single disc considering the quality of the last game and the sheer amount of content that was promised fans began to get very excited with the Lego franchise only having gone from strength to strength expectations were Sky High now in Lego Indiana Jones 2 finally released in November of 2009 its reception ended up being amazingly similar to the film that had prompted its creation sales were pretty strong critics seemed to broadly like it but fans were not happy it was felt that too much had been changed that it didn't capture the feeling of the original and that not enough effort was spent putting it together it's now largely considered to be one of the worst games in the entire Lego series and after having played through it myself I can't say I disagree so the first big change is that the central Hub where you chose your mission and viewed your unlocks has been done away with and you now select the movie you want to play from a main menu with them dressed up to look like official Lego playsets now that might seem like an odd decision but the concept of Hub zones is still here now each movie has its own unique version of Barnett College while the main purpose of these areas is still to house the story missions they also act as sandboxes with secrets to discover new characters to unlock and lots and lots of optional content with everything from vehicle zones to Side Quests to alternative versions of the main levels in terms of filling the game with things to do these Hub worlds are pretty successful but the way they're structured brings me to my first criticism they really vary in quality and while things start out strong with a great Lego interpretation of Marshall College and the surrounding town from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull they drop off very hard the second Hub which houses the Peru and Amazon levels has an awful layout that really obscures where the next mission is located and then in the third Hub all of the missions are right next to each other and there's almost zero exploration I also wasn't much of a fan of a lot of the optional content as most of it gave me that same filler feeling that I've had from the other open world Lego games smashing up 10 fire hydrants or doing a handful of jumps to find a colored brick just feels like busy work and while there are a ton of alternative modes and missions I very quickly found myself sticking exclusively to the story missions and spending hardly any time in the hubs now in previous Lego games that wouldn't have been a problem as the whole reason they were so successful was all the charming Lego cut scenes and the satisfying party-based missions well this is where we find the most confusing changes as for some reason both of these elements have been dramatically reworked with Lego Indiana Jones 2 Jett ascending almost all of the good ideas from the last game instead of large levels that embellish movie scenes with a blend of combat platforming and puzzle solving traveler's Tales have decided to split all of these elements up and the levels are now nothing more than a few minutes each focused around just one of these mechanics now the problem is that the fun has always come from seeing them mixed together and separating them out makes for some very shallow gameplay in combat levels enemies arrive in small groups and you just Mash attack until they're gone puzzle zones are now just a single screen and as you only ever control two characters at once there's never any complexity or challenge the worst offenders by far are the new driving missions which are truly Dreadful and come up in every single movie regardless of if they even fit into the plot the sole objective in each one is to bash into and destroy a host of enemy vehicles but thanks to the isometric perspective and laughably slidey controls they feel like a punishing Gauntlet rather than a fun mix-up it's particularly galling as Lego Indiana Jones 1 used vehicles in a really tasteful way and by only including them in a select few places they came across as a fun surprise despite their mechanical Simplicity now I'm not sure if this was a misguided attempt to better flesh out this part of the game or a veiled attempt at padding these missions don't add anything to the Lego formula and are easily the worst part of the game all of these structural and gameplay changes add up to an experience that is shockingly lightweight and for a series that is already pitching itself to quite a casual audience it makes for a game that can often feel rather dull where Lego Indiana Jones 1 had become a lovely end-of-day ritual offering just enough engagement and reward to send me off with a smile the sequel quickly turned into a tedious slog serving up a huge portion of objectives and goals but without anything to make it feel meaningful now this was obviously hugely disappointing but I think what hurt the most was how the tone of the cut scenes had walked away from the Charming style that had made the series so popular in Lego Indiana Jones 2 Everything feels very over the top with most of the movie scenes reworked into some sort of big Goofy joke that usually takes precedence over the storytelling for example let's look at the opening of the Ark of the Covenant in the first game this was played pretty straight with ghosts streaming out the ark and bursting apart bellock and the Germans in an explosion of Lego limbs now this works not because it's trying to be funny but because it's recreating something serious with colorful Lego characters and that amusing Clash is at the center of almost every scene we see people get shot we see heads rolling across the floor and we see people getting dunked into flames but when presented with Lego figures it all has an air of ridiculousness that makes it enjoyable by contrast the second game is entirely focused on randomly breaking character and being as key as possible here when the arc is opened a disco ball comes out and everyone starts dancing why well because the Lego games are meant to be funny and isn't this very funny the game religiously sticks to this late afternoon kids show Vibe and if you're not particularly into characters wearing silly outfits falling over or pulling faces there isn't a lot to latch onto oddly this inclination towards zany visuals also creeps into the gameplay as each movie now has a climactic boss fight that often feel wildly out of step with the tone of the source material the battle on the bridge during Temple of Doom now involves mola ROM operating a giant Carly robot and the soldier ants from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull spend less time eating people and more time walking around as a large human and hybrid considering it was exactly the same team that had delivered such a home run with the last Lego Indiana Jones game I really can't work out what's happened here it's the same writer the same director and the same animators so it's perplexing to see the miss the mark So dramatically especially when the quality of the adaptation is usually an area where the Lego games always deliver now you're probably thinking that this is all quite harsh criticism that it's just bonus content on top of the campaigns from the last game but this brings us to another big problem with Lego Indiana Jones 2. that promised remake of the first three movies goes beyond adding in unique hubs as the levels themselves have all been entirely redesigned to conform to the new structure used in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull the lengthy and interesting levels have all been removed and in their place is a predictable parade of single screen puzzles wave-based combat and even more God forsaken vehicle sections what makes this even more offensive is that Raiders Temple and Crusade are all dramatically shorter than they were in the last game while Kingdom of the Crystal Skull takes place over three hubs and 15 levels each of the original movies only gets Five Short levels which can be completed in as little as 20 minutes it's inferior to Lego Indiana Jones won in just about every conceivable way and I really cannot fathom what possess traveler's Tales to make all of these changes all they had to do was bundle the last game with the new levels and they would have had a bona fide hit even with the lower quality of the Crystal Skull missions as it is I can only see Lego Indiana Jones 2 working for hardcore fans of the Lego series itself rather than having any crossover appeal to Indie fans or really anyone who's interested in well-designed video games it's stuffed full of content but it's severely lacking in heart and for a Lego game that's particularly disappointing now obviously the Lego series steamed on ahead despite this misstep and traveler's Tales quickly recovered with the release of some of their best games like Lego Harry Potter Lego Batman 2 and Lego Lord of the Rings the problem was that for Indiana Jones this had been a rough few years and with traveler's Tales increasingly looking beyond the Realms of lucasart's properties demand for our archaeological Adventurer had well and truly dried up where the series had once Sat On The Cutting Edge of video game storytelling mismanagement and weak ambition had seen Indy's relevance slowly erode by the end of the decade pincered between his controversial fourth movie and a Spate of video game failures his vice-like grip on popular culture was finally relinquished and the hero that had dominated the 1980s slipped into quiet retirement despite being an almost ever-present figure throughout the 1980s and 1990s Lego Indiana Jones 2 would Mark the beginning of a 14-year sabbatical for the hero of this video during this time not a single game or movie or television show would Grace our screens and for the longest time it really did feel like India had given up on his life of globe trotting Adventure so this brings us to the final mystery in this video game treasure hunt whatever happened to Indiana Jones well the roots of his absence are found in what happened to LucasArts shortly after the release of Staff of Kings on December 21st 2012 lucasfilm and all of its subsidiaries were purchased by the Walt Disney Company and unsurprisingly there was no space in this new regime for a floundering publisher and developer in late 2013 having failed to release a full console game in almost four years LucasArts were shut down and Disney's franchise strategy shifted towards third-party publishing deals thanks to this all responsibility for future Star Wars games was passed over to EA but Indiana Jones was conspicuously absent in fact while Disney eventually confirmed that they were interested in producing another Indie movie there was never any Whisper of another indie game and so while EA got stuck into milking the Star Wars franchise dry Indiana's retirement continued now this might seem strange considering Indiana Jones had always been a series with enormous video game potential but it really can't be overstated what a poor job LucasArts had done of managing it if it had been in good health I'm sure Disney would have immediately found a publisher but through the cold and unfeeling eyes of an investor-focused executive there hadn't been a truly profitable Indiana Jones game for over 10 years so why bother now the discussion could just end there but I do think there's another read on the situation that views LucasArts in a bit of a Kinder light there had been a specter haunting the Indiana Jones games from the moment LucasArts had formed and its name was Star Wars Indiana Jones had always been a big franchise but Star Wars was and is colossal from Modest size publisher and developer like LucasArts it simply sucked up all of the air demanding every morsel of resource and starving its archaeological sibling of any attention now I probably makes it sound like LucasArts were simply chasing the dollars and while that is true to a degree Indy also struggled thanks to the contrasting Natures of these two franchises you see in Star Wars developers have the vastness of a foreign Galaxy to work with it you can make any kind of game and tell any kind of story with the only requirement being to not mess with the content of the films Indiana Jones on the other hand is actually very rigid in what you can and can't do you have to have ancient mythology you have to have globetrotting you have to have puzzles and combat and also base everything around a static character from which you can never deviate if you need any more convincing just look at the utter lack of interest in the young Indiana Jones Chronicles or the disdain with which the Sci-Fi elements from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are now held in obviously talented designers like Hal barwood Ron Gilbert and Julian eggabrecht were able to work around these limits but they often meant that ambitious Studios simply weren't interested in picking up a license there was not only less profitable but also far more restrictive while Star Wars gorged itself on BioWare Raven software and pandemic Studios Indie was left with cheap scraps and while having such a clear identity has made the character into an icon it's proved to be something of a curse in the world of video games in fact this issue runs even deeper as Indiana Jones was so influential that his games often found themselves lagging behind the video game curve you see the movies had been so crucial in forming the language of action-adventure Cinema that when video games began to adopt these Concepts Echoes of Raiders of the Lost Ark the Temple of Doom and the Last Crusade began to appear all throughout the industry whether it's in Simon Belmont's where it pulled the dungeon diving of Legend of Zelda or in the fiendish traps of Prince of Persia you can see the influence of Spielberg and Lucas's movies in so many classic video games and this meant that LucasArts were always playing catch up by the time the industry arrived at Tomb Raider and Uncharted everything that made Indiana Jones successful was right there in video game form but just not in the Indiana Jones games so the explanation for that 14-year Hiatus is quite a bit more complex than the series suffering from a few dud releases despite 21 unique games and countless ports spanning three decades the reality was that Indiana Jones was being done better elsewhere and with such strict rules about how his story should work it was hard to see how he could catch up this is why it was all the more surprising that in January 2021 totally out of the blue Bethesda announced that they would be publishing an all-new AAA Indiana Jones game developed by machine games obviously this was a huge shock thanks to the decade-long absence but also because of the studio that was behind it machine games were known for their first person shooters having produced the Wolfenstein revival games the New Order and The New Colossus in 2014 and 2017 both were highly acclaimed and frankly it was hard to believe that such a talented Studio was stepping up to the play now given that was over two years ago and we've not actually had any further information not even a proper name you might feel that old dread returning but I'm going to try and look at the situation with an optimistic eye machine games Wolfenstein titles could often get quite pulpy and if they're able to take their skill at creating exciting FPS set pieces and convert that into third person tomb raiding well I'm sure they'll nail both the charismatic charm and pulse-pounding action that defines indie's Adventures on top of that even with the two years of Silence the timing couldn't be better as both Uncharted and Tomb Raider are on indefinite Hiatus currently there's a glaring lack of treasure hunting Blockbuster adventure games and Indie is perfectly suited to step into this space maybe we haven't heard anything because the game is in trouble maybe it's just too different to what machine games have made in the past or maybe those same old issues that plagued LucasArts for so many years have once again reared their ugly head it's certainly possible but I'm gonna hold out hope that this acclaimed studio is the missing key that will solve the mystery that is Indiana Jones lack of video game Glory so while dial of Destiny represents the end of Indie cinematic Journey it doesn't have to mean the end of Indiana Jones the world of video games offers a solution to that problem that we spoke about at the start of this video a way to carry on making creative and engaging experiences when a franchise feels like it's run its course there's no need to worry about the age of Harrison Ford or the desire of Steven Spielberg or the ideas of George Lucas because in this digital New Frontier The Adventures of Indiana Jones can go on forever Nostalgia be damned thanks for watching as ever a special Thanks goes out to my patrons for backing the channel and helping keep I finished a video game going I've been working on the Channel full time for about six months now and I can safely say that the difference you all make is absolutely massive in a world where YouTube can snap their fingers and demonetize a video for almost nothing it's incredible to have some degree of security so from the bottom of my heart thank you so much if you want to join in there's a link in the description below and it gets you access to all manner of behind the scenes info and a special chat in Discord where I preview and discuss elements of the videos before they come out and so with that I hope you enjoyed the retrospective I'll catch you on the next one

Channel: I Finished A Video Game

Views: 95,677

Keywords: Indiana Jones, LucasArts, Star Wars, Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Monkey Island, video game, video game review, video game retrospective, retro games, video essay, Knights of the old republic, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, The Last Crusade, Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Xbox, Playstation, Lego, Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Star Wars, Tomb Raider, Uncharted, Fate of Atlantis, Infernal Machine, Emperor's Tomb, Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Factor 5

Id: 8PbXyoS6wUU

Length: 226min 24sec (13584 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023

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[u/Barrel_Titor]

I really liked The Infernal Machine back in the day.

Maybe it's just because I liked the IP but I played it before any Tomb Raider games (which it was a shameless clone of) then got Tomb Raider 2 and didn't like it as much as Indy.

I have a weird fondness for Desktop Adventures too. To this day I like to have some games on hand that aren't too taxing and don't need much reading to play while listening to podcasts or youtube videos and I think it goes back to me spending countless hours of my teens playing Indy's Desktop adventures and Yoda Stories while listening through albums.

[u/raptor2k1]

Emperor's Tomb was legit over of my favorite games ever. Tomb Raider with a focus on brawling instead of guns was just stupid fun and really captured the 'feel' of Indy, along with having a really cool setting/adventure.

Except for that absolutely awful drill machine chase sequence towards the end, lol. Absolutey killed the momentum and was so buggy and unforgiving. I think I actually gave up on it for almost a year before finally coming back and finishing it.

I was expecting the Wii game to be a successor, but it was sooooooooo bad in so many ways.

[u/VagrantShadow]

I still remember getting Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for the NES for Christmas. That game was insanely hard but it was so fun, and as a kid that loved video games and Indiana Jones, this game was the greatest thing in the world.

It made no sense but that didn't matter it was just so awesome to swing across with the whip.

Still have fun memories of that game but I doubt if I'll ever play it again, I rather keep my nostalgia of it positive.

[u/hdlsa]

This dude needs a editor. There is so much filler and unnecessary narration & detail padding this video to 4 hours it’s just ridiculous.

[u/TerahardStudios]

First time I found this Youtuber was back when he did a full 8 hour retrospective on the Prince of Persia series.
I felt like he had this pent up energy about the games for years and he finally said it all. Sure I know 4 hours are alot but if this was a series I wouldn't watch it as I hate waiting for episodes.
Plus he seems kind of sincere, and makes me nostalgic about the way I felt for games back in the day.

[u/Gargenville]

I 'member the Genesis US Gold one where if you jumped and bonked your head off the cave ceiling you'd lose health lol.

[u/MustacheEmperor]

FYI, skip to about 5:50 to watch the Indiana Jones video game retrospective without five minutes of a youtuber navel-gazing over the nature of time and nostalgia.