Maniac Mansion (NES) Playthrough

A playthrough of Jaleco's 1990 point-and-click adventure for the NES, Maniac Mansion. Here are a few time stamps for your convenience: 1:27 Playthrough #1 w/Dave, Razor, and Jeff 1:04:27 (normal ending, everyone survives) 24:09 Alternate ending (nuclear explosion) 1:09:40 Alternate ending (plant) 1:22:01 Alternate ending (everyone dies) 1:31:03 Playthrough #2 w/Dave, Michael, and Syd (Michael's path. Dave dies) 2:07:17 Playthrough #3 w/Dave, Bernard, and Wendy (Bernard's ending) 2:51:12 Alternate ending (Wendy's ending w/Sandy and police) The Edison family was enslaved by a sentient evil purple meteor that crash landed in their yard twenty years ago. They now spend their days performing experiments on human brains at its behest, so when local girl Sandy becomes their latest test subject and victim, her boyfriend Dave assembles a group of friends to help him storm the mansion and get her back. Maniac Mansion started out as a 1987 computer game from Lucasfilm Games. It combined the object-oriented puzzle solving of King's Quest with the cursor-driven interface of the MacVenture games, but it shifted the focus to the story and its characters by introducing a slew of innovations that revitalized the stagnating adventure genre. And perhaps most importantly, it was cool. Maniac Mansion starts by asking you to choose who will accompany Dave on his adventure. The friends have unique skills that they can use to solve puzzles, and they'll have to combine skillsets if their going to survive long enough to maneuver their way past mad scientist Dr. Fred, his sex-fiend wife Nurse Edna, their socially awkward son Weird Ed, and the family's moist, squelchy pets, Green Tentacle and Purple Tentacle. Since the makeup of your party will decide your path through the game, there are several ways to solve Maniac Mansion. The choices include: -Bernard is a nerd with technical expertise (and who would eventually become a starring character in the sequel). He has a knack for fixing radios and phones. -Syd and Razor are rockers that play a mean piano. -Michael is a photographer for his college's paper and who knows how to develop film. -Wendy is a talented writer who aspires to one day become a novelist. -Jeff is burnout surfer who also knows how to fix radios. The puzzles are creative but logical, the cast is as funny as it is eccentric, and in spite Nintendo's best efforts at censorship, the game's tone and humor are refreshingly edgy and adult for an NES title. In fact, the entire game translates incredibly well to the NES. The control scheme has been nicely adapted, the redrawn graphics are appealing and move about smoothly, the soundtrack is thoroughly excellent, and the game runs much faster thanks to the massively reduced loading times. The game was a huge success for Lucasfilm Games and for its creators, Ron Gilbert and Dave Winnick, and in my mind, the NES port trumps any other point-and-click adventure on the console. Shadowgate, King's Quest V, Linus Spacehead, and Nightshade were all good, but none of them can match this masterpiece in the 8-bit console space. If you liked Maniac Mansion, you should also check out its excellent sequel, Day of the Tentacle:
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