Grim Fandango

Calls for a remastered edition of Grim Fandango have been lodged with publisher LucasArts for years without avail, yet the company's success with the superb remakes of The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2 have piqued interest in another updated adventure.

Kotaku: People, if you want to impress us with custom action figures, don't do Metal Gear Solid, or Grand Theft Auto. Do classic Lucasarts adventure games! That's what Iain Reekie did with these Grim Fandango figures, which are amazing not only for the likeness, but for the fact that he did the entire sculpt. Then again, he had to, really, since there aren't many Marvel or GI Joe figures lying around you cannibalise for heads like these.

Abe Lincoln. Charles Darwin. Edge. Between them they’ve mastered the realms of politics, science and writing about overweight Italian plumbers. And, more importantly than any of that, they’re now all 200. Yep, the long-running and respected games mag has just reached its 200th issue, celebrating the landmark event by publishing 200 unique covers.

So if you’re mad for Master Chief, delirious over Deus Ex or want to dip

LucasArts has been around for over a quarter-century now and in that time they've managed to create some pretty great and some pretty not-so-great games. Curious how that happened? The new book Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts provides a detailed history of the company - along with a lot of pictures for you word-haters out there.

Tim Schafer: In a temporary fit of Cake-induced Grim nostalgia, I dug up the old puzzle document for the game. It's 72 pages long and this file is 2.3M so it's not for the faint of heart, or low of bandwidth.(...) Things I noticed: -Man, game documentation sure has changed since 1996! -People said the puzzles in Grim were super hard, and I've always maintained that this was due to a deep character flaw or mental illness on the part of the player. But now, reading this again, I've realized that holy smokes--Some of them puzzles were nuts. Obscure. Mean, even. I blame Peter Chan, because he will never read this post to know that I blamed him. -Look how much stuff we had to cut just to get that game done in three years. The Pizza Demon! Giraffe Lady! Bernard, and my beloved Dillopede. And the five-puzzle action climax with Hector LeMans! If only we had one or two more years! Well, reading about them ten years later is just as good, right? -We didn't have the last puzzle designed when I wrote that document, so I wrote two nonsense paragraphs and then overlapped them in the file so it would look like the final puzzle description was in there, but obscured by a print formatting error. That way I could turn the document in by the deadline. As if anybody was going to read it all the way to the end anyway. Ha ha. Obfuscation triumphs again! I delight in Evil! You can go to his blog and download it.