Product Description

Meet Manny Calavera, travel agent at the Department of Death. He sells luxury packages to souls on their four year journey to eternal rest. But there's trouble in paradise. Help Manny untangle himself from a conspiracy that threatens his very salvation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3082 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Lucas Arts
• Model: 10981
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 95
• Format: CD
• Dimensions: .44" h x 5.63" w x 4.94" l,

Features

• A bizarre afterlife adventure -- a homage to Mexican folklore with a film noir twist.
• Extraordinary 3D Art Deco -- and Aztec-inspired environments.
• The dead come alive in a cast of 55 characters and over 7,000 lines of brilliant dialogue.
• Hundreds of puzzles to challenge the novice and veteran adventure gamer.
• * Designed by Tim Schafer, creator of Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle?.

Amazon.com Review
Join Manny, the undead travel agent, and uncover a conspiracy to keep new additions to the underworld from buying a safe passage through purgatory. Grim Fandango combines a unique story line and complicated puzzles to create an adventure different from any you have experienced before. Follow Manny through four years of mystery on his quest for true love and eternal salvation.

The game opens to find Manny in search of the perfect client, one with the means to place them both on the fast track out of purgatory and into eternal paradise. Enter Mercedes Colomar, the client who has it all--beauty, brains, and enough money to buy them each tickets on the exclusive No. 9 train. Following the film-noir formula, Mercedes promptly vanishes, leaving Manny to solve the mystery behind her disappearance and her connection with the Department of Death.

With fantastic graphics--stylishly rendered in the film-noir style--and art from the Mayan, Aztec, and Mexican traditions, Grim Fandango is imaginative and appealing. The challenging puzzles call for attentive play and serious exploration of the Land of the Dead--not an unappealing job when surrounded by such beautiful animation. Include the original story line and humorous characters and you won't want to stop playing--we didn't!

Amazon.com Product Description
A trip into Mexico's Day of the Dead, where you experience a film noir epic adventure.

Customer Reviews

Amazing narrative, characters, settings, and dialogues...and it's smart!
An exemplary adventure game, this story of Manny Calavera and his quest through a Mexican limbo (in the afterlife sense) for a beautiful woman cheated from the afterlife she deserves takes us through a vivid world of politics, corruption, and heroism. This is no shallow game, but that doesn't mean it doesn't offer the thrills and fun of one. The script, music, and performances are of the highest quality, and the effect is both fun and moving. Play this!!

Great little game, good mystery
great game for a 1 time play. the story line is wonderful, along with the voices and humor. Wonderful for a 1 time play. Not replayable in my opinion, but worth the buy, old game, so don't expect current graphics etc.

Genius


I purchased Grim Fandango towards the end of November 2005. The game wouldn't play on my Pentium 4, 3.2 Ghz processor laden with XP and the dreaded Sp2.

I was able to limp along with the compatibility mode...which is terrible. If active gameplay was possible then the subsequent cutscenes played with an echo and out of focus and out of perspective, and when active gameplay was achieved ... it wasn't the greatest.

I was able to solve the beginning of the game all by myself...not knowing there was a spoiler walkthrough on the PDF manual from installation.

The game started to give me a headache. Between the lousy controls, the annoying echoing cutscenes, and the increasingly difficult gameplay, I was hoping the Grim Reaper would come and rescue me.

With all of those problems, I couldn't put it down. I suffered through with the lame comaptibilty mode. I eventually had to resort to walkthroughs, and found it tough with the walkthroughs!

I finally completed the game, uninstalled it and to my surprise, re-installed it, and played it again. This was really a surprise because I received Myst, Indigo Prophecy, The Longest Journey, and Runaway for Christmas 2005, and all were XP compatible. The game on my hard drive ...this very moment(January 2006)... is Grim Fandango.

I found that the cutscenes played beautifully without the compatibility mode on, and since I had completed the game, I had access to play them all without enagaing any game play (that wouldn't happen anyway with the mode turned off), one scene after the other, all from the game's general menu...

I played the cutscenes for my cousin, he was amazed and totally enthralled. This is a game made eight years ago, made to run on computers made eight years ago, that is in fact better than any game developed today.

Tim Schafer's follow-up, Psychonauts, is almost as good, but its really not a PC game and plays much better on XBOX or PS2.

The quirky, unusual little Grim Fandango, is more addicting, and much harder to shake then any of its contemporary competitors.

I finally came out of the closet with my Grim Fandango addiction and found several wonderful fan sites with a solution to the cumbersome compatibility mode play. Two of those sites are grimfandango.net and Tim Fandango's ninthworld.com both are Lucas webring sites and are brilliant in helping the player with a multitude of challenges the game presents within and out of gameplay. Both of the aforementioned sites along with Lucas Arts also contain a very necessary patch for the game, that should be installed before the game is installed.

As far as the gameplay itself goes...very difficult. It is not trial and error. There is a thread of logic connecting the solution to the challenges presented.

While many times far fetched, Grim Fandangos puzzle solutions all have a purpose, and are often hinted at through dialogue and gestures the animated characters make leading up to the challenge.

I don't know what happened between Lucas and Tim Schafer. But for Lucas to sit on this game and not produce an updated XP version, and basically not produce any versions at all is one of the biggest trajedies in computing history, much less gaming history.

The wonderful Mexican graphics as well as the unsinkable, never say "die" spirit of Manny Calavera are delightful and encouraging. The humor is smart and sophisticated. The music, I can't get out of my head...superb soundtrack and still regarded as one of the best, if not the best. Our culture should not be denied this game. Believe me, we need this game.

mjh