CLASSIC GAMING
The DIG
Developer - LucasArts
Publisher - LucasArts
System - PC
Year - 1995
Genre - Point-and-click/Adventure


Back in the early 90's, LucasArts had a penchant for making excelling point-and-click games when they weren't busy making Star Wars on videogame consoles.  Many memorable games have come out from them, ranging from Sam & Max Hit The Road, Full Throttle, the Monkey Island series and Day of the Tentacle.  All  of them were known to be funny, absorbing and challenging.
But then came one game that not only became the best-selling videogame in LucasArt's history but also was the only serious adventure game they made.

Story - The DIG starts out like a real Hollywood film, despite the graphics.  A space station in Borneo has detected an unknown mass heading right towards earth.  A giant asteroid that has the odds of hitting Earth at 1:1.  In other words, this thing is gonna smack Earth hard, and can mean destruction to mankind.  So a mission is made by NASA to try and alter the course of the asteroid (for if they blew it up, then pieces of the asteroid would still hit Earth) with the help of an expert team and a few nuclear charges.  The team consist of Commander Boston Low (retired astronaut, survival expert and the main character of the game), Professor Ludger Brink (archaeologist), Maggie Robbins (journalist and linguistics expert), Ken Borden (shuttle pilot), and Cora Miles (shuttle co-pilot).


The beginning cutscene show the characters as well as the press conference and credits of the game, seeming to try and impress you with such star talent as having Steven Spielberg and George Lucas think of the concept, and real-life sci-fi write Orson Scott Card write the script of the game.  While this all seems impressive, your judgement alone.  While the team of Low, Brink and Robbins investigate the asteroid, they find a strange tunnel into the asteroid, which is actually completely hollow.  Finding a strange indent and a few pieces to fit in, they seem to activate something and the asteroid reveals itself as a shining dodecahedron-shaped starship, travelling at the speed of light to another galaxy, and another planet.  The quest begins there in earnest, as Boston Low must find his way back with his team to Earth, and away from a strange alien world.

Gameplay - The game shows itself as being very different from LucasArts usual repertoire of point-and-click games.  While most of them were more sillier and funny, this game takes a more graver tone.  Little has changed though, for you have a limitless inventory and a noticeable grey crosshair cursor to guide Boston around to walk, talk, and interact.  One mouse button looks at something or someone, and the other interacts with it or them.  The game in general also has more intelligent puzzles compared to the more inane ideas of Sam & Max yet has a similar inventiveness to that of Monkey Island, except with less funnier results and sadly no three-headed monkeys.  Which of course you WANT to see on an alien world when their evolution has every opportunity to make one!


There really is no way to get killed in this game, and it is incredibly linear, with only one divide of the game happening near the end which gives you a slightly different ending.  The game also has its own saving system like all these games do which utilise the Scumm engine that LucasArts has patented for their works on the point-and-click games they became known among PC gamers for.

Graphics - They are not the best graphics, but then this is 1995 it was made in so we should give it some slack.  The human characters never look entirely right, especially from afar and looking like disgruntled monkey-faced imps.  Closer up it's different during FMVs.  Boston looks like a younger forehead-pushing lovechild between a gorilla and G-man of Half Life, while Maggie always looks pissed off.  Not that this is a bad thing, but like I said, they're not the best graphics.  The aliens however, are the best things in the graphics, since hey, if your graphics don't look that good, the aliens are gonna look greatly original.  The best thing about the graphics though, is the scenery.  Every new scene is quite beautiful to behold, from rushing waterfalls to wide scaping sunlit mountains and half moons shining through the spires of the alien world.  You can't deny the fact that there have been some talented artists working on the world to look as breathtakingly alien as possible.


Music/Sound - This is quite a mixed bag.  While the music is superbly marvellous, the voice acting suffers quite a bit.  Let's start on the good first.  The music is mostly taken from the overtures and excerpts of the works of Wagner, famous German composer of operas, and his work does splendidly here, with original equally-sounding operatic works by Michael Land.  Every new scene presents you with a similar sounding but quite different-feeling musical excerpt that demonstrates the overall beauty of this incredibly foreign silent world, as if the music speaks for the world itself.

Now onto the bad.  The voice acting is not the best you will ever hear.  In fact some parts of it sound downright wooden.  Despite the pulling in of Robert Patrick (a.k.a the T1000 of Terminator 2) as Boston Low, it's not doing any justice.  Boston sounds nearly as emotional as Patrick's famous screen role, and Robbins is pretty wooden.  The best voice acting is really Ludger Brink, who is quite empathic and later on in the game definitely becomes an influential player.  The voicing of the aliens as well are quite good, as well as Cora Miles' sarcastic remarks that may make you chuckle a little bit along with Ken Borden.  The scripting does not really work sometimes, for example, when they first land on the world, they take it TOO damn well.
Surely, you'd be blithering idiots in panic of the fact you just got transported by an asteroid that was really a starship that took you to some other alien world WAY beyond the reach of the Voyager Satellite.


While this is a great game for its story and explorative imagination in an empty-looking alien world, it doesn't feel as believeable as it should be by the fault of the acting.  Not only that, but the graphics sometimes don't look as good as they should sadly.  The Monkey Island games seemed to have better graphics, heck Sam & Max looked more believeable than this.  As much as this is a brilliant game for any point-and-click fans who'd love to sit back and wander among the alien scenery to Wagnerian scores, it's not the best of LucasArts work in truth.  But it has remained one of LucasArts classics nevertheless.

Fun and Innovation - 3
Replayability - 2
Gameplay - 3
Presentation - 3