News
Last Crusade on Steam Will Be Previously Unreleased Version
Indy Gets Some New Content
by Sarah

It has definitely been a big week for LucasArts. Tales of Monkey Island’s first episode is launching, The Secret of Monkey Island is coming to XBLA next week, and the publisher is partnering with Steam to make some of their classics, many of which have been discontinued for years (if not decades), available digitally. With several early point-and-click adventures in the first wave of Steam games coming July 8, one of the major questions has been “which version will we get?” You see, kids, back in the early 90s, CD-ROM was just becoming a feature in home computers, and many LucasArts games were published both on floppy disks and CD, with the CD version being superior. These better, “talkie” iterations of LOOM and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis are the ones to be made available on Steam, but when it comes to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we’re getting something else entirely.
According to Joystiq, the Steam version of Last Crusade will be “previously unreleased”, with more bugs fixed than ever before. While Last Crusade was a great early adventure game, I must admit that it was way too easy to hit a dead end in that game just by making the wrong choice. In fact, I tried to play through the game again a few months ago and got stuck in the castle after emptying a keg of beer onto the floor and not in my cup, making it impossible for me to continue. That’s a perfectly innocent mistake, right?
Again, this is nothing but good news for adventure game fans, but it also raises some questions for me: if Maniac Mansion comes to Steam (and it should), will it receive a similar treatment, eliminating some of the dead ends that are way too easy to fall into? I guess we’ll have to wait for the next few rounds of LucasArts classics on Steam to find out.
Comments
Maniac Mansion wasn't timed, but there were portions of the game wherein you would have to turn off the electricity/drain the pool for a certain story element, and if they weren't turned back on in time the house would blow up, resulting in an instant Game Over.
Most of MM's dead ends did seem more deliberate than Indy's glitches, though. And I only bring it up because I can't imagine that game (or Day of the Tentacle, which includes MM in Ed's computer) won't be coming to Steam.