This one’s definitely worth a read, and might just inspire you to break out some of the older titles from your Pile of No Shame. While we may not all agree with every choice, it’s fun and interesting to read through the article anyway.

The Story:
In the world of Grim Fandango, death is just the beginning of a very long journey into the afterlife. Nice folks get a lickety-split train ticket that gets them to the afterlife in only four minutes. Some take a boat, or drive. The worst sinners have to go on foot, a journey which takes four years - maybe even longer if you have to stop and get a job for awhile. As Manny Calavera, you’re a Grim Reaper - one of the travel agents who help people on that journey. And you’ve got some rough years ahead of you.

See, Manny’s boss gives him all the least profitable clients, so he steals one - Mercedes “Meche” Colomar, from a rival agent. When she gets sent on the four-year trek, he wonders why she didn’t have a ticket for the train, and investigates. It turns out, his crooked boss has been saving up the train tickets and selling them to a gangster. Manny and his demon buddy Glottis, a speed-obsessed auto mechanic, set out to save Meche, and pay tribute to pretty much every great film noir movie ever made.

Why it’s the Best:
Imagine an old black and white movie, with Humphrey Bogart in a trench coat and fedora chain-smoking, set in a world packed with dames and pencil-thin moustaches and secrets and double-crosses. Now imagine that everyone in the film is already dead and looks like either a skeleton or a demon, and most have Mexican accents.

Give it a cheer-worthy everyman for a main character, a beautiful damsel in distress for him to pine for, and some truly evil villains. Now throw in guns that kill you by making you “sprout” flowers, flaming beavers, and a big orange sidekick who’s dumb as a shoe but loyal as a puppy and who loves to drive really fast. Oh wait, there’s more…

The point is, you’ve never played a game with an atmosphere and style like Grim Fandango. It’s completely unique, a mix of Hollywood’s film noir classics like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration, and a sitcom written by a mad genius. No other game finds you searching the forest for a character’s actual heart, which he’s thrown away in a fit of disappointment, or using a ship’s anchor to rip an entire ocean liner in half rather than finding a way to just open the door. And we’ve never played a game in which it was necessary to get your best friend to vomit, then spray the resulting glop with liquid nitrogen.

All the while, the dialogue is snappy and humorous, perfectly drawing you into the characters. Most games with a setting like this would constantly make self-references, coming just short of screaming, “Hey, look! Isn’t this odd and crazy!?” But Manny, down-on-his-luck hero that he is - is the ultimate straight man, content to ironically comment upon the craziness around him and move on. And you’ll never find another companion as dim-witted, yet faithful and innocent as Glottis - or as lovable as a result.

Plus, most importantly, the game never forgets that it’s essentially a love story between Manny and Meche, and that old-school romance and panache is still very much in effect, even if everything else in the world is crazy.

So there you have it: a truly unique setting that enables a completely creative plot, dialogue that’s probably more funny and clever than any movie you’ve seen in the last decade, and a romantic story with characters you simply have to cheer for. We would say that’s all it takes to have one of the best stories of all time, but the truth is that’s a whole heck of a lot.

Head on over to the original article to read the whole list, and remember why we love games in the first place.

Spoiler warning: You may want to skip reading about games you haven’t played - some twists are given away in this article!

2 Comments

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  By kPod, 20 April, 2008 @ 3:57 am

  I certainly remember reading about Grim Fandango to begin with, when I started getting into gaming. Not sure if you remember the magazine, but Ultimate PC (I still have some of them), with the first issue I bought (before GTA2 was out) had a guide to Rainbow Six and Grim Fandango. Good times.

  On a completely unrelated note: My laptop was accepted at Heathrow Airport. It’ll be here soon. <333
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  By Dave Barlow, 20 April, 2008 @ 6:54 pm

  On a related-to-your-unrelated-note note, my new laptop battery should arrive this week. I’ll be portable again!

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