One of the world's first VGA adventure games.

User Rating: 8.2 | Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure PC
By lordgodalming | Review Date:
The MSDOS version of The Last Crusade came out alongside the film of the same name in 1989, and retailed for $80. That's right. $80. And you thought PS3 games would be expensive. I played this game on my dad's 286 PC with a 40MB hard drive and 12k RAM. It was glorious. The Last Crusade was one of the earliest games featuring a full 256 color VGA palette, and Lucasarts used the colors to the game's benefit. They did a surprisingly thorough job recreating and expanding every one of the film's locales.

The Last Crusade is a classic adventure game in which you direct Indiana Jones around his university, the library and catacombs of Venice, a castle on the Austrian/German border (preceded by a book burning in Berlin where you have the option to end your game quickly by punching Adolf Hitler in the face), a German dirigible, and the ruins of Alexandretta, where you eventually discover the Holy Grail. Gameplay is typical of adventure games like King's Quest, meaning interact with NPCs and pick up lots of stuff to use with other stuff, ultimately getting you to the next screen. I remember being surprised at how long the game was, though it was probably less than ten hours (it came out when I was 10).

This game featured some of the first "cutscenes," which were ragged animations done in the game's "engine," that is, still screens painted in 256 colors. At the time, they were nothing short of stunning. As I recall, the scene where Indy and his dad fly the German biplane is especially impressive.

Although I'm sure it is nearly impossible to find this game any longer, let alone play it on an XP PC, it is still one of my all-time favorites.

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