Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure is a graphical adventure game, originally released in 1989, published by Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts). It was the third game to use the SCUMM engine.

Plot
The plot closely follows, and expands upon, the film of the same name on which it was based. Jones just returns from the reclaim of the Cross of Coronado when he is approached by Walter Donovan who tells him about the Holy Grail and the loss of his father.

Indy then travels to some of the places seen in the movie, like Venice and the catacombs after he met Elsa Schneider. In the process he finds his father held captive in the Brunwald Castle after passing through the mazelike corridors, fighting and avoiding guards. Then Elsa's double role is revealed and steals the Grail Diary from Indy. After escaping, father and son pass through Berlin to reclaim the Diary and have a brief meeting with Hitler. Then, they reach an airport, from where they intend to seek the Valley of the Crescent Moon, by Zeppelin or biplane. There are many action scenes, involving fists, and the biplane sequence above Europe, pursued by Nazi planes.

Several key elements of the movie - such as the Brotherhood of the Grail, Indy's friend Sallah, the Venice water chase scene and the desert battle - were not included in the game.

Technical details
One of the most innovative of the LucasArts adventures, it expanded on the traditional adventure game structure by including a flexible points (IQ, or "Indy Quotient") system and allowing the game to be completed in several different ways: The point system was similar to that of Sierra Entertainment games, however, when you restarted or restored the game, the Total IQ of your previous game was retained. The only way to augment it was to find the alternative solutions of the scenario (e.g. fight a guard instead of bypassing him or the opposite) and reach a max of 800. This countered one common criticism of adventures games - that since there is one completely fixed way to complete them, they have no replayability value. Note that some of the alternative fights, like the one with the Zeppelin attendant in case you don't have the ticket, were practically next to impossible to pass, so the IQ max was hardly acquired.

The game was originally released with Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) graphics; it was later updated with VG graphics and an in-game orchestral soundtrack for the FM Towns; only the VGA graphics were backported to the DOS re-released version. The project was led by Noah Falstein, David Fox and Ron Gilbert.

The game's packaging offered a replica of Henry Jones' Grail diary featured in the movie. While very different from the film's version, it provided a wonderful collection of background information as well as copy protection.

An action game also based on the movie (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Action Game) was released at the same time, but the adventure game met with unquestionably better sales and reviews.

Trivia
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure also introduced the phrase "Hello, I'm selling these fine leather jackets," which became a running gag in future LucasArts games. The phrase is a reference to an in-house promotion that was going on during the game's production.

Sequels
One final Indiana Jones graphic adventure, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, was released in 1992.

Links

 * Indiana Jones Wiki
 * Classic PC Games