Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure



When I first found out that LucasArts (then LucasFilm) had created a SCUMM game based on this movie, I was totally ecstatic. Last Crusade is my favorite of the Indiana Jones movies, the casting of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery was the perfect formula of awesome. But what made me more excited, was that only prior to hearing of the game’s existence, I had been playing theSecret of Monkey Island and I was so taken by the game’s humor and cleverness that Last Crusade seemed like the perfect fit. Unfortunately, the first time I had played the game was a week ago. Many years of waiting and it was all worth it.

Essentially, the game follows the movie pretty well only leaving out the more action heavy parts such as that long tank fight where the Nazi commander guy falls over the edge and still hanging onto the top portion of the tank, gets crushed over and over again on the rocks below. Also missing is Sallah, Indiana’s desert friend who Sean Connery took over comedy duty from in the movie.

The game opens at Barnett College where Indiana Jones has just returning from retrieving the Cross of Coronado, literally, he is even still dripping wet from the swim! Having characters showing up dripping wet actually becomes the running gag of the game as it progresses. Then after some point-and click adventure work, you move on to Venice and the hunt for the Holy Grail begins.

A neat piece of nostalgia that the game came with was Henry Jones Sr.’s actual grail diary. It supposedly provided some back-story into Indiana’s and his father’s life as well as served as the game’s copy protection by housing answers to some of the game’s puzzles, like the description of the one true grail, that could only be found in the book. Needless to say, when I played through the game I didn’t have the diary and that made things very hard. If anyone actually owns it, hit me up in the comment section below, we have some business to discuss.

The game, like the movie, has plenty of humor of it, including some LucasArts staples of referencing their other SCUMM games such asManiac Mansion . The game also introduced the phrase that would become the legendary running gag of SCUMM games: “Hello, I am selling these fine leather jackets”. It also introduced the Look and Talk functions, which would make for some very humorous dialogue. But the game also did some unique things that other SCUMM games did not.

For instance, you could actually die in this game which happens quite a lot if you are not careful. The game also let you fight action game style with Nazi’s, though doing this was only effective one time a level as your health doesn’t regenerate and fighting just one guard diminishes pretty much your whole bar, though maybe I’m just bad at fighting. Perhaps the most innovative thing the game presented was that it offered more than one solution for going through the game.

Finding these different solutions would garner what was conveniently called “IQ” or “Indy Quotient”. IQ was basically just a point system of which the max you could get was 800. The biggest complaint I have about the game is that you had to physically click the action you wanted to carry out rather than being able to just hit a letter key and point. Granted the SCUMM engine was still in the early phases, it really is a bit frustrating going from being able to do that to not being able to.

Humor, action, innovation all are what make Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure not just a good Indiana Jones game, but a good SCUMM good as well. Not to mention it fits into the rare game-worthy-of-the-movie category. So that’s one down, on to the next shall we?