"The New Adventures of Zak McKracken" is a game which starts out with a lot of potential. The game is a fan-made sequel to the excellent game "Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders," published by LucasArts (then LucasFilm Games) in the late 1980s. These are adventure games featuring a standard point and click interface that is easy to master.
Fans of the original "Zak 1" will be gratified when playing this game, because it bears a lot of similarity to the original and features many of the same characters.
For instance, the makers of this game did an excellent job of imitating the look and feel of traditional LucasArts games. The game play is almost identical to that of "The Secret of Monkey Island." Many of the game's rooms and characters are simply retouched, VGA versions of the same rooms from the original "Zak 1," which gives fans a nice feeling of nostalgia. In order to finish writing the game in record time, LucasFan Games also stole other background scenes from tournament style games. Surprisingly, this flows nicely with the feel of the game and does not make for an awkward feel for players. LucasFan Games also did an excellent job of imitating the original LucasArts sense of humor and "Monkey Island 2" style of writing sequels.
For instance, many of the characters from the original "Zak 1" reappear and divulge funny little quirks about their lives.
While many of the puzzles of this game are logical, hardly any hints are given about how to solve them, and the player is left to essentially try random actions with various objects, in the hopes that one of them will work. Even when she is on the right track, the game still gives the standard "That doesn't seem to work," answer, misleading the player into thinking she wasn't on the right track after all. The user will truly have to think and rely on logic in order to complete each challenge. The game's storyline is also too short and not complex compared to the original. This also has the effect of throwing the player into difficult puzzles more quickly than the original "Zak 1" did.
"The New Adventures of Zak McKracken" ends with Zak and Annie chained up in the Ghost Pirate LeChuck's dungeon from "Monkey Island 2," with apparently no means of escape. The ending screen shows the words "The End", giving the impression that this is simply the end of the story. LucasFan Games has since ambiguously disappeared, leaving no forwarding information as to whether they intend to come back, and the last known news from them prior to their disappearance was that they turned down an opportunity to write a "Zak 3" game in favor of writing a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" game. Essentially, fans who were left feeling gratified for the characters they fell in love with in "Zak 1" are now left feeling "So that's it? They just die like that? What a rip off!"
Some of this game's supporters have argued that fan-made sequels are unfairly held to a higher standard than "legitimate" sequels and that it is therefore harder for them to succeed. While this may be true, it is also true that writing a sequel to any story that is beloved by so many people worldwide, should never be taken lightly, and every attempt should be made to respect the wishes of the original authors, and honor the memory of the original game.
