1998 was one of the absolute best years in gaming’s history for new releases:  Half-Life, Ocarina of Time, StarCraft, Thief, Metal Gear Solid, Banjo-Kazooie, Sonic Adventure, Spyro the Dragon, SoulCalibur, Unreal and many more first launched that year.  Among these behemoths, many of which spawned series that are still running today, was LucasArts’ Tim Schafer-directed Grim Fandango.  The 1998 market was saturated with games of the highest calibre and although it received critical acclaim and many awards, Grim Fandango didn’t sell as well as LucasArts would have liked and more or less marked the beginning of the end for LucasArts’ illustrious adventure games.  Many of today’s adventure game fans (myself included) were either too young or too ill-informed to have yet joined the PC gaming master race when games like Grim Fandango were on the scene and even if you want to check out old PC classics, operating systems and hardware have evolved in such a way that getting such games running can often take hours of config file editing and driver hacking.  Luckily enough Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Productions saw fit to dust off Grim Fandango, give it a touch of paint so that it wouldn’t look like what happens when you try to hook up your Sega Saturn to a 60″ HDTV, and release a Remastered version for audiences new and old to enjoy.  We were fortunate enough to receive a copy of Grim Fandango Remastered from Double Fine, so read on to see what we thought of our first few hours with the game.

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