Having only played the demo of Grim Fandango, I didn't have much to compare with for the progress LucasArts made with the 3D rendering, but I was greatly impressed by what I saw. The movements were very lifelike, with Guybrush's funny "heroic"-walk, and characters which would periodically shift weight from one leg to the other, or otherwise subtly move around. The only bad point I really found with some of the models is that doors never seem to look right when they shut (They're usually not rectangular), and people's mouths tend to foul up while talking. This is nothing new in most 3D engines, though, so I'll overlook it.

Holy Giant Mecha Monkey, Batman!

The game can be rendered in either OpenGL or Direct3D, but you wouldn't know that unless you had a problem with the game. LucasArts hid the API selection option in some troubleshooting controls in the game launcher, so you might just be using OpenGL and not even knowing it. I'm glad I was though, because using Detonator 7.17, the game crashed to the desktop if I tried to run it via Direct3D. Other game controls were similarly hidden or cryptic. Under the "Gee Whiz!" settings, you can adjust the movie quality, the music quality, the shadow quality, and other options, including the (lack of) multiplayer support. Just try to select that and you'll see what I mean. Incidentally, in Curse of Monkey Island, there was a similar option for enabling 3D rendering...makes me wonder if Monkey Island 5 will be multiplayer...

Back to the quality settings...They have two settings - Minimal and Maximal. That is really vague. I was rather disappointed that I couldn't try to force the resolution to 1600x1200 and try to play it that way...I felt like I didn't really have control over the game's options...or whenever I DID have control, it was only because I had stumbled upon a "secret" control panel. Granted, the game was never intended to push hardware to the next level, and the game is rendered is rendered in 640x480...but they did a really good job of packing in detail in 640x480.

The control was rather good too. I still felt confused - I wasn't playing a LucasArts game with a mouse anymore! I got used to the keyboard controls eventually though...and soon enough, I felt like I was playing Resident Evil Monkey...The character-based controls operate just like Resident Evil, where left and right turn your character while up and down move you forward and backward. Sometimes the character-based movement was just REALLY hard to manage though. When Guybrush hit a wall, he'd just *figure* out which way he was going to turn and head there almost as if he hadn't stopped. Needless to say, this would cause me some unnecessary load times if I accidentally went out a door instead of stopping by it. Frustrating, but it didn't happen very often...