Is it easier to miss Rusty Anchor than it used to be?

[Huz]

I was looking through the list of achievements for Grim Fandango remastered and I noticed that only 2.1% of people have got the achievement for finding the Rusty Anchor Easter egg. Only 2.1%! Pretty weak. That's less than the number of people who hate themselves enough to have played through using the tank controls.

 

Ok, the figures aren't quite as damning as they seem. The rest of the stats suggest that less than two-thirds of people have had a proper conversation with Eva, the first interactive bit in the game, so lots of its purchasers have clearly barely opened it. And only 21.5% of people have completed Year Two, so we can conclude that one in ten of those people managed to see Rusty Anchor. That's more like it.

 

However! 10% still feels quite low to me. I bet a lot of people playing through are well aware that the Easter egg exists, so for 90% of people to miss out is a surprise.

 

Has the remaster actually made it easier to miss out on Rusty Anchor? When I first played through the original, I found Rusty Anchor by accident, presumably the way God (Tim) intended. I was deep into the "use everything with everything" phase of puzzle solving, and I got my reward.

 

But when playing the remastered edition, it would have been super easy to mess up my opportunity to see the song. As soon as I got the cat track pass from Chowchilla Charlie - which is easy, so you pretty much get it immediately - any time I spoke to Glottis I was able to say something like "Hey, check out this fancy pass to the High Roller's Lounge!". But if I'd said that, Glottis would have run off and not been able to play the song!

 

I can't believe that I wouldn't have explored every conversation option before trying to use everything with everything on my first playthrough, so how come I didn't mess up my opportunity then too? Is the option to show Glottis the pass as part of a conversation, rather than specifically by using the pass on him, a new addition?

 

If so, I don't think it's a change for the better.

[MeddlingMonk]

The remastered edition hasn't made any changes to the puzzles or dialog choices. It's entirely possible in the original to show Glottis the pass right after getting it. I've only played the game a gajillion times (I've literally written the book about it, after all) and have it pretty much memorized. And even though memory gets fuzzy over time, I believe that way back in '98 playing the game for the first I showed Glottis the pass before getting Lola's rusty anchor note and missed the song. Unless my memory is really playing up, I don't think I even knew that Glottis did have a song to sing until I read about it somewhere.

[Huz]

That is super weird. So confuse. Stupid Grim Fandango.

[Metallus]

Totally missed it on my remastered playthrough; I had thought I'd still have a window where Glottis was back playing piano in the club after getting kicked out of the High Rollers' lounge, or that the item would stay in my inventory after being shown. Unfortunately a lot of stuff happened in a different order than my way-back-when playthroughs as a result of still remembering generally what to do to solve everything, but misremembering lots of other little things about the environment.