Hollywood Hijinx is basically a treasure hunt
-- at least it is as far as I've progressed with it.
A good, ol' fashioned grab-the-artifact number. Forget
the Underground Empire, however, as this little ditty
takes place in a luxurious Hollywood mansion, left to
you by your recently-deceased, fabulously wealthy Aunt
Hildegarde.
Well,
not quite left to you, actually. In order to inherit
limitless wealth, Auntie's will stipulates that you
must spend the night in her house, and locate ten treasures
within it or around it before morning. That gives you
12 hours of game time, or 720 real life moves. Each
treasure is a keepsake from one of Uncle Buddy's movies,
which together grossed enough at the box office to keep
widowed Auntie in clover until her dying day.
Apart
from the usual high standard of programming, parsing,
and general gamesmanship, the real merits of Hollywood
Hijinx lie first in the simplicity of its storyline,
and secondly in the way in which the atmosphere so vividly
conjures up all the trivia of Tinsel Town. If you have
to stay tone in Tone Town, you need to be on first name
terms with Sonny Tofts and Douglas Fairbanks -- not
that you're likely to meet them, it's just that the
whole aura of the locations shimmers with reflections
from the silver screen.
So
there are vast patios for garden parties, doorbells
that play movie theme music, statues of Rambo's relatives
in the garden, and numerous gadgets and props from assorted
B Movies. And of course, amongst all this dross there
are ten treasures.
Now
we come to the nitty gritty. At least half of these
treasures are fairly easy to locate. One of them is
even visible without even needing to search for it,
but in a style reminiscent of the infuriatingly devious
Scott Adams, seeing it is one thing and actually getting
your mitts on it is quite another.
However,
for the first time ever with an Infocom game, I found
myself wondering whether this adventure was not perhaps
a little too easy. There's no doubt that getting everything
inside 720 moves is pretty nigh impossible on the first
attempt, or even on the fifth -- but I reckon you might
do it in the tenth. And since it doesn't take too long
to notch up 720 moves, that leaves me wondering whether
there's as much meat here as there is in, say, Hitch
Hikers.
For
example, there is a positively ENORMOUS maze, which
I reckon must have over 150 locations, and which would
normally keep even the most experienced adventurer busy
for hours on end. I say normally, because even here
the spectre of simple solutions hangs over us -- there's
actually a map of the maze hidden in the game. The Wiz
found it within about ten minutes of starting play (whether
from luck or from sheer outrageous genius, only comparison
with others' attempts will show) but ten minutes to
solve a puzzle of that dimension just ain't enough for
Ol' Whitey.
Maps
apart, however, the size of that maze really puts this
game on the . . . er . . . map, especially when taken
with a host of other appealing puzzles involving cannons,
computers, mechanical closets, spinning statues and
no end of other gimmickry. You also get those wonderful
long text descriptions that Infocom excel at, and that
make you wonder why other adventure software houses
seem unable to string more than a couple of sentences
together without sending half the population to sleep.
So,
it's a change from the more recent fashion for lots
of communication with other characters and a return
to the old sport of inventory-boosting. There are only
ten things to get, which sharpens the mind wonderfully,
and despite the slight qualms about the ease of the
game -- at least in the first half -- Ol' Whitey reckons
that you can't go far wrong with this one at £1.99.
Oops . . . Silly me, this isn't one of those BUDGET
games, is it? That comes next. In the meantime, buy
Hollywood Hijinx anyway.
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