Pepper's Adventures in Time – Final Rating

 by Will Moczarski

When I started playing Pepper's Adventures in Time for the blog (way back when) I singled out the manual as a true labour of love. I stand by my assessment. However, I also remarked: "This is beginning to sound like work, or worse - school." And if I ask myself the pertinent question: was the game fun and did it meet its goal of teaching me something as well? I'm not sure what to answer. Did I learn something? Yes, lots of trivia. Would I have learned more had I known next to nothing about US history? Possibly but...the game tends to work sort of like an old-school museum. The "TRUTH" button is a stand-in for reading the plaques, and you learn a lot about the artifacts but not so much about the broader strokes of history. Your mileage may vary but I felt that a kid playing Pepper will pick up a lot of tidbits and facts which means that the most absurd ones will probably stand out and continue to linger in the back of their head. The game is edutaining, but is it educational? I doubt it.

On the other hand, TAG regular Vetinari claims he learned a lot about history when he played Pepper around the time of its release. Maybe I'm wrong but the TRUTH button sure felt a bit like the Neuschwanstein episode in Gabriel Knight 2 at some point - I fear it belongs in a museum.

But we're not here to rank a game based on its educational merit but rather to see how it fares with our six PISSED categories. Let's do that instead of waxing didactic, shall we?

The Clue! - One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Written by MenhirMike

Last time, we burgled a Kiosk and stole 380 pound sterling worth of loot. But let’s travel back in time and explore what I could have done differently, because the game actually offers alternate approaches.

First, I could have gone to the Hotel and said that I reserved a room under the name Mark Goldberg, who is apparently a millionaire. Doing so gets me into the hotel room, but without getting Gludo’s identification card - I do not know what the ID card is useful for, so I have no idea if this is a good or bad thing.

Another option would’ve been to go to the police station and insult Gludo instead, which gets me kicked out without the 10 pounds, but with the identification card. Since I don’t have money for a hotel room, I eventually ended up at Cars & Vans, where a Mr Danner thinks I’m a relative of Sir Henry of Yorkshire and insists on giving me 20 pounds. So this gives me both the ID card and an extra 10 pounds.

Excuse my French.

20 bucks is 20 bucks…

King’s Quest VII - The Saga of Mimi and Drew

Written by Michael

I haven’t had lasagna since last Christmas.  It’s been too long.

Remember when we first started this game, and mother and daughter were separated?  Rosella was stolen away by a hand that looks like it belongs to a cartoon dog named Spike.

So we head off to chapter 2.  Something about trolls.

Goblins Quest 3 – Final rating

By Ilmari

My experiences with the Goblins trilogy have been a mix of charm and frustration. The quirky humour and the intriguingly innovative gameplay have been a strong backbone of all of the three games. Then again, the first game had a frustratingly hard interface, with a diminishing health bar forcing you to replay the levels until you nailed it perfectly, and the second game was just too long and repetitive. I feel like the third game has nailed it, since there really was nothing to annoy me – even the length of the game was spot-on, the end coming after the most ingenious levels. We’ll see how far that gets with the PISSED rating.

Let's see where we'll land

Pepper's Adventures in Time – Won!

 By Will Moczarski

400 points in my pocket, and one more act to go. This time around we need to find out how meat was cooked in colonial households, learn about colonial cures for fleas, compositions for the glass armonica, blue dye, and taxation without representation. Sounds like a wicked school day to me.

Actual objectives are as follows: 

• Get into Penn Mansion,
• Rescue Lockjaw,
• Prove General Pugh's a Fraud!

Time to tie up all these loose ends, it seems. If you think back to act 5 you may remember that it involved a bit of time-travelling to the year 1787. Instead of witnessing the Constitutional Convention firsthand we learned about Ben Franklin's troublesome gout. Then we went back in time to 1764 again, which is why middle-aged Ben now looks quite young to Pepper. The jolly founding father, not knowing about our time travel shenanigans, takes that as a compliment, of course, and then the chitchat makes way for some serious plotting. Ben hands Pepper a custom-made kite and wants her to go windsurf across the river with it. After that, she is to distract the sentries at the front bridge with food. While Pepper proceeds to sneak into Penn Mansion, Ben will rally the colonists in order to put pressure on the General. (He does not acknowledge that it was us who did all the legwork for the rallying in the previous act by performing some mind-numbing...well, what's the opposite of a fetch quest? A spread quest?)