The Beverly Hillbillies - From Rags to Riches

By Ilmari

Diary of Jed Clampett 1: “Weeelll, doggies!  I was fixin’ to get me some dinner, when oh’ahl started to share from the ground. A billion dollar they paid for it, ‘n y’all know ‘at’s a right smart of money, so I might could buy me ‘n my kinsfolk a house in Beverly Hills. If I just knowed whur it was. Way over yonder, I thank.”

Let’s begin this

Darnation! It crashed already

Wait a minute…

What’s she doing with that?

Seems I am not the only one asking it

After this surprisingly delightful intro sequence, I landed in the role of Jed Clampett, the father of the Clampett family. Jed was standing in front of a little shack, and her mother-in-law, Daisy May Moses, or Granny as they all call her, asked him to fetch a rabbit. I checked in the shack and found a rifle and some bullets. Off to hunting!

So far, the controls seemed rather simple. There’s no icons or anything to choose from, you just click the mouse anywhere and Jed moves there or picks something up or does pretty much anything he can do. There’s a simple inventory, where you can just pick an item you have and then use it on anything on the screen. Pretty straightforward.

Mapping my environment, I found myself in a 4 x 4 grid of forest screens. Most of the screens were just decoration, but in some of them I saw more of my relatives.

Here’s Elly May, Jed’s only child. Jed raised her like a boy he never had, and she became a tomboy, who likes to wrassle and is not into wearing girly clothes. She had more bullets I could take, and if I wouldn’t have figured it out on my own, she told me that I could scare bears and boars away with my gun.

Like this

Here’s Jethro, Jed’s nephew and the scholar of the family, since he’s the only one who’s schooled himself. In Oxford, even. No, not that Oxford, the other one. The one that used to be called Oxenford, because there was a ford for oxen. He’s so smart he can tell Jed that rabbits can be tricked to move where you want by approaching them from the right direction.

Like here

It was quite obvious what to do next. I had to lure the rabbit to a room with a swamp, and when it was caught there, shoot it and reproduce the iconic scene of the series.

 No rabbits were harmed when making this game

A long cutscene began, retelling the story how Jed sold his farm for “a new kind of dollar” (this time, a billion dollar), purchased an estate from Beverly Hills and drove there with his family. And drove. And drove. And drove. Dagnabit, this was a really long cutscene.

At least the game is honest

Finally, I noticed this wasn’t a cutscene, since I could move the car between the three lanes with my arrow keys. Still, I had no idea what to do, as there weren’t even any obstacles to avoid. After a long period of boredom and frustration, I noticed that picking a certain lane changed the road signs, telling me that I was getting closer to my destination. Testing what lane to choose was made difficult by a bug, which corrupted save games and finally just crashed the whole Dosbox, if I happened to take screenshots while driving (a nice surprise for an adventure game blog writer). Still, I managed to crawl forward, just to be killed by a car suddenly appearing in the lane I was driving.

Restarting for the umpteenth time from the beginning of the driving section, I retraced my steps and this time managed to avoid the crash. Then exit ramps started to appear at the top lane. Most of the ramps just led back to the motorway, but finally the one with a sign saying Beverly Hills led me to a new section of the game.

Driving, again

This time the minigame resembled the driving section of Police Quest, except there were no other cars to worry about and the road network of Beverly Hills resembled more of a maze than Lytton’s. I could stop at the various mansions, speak with their residents and occasionally pick up some inventory items, such as a letter from the IRS and a dead squirrel. The bug with the screenshots and the save games continued, which started to tick me a lot.

At least some plot developments are going on in the background

After some frustration with constant reloads, my journey was stopped by a roadblock. I could do nothing about it, so I turned around and searched elsewhere. The next point of interest was a tourist info stand, where I bought a map. The stand owner also told me that the road construction had been finished. Indeed, when I returned, the roadblock was away and I could continue driving to the Clampett Mansion. The mansion was also a place where I could finally take screenshots without any fear of a save game corruption. I’m glad that was over!

The next problem is how to get inside