Written by Michael
In our last meeting, we came across Mrs. Halibut, who is concerned because her daughter Gabby is stuck inside this cave. But before we can do anything, she tries to go in after Gabby, and gets caught in the small opening.
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| If Pixar made pornography. |
Of course, Freddi and Luther are helpful, so they pull her out. Then they go in to do the job the right way.
Gabby is stuck under a rock, and trying to rock it off using a small board. It’s not creating enough leverage, so a bigger board is needed. That’s what we’ll need to find.
But, on the plus side, there’s a leftover shell at the top of the rock pile. I think I know a crab from the last post who’d appreciate a used home...
...but while I explore my way around, I find a larger board stuck in the mud. Think that might be helpful?
We also come across a ray named Ray, who tries to get us to give him a clock in exchange for a device to lift a shrimp net. We won’t end up needing it anytime during this game, and I don’t find a clock, so I expect this is a puzzle for a different random iteration of the game. But there’s a key laying on the ground, so I grab that.
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| Predictably, when he moves from one shell to the other, he brings his suitcase. |
But we need to work on the puzzles we do have, before I lose track of them. So let’s deliver that dull shell to Herman, in trade for the glowy one.
And now we can go into the three sockets of the skull, but it turns out there’s nothing there for us now. Then again, I hadn’t needed to solve this puzzle yet.
You know what puzzle I do need to solve? I’ve forgotten about it all this time: find the next message in a bottle. Actually, that’s a lie, I haven’t forgotten. By this point, Freddi and Luther keep on mentioning it to me every now and then, reminding me.
But I still haven’t found that darn whale bone. What screens have I missed?
Well, I missed this one, with Fiddler Crab locked in a cage trap. Good thing I have a key, huh? We get him out, and he gives us a fishing pole.
Umm....
He gives a fish a fishing pole.
Again, the morality in this game is questionable at times.
Some more exploring, and I FINALLY find the darn whalebone. And, bonus, there’s some bones in the ground below it! But first, let us read the letter in the bottle...
...and as soon as we do, the two sharks, Spongehead and Boss, have a cut scene arguing over where the other bottles are, and how deep in trouble they’ll be if they misplace the kelp seeds.
Conveniently, the bottle told me to go to the junkyard. I wanted to go there anyways, with that bone, and now I’m going to need it to get to the bottle. Otherwise the guard dog-fish won’t back down.
And the good boy goes away, and leaves me another bottle to read...
...and another cut scene. Spongehead really messed up.
The message in the bottle told me to go to the right eye-hole of the skull cavern, and another bottle was awaiting me...
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| I’m sure this is meant to be a Bond reference, but I still think first of Inspector Gadget. |
...and another cutscene, where we finally meet the Squidfather.
The message in the bottle sends us to a sunken ship. It’s a location we’ve never seen before, and we are brought directly there because Freddi knows where it is.
There’s a pirate outside who lets us aboard when we tell him we’re looking for Grandma Grouper’s treasure.
And as soon as we get aboard, there’s a window to look through, and the treasure is there! But the crank to pull the rope to open the window is missing.
So, let’s explore the ship.
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| A poster of Fatty Bear won’t help us much, will it? |
In one of the rooms, I can pull down a poster to reveal another one. But more importantly, there’s a wooden crutch we can swipe.
In one of the other many rooms of the sunken wreck, we find Phineas McFinn, who sings us a song about the useful word “Arrgh!” and we even join in. But as soon as the song ends, he accidentally breaks off the handle from his music box. If we find him another musical instrument, we can have the handle.
Well, I have a crutch, and the pirate outside the ship is using a guitar as a crutch. Hmm.
Two trades later, I have a crank handle...
...and we find the treasure! But, the sharks arrive just after us, because Spongehead finally remembered where it was hidden!
However, Freddi convinces them that, instead of stealing the treasure, the best thing to do is to share.
(I wonder if Humongous Entertainment would be okay with that concept if we were talking about their software?)
Anyways, we bring the chest home, spilling seeds all over, causing kelp to grow everywhere, saving all fish-kind.
Should we do this again? Different set of puzzles? Maybe not today. Next time, perhaps, we’ll just go to the rating.
Session Time: 30 minutes
Total Time: 1 hour
I hate this era of pc gaming, where games were being released on win 3.1, and the start of win95.
ReplyDeleteNot specifically FMV games, but the low quality 3d / animation / voices, more often seen with educational titles and tons of new small developers attempting to do the next big thing.
It would take sometime for the dust to settle, but by then, the golden age of adventures was already over.
Anyway, good job on finishing this game
I'm not really sure what you mean. I find the art shown here incredibly charming.
DeleteAlex, I guess I see your point, but it helps if you shrink the window when you look at a game from the past. Yes, on my 34" curved ultra-widescreen monitor, the pictures of Freddi look a little grainy, but if you shrink it down to the 14" screens we had back then, it looks a lot different.
DeleteI also think that visually this game and others like it look rather wonderful with their cartoon styling.
DeleteYeah, see I thought this looked great on both a 19" CRT, and a 75" LCD. I agree there are some naff looking animated games of this era - the only thing that springs to mind as a comparison is The Magic Schoolbus, which isn't the worst, but when you compare the level of care and attention that went into integrating the animation here vs TMS, it's night and day.
DeleteOh, I remember another now: Mr Potato Head Saves Veggie Valley. Again, not terrible, but that to me is more typical of the era - everything looks like a cutout stuck on an generic background, and animated in a budget-studio, low framerate manner. The cutscenes with depth of field are unique to Humungous Entertainment in the early 90s AFAIK (there were a couple of examples in MI2 to be fair, but that isn't the same generation of game, and I don't think I saw it again until Broken Sword).
DeleteThese games are beautiful and charming for their era, but I remember as a teen being a bit frustrated that the adventure game genre for people like me seemed to be collapsing in favor of stuff like this being made for babies (and, conversely, stuff like TLC and Voyeur being made for adult perverts.) Of course I understand that with more high resolution graphics and digitized sound you need a bigger staff to fill the game with assets, and that requires you to have a bigger budget and plan to cover your costs by targeting a large and lucrative market segment, and unemployed game-addicted youth oddly were never that lucrative a segment to target.
DeletePerhaps I'm reading too much into Alex's statement, but I interpreted it as other games being the worse of it. I can't say too much about it because as a kid I liked the FMV and 3D stuff even if some of it obviously looked...crappy. It doesn't help that around this time you could feel magazines losing patience for adventure games which contributed to the first period people feel is their death. Nowadays there are whole websites dedicated to cataloging lists of adventure games of various types, but back in the day you had to rely on the box, magazines, word of mouth, and if you were lucky, the internet. (And of course, you're from a Spanish-speaking country, so that affects the issue) There could very well be ten classic-style adventure games released in say, 1995, but if you don't hear about them, they might as well not exist.
DeleteOK, my son's assessment: "I liked it, but it was a bit short. And I didn't like how the bad guys turned good immediately at the end. But it looked good, and sounded good.". We'll have to work on his depth of critique, but to be fair... he summed it up pretty well :)
ReplyDeletePretty spot on. But to be fair, didn't EVERY television show have the bad guys do a 180° reversal like that at the end of the half-hour? Except for Scooby Doo, of course.
DeleteA bunch of old Japanese PC-98 adventure games are getting an official English release (by adult publisher FAKKU), including Necronomicon and Dead of the Brain 1 & 2:
ReplyDeletehttps://nitter.net/erogearealive/status/2073685692924792852
The Nitter link now suddenly shows as restricted to me (I guess due to risque box art which the account already tried to censor), here's the announced games from the tweet:
DeleteShinjuku Monogatari
Ballade for Maria
Jinmon Yuugi
Dracula Hakushaku
Necronomicon
Marine Philt
Dead of the Brain
Dead of the Brain 2
Pia Carrot
Dengeki Nurse
The Dracula game is notable for being (partially) played on this blog.
This is actually going to be a big help to me. Ballade for Maria is one of the ones I'm planning on going through before Necronomicon and most of the others are ones I planned on doing sooner or later. Might even do another post on Dracula, see if I can get past where I got stuck and see how good my Japanese really was at the time.
DeleteI don't really have anything interesting to say, but I do thing that while none of the puzzles were all that challenging to me, for a child it's a great start to the genre and provides a few association challenges which feel like they're good to know in general in life. Not really saying that because of nostalgia or anything, just saying it because it seems that way. As a child I never cared for the songs or a lot for the random stuff you could click on, even if as an adult I understand why that's the way it is.
ReplyDelete