Missed Classic: Hollywood Hijinx - Won! And Final Rating

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back to Hollywood Hijinx. When I started this series ages ago, I intended to play and document each game in three posts, with an allowance that I would let fun or important games breathe more. I rarely managed this, especially as I got into the groove of doing research and describing the puzzles. Hollywood Hijinx joins this exclusive club of three-posters with my victory today and I’m glad to get it behind me. I had hoped to reach Beyond Zork by Christmas, but that seems unlikely now, especially with the detours and interesting things that crop up. Still, it is the journey and not the destination and I am just glad that I haven’t bored you all to pieces with the twenty-somethingth Infocom game.

When we left off last week, I was stuck. I found eight of the ten “treasures” but two others were elusive. I have only three more items on my “unsolved puzzles” list: the underwater passage, mysterious hatch, and the computer. I was unable to find either a waterproof light source or the final punch card to solve two of those, and I have no leads on how to open the hatch. To make matters worse, it’s just now 7:00 AM and I have only two hours left to find them all and win the game. I can restore or start over to play faster, but I’d rather not. (I already saw the “losing” scene last week when I tried to wait out the candles burning.) One of the things I detested about early text adventures was the “do it again, but faster” mechanic. That is not the kind of retro charm this game needs.

After much screwing around and searching, I needed to take a hint. The answer was a doozy: I needed to waterproof a match by dripping wax on it. I had never considered that this was possible, no doubt because I never made it beyond Cub Scouts as a kid. With that solution in hand, I’m back to the grotto to try again.

Missed Classic: Hollywood Hijinx - Atomic Chihuahuas from Hell

Written by Joe Pranevich

Like this, but atomic and from Hell. 

Hollywood Hijinx has been a fairly breezy game so far, neither too challenging nor too serious. When we left off last week, I explored the first floor of the house and recovered two of Uncle Buddy’s “treasures”, film props of dubious value that I must collect to inherit the family fortune. Not everything has been perfect-- the hour I spent mapping an oversized maze was not time well spent-- but it’s good enough. While I do not understand (yet?) the distaste that some have for this game, it’s a thinner experience than most Infocom adventures. It doesn’t aspire to be more than a cute treasure hunt and that’s okay, but it remains to be seen how that will translate into a rating once I’m through.

My plan for this post was to play the game to completion and knock out a quick rating, but I didn’t make it. With luck, we’ll wrap up next time. 

Before I begin, I should remind readers that I play these games like an insane rabbit who tried to give up coffee but keeps getting drawn back into its dark embrace. I jump around from puzzle to puzzle, trying one thing and then another, and return when I have a better idea even if it’s in the middle of doing something else. None of that makes great reading, so the following is a mildly sanitized account of my explorations where I knock down one puzzle after another in sequence. Do not be fooled, I spent a lot of time just beating my head against things. Now that you understand why I can never stream on Twitch, let’s get to the game!

Missed Classic 87: Hollywood Hijinx (1987) - Introduction

Written by Joe Pranevich

At the dawn of 1987, Infocom wasn’t the company that it once was. A scrappy gaggle of cutting-edge game developers had grown too large, made some bad choices, and was struggling to survive. The new bosses at Activision wanted to profit off their investment and since Infocom games weren’t selling like in the good old days, they just asked Infocom to make more of them-- with the same resources-- to make up for it. Simple, right? The result was a year that was their most prolific as well as the nadir of their commercial success. Even as commercialism failed them, 1987 will see innovations such as the first romance game (Plundered Hearts), the first horror game (Lurking Horror), the first weird wordplay game (Nord and Bert), plus reinventing what a Zork game could be. None of those were commercially successful, but I haven’t played more than a few minutes of any to say how good they really were. At least Infocom was still out there doing interesting things.

That brings us to Hollywood Hijinx, the first of this mad rush of games. Developed by a new pair of Implementors, Dave Anderson and Liz Cyr-Jones, the game appears to be a throwback to the Zork games of yesteryear, with a “puzzle house” to explore and treasures to collect. For reasons that may (or may not) become apparent later, this is Anderson and Cyr-Jones’s only released game. How will it work out? I’ll have to play it to see.