Inspector Gadget - Final Rating

Written by Joe Pranevich

The evil Dr. Claw has escaped and the Earth is saved from an environmental catastrophe for a few years. We have recovered Uncle Gadget’s gadgets, at least most of them, and need to go buy a new TV. Most importantly, we have reached the end of our Inspector Gadget coverage and now it is time to rate the game. I am always uneasy rating a kids’ game, but actually I think this one will do okay. I enjoyed the game much more than I expected. I did get bored for a bit in the middle, but the high-quality of the writing kept me exploring even as I knew how the plot beats would play out.

Let’s see how the game does by the numbers!

Inspector Gadget - Won!

Written by Joe Pranevich

We made it! After madcap (get it?) adventures across four continents and rescuing all of the U.N. environmental ambassadors, we finally arrive back in New York. For acclaim and fanfare? For fortune and glory? No! It’s time for our final confrontation with M.A.D. inside the hallowed halls of the U.N. building itself. This is exciting and I am eager to see how (and if) all of the various plot threads come together. Will we be able to avert an environmental catastrophe? Will we have the same plot beats in New York as we have in all of the other episodes? There’s only one way to find out!

Unlike the previous time that I came to New York, it’s light outside and it’s a nice detail that they actually changed the little airplane animation to show blue skies. We don’t have to navigate an airport this time; we arrive directly at the U.N. building, guarded by an Officer O’Malley. Penny expresses disbelief that M.A.D. could ever infiltrate an organization as important as the U.N., but there seems to be something going on inside. When we talk to the officer about it, he can tell us only that Dr. Claw is here and hatching a “twisted plot”, although he doesn’t know specifics. (“I don’t know exactly, but it’s wrong. That’s for sure.”) He says that the police do not plan on doing anything about the situation except to hand it off to the world-famous Inspector Gadget. Uncle Gadget agrees and the police officer lets him in, but Brain and Penny have to remain outside where it is safe. How will we help Gadget if we’re trapped outside?

Inspector Gadget - Home of the Shiny Green Suit

Written by Joe Pranevich

Here we are at last, Hong Kong! In my west-to-east tour of the world of Inspector Gadget, this is the last stop. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t ready for the game to be over at this point, but it’s actually been a fun ride. I am curious to see how well (and if they bother) to adapt Hong Kong as part of the game. Will it be culturally accurate like our recent trip to Moscow? Or as generic and white-washed as Nairobi? The opening screen both terrifies me and gives me hope: the airport screen is identical to the one in Rio de Janeiro! The “Portuguese” signs are now in Spanish and there are no Gadget-clones running around, but otherwise it is the same. But in all that there is a glimmer of hope: I had a Chinese friend check out the signs and he claims they are all accurate! The yellow sign is for the Hong Kong Airport while the red sign really does say “No Parking” in Chinese! That represents a surprising amount of effort for the designers and I am eager to see if the same level of detail is applied throughout the rest of the adventure.

We talk to Gadget and the conversation has me puzzled. He tells Penny that Hong Kong is the home of the “shiny green suit”. Penny replies that Hong Kong is a free port where you can buy just about anything, but he insists that he wants a “shiny green suit”. What is up with that? Is this a dated cultural reference that I am missing? CAPs for anyone that can figure out what the heck they are talking about.

Inspector Gadget - From Russia with Gadgets

Written by Joe Pranevich

Inspector Gadget isn’t a bad game by any stretch, but as I am inching closer to the end it is becoming… boring. The writing is still good (and occasionally brilliant), but the lack of care that the developers take with their settings and puzzles is making it difficult for me to want to keep playing. There’s been precisely one puzzle this entire game that required you to have Penny and Brain work together. None of the “disguise” puzzles have been more than just picking up the only objects visible in the room. I know I am not the target audience, but I am ready for this game to be done soon. I seem to have a knack for playing “occasionally brilliant but mostly just boring” games these days since I have been playing Icewind Dale and Quest for Glory V in my off time. I expect those are not popular opinions, but I keep having the same problem. If I wanted boring, I’d play The Bard’s Tale III...

As we start this week, Gadget and Penny have arrived in Moscow, only recently freed from the shackles of the Soviet Union. We have a decade until Putin, so what type of trouble can we get into in Yeltsin’s Russia? And I don’t just mean by the Bard’s Tale fans...

Inspector Gadget - I Escaped a Crane Down in Africa

Written by Joe Pranevich

The voice of the people have spoken! Although I had considered fast-forwarding through the remainder of the episodes, you have convinced me to savor the events as they come. As such, I expect there to be three most posts before we get to the ending: Moscow, Hong Kong, and (presumably) New York. I could be wrong since I haven’t played this game before, but it’s probably a good guess. Part of me is looking forward to getting back to the Infocom marathon, especially as Hitchhiker’s Guide is next, but I can wait a few more weeks.

By way of warning, most of this post was written while running a fever so if anything seems more off the wall than usual, just blame the Tylenol. There’s also a major “political correctness” issue in this episode which I will want to talk about after the gameplay. I already know the pitfalls of bringing 2018 ideals into a 1992 game, but in this case I think there’s a good debate and I’m honestly curious for your views. I’m not quite as upset about it as the fake-Portuguese, but I’ll let you try to figure out what “it” is before I get to the end. Ready? Let’s save another U.N. ambassador!

Inspector Gadget - Deja-Vu in London, Too

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back! We’ve been traveling around the world so much we will soon need to hire Rockapella. (What? Is that reference too dated?) In the last two weeks, we’ve rescued one U.N. environmental ambassador from a life making “secret sauce” for a fast-food restaurant in Los Angeles and another from a similar life creating toothpicks down in Rio de Janeiro. Thus far, the game has been fun, if a bit simple and aimed at children. The humor has been well-done and the animation is better than I expected, but all the same the plots are feeling a bit repetitive. This week, I am crossing the Atlantic to rescue another U.N. representative in London.

What do I mean by “repetitive”? Last week, I discovered that this game appears to follow a set pattern for each episode: Penny and Brain are kidnapped, Brain escapes, Penny discovers where she’s been taken, Brain rescues her, they go to a final puzzle at a different location to rescue the U.N. ambassador. I’m going to see if that holds up a third time.

Inspector Gadget - Send in the Clones

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back! Last week, we successfully helped Inspector Gadget rescue our first UN diplomat, Caroline M’Bega, who was trapped in a life of making secret sauce for an tofu-but-evil fast-food corporation. We also learned an important lesson about… er… polystyrene containers? Smog? Fast food? Something? I’m pretty sure we learned an important lesson, but I can’t remember what it was now. I ended last week saying that my next stop would be New York, proceeding on the map from west to east. When I arrived, I was essentially told that there was nothing going on there (yet) so I picked my next destination instead, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil! For the soundtrack to this post, I recommend that you stick with my childhood memories: “Welcome to Rio” from the 1979 album, “Mickey Mouse Disco”. For no discernable reason, the tracks on this album have stuck with me for nearly four decades despite only hearing it a few times while sleeping over at a friend’s house. You can listen to this enjoyable tune while reading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3rcmrRtnIQ

Last week, a reader asked if Caroline M’Bega was a reference to… wait. Hold on a second. I just noticed the signs. The first sign is “Aero Puerto” which you are probably thinking is just fine, but no. That is the Spanish word for “airport” and here in Brazil, they speak Portuguese. The correct spelling should be “aeroporto”. Do the developers not know the difference between Spanish and Portuguese? Or is this the real way it is spelled in Brazilian Portuguese? Even worse is the “U No Parko” that is just an offensive parody of the language. I believe in Brazil they used a crossed-out “E” symbol for “proibido estacionar”. Will we have to deal with offensive caricatures of language in every country we visit? Sorry. Maybe no one cares about this stuff, especially in a kids game, but this is practically offensive.

Inspector Gadget - Cooking with Secret Sauce

Written by Joe Pranevich

Go-go gadget retro-review! The manual has been read, the score-guesses have come in, and it’s time to actually play Inspector Gadget. This might seem silly, but I am struck first just by the question of what we should expect in an adventure for children. Some might argue (not incorrectly) that pretty much all adventure games are designed for children, even if some of those children are well into their thirties or beyond. With few exceptions, adventure games since the golden age have been all-ages affairs with puzzles and stories that would not be tremendously out of place for young people. So when I say “children”, I suppose I mean the younger ones. We at the Adventure Gamer don’t specialize in games for younger kids and I am not sure that we can review them fairly. I have personally reviewed only two so far, Dragon’s Keep (1982) and Winnie the Pooh (1985), while Aperama looked at Mixed Up Fairy Tales (1992). Trickster was famously uncertain about playing these adolescent adventure games, in large part because of how difficult it is to judge them on a scale that they never really aspired to. I will do what I can to be fair and to enjoy the games for what they are trying to do, rather than what an adult thinks they should do.
All that is to say that I do not know yet how I will cover this game. I’m just going to start playing and start typing and we’ll see what happens.

Game 94: Inspector Gadget: Mission I: Global Terror - Introduction (1992)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Say what you will about 1992, but there were a lot of licensed games. We’ve already seen Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones, Gateway, Dune, Star Trek, L. A. Law, and Hook and we will have a few more before the year is out. Is this the peak year where everyone wanted to get in the boat of low-quality point-and-click adventures? Had technology and design-plagiarism finally reached the point where these sorts of adventures were easy wins? Or did that same technology advancement mean that designers could finally produce the tie-in games that they had always dreamed of? I have no idea. What I do know is that I have open on my laptop our first (and likely only) Inspector Gadget game. Are you excited?

This game, given the unwieldy title of Inspector Gadget: Mission I: Global Terror, will be another of those games of uncertain pedigree that I find so difficult to predict. We have seen virtually unknown designers do amazing things in the first Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes game, while similarly unknown designers came up shorter in Hook and Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. If this thing has one thing going for it, it is that Inspector Gadget is a pretty fun series and one of my favorites as a kid. If they manage to strike the right tone with a silly-but-interesting mystery with plenty for Penny and Brain to do, I could be pretty happy.