Thursday, 29 March 2018


I completed The Adventures of Fatman: Toxic Revenge last night. It wasn't great. It's a fairly short adventure game with a few locations and a lot of backtracking. The interface is fairly simple, but it's full of obtuse puzzles and pixel hunting. There are objects that you have to click on twice to get the correct interaction, objects hidden within other objects, new (tiny) objects that appear when you revisit a location (and for no apparent reason). It does most of the things that are wrong with adventure games. It also doesn't automate the boring stuff - e.g., there's a place that you have to change into different clothes to enter. It's fine to make you go through the rigmarole the first time that you enter (it involves getting in your car, traveling to a specific location, changing clothes, getting back in your car and traveling back to the location that you want to visit...and then doing it all in reverse to change back and get on with the game), but subsequent times you enter they should just do it for you automatically. That kind of stuff is just no fun and serves to make the game longer and more boring. There are also plenty of situations where you have to do something wrong and restart before you know it was something that you should have been avoiding. Positives? It does let you restart on the same screen if you die (at least, it does on Easy mode!). It looks okay - not spectacularly, but enough like a comic. Some of the stuff might be funny (it wasn't to me, but I wasn't enjoying the game). It actually ran under Win 10. That's about it. I had to use a walkthrough to get through some of it, and quite frankly it still took too long. Happy to be moving on.

Next up on the randometer is...Sensible Golf! As you can probably tell by the name, this is golf reimagined by the Sensible Soccer folk. Worth a look.

...and there's something weird about my copy of Sensible Golf. For one, the mouse is completely knackered, so it takes ages of trial and error to actually navigate the menus and start a game. Once in the game it's all via keyboard, so I can actually play. The issue is that the computer player is completely rubbish. Normally that wouldn't be a good thing, but he's literally just hitting the ball a few centimetres each shot. Because in golf the player furthest back plays first, it means I don't get another shot after my first. I've got a screen open in the background with the computer still playing, and he's currently on par 90. Ah well, it was never going to be my favourite game anyway. Onwards!

Next up on the randometer is...Ivan "Iron Man" Stewart's Super Off Road! Great.

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