SPUD!

Big Trouble for Little Santa

As if Santa Claus hasn't already enough to do with making Christmas presents to good children, an unknown bad guy crops up and kidnaps the bearded one.

When young Spud approaches the Santa Claus estate, he already suspects that here something is wrong: The door isn't locked, and in the entrance hall a lonely dwarf puppet is lying on the floor. Spud picks it up and puts it on its feet, whereupon the cap of the dwarf opens and a hidden holo-projector is activated. It is a message from Santa Claus, recorded briefly before he was kidnapped.

He asks Spud for help, a request which the boy cannot refuse. This puts Spud is in the middle of a ludicrous adventure of the funny kind. Like in many other games of the genre you have to move from location to location, to solve puzzles and collect objects. But instead of a static view, each location is shown in a round view panorama.

In practice you can scroll the visible screen window from the left to the right by rolling the mouse there. If you drag the mouse far enough, the screen turns around whole 360 degrees. The game is controlled by an intelligent mouse pointer, indicating by arrow -, hand- or mouth shape that the concerned areas can be manipulated, marched through or talked to. First one must cope with simple puzzles, which however become more difficult later. The spectrum of the wacky characters to meet, is worth seeing: Rudolf, the red-nosed reindeer, emerges as juvenile hacker. Two more reindeers are addicted to deep sleep and continuous shower. Weed smoking rasta-hares put wrong tracks and a gang of dumb gorillas waits at a bus stop for weeks on the pertinent bus.

Another render adventure, I thought first. But then I pleasantly noticed fast loading times and good animations. At the latest with Santa Claus's hologram message, which reminds me strongly of a similar message in a Star Wars movie, the humoristic potential of this games emerges. When then Rudolf, the red-nosed reindeer, appeared as juvenile hacker, the game gets its first broad laughter after less than five minutes. It continues with more and more wacky characters, screwiest gags and constantly rising degree of difficulty. Spud is a real adventure jewel, to be released in the complete German version in a short time. One can only hope they won't be thrifty during synchronisation and that they succeed in finding German speakers to carry the crazy malapropism of the English version in a reasonable way.

What attracts our attention:

+ really crazy gags

+ short loading times

Rating:

• Graphics 4 of 5
• Sound 4 of 5
• Comfort 3 of 5
• Total 4 of 5

System requirements: 486/50, 4 MB RAM, VGA, 2x CDROM-drive, mouse, 10 MB on harddisk

Developer: Alternative Software

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PC-Spiel, © 6/96

adventurearchiv - 23-05-02