Hollywood Hijinx
| Hollywood Hijinx | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Infocom |
| Publisher | Infocom |
| Senior Developer | Dave Anderson, Liz Cyr-Jones |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
January 1987 |
| platform | Amiga , Apple II , Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Mac OS , MS-DOS , TI-99 / 4A , TRS-80 |
| Game engine | ZIL |
| genre | Text adventure |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | keyboard |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing ("Feelies") |
Hollywood Hijinx (in German about Hollywood extravagances ) is a text adventure from Infocom from 1986.
action
The player is a nephew of the fictional Hollywood producer Buddy Burbank. This was known for cheaply filmed B-movies , but had also produced more expensive productions in later years. Years after the death of Buddy, his widow Hildegarde also dies. As the childless couple's favorite nephew, the player is given the opportunity to inherit the Burbank estate. To do this, however, he has to find ten special objects from the director's films within one night in the Burbank villa, otherwise the inheritance will go to his cousin Herman. The mansion is filled with props and mechanisms from Buddy's films. Once the player has found all the necessary props, the action takes a dramatic turn: it turns out that Herman kidnapped Hildegarde, faked her death and forged her will. The player defeats Herman in a fight and can hug his beloved aunt again.
Game principle and technology
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Hollywood Hijinx is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the visualization is largely up to the player's imagination. The character is controlled via commands that the player enters using the keyboard and that are processed by a parser . The commands are in natural language and allow the game character to interact with his environment. The player can move through the game world, find objects, apply them to the environment or other objects and communicate with NPCs . As the story progresses, more locations in the game world will be unlocked.
In contrast to the majority of text adventures, the game is not linear; the order in which the ten treasures must be sought is arbitrary.
Production notes
Author Dave “Hollywood” Anderson had worked in a sawmill before he became a game tester at Infocom in response to a job advertisement in 1983 without first having come into contact with computer games. He came up with the design of Hollywood Hijinx by chance: In 1986, Infocom was bought by Activision . The new mother asked for the game output to be doubled. Infocom did not have enough authors available for this and no money to recruit and train external authors. The task of writing a new game was given to Anderson, the longest-serving game tester with three years of experience. The initial idea came from his colleague Liz Cyr-Jones. For both of them it was their only involvement in the creative process of game production. Since Anderson was neither familiar with the programming of the Z-machine nor with B-Movies , he needed a lot of help from other Infocom authors and especially from Brian Moriarty , who gave him background knowledge on the subject of films. The German Happy Computer judged the result : "The programmer seems to be a real connoisseur of the cinema scene." The working title of the game was "Aunt Hildegarde's Secret".
As side dishes ( "Feelies") contained Hollywood Hijinx the will of Aunt Hildegarde, a signed photo of Uncle Buddy, an output of the fictional gossip magazine "Tinsel World" (which was written in large part by Brian Moriarty) and a plastic swizzle stick in the form a palm tree. These supplements are referenced in the game and therefore represent copy protection. For example, at the beginning of the game a statue must be rotated in a certain order in different directions; the directions and the order are given in a poem on the back of a photo by Buddy Burbank that came with the game.
reception
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With fewer than 20,000 copies sold, Hollywood Hijinx was the company's most commercially unsuccessful product at the time.
Hollywood Hijinx received mostly positive reviews. The German Happy Computer saw an adventure “teeming with gags, allusions and satire”. Reviewer Boris Schneider praised the parser, which can cope with almost every input, and the humorous and allusive inserts. All in all , Hollywood Hijinx is "a must for all English-speaking adventure and cinema fans". The Allmusic offshoot Allgame emphasized the high level of difficulty and the extensive help system of the game. It mentioned the genre-typical low replay value of Hollywood Hijinx . The Computer Gaming World turned out that the game contains several dead ends, where the player misconduct puts the game in a state in which it is no longer solvable. The CGW also noted that the size of the game world is quite limited compared to other games.
The ludo historian Jimmy Maher retrospectively judged Hollywood Hijinx that, unlike other Infocom games, it was "unessential" and the company's least innovative game. He praised Anderson's writing style, but criticized several of the game's puzzles as demotivating and unrealistic.
Web links
- Hollywood Hijinx at MobyGames (English)
- Packaging and goodies
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Scorpia: Hollywood Hijinx . In: Computer Gaming World . No. 36, April 1987, p. 22.
- ↑ a b c Filfre.net: Hollywood Dave's Hijinx. Retrieved September 20, 2018 .
- ↑ a b c Boris Schneider-Johne: Hollywood Hijinx . In: Happy Computer . May 1987, p. 83.
- ↑ Factsheet on Mobygames
- ↑ Allgame.com: Hollywood Hijinx ( Memento from November 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive )