Tony
Tough and the Night of the Roasted Moths
Flashback : Halloween 30 years ago - a young Tony sits on the window
sill minding his own business, reading a book, when his bully of a
neighbor shoots him with a sling shot. We then see the evil deed doer
running down the stairs of his house and exiting his door - low and
behold the pumpkin that was sitting above the door falls and lands on
his head and it gets stuck! Next scene - said bully cursing Tony for
his new head gear.
Fade to the present day Halloween - Tony is now 30 years older - not
much taller and is working as a private detective (of sorts). For the
past 10 years he has been working on a case involving a swollen headed
maniac who every Halloween steals candy from all the kids. Tony has
vowed that this year is the year he will catch the thief (actually Tony
believes this maniac to be an alien which has not helped his reputation
in the agency one little bit). But first, in accordance with the PI
handbook, he needs a really good wig. When Tony is down in the basement
on the wig hunt he hears Pantagruel (his dog - a purple tapir) let out a
horrible howl. Tony dashes out and finds a ransom note that leads Tony
to the Halloween
Fun
Park.
Tony Tough is a third person, point and click, 2D cartoon based
detective game of the old school. If you've ever played the Monkey
Island
games you'll feel like you've come home again. When you right click you
bring up the "action" disk where you talk, take, use and examine items.
Talking brings up a conversation tree of questions that Tony can ask.
Just for fun I went through all of them just to hear what the comments
would be - most are very clever and funny - and I got quite a few
chuckles out of them. The game is subtitled which is a feature I wish
more games had - and you can turn it on or off - I always turn on
subtitles if that option is available. You can also choose two modes of
play: Baby Tony or Grownup Tony - and being the big, brave, smart
[cough, cough] adventure gamer that I am - I chose Grownup Tony.
Hitting the Esc key brings up the load, save, quit and options menu. I
didn't count all the save game slots but the manual said there are 95 -
that's plenty in my book. And even better – you cannot die – no matter
what dumb move you pull.
Most of the puzzles aren't too far fetched but there are a couple that
are typical of the "think outside the box" type. So if you're the type
where your puzzles have to make total sense, you will find yourself
pretty frustrated in a few – okay, quite a few - places. Logic takes a
back seat to imagination in this game.
The majority of the game is played inside the park and Castle and there
are lots of both. As you visit different locations in the park Tony
draws it on a map that you can bring up and "transport" yourself to. My
map never did work the way it was supposed to and I wound up mostly
walking Tony around. He also makes smart aleck remarks if you do
something dumb (or what he considers dumb). You will be told that
"using everything with everything will not get you far in a video
adventure game” which I obviously did because I heard that so much I
wanted to smack the little guy.
Bugs: I didn’t encounter any other than I got dropped back to desktop
one time for no apparent reason.
All in all I’d have to say I thoroughly enjoyed this game. My only
question is :
Where the heck were the Roasted Moths??
Final Grade : 4 ˝ baags
My system:
KMD450
196 megs ram
SB Live Sound Card
32 Meg Tnt Video card
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GameBoomers
