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| | Publisher: Worldwide Biggies  Genre: Puzzle & Trivia | | | Min OS X: 10.4 CPU: G4 @ 1000 MHz RAM: 512 MB Hard Disk: 100 MB |
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The Princess Bride has become a piece of Americana. The film is a modern classic, something that I’ve seen at least a dozen times and quote more often than I realize (references to building up immunities to iocaine powder, telling people that “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”, and so on…). It contains a vibrant cast of characters and has a beautifully told storyline of epic fantasy. It would be remiss of me not to mention that there is also a wonderful book that the film was based around, but I’m sticking to the film because that’s what this game is an homage and adaptation of. However, where the film is somewhat of a masterpiece, the The Princess Bride Game is hit and miss.The game actually retells a bit of the movie via some very nice animated cut-scenes. The animation is high quality and the characters portrayed are very likable analogs to their real-world counterparts and, in what I consider a major coup for the game, it actually features Wallace Shawn, Mandy Patinkin and Robin Wright-Penn’s voices for the game. However, while the cut scenes are fun to watch, they seem briefer than they need to be. It’s clear that to enjoy the game fully, you’re expected to have seen the movie. The cutscenes are charming and highlight the film’s most memorable moments, but it’s a pretty choppy narrative unless you know the flow of things from the film. This might have the effect of whetting the appetite for someone not familiar with the film, but it made it feel a little thin to a serious fan. The actual meat of the gameplay comes in the form of four sets of mini-games. You have a task management game with Westley and Buttercup on the farm, a trivia game with Vizzini, a platformer game in the Fireswamp and a hidden object and item-mixing game at Miracle Max’s. There’s a Storming the Castle section as well, but it’s not so much a mini-game as it is a reason to re-watch the game’s cinemas so you can click on items in them (it makes sense when you play, trust me). The problem with the game, and what makes it so hit and miss, is not the games themselves (not entirely), it’s actually just how they’re made. Everything you watch in the game is just an .flv file and everything you play is an .swf. Basically, you’re playing an embedded Flash game. The problem with this is not Flash specifically, but the fact that however this game was created, the Flash is not very responsive. This is very much apparent in the task management game and the platforming game. Both games require precise and rapid inputs, and they just don’t respond as they should. The task management game has no task queue system, so you have to always be clicking around rapidly, and it just feels like a jumbled and clunky experience. The platformer would perform better, but it actually manages to be jumpy graphically, pausing every few seconds as if it was running on an underpowered machine. A MacBook Pro with 2.33 GHz and 3GB of RAM should be able to run Flash just fine, thank you very much.
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