Review So Blonde Developer: Wizarbox Publisher: dtp entertainment/Anaconda Genre: Adventure Release Date: September 26, 2008 Platform: (reviewed) Review by Greg Collins January 19, 2009		Buy this game at Trade for this game at:

So what's up with So Blonde anyway? Is it just so so, or is it so good you can't stop playing? Okay, I've gotten that out of my system now.

So Blonde is an adventure game from a couple of companies called Anaconda and Wizarbox, who are new to me. I must admit I wasn't expecting much from this entry, once I got it working on my PC. I had to buy a graphics card (256 megs, ATI) to play this! Everyone else gets a graphics card to play the latest monster game from id, but not me. I have to beef up my specs to play what is really an old-school adventure game. I still don't understand this compulsive industry-wide need for more massive computing power in every single new game release. Is it really that big a selling point? By sheer coincidence I happen to have recently replayed the game that So Blonde is doing its doggone best to emulate, LucasArts' Curse of Monkey Island. I first played Curse about eight years ago on Windows 98 running in Virtual PC on my G4 PowerMac. This is a system that choked on graphics specs higher than 1 megabyte. The game ran beautifully, full screen. I'm not saying adventure games don't benefit from technological advances. Not even I want to go back to the original SCUMM engine with the verbs lined up at the bottom of the screen (fine as it was in its day). I'm just saying you shouldn't have to buy a new computer every year to play them.

The reason I was not expecting great things from So Blonde is because I assumed, based on the title and the screenshots and other material on the official website (www.soblonde-game.com), that this was a game designed for teenage girls. Sunny ("So") Blonde is a 17-year-old American teen princess cruising the Caribbean with her parents when she falls off the ship and washes up on a very unusual island. I thought this was going to basically be an adventure-game version of those dress-up doll games you see on the web. You know, Sunny goes around meeting hunky island guys and gets to wear a lot of wonderful new outfits and go to parties and things. Sure enough, the hunky island guys put in an appearance and she does get to wear one really fab dress, but otherwise this game is nothing like what I anticipated. I'm not complaining, because the real surprise of So Blonde is that it really is a terrific old school LucasArtsy adventure game with gorgeous graphics (thanks, ATI).

I'm just not sure it's such a wise marketing idea to try to sell a really good, intelligent game as a ditzy teen blond vehicle. There's a sort of tension here, the game pulling two directions at the same time. Sunny Blonde is only sporadically the classic blonde American princess throughout the game. For far too long, for instance, she keeps thinking she's on some sort of theme island. This was a funny conceit for the first two minutes, not the first two hours. However, the rest of the time, she's as sharp as a tack and courageous, a real heroine. It's almost like half the people producing this game thought they were making a lightweight game for teenage girls, and the other half thought, hey, screw that, let's make a great traditional adventure while no one's looking.

The ace up the sleeve of this game is the involvement (story and dialogs) of one of adventure-gamedom's greats, Steve Ince. Of Broken Sword fame. And while So Blonde is mainly channeling Ron Gilbert and George Lucas, there's also a definite Broken Sword strain to it. In particular the lush, quasi-realistic yet cartoony, brightly colored backgrounds. In fact, this game is channeling a lot of old classics. It's like some sort of monster mash-up of Ince's (or someone's) favorite pop culture icons. Not only do Broken Sword and Curse of Monkey Island characters make oblique appearances, so does Luke Skywalker's X-wing. There's also a fair amount of Will Elder Mad magazine-ish animated marginalia -- tiny cartoon characters popping up in the corners waving signs, or Max of Sam and Max fame bobbing up out of a barrel. At first I admit I found this distracting, because I assumed these were game clues. Once I realized it was just the game designers amusing themselves, I got used to it. I still kept clicking on them, just to make sure, but I got the gag.

This is not to mention the whole Peter Pan vibe. In fact the game basically plays like Wendy, updated for the 21st century, going to Monkey Island and battling Captain Hook. Perhaps I should elaborate on that.

You see, Forgotten Island, like Never Never Land, is a place out of time. The inhabitants have been frozen by a curse, essentially stuck in a time warp for the past 200 years. Which is why everyone wears flouncy shirts and knee britches and full length dresses and kerchiefs and One-Eye the pirate has the same tailor as the aforementioned Capt. Hook. Sunny washes ashore and can't understand why her cell phone won't work. In traditional adventure game style she wanders around solving inventory based puzzles, talking to colorful characters and expanding her area of exploration, until she of course runs across the special dilemma of Forgotten Island (or, in the original French, L'ile Oubliée). Naturally, Sunny sets about setting everything right, having a raft of adventures along the way and nearly getting killed a half dozen or so times. She also meets Max (not the one of Sam and Max fame), an animal described in the game as a cross between a dog and a bear but which really looks like a large Pepe Lepew, only with more stripes.

Honest, it sounds nuts, but it all adds up to a very charming, whoppingly entertaining adventure. And a long one, at that. The save games keep track of your playing time and I was almost embarrassed to see my final save clock in at about 23 hours. And that's just "game" time. The real time I spent was probably twice that. This is one of those games where about halfway through you'd swear you're just about at the end when, lo and behold, a whole new area opens up. Which is good. That's what adventure games should do. By the way, the save slots appear to be unlimited, a good thing.

I still can't make up my mind if So Blonde is a challenging game or not. Most of the time it's pretty straightforwardly use the inventory item in the largely obvious place, or talk to the case-appropriate character, but, honestly, I felt myself scrambling for almost the whole game. And that despite Sunny's frequent tendency to tell you pretty much exactly what to do next. Something like her announcing out of the blue to herself, "I need to find Max now." But, as I say, even with this hand-holding I was still at sea much of the time. Which, somewhat strangely, is what you want in an adventure. If you never got stumped you'd just watched a movie, not play a game. Much of the level of difficulty, I suspect, is due to the size and density of the game world, but there were a few genuine puzzle twists here and there. You even play as Max a few times, and once as Juan. Hey, girls, Juan is your hunky-dory love interest.

However, I'd be amiss if I didn't bring up the mini-games. This is now, officially, a trend in modern adventures. When and where did this start, anyway? At least a dozen times So Blonde stops dead to present you with a stick-figure-ish game panel, whereon you play one of a very familiar assortment of web coffee-break type skill games. Yes, there's a slider puzzle. Yes, there's a whack-a-mole variation. You name it, it's here. Now, I don't personally mind mini-games. These, with one exception, were all stunningly easy. And as if that weren't enough, they all have an "automatically win for me" button. If I have an objection to this sort of thing it's only that it breaks the mood. It's a bit like watching a good play but having to climb up on stage every twenty minutes to play a round of badminton with the actors. I like plays. I like badminton. I don't know if I like them conjoined.

You know what I wish game designers would emulate? The Groovie. You aficionados will remember the Groovie as the Trilobyte puzzle engine from The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour. In an almost seamless manner, you moved from the main game screen to the puzzle screen. That is, with no break in dramatic mood. From what I read on the web, the Groovie engine was essentially a video player that permitted player interaction. The folks at id used it for the much-praised Quake 3 engine. How come we don't get stuff like that in adventure games? It's not fair.

Game play in So Blonde overall seems to strive to be as Curse of Monkey Island-like as possible. You've got your situationally sensitive right click action icons: look, talk and interact. The inventory does that hide-and-go-seek thing with the bottom of the screen. Mercifully, you can double click on where you want to go and Sunny will run not walk there. Double-click the arrow to the next screen and you'll directly switch there (if available). There's even the bird's-eye-view island map that traces Sunny's passage from one area to the next. Unlike Curse, you can't select where on the map to go, though. A tiny teeny Sunny just runs there. At one point in the game you get this map to put in your inventory. Alas, it doesn't do anything. You call it up and click wildly and -- nothing. I'm not sure if this was a glitch on my computer or version of the game. I couldn't think of a reason why the designers would give you a non-functioning game map. There are times when certain actions are triggered when you move through certain areas, so perhaps they didn't want you to miss those. But they could have just interrupted your passage and plunked you where you needed to be. Not a tragedy, but odd.

By the end of the game, Forgotten Island gets so big that you will indeed forget a number of places you've been. A trek from one end of the isle to the other takes a rigorous amount of time, not only because of the non-map but the load screens, which generally last about five seconds. And there's a load screen between most areas of the game. You will grow quite familiar with all four of them. So much for my whopping new graphics card! The recommended specs for So Blonde don't sound too imposing. I'm not really sure why the game needs to pause so long. It may be because each screen is considerably larger than your average graphic adventure game background. This creates a lush look to the game, with lots of eye candy, but it also makes it a little challenging to find everything you need to put your mouse hand on. I'm not averse to a certain amount of pixel-hunting. After all, exploration is a key ingredient in adventure gaming. But a couple of times, at least, I had trouble tracking down something simply because the item in question was too small to be readily identified.

The story of So Blonde unfolds quite engagingly, providing a real sense of adventure. At one point the story even seems poised to make the leap to serious-fiction interesting. Even Curse of Monkey Island, as brilliant as it is, has a largely functional story. Guybrush loses Elaine, Guybrush must get her back, LeChuck stands in the way. It's not, you know, Faulkner. Nor should it be. But So Blonde at one point almost gets there. Then the hugfest happy ending kicks in. Still, a noble effort. And I'm not myself sure if serious (even serious comic) fiction can mesh with the adventure game. Their separate interests might fight each other. I'd like to see somebody try it, though. The closest anyone ever came was Grim Fandango.

Let's see. What else. The music of So Blonde is also expertly done. From the main game screen forward those steel drums will instantly transport you back to Plunder and Blood Islands. The voice acting is also expert. The dialog tries to be as witty as Curse, and almost gets there. Curse is one of the few genuinely witty adventure games. It's not just funny, it's brilliantly sarcastic and clever. Tough to match that.

Perhaps the thing I admire most about So Blonde is how it unabashedly, unapologetically goes about being a classic third-person adventure game. These don't come down the pike that often nowadays. LucasArts' Monkey Island series is indeed a model worth perpetuating. Not some silly fad but a genuine classic entertainment form, like the detective story or the suspense movie. You wouldn't have wanted writers to stop penning mysteries after Edgar Allan Poe's “Murders in the rue Morgue,” and we shouldn't want game designers to stop making classic inventory-and-dialog graphic adventures. So Blonde strives to be the best kind of adventure game and aside from a few peculiar gaming and technical choices, succeeds. While it may not quite reach the level of its model, it is nevertheless an excellent game. Overall, I give it an A-.

System Requirements (Minimum):

• Windows 2000/XP/Vista
• Pentium 1.6GHz
• 512 MB RAM
• 64 MB DirectX 9-compliant video card
• DirectX 9-compliant sound card
• DirectX 9.0c or above
• 3 GB free hard disk space
• DVD-Rom drive
• Windows-compatible keyboard & mouse

System Requirements (Recommended):

• Windows 2000/XP/Vista
• Pentium 2GHz
• 512 MB RAM for 2000/XP
• 1024 MB RAM for Vista
• 128 MB DirectX 9-compliant video card
• DirectX 9-compliant sound card
• DirectX 9.0c or above
• 3 GB free hard disk space
• DVD-Rom drive
• Windows-compatible keyboard & mouse