{"id":254,"date":"2008-02-08T00:32:20","date_gmt":"2008-02-07T13:32:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/?p=254"},"modified":"2008-02-08T00:34:07","modified_gmt":"2008-02-07T13:34:07","slug":"runaway-drag-queens-in-the-desert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/?p=254","title":{"rendered":"Runaway: Drag Queens in the Desert"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/batrock.net\/images\/runaway.jpg\" hspace=2 vspace=2 border=1 text=\"Oh no.\" height=\"264\" width=\"450\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>When it comes to <i>Runaway: A Road Adventure<\/i>, I&#8217;m pretty sure I&#8217;m not trying anymore. I had forgotten how obscure video game solutions could be, and was grateful that Pendulo Studios were kind enough to have created a game that didn&#8217;t lead to horrible deaths or irreversible mistakes that set you back hours of gameplay (yes, again, I am looking at <i>you<\/I>, Sierra).<\/p>\n<p><b>Mention of story and solutions to an obscure multi-year old game contained within!<\/b><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Chapter Three of <I>A Road Adventure<\/I> begins with Brian trapped in the backroom of a small cabin in approximately the middle of nowhere. You have to figure out how to escape. The solution is logical and provokes no protest from my side. Once you <i>have<\/I> escaped, you run into a trio who call themselves &#8220;The Divas&#8221;, and the game is written just as it <i>should<\/I> be at this point: if you&#8217;ve run into someone who is blatantly a man, but is in a dress and going by a female name, collectively she and her companions are indeed &#8220;the girls&#8221;. Their tour bus has broken down out in the middle of nowhere, and at this point you&#8217;re forced to wonder whether they&#8217;re channelling <I>Priscilla, Queen of the Desert<\/I> or <i>To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Love, Julie Newmar<\/i> (That really is an unwieldy title). The three lack any depth but they provide enough entertainment without provoking any horrifying facial animations from the art team. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s here that long bows start to be drawn. What did I do this chapter?<\/p>\n<li>Turned a box of lipstick into a belt of machine gun ammo;<\/li>\n<li>Used a helmet to combine peanuts and butter and melt them into &#8220;peanut butter&#8221;;<\/li>\n<li>Used aforementioned peanut butter to provoke ants into eating an explosives shack;<\/li>\n<li>Hit a bike with a crowbar to get a foot pedal to use as a crank to close the door of a tourbus.<\/li>\n<p>How many of these solutions did I think of myself? A few, but in <I>A Road Adventure<\/I> items are really hard to find (I&#8217;ve read in the manual that <i>The Dream of the Turtle<\/i> is infinitely more forgiving in these stakes). Consistency in artwork <i>is<\/I> a good idea but important items should be more obvious. If you can&#8217;t tell background from foreground, a lot of unnecessary challenge is created. You have to figure a lot of things out in roundabout fashions: for instance, you have to dip a pair of sunglasses into a pool of oil (as in black gold, Texas tea) in order to switch them out with another pair of sunglasses, in order to convince Mariola that she has a better tan than she really does, so that you may borrow her tanning oil to oil a rusty old machine gun. Now, I would have thought that you could simply take the black oil and use it on the machine gun straight up, but &#8230; this was simply not meant to be.<\/p>\n<p>Yeah.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m still interested in continuing the game, but without a FAQ where would I be? Most games you can get through based on your own instinctive gaming abilities, but in games like <I>Runaway<\/I> you need to have the thought processes of an Adventure Game Programmer: the kind of instincts that make you think that skinning a cat is an effective way to get strings for a guitar. At least it will make a vague sort of sense in the end; I mean, clearly that cat skin can be worn on your head to garner you access to the secret society of the raccoons, who happen to have a stockpile of piano wire, which you use to fulfill a contract ordered on the proprietor of a pita stand, which provides you with access to the pita stand&#8217;s stock room, which contains mice who realise that you have slain their great oppressor, which garners you a screwdriver, which you combine with a bottle of milk that you&#8217;ve picked up along the way, which you then deliver to the home of the world&#8217;s premier guitarist, whose instrument room you sneak into while he&#8217;s distracted by his freshly stabbed hand. Then you string the guitar and start to play but, of course, the neck breaks &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I have the sneaking suspicion that made <i>too much<\/I> sense. In my game, for instance, you don&#8217;t have to check the same thing multiple times to get all of the results you need from it.<\/p>\n<p>Plus the start of the next chapter features a montage dedicated to Gina, who is really nothing but an annoying woman who gets into constant strife at this point. Everything&#8217;s coming up <i>Runaway<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When it comes to Runaway: A Road Adventure, I&#8217;m pretty sure I&#8217;m not trying anymore. I had forgotten how obscure video game solutions could be, and was grateful that Pendulo Studios were kind enough to have created a game that didn&#8217;t lead to horrible deaths or irreversible mistakes that set you back hours of gameplay (yes, again, I am looking at you, Sierra). Mention of story and solutions to an obscure multi-year old game contained within!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-video-games"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1HLZ6-46","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}