Sights and Sounds of Multimedia
By George Harding
Wanted: A Wild Western Adventure …
This is an lo Adventure Company game that is a little different. It falls into the classification of a first person shooter, since you take an the persona and act as the primary character. His name, and yours, is Fenimore Fillmore. You volunteer to rid the town and the farmsteads of Starek, a rich man who already owns the town and wants to take over all the farms in the vicinity to use for grazing his cattle. You don’t get a lot of help in doing this!
Your job is to visit places, gather things and accomplish tasks. The first task is to grow enough carrots for your horse. He likes carrots, but every time you ride him, he uses one or two more. To grow carrots, you have to get water, dump it on the crop fields and wait for the carrots to grow. It takes time to do this, which is otherwise unproductive (and sort of ridiculous!).
You have to have enough carrots to be able to maneuver from place to place. Carrots can only be grown in a couple of places, so you have to anticipate your horse’s needs. If you don’t have enough, he just slumps down and won’t go. Unfortunately, you can’t walk anywhere, so you have to go back to an earlier point in the game.
The game has the save capability, of course, but I found it to be a bit glitchy, as are other parts of the game. Sometimes when you want to save, you cannot move to an empty frame in the save grid. The only recourse is to save over another save point, or abandon what you did since the last save.
I found that it is wise to save after every section where you do important things or have a great deal of conversation with other characters. There is no way to short-cut dialogue; you must go through the same conversations each time you back-track. If you save after a long dialog, at least you don’t have to listen to all the stuff again. There appears to be unlimited save capability.
There are major locations for you to visit: Bannister’s farm, Jones’s farm, School, Starek City (it isn’t clear how Starek made all his money, but he apparently has plenty!) and so on. To go from one place to another, you must travel by horse and use an overhead map to show where you want to go. Walking within a location is done by pointing where you want to go. Fenimore ambles over at a slow pace.
One of the irritations in this game is the need to right click a lot. When you mouse over a person or object, the text shows look at XXX. Then to use that object, for example to enter a door, you right click and the text changes to Use door. There are few things you want to simply look at, except for positioning. It would have been simpler to be able to left-click.
As you play the game, you must acquire things, and there are a lot of them. You inventory is accessed by moving the mouse to the top of the screen. The inventory show a few things and left and right arrows to scroll through your stuff. You left click to use a item, move the mouse onto the screen on top of the object with which you want to use the item and click.
When you encounter a person, you can speak with him/her. Usually you must exhaust the dialog, which means that you have to go through all the possible conversations that are available. This gets kind of tedious, since many of the things you speak about don’t have any real importance.
As usual in a first-person shooter, there are a few puzzles to be completed. The first test is to scoop a fish out of the stream and toss it into a basket. The fish swims around you in a sort of random pattern that is fast enough to make it difficult to get it. You have to be facing the right direction, too (toward the basket), otherwise the fish goes somewhere else. This takes many tries to complete.
The next test is a shooting gallery at the fairgrounds. You have to shoot the bad guys and not shoot the good ones. I was not able to complete even the first round, and you have to complete for or five rounds of shooting to proceed with the game! The first round requires you to shoot 15 bad guys; my best round was 8! You can see that I was severely pistol-challenged! If you hit a good person, you lose that round immediately.
The rounds are timed. The second round requires 20 successful hits, the third, 25 and the fourth 30. The fifth involves matching shots with a robot! Since this was a mandatory test, I could not complete the game.
I found several glitches in the game. In a couple of instances, I could not save my progress. In another Fenimore walked into a wall and disappeared. Another put me in a scene that I could not move out of; I could only reload that last save.
The graphics are very good, but the speaking parts are rather corny. The few jokes are just awful! The general scenario is rather like a series of comic book scenes.
Like all the Adventure Company games, this one is advantageously priced.
Wanted: A Wild Western Adventure by The Adventure Company adventurecompanygames.com Price about $30
Requires WIN 98 or higher, 850 MHz P III or better, 128 MB RAM, 64 MB video card, sound card, CD-ROM drive, 1 GB hard drive
ESRB rating E (everyone) with descriptors Cartoon Violence, Mild Language, Use of alcohol and tobacco
Windows XP Personal Trainer …
This book is aimed at the new user of Windows XP. It starts you off at the very beginning and takes you step by step through all the features of XP that you’ll likely ever have a need to know about.
The book is very methodical and never assumes that you know about something that is just introduced. A picture always accompanies the text when a new subject is introduced. Further, at the end of a group of related information, there is a Quick Reference to reinforce your learning.
Fro example, the section on working with a window shows a picture of a typical window and identifies the important parts of it. There is also a list of the parts, with an explanation of what each does. Then the various actions related to a window are discussed and the Quick Reference goes over the material again in summary form.
The subjects covered are opening a window, resizing it in several ways, maneuvering in a window, maximize, restore and minimize, and closing.
A related subject is working with several open windows. This includes using the Task Bar to tile the windows, minimize all and restore, and switching from one window to another.
Each chapter has a Summary Review, a Quiz and Homework. Quiz answers are provided.
One extra benefit of the book is the included CD-ROM with lessons and a quiz for each chapter. The lessons involve doing tasks as directed, so you can more easily see how to do something. The quiz is rather simplistic. The book is better for learning about something than is the lesson.
The chapters start out with the very basics but move on to more complex subjects such as Files and Folders, the Task Bar, the Free Programs (Word Pad, Notepad, Calculator, Sound Recorder, etc.), Pictures and Multimedia, the Internet, Networking and setting one up.
The chapter on Optimizing and Main ting Your Computer includes error checking, defragmenting, freeing hard disk space, scheduling tasks, adding and removing software (including Windows components), installing a printer, using Windows update, restoring the computer to an earlier date, formatting a disk and using Device Manager. Each of these topics is covered in some detail, including under what circumstances you might want to use that service and how to do it in step by step fashion.
This book would be very useful to the new computer user, especially one who has just purchased a new computer. The book should make understandable the jargon that we all use in talking about computers.
Windows XP Personal Trainer by CustomGuide and O’Reilly oreilly.com
Price $30 Buy online at O’Reilly or at other online book stores
Pictures:
Click on a Picture to see the Full Size Version
Use Back Button To Return Here
