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The Hardy Boys: The Hidden Theft
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Graphics & Sound:
The Hardy Boys license hasn't seen enough action in the gaming world, for our money. The books have also faded in years past, read by Gen-X'ers more because of their parents' fond memories than genuine interest and relevance. We had Magnum P.I. on the tube, for goodness sakes! We'll admit to reading a few Hardy Boys mysteries back in the day, but the boys have a tough time standing out in a crowded room of teenage detective characters like Encyclopedia Brown and Spider Kane, or their female counterpart Nancy Drew. If you were ever a fan of the books, you'll find that the branding of The Hardy Boys: The Hidden Theft is close to what you held in your mind's eye. The voice acting by teen stars Jesse McCartney ( Summerland) and Cody Linley ( Hannah Montana) help to bring some fresh youth-appeal to a brand that predates most Tweens' grandparents... If you like Linley and McCartney, there's a lot of them to like in The Hidden Theft. Most of the game involves solving puzzles to open up new areas or uncover hints, to gain access to new characters that give you your next hint. Get ready for lots of reading.
The design of The Hidden Theft is good, comparable to what you'd find in a Web-based casual game, putting it in the high middle of most output for the Wii at the moment. Strange placement of objects so they can be obscured by your characters makes it a puzzle at times to just click on something. Discovering the "hot zones" in each level will have you waving your controller around like a magic wand, as you watch for the pointer icon to change and show you can interact with an object. Clues and objects tend to be buried in the background, but nothing a seek-and-find devotee won't be capable of spotting. The Hidden Theft is a good console equivalent to the type of games you'll find online that burn up a few hours before running dry. The only difference here is the challenge level, which extends the game and often increases your level of frustration in the process.
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Gameplay:
Solving mysteries has been a teen pastime for as long as we can remember. After The Hardy Boys there was the Mystery Gang, and then Buffy started calling her crew the "Scooby Gang" in deference to the Great Dane Detective, and now we have hijinks from the likes of Zack and Cody for kids of the new generation... The Hidden Theft stays true to the original formula, with Frank and Joe Hardy cast as inquisitive kids solving crimes that have the adults around them baffled. The Hardy Boys are always the smartest guys in the room, but play their smarts down by talking up sports and girls. As the game begins, the boys are grounded and stuck in their room. A call to their father sets them on course to unravel the mystery of a theft at the Spencer Mansion, and you take over the process of gathering clues and navigating the dark, curvy roads of Bayport, Long Island and New York City.
The Hidden Theft is classic Adventure gaming, point-and-click action all the way. From the perspective of a gamer that grew up on a strict Infocom diet, this is good stuff. The only major differences between classic Interactive Fiction and a game like The Hidden Theft is that The Hardy Boys adventure paints the mental pictures for you and offers contained choice. Even with these limitations, you'll need to use your noggin. Playing through an area requires a keen eye, persistence, and intellect. Like any good detective, you'll interview suspects and examine your surroundings for clues. After the clues have been gathered, it often comes down to connecting the dots and understanding what the evidence is telling you. Suspects or NPCs will often disclose new information if you approach them later in the game, or with the right object. Mostly, you'll find that each area contains a single puzzle, and it falls on you to gather items from other areas to solve that puzzle. In the end, all the clues are leading you toward the solution of a theft that involves an unbreakable safe, sibling rivalry, and of course a cute girl from Frank and Joe's school. The focus is on story and exploration, but is the pleasure of solving the mystery worth the pain of overcoming the game's shortcomings? |
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Difficulty:
The primary shortcoming is that The Hidden Theft ends up being too hard. The difficulty level is raised because of too many arbitrary puzzles and item combinations that are far fetched at best. From the very first scene, where you'll have to "combine" your cell phone with a parrot to transport the phone into a second-floor window, our alarm bells were going off. Further progress in the game reveals lots of these little puzzles, not central to the mystery but placed to slow you down on your way to gathering evidence or breaking the case. Why you would even think to put together some of these objects or set up the scenarios that move the storyline forward is beyond us. The implausibility factor goes quite high, and leads to some frustration when you can't play in a non-linear fashion. Some would say the difficulty goes down when it is always that case that you'll only solve one puzzle at a time, but we found it more frustrating to be stuck in one area, unable to advance because of some missing piece to a particular puzzle. The remedy of looking the answers up doesn't do much for the game, which is supposed to be well adapted to a younger gamer that wants the satisfaction of solving puzzles on his own. We're brought back to other puzzle games on Wii like Zack and Wiki, which did a far better job of establishing a level of challenge that encouraged experimentation. Feeling stuck and then finding out the solution is something you never in a million years would have considered begins to feel cheap, and there's a lot of that happening in The Hardy Boys: The Hidden Theft. The game's creators must have seen it as dialing up the difficulty, but they missed the mark in several instances.
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Game Mechanics:
Weak controls hurt The Hidden Theft in this instance. Pointing and clicking is one thing, but having to double-click is an insult on this platform. C'mon , we're not playing a PC game, guys! Most objects only require one click, making the double-click actions all the more confusing. Are you not getting a response because you've chosen the wrong object combination, or because you didn't click the proper way. Other issues are the navigation in a single screen, as mentioned earlier. The backdrop for each screen is static, so Frank and Joe or another character can block off good things you need to access. For some reason, the room is usually crowded, or maybe it's just the way camera angles are handled once you close in on a clue. Not knowing what is clickable at first, you'll move the cursor to find special animations on objects that can be moved or acted on. A hand shows that this is something you can take or grab and move, while a spinning set of gears shows you can interact with an object in some way. Knowing how to combine objects is as simple as a drag-and-drop, and to use a single or combined object is no more complex than opening a menu, grabbing and object, closing the menu, and acting on your environment. Is the pace rapid? No, but it's better than the old text adventures we used to experience through typing in a novel's worth on a command-line-like interface.
The Hardy Boys: The Hidden Theft relies on kids' ability to read and read well. There are big words for little kids, and the pacing of the game won't appeal to them in any event. Solving the mystery yourself is a component that will appeal to older boys, and Nancy Drew even makes an appearance to rep the woman's side of things. You'll find that the controls become manageable after a short while, and the conventions of finding objects, combining objects, and interacting with the people you meet become second nature. Young kids that are early readers may get into this game for a chance to read dialogue, but most of the spoken lines whip by in an instant. Older kids may resent the slow pacing of the game itself, but they'll like the chance to think creatively and do some of the cool things Joe and Frank do in their books. We can say that The Hidden Theft made us happy for The Hardy Boys and their entree to gaming, but we wish like heck they'd launched the series on a better foundation. The problem isn't using a point-and-click format, but the fact that many of the game's puzzles are just too random to be attainable without peeking, by most kids. On one hand, using strategy guides is fine, but the nature of this series is that The Hardy Boys are a couple of clean-living, conscientious boys. In this context, cheating by looking up the answer just feels wrong... |
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-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications AKA Matt Paddock |
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