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Treasure Island
This 'interactive movie' from Hollywood Inter-active Digital Entertainment is only very loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale, Treasure Island. The 'action', such as it is, takes place when young Jim Hawkins from the original story is now a man and he meets up with a boy, Garrett Hansen, who yearns for adventure and dreams of finding buried pirate's treasure.
Unfortunately, this is an interesting concept poorly executed and illustrates vividly all the bad features of 'interactive movies', and then some. For a start it is nowhere near interactive enough to be called a game as your interaction consists largely of watching video footage on a tiny screen. The acting and script are so poor as to make parts of it almost unwatchable. The characters in the video make no attempt to speak their lines so the voices are mere voice-overs and even then they are, at times, difficult to understand.
Your character is notionally young Hansen, though I can't say that you actually play the character in any meaningful sense. Interaction is restricted to clicking on an icon, but only when the program tells you to do so, and frequently there is no choice of action. Even when you are offered a 'choice' it is often no choice at all. For example, one choice is to 'investigate' or 'do nothing'. Another is to agree to a deal or refuse it. If you refuse the deal three times, as I did to see what would happen, the game ends and you must commence the scene again.
Such 'choices' as these only give the illusion of interaction as does clicking when you are told. In some scenes towards the end of the game, and in particular during the 'maze', a few more choices are offered, but really this is as 'good' as it gets.
There is no facility for saving your game, but passcodes for each act allow you to skip previously watched acts. This is not very satisfactory as within the acts there are often long and uninspiring sequences to watch whilst awaiting your turn to do something, but if you have to restore it is marginally better than watching the whole game from the beginning.
Surprisingly, for a Windows game there is no installation program to set up an icon or a Windows group. This means that to play the game you must 'run' Treasure Island.exe each time.
Another problem with this package is its claim to be educational. Sure you can learn a few 'facts' about pirates and about Robert Louis Stevenson by clicking on the relevant icons on the main screen, but the whole thing is so shallow it is neither informative nor interesting. And the synopsis provided of Stevenson's Treasure Island is not only irrelevant to this game, but it hardly does justice to a great work.
On the whole, then, I think children will become bored very quickly with this product as only the maze, limited though it is, and the unconnected puzzle in the manual, provide any sort of challenge at all. My 'old-fashioned' recommendation is to buy your child the book instead, it's not as high-tech, but it's much, much more enjoyable.
Copyright © Gordon Aplin 1995.
All rights reserved.
System requirements:
386 (486 recommended), 4MB RAM (8MB recommended), CD-ROM, Win 3.1, mouse
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