Remember the good ol’ days, when real games required pointing and clicking your mouse? Well now those days are back. With the various adventure game creators out there it’s now more accessible to most computer users to make games that rival commercial games of days past.
This is the first adventure I’m reviewing on my blog hopefully with many more to come. The name of the game is Limey Lizard, Waste Wizard made by Shane Stevens with Adventure Game Studio. It’s a fun, old fashioned point and click adventure game. You step into the role of Limey Lizard, who happens to be a maintenence worker on the ship, “The Spicy Curmudgeon”, where your role happens to be… well… maintanence. If there’s a leak in the waste system of the ship, Limey is always ready to lend a hand. Well not really, see he’s kind of lazy, but heck who isn’t lazy these days!
It’s set up as if it were in an episodic format. It starts up, presumably, when the last episode ended. Limey is called to defeat a “Meeba” a giant space amoeba. With his sidekick Lucky Lemming, they attempt to use a Spitronian laser to defeat the giant Meeba. After that is taken care of, Limey is then told to clean up green “gloop” before finally getting down to his real assignment. Going into the bowels of the ship to stop some broken and clogged pipes.
The games puzzles are actually decent, although I did have to look for hints a couple of times. In general almost every adventure game I’ve played requires some sort of hints or walkthrough or something. This, I have always felt, was because of something I didn’t know I could do in the game. On alot of lucasarts adventure games, for instance, I would be unaware of a screen that scrolled because somehow I couldn’t click on the right place to go there. This is a flaw in some games. This also shows up in Limey Lizard. For instance, you have to put two items together to make a new complete item to use in the game. What the instructions don’t tell you is that you also may need to take it apart again so you can use the same item with another item. This is a fallacy on the part of adventure game creators. This is not, however, singular to Limey Lizard. Other than that the puzzles are decently written and you’re not able to really get stuck, except when the author conciously made a decision to let you die. That isn’t really even getting stuck though. The game also includes a mini-game, of the whack-a-mole variety. This can be somewhat annoying if you can’t click your mouse fast enough, but otherwise is an ok part of the game.
The music isn’t great but it is quite decent. The “walking around” music fit rather well with most of the game, although, I had wished that the music would cut out after a little while, and that another tune would play. But I suspect this was because it is essentially a free game with help from other people in the adventure game studio community. The graphics are pretty good, and pretty retro. It looks like 16 color 160×120 — or somewhere around there to give you that feeling of the computers that adventure games evolved from — They are fairly clear to read, although at times sometimes the items tend to blend in with each other.
The interface is almost perfect, but there are a few things that sort of don’t help it very much. See you left click on an item to activate or use it, and right click to examine it. The only problem is, it sort of works opposite in your inventory. In your inventory, you left click to pick it up, and to change items, and right click to actually make it work with other items. It gets sort of confusing because you have to right click on the inventory alot to try different things, and yet, you left click to use it in the game itself.
The real surprise in this game, is the voice acting. Reguardless of the fact that I believe most are amateurs as far as voice acting goes (maybe the guy that voiced Limey is a professional, and I just don’t know about it. You can correct me in comments), the dialogue is not cringe worthy at all, and in fact is quite pleasant. The cockney accent is enjoyable to listen to. The other voices are pretty good as well. You have Lucky Lemming who’s voice is sort of high-pitched. Mr. Hissington a snake with a faux-asian accent. And Panda which is, I believe, the ships AI. All-in-all i’m quite impressed. (Maybe a little more than Herculean Effort’s Apprentice I, because the voiceover’s in that I believe were done by pros on a volunteer basis).
The only other drawback with the game is that it is quite short. Even though it says medium length on the AGS entry page it took me maybe just over an hour to complete. I did look at hints a couple of times though. I’m really looking forward to any future Limey Lizard’s because now that I’ve played this, I know that most likely Shane Stevens’ next outing for Limey should be even better than this one.
Name: Limey Lizard, Waste Wizard
Final Analysis: A delightful little adventure game, with loveable characters.
Price: Free
Where you can get it: Limey Lizard on the AGS website.
Tags: Adventure, ags, games, point'n'click, retro, retro styled
The voice of Lizard is done by Boyd, a prominent member of the AGS community. As far as I know, this is his first outing as a voice actor and is by no means a professional. Yet, he is astounding.
Thanks for the review, and I’m glad you liked the game!
My last name is Stevens, not Steven, though :).
If you’ve noticed I’ve gotten Stevens correct at the beginning of the review. The other was a typo, because I was dealing with a possessive proper noun, so in my haste I typed it ‘s instead of s’s or s’
But it has been fixed.