Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz. What’s that
sound? Why it’s the drone of a pesky bug in my computer and its also
a din you’ll become familiar with if you play Simon 3D; easily
the buggiest adventure game I’ve ever had the misfortune of attempting
to play. Now before you read any further, let’s pattern this review
after an episode of Peter Falk’s Columbo. First, the conclusion: Simon
3D will receive a grade of F and not only did I not complete the
game, but I would rather be locked in a room with headphones glued to
my ears blaring a nonstop stream of Eminem and Dr. Dre. Now before I
go deaf, lets outline our inventory bag full of evidence to support
the final grade.

Before
we begin though, a short history lesson. Simon 3D had been
in development at Adventure Soft for at least 2 years; 4 if you include
the amount of time it took to find a publisher. Ugly rumors surfaced
in the adventure underground that the game was unplayable and poorly
programmed (and as you know, we usually don’t report rumors, we just
start ’em!). Just Adventure was unable to substantiate these reports
as unfortunately, our repeated attempts to obtain a playable version
never received a response. The game itself is a sequel to the moderately
successful Simon
the Sorcerer 2, which could never find a North American publisher
(are we sensing a trend here?).

For those new to the adventure
community or who are unfamiliar with certain computer terms, let’s
explain a bug. A bug is caused by poor programming and will cause
a game to either quit working (freeze) at certain points or kick the
player entirely out of the game, usually before they have had a chance
to save their progress. Poor programming can often cause other problems
also such as characters becoming stuck in walls, inventory items not
appearing when needed and so on. There was a time, long ago in the
enchanted, innocent past of adventure gaming when bugs were non-existent.
This no longer holds true as this year alone patches have been released
for Jazz & Faust, Watchmaker and now Simon 3D;
the Queen Bee in this hive of buggy games.

The game proper concerns
Simon’s efforts to reclaim his body from the evil wizard Sordid. Simon
is a 12-year old boy who has magically been turned into a young sorcerer
and now has wonderful adventures in a fairy tale land stocked with
Mother Goose-like characters. This would all seem to be a rollicking
good time, except Simon’s adult writers have attempted to make Simon
sound and behave like what they believe a 12-year old sounds like:
potty-mouthed, self-serving, sarcastic and chock-full of double entendres,
leering and sexual innuendo. Yet, I’ve played two erotica adventure
games (Kama
Sutra, Exotica Island) that I didn’t find as insulting
as Simon 3D simply because the erotica games respected their
core audience. A reading of the Simon 3D instruction booklet
gives the distinct impression that the game is also aimed towards
the younger gamer. If this is the case, why then was I embarrassed
to play Simon 3D with my own 12-year old son?

Being
as this is Simon‘s third adventure, one would hope that he
would have matured some by now, but alas, the humor is as trite and
stale as ever. The writers engage in British T & A, fart and tee-hee
humor that will appeal to a South Park mentality. An encounter with
an entomologist invokes the following response to Simon’s question
regarding the difficulty of capturing butterflies, “…it’s
HARD, but if you POKE around in enough DARK BUSHES…,”
and to reinforce the point, Simon leers smugly into the monitor screen.
Tee hee, get it? They’re talking about a male erection. And lest you
think I’m exaggerating, I was playing with the subtitles on since,
because of the game’s bugginess, characters would sometimes speak
and not be heard. And as the writers consider us totally stupid, any
word that could be considered a sexual innuendo is not only capitalized,
but also bolded in the subtitles. My son had been playing alongside
me up to this point but I asked him to leave the room. Not that I
believe for a moment that he has never heard any of these terms, but
kids his age are subjected to enough of this crap on television and
in the movies without being subjected to it in an adventure game.

To be honest, if this were
Beavis & Butthead, I would probably be rolling on the floor
with laughter. But Beavis & Butthead are meant to represent
everything that is wrong with society today; they are antiheroes.
Beavis & Butthead are also teenagers geared towards an audience
of young adults, they are not, like Simon, a 12-year old attempting
to humor a similar audience. So is any of this actually witty? Well,
if dated references are your cup of tea, there are numerous references
to Star Wars and Tomb Raider (can’t ever get enough
of those Jar-Jar jokes). During load sequences, Simon is pictured
sitting solitaire on a park bench a la’ Forrest Gump. If you find
incest to be a hoot, there are numerous jokes about ma and pa and
moron offspring (and more leering by Simon). One particular metaphysical
conversation with a character named Judas in the Pool of Punishment
is actually witty because the humor relies on Simon’s misunderstanding
and naivety of the situation, unlike other scenarios in which he is
just a wiseacre. The smart-ass kid angle gets stale after a point,
especially when it is so heavy-handed.

The
previous Simon games were in 2D, but due to pressure from gamers
who don’t play adventure games yet have deluded developers into believing
that improved graphics will translate into improved sales, Simon has
gone the 3D route. If dated and blocky 3D graphics are your preference,
then you will be in nirvana. If this game had been released two years
ago, the graphics would still look dated and blocky. Bushes are square,
trees are polygonal. There are vast open areas of space that are not
utilized other than to have Simon run to-and-fro endlessly. Two nice
touches are phone booths that allow you – when they work – to transport
between areas and restore points placed in areas were death might
be imminent. This provides the gamer with the opportunity to save
a game before or after being killed, an oversight that adventure gamers
have been complaining about for years

True adventure gamers are
aware that character development and puzzles take precedence over
graphics, but allow me to make the following point. Simon, in order
to make some money, must catch butterflies in a net. The animation
of Simon swinging the net is very STIFF and RIGID. Tee
hee. Leer into screen with stupid sneer on face. Not very funny was
it? Simon’s movement throughout this 3D world is controlled via the
keyboard and while the controls are responsive, they are also over-responsive.
There is not a square tree or bush that I did not thunk into at least
ten times. The music and voice-overs are both wonderful, though Simon’s
character does sound much older than his years.

Give the people at AdventureSoft
their due, when it comes to puzzles, they are among the best. Tried-and-true
stalwarts like combine the inventory items fit nicely alongside puzzles
that require the player to think “outside the box.” Unfortunately
a 3D world demands puzzles that take advantage of the graphics and
these 3D puzzles don’t always work. Take for example the butterfly
puzzle. You must equip a butterfly net and then swing it towards a
butterfly. That’s not the problem. The problem is getting a butterfly,
specifically a Purple Emperor worth 250 gold pieces, to appear. I
understand that butterflies are an endangered species in some parts
of the world, but it took over twenty minutes for this particular
butterfly to appear. You can literally run around the screen for up
to three minutes before a butterfly even materializes and then it
is probably the wrong one. To make matters worse, it seems as though
only one butterfly can appear onscreen at a time, so you have no option
but to capture and then release the unwanted butterfly in order to
trigger another’s appearance. Or you can you run back and forth to
the entomologist to sell your catches for smaller increments of ten
and twenty gold pieces at a time. This was easily the most boring
and pointless puzzle I’ve ever encountered in an adventure game.

Even
all of the above criticisms could be minimized if it weren’t for the
bugs, the damnable bugs. Simon 3D is divided into six chapters.
I made it almost to the end of chapter 2 (a very long chapter) which
in theory would be about 33% of the game (and believe me, those reviews
of Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind that appeared two
days after the games were released – those reviewers didn’t even play
33% of those products). In the course of two chapters, the following
occurred:

• The game kicked to desktop
  6 times.
• Twice I used a phone
  booth for transportation only to be unable to exit the booth when
  I reached the desired destination.
• Twice characters voices
  disappeared, thus the need for the subtitles.
• Twice inventory items
  needed to solve a puzzle could not be activated. I had to exit the
  game and then restart.
• Chapter One just strangely
  finished of its own accord without any warning.

The worse is yet to come,
for a puzzle that involved giving magic beans to an incestuous moron
crashed six times. A search on the internet found the required patch
which was then downloaded and installed. After installing the patch,
a readme file appeared along with a warning that the patch might destroy
any saves. Why would I expect a company that takes four years to develop
and release a game that is still rampant with bugs to release a patch
that doesn’t erase the player’s saves? Of course none of my saves
now work.

Did I give this game a
fair shake? I put in over ten hours of playing time. I restarted numerous
times. I downloaded and installed a patch. I researched various walkthroughs
on the Internet and discovered that not only were others having the
same problems, but even after installing the patch there are still
tons of bugs in the game that render it unplayable unless you take
certain precautions such as turning off any programs that might be
running in the background of your computer. Just Adventure has been
following and looking forward to this game for four years, but there
comes a point when you throw your hands up in disgust and we’re not
going to give it a good grade just because it’s a much needed adventure
game.

Where did Simon 3D
first go wrong? Personally, I think the developers tried to please
too many gamers from outside the adventure community. You simply cannot
make a good adventure game that combines adventure-type puzzles, with
arcade and action sequences. Sure you can try, but most times what
you end up with is a hodgepodge of a mess like Simon 3D. Adventure
developers are going to have to face the fact that there is simply
a smaller audience for adventure game than there is for action games
and trying to appeal to the action gamers is futile, because then
you please no one for those who crave action won’t buy the game because
of the puzzles and those who crave puzzles won’t buy the game because
of the action. Nor do we demand fancy 3D graphics. All we ask is a
solid storyline with character development. Even that would be enough
to encourage me to finish a game starring a pint-sized smart-ass with
no redeeming qualities.

Final Grade Simon
3D: F.

If you liked Simon 3D,
then:

Read: any of the
Harry Potter novels
Play: Simon I & 2
Watch: Pinocchio the X-rated version (the ads for this movie
declared, “It’s not his nose that grows”)

System Requirements:

Windows 95/98
Pentium 233
64 Mb RAM
430 Mb HD Space
8x CD-Rom Drive
8Mb Direct3D Compatible Video Card
Soundblaster Compatible Video Card
DirectX 7.0