What
a missed opportunity. It’s one thing when a game is not successful because it’s
just plain, old-fashioned bad. It’s sadder, though, when a game is full of interesting
elements and still doesn’t come together as a good package.

For the
record, 9 is a first-person point-click-and-wait puzzle-based adventure
game. The “wait” comes from the fact that navigation in the game is
quite frustratingly slow.

The shockingly innovative, ground-breaking plot
involves your nameless character inheriting a mysterious and sinister mansion
full of puzzles that you have to solve. No, I’m not kidding. Wild idea for an
adventure game, right? What’ll they think of next? Okay, so I’m being a bit mean.
Frankly, that’s a formula for lots of games I like, and I’ll play games with this
exact same plot as many times as it’s done well.

Produced by Robert DeNiro’s
Tribeca Interactive, 9 is one of the most notorious titles in the adventure
canon, mostly because it’s full of Hollywood money and talent but was a huge
bomb. The voices are provided by Christopher Reeve, Steve Tyler and Joe Perry
of Aerosmith, and Jim Belushi.

Hilariously,
the interface is a gypsy played by Cher. I’ve read many complaints about her character,
but I found her a riot. There was just something surreal about having to talk
to Cher every time I wanted to save or load a game. She’s constantly making oblique
cracks like, “I’m always saving for you … you don’t write, you don’t call …”
or “Count backwards from one trillion …”

I was interested
in playing this title because of the high emotional reactions it seems to provoke
in people. A naturally contrary person, I figured I might be in the minority who
loved the game.

Did I? Well … there are certainly things about it I admire.
The overall graphic design is rather brilliant. It’s like being trapped in an
evil 70s funhouse-gone-mad album cover. The look and the accompanying sound effects
are extremely aggressive, and I can see how they could be off-putting to many
gamers. I enjoyed them, but they are certainly a far cry from the gentle beauty
of Myst or the elegant creepiness of Shivers.

Another thing
I think many people didn’t like about 9 was its proliferation of music-
and sound-based puzzles. Here’s an area where I definitely am in the minority:
I absolutely love any auditory puzzle. It’s not surprising that, in a game with
such rock-star involvement, there would be a lot of music puzzles. There’s an
auditory game of concentration, a drumbeat game of Simon, even a sequence in which
you have to tune a guitar! I really enjoyed these puzzles, and I enjoyed moving
through the game, opening up more and more of the bizarre mansion as each new
puzzle was solved.

However.
After a few hours into the game, my friend and I began to see one of 9’s
major problems: there’s a huge uber-puzzle involving a pipe organ that you
have to solve to finish the game. It involves several extremely cryptic and confusing
clues left around various parts of the mansion. The problem is, not only are the
clues willfully obtuse, but you can’t collect them anywhere! Meaning you have
to do very laborious visual recreations of these notes … over and over again.

For
ages I heard my friends groan about this puzzle. “Ooh, the organ puzzle,”
they’d say, shivering. I’d think, heck, what’s another music puzzle? That can’t
scare me. Well, it turns out this organ puzzle isn’t really a music puzzle at
all, it’s a brutal exercise in cryptography. Time to trot out Ray’s Big Fat Book
of Adventure Game Rules, and let’s turn to #99845, shall we, which clearly states,
“a puzzle can be challenging but it must not be depressing.” This
organ thing is so obtuse, so intimidating, and so nonintuitive that it just makes
you want to stop playing. That’s a real shame.

But it gets worse, my friends.
The goal for solving the organ puzzle is a key to the attic. For each piece of
the puzzle you solve, you get a coin, which you give to the gypsy fortune teller.
After solving the last one, she’s supposed to give with the key. Well, we solved
the puzzle, checked it with numerous walkthroughs and hints files, and were sure
we had the right combo–and yet the key was not forthcoming. Another reviewer
has claimed that the game contains an unforgiving bug that locks you out of the
solution if you don’t wait to use the coins until you’ve gotten all of
them. I don’t know whether this is true or not, but that is exactly what happened
when I played the game. Very fishy. After a frustrating day of repeating a solution
I knew was correct over and over, I finally got fed up and used a cheat code to
get into the room I needed the key for.

And
here’s where things went from bad to worse. Because the attic leads you to the
basement, which is where you encounter possibly the worst arcade sequence I’ve
ever seen in an adventure game. Yes, sports fans, after twenty or so interesting
adventure game puzzles, 9 abruptly turns into … a rat shoot. Now,
you can argue whether a sequence like this belongs in an adventure game at all.
But I’d be hard-pressed to imagine anyone arguing that, even if such an action
element should be allowed, it certainly shouldn’t be this hard. The rat shoot
is just plain too difficult.

What follows is more disappointment. For the
entire game, you have been repairing something called a “Muse Machine,”
dutifully dragging various items you win on your journeys to the machine, part
by part (the interface only allows you to carry one inventory item at a time).
After shooting the rats (assuming you manage to get through the sequence without
quitting in despair or disgust), you get the final piece of the Muse Machine.
Excitedly, you race back to the machine for your final repair. You insert the
piece, the machine starts humming and then … promptly blows up. Yes, blows
up. That’s just a nasty trick to play on a gamer who’s been working so hard.
Makes the whole game feel like a snipe hunt.

The game had one more obtuse,
difficult puzzle, again involving an organ. My friend and I actually worked this
one out, and the game did have an entertaining finale. Actually a literal finale–a
musical number! But, in a final twist of the knife to the hapless gamer, in a
game that featured the voices of Jim Belushi, Cher, and Steve Tyler, the only
star who sings in the final number is … Jim Belushi. Now that’s just mean.

Sorry,
Tribeca, I deserved better after struggling through 9.

Final Grade:
C-

If you liked 9:
Watch: Willie Wonka and the Chocolate
Factory
Read: I’m with the Band by Pamela Des Barres
Play:
Shivers

System Requirements:

486/66

16 MB RAM
2X CD-ROM
Mouse
Sound board
Windows 3.1 or Windows 95