Elroy Hits the Pavement is the follow-up to Elroy
Goes Bugzerk, a game I reviewed a little while ago. It is touted
for ages 8 to 98, but it is really aimed more toward children.

This time
around, Elroy must either do a science project that will satisfy his teacher or
go to summer school. At the same time, he is distressed by the lassitude of his
faithful companion, his blue dog Blue, so he decides to create a dog revitalizer.
He and his lab partner, Sid, get to work and actually get the dog revitalizer
built, but then … it goes missing! Along with Blue! Elroy and Sid set out to
recover both their invention and Blue, and in so doing they uncover a nefarious
plot involving dog-napping, gum-chewing mobsters, and Elroy’s arch-nemesis, Gordon
Smugs.

In my Bugzerk review, I had complained about the console-style
save system—while you could save-and-quit at any time in the game, you had
to restart at the beginning of the scene if you went back to the game later. In
hindsight, I think it was done this way so that children would get a little refresher
about where they were in the game, but I still didn’t like it because there was
a lot of “dying” and I got sick of repeating the scenes to get back
to the point where I went astray. Well, in this game, the save system is automatic
(you have a login name), but you must still repeat scenes if’n you screw up. There
is a lot less “dying,” though—I probably only had to restart three
or four puzzles throughout the entire game. So that counts as an improvement in
my book.

Another nice addition is an on-disk hint system. It works just
like the Universal Hint System;
in fact, Jason Strautman, founder of the UHS, is listed as one of the designers
of the Elroy Hits the Pavement hint system. This is a welcome addition;
for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the hints are doled out in progressively
more specific increments, from vague to outright spoiler, depending on how much
help you want. None of the puzzles in this game are very difficult, but I did
use the hints a few times when I didn’t care to repeat puzzles enough times to
solve them myself.

This review is turning into more of a compare-and-contrast
between Bugzerk and Hits the Pavement, so methinks I will stick
with that theme and say next that Hits the Pavement has a lot less overt
educational content than Bugzerk; in fact it has practically none. This
is a good thing in my view; I know my own kids are turned off by blatant book-learnin’
in entertainment titles. I think Hits the Pavement is only intended to
promote critical thinking and provide a fun experience for the player.

The
puzzles are all organic to the plot and solving them is required to advance the
story. The game is very linear; you must progress through the game in a set order.
There is no inventory but you are occasionally called upon to use one or more
items on the screen on something else on the same screen. There are a couple of
quiz-like puzzles, as with Bugzerk, but answering the questions is easy
if you pay attention to all of the clues leading up to that point.

The graphics
are the same Macromedia slide-show style as Bugzerk, again with the collage-ish
animations sometimes overlaid on photos. The voice actors who play Elroy and Blue
are the same in this game, and there is the addition of the lab partner, Sid,
this time. She also is played by a scratchy-voiced, chain-smoking(?) woman—the
gravelly voices seem to be a theme for these games. They all do a fine job, though;
none of them sound as if they are reading as is the case with so many adventure
games.

Randy tends to grade games as measured against all of adventuredom,
but my final grades are always based purely on how much fun I had with the game
in question. Elroy Hits the Pavement is an entertaining, albeit short (for
me, a grown woman playing a kids’ game), experience, and it has several improvements
over its predecessor. All in all, it rates a slightly higher grade than Bugzerk;
it really is well-done with the glaring exception of the save system.

Final
Grade: B+

System Requirements:

PC:
33 MHz 486 processor or better
Microsoft
Windows 3.1 or Windows 95
8 MB RAM
Double-speed CD-ROM drive
640×480
256-color display
Windows-compatible sound card
Speakers and mouse

Mac:

25 MHz 68040 processor or better
System 7 or higher
8 MB RAM
640×480
256-color display
Double-speed CD-ROM drive