While the world watches and waits and speculates about the prospects
of a Monkey Island 4 and bemoans the lack of LucasArts adventure releases,
a little-known Italian company is poised to fill the void with a good old-fashioned,
point-and-click, 2D comic adventure game, Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted
Moths. Tony Tough has been released in Italy, in the Italian language, already
and by all reports is selling quite well. I had the opportunity to play a nearly
full-length demo of the game, with voices in Italian and English subtitles.

Tony
Tough is a short, portly Milquetoast-type private detective who works for a gigantic
detective agency–but his office is in the dank basement. As the game opens, we
see him as a child, sitting in his window on Halloween, eating his candy. His
hell-spawn next-door neighbor sling-shoots a pebble at Tony, knocking him down
and setting off a chain reaction that results in a jack-o-lantern falling on the
neighbor boy’s head, from whence he can’t remove it. Time passes; now man Tony’s
mission is to catch the pumpkin-headed being who steals children’s Halloween candy
every year. It is Halloween again, and Tony has not been successful, but he knows
this is the year he’s finally going to solve the case and put an end to the “alien’s”
depredations.

Tony starts out with a sidekick, his “dog” cum purple
tapir, Pantagruel. Pantagruel is kidnaped, and Tony receives a note telling him
to go to Halloween Park (a sort of a permanent carnival, a no-budget Disneyland
if you will) if he ever wants to see Pantagruel again. (“Pantagruel”
is not half as much fun to type over and over again as it is to hear in Italian.)
First Tony must find his way out of his office building, and then he must find
his way into the park, and after that the game’s afoot. Beyond that, there’s not
a whole lot of plot to the game–the characters and locations and inventory items
mainly serve as vehicles for comedy and puzzles.

And comedy and puzzles
there are–by the boatload. This game is very obviously patterned after the earlier
LucasArts games–in fact, there are numerous references to LucasArts classics
throughout Tony Tough. The comedy was actually pretty funny, even through
the subtitles. (Whoever did the translations did a fantastic job–I only hope
the English-voices version is as well-done.)

The puzzles are mostly of the
find-odd-inventory-items-and-use-them-in-creative-ways that we LucasArts fans
are all so familiar with. Since this game is brand-new and there is no walkthrough
available, I actually had to figure out the puzzles all by my lonesome. And let
me tell you, that was no easy feat. Due to the ready availability of hints and
walkthroughs on the Internet, my brain has turned to mush when it comes to solving
these things. But I got way more satisfaction knowing that I beat the game without
any help than I’ve had from a game in a long time.

The interface is point-and-click–you
right-click on an object to bring up verb choices–examine, use, take, or talk.
The inventory comes up from the bottom of the screen when you move your mouse
down thataway, and to use an item, you select it and click it on whatever you
want to use it on. Also, you can examine an item, use it on yourself, or talk
to it, although that last never bore any fruit for me. The save, restore, and
options can all be brought up by hitting the escape key.

The graphics are
2D. Yes, you heard me, in the year 2000 some company actually had the gall to
release a 2D adventure game. You don’t even need a very fancy computer to play
it, and your video card will lie fallow. Imagine! The noive! Actually, I really
liked the look of the game–PROtonic can definitely run with the big dogs with
the quality of this release.

The music changes with each location, but the
game is so hard that the music got on my nerves when I had to hear each snippet
6,000 times over the course of the game. But I did enjoy it at first. The sound
effects are very squelchy and suit the game to a tee. I can’t comment on the voice
acting because I don’t speaka da Italian, but like I said above, the English subtitle
translations were very well-done.

I know there are some people who don’t
much care for 2D, cartoony, third-person, point-and-click inventory fests with
grade-school toilet humor galore … but I’m not one of them. I think it is refreshing
to see a company take a chance on a genre and format that’s been pronounced dead
and do such a fine job.

Final Grade: A

If you liked Tony
Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths:
Watch: The Simpsons
Read: Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen
Play: Any LucasArts
adventure; Beavis and Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity

System
Requirements: Windows 95/98
DirectX 7 (included)

Pentium 200
32 MB RAM
8X CD-ROM drive
Sound card