Warning! Do not play this game if you will be operating heavy machinery
or driving a motor vehicle as it may induce drowsiness.

A Just Adventure
reader emailed the other day and exclaimed, “Wow are you lucky, it must be
great fun to be able to play all of the new adventure games before they are even
released!” With all due respect, this reader had never played The New
Adventures of the Time Machine or she would have instead emailed her condolences.

“Loosely
based” (Cryo’s description, not mine) on H.G. Wells’s classic 1895 novel
The Time Machine, The New Adventures of the Time Machine is the opening
salvo in the Cryo Legends line of games being touted as “a new interpretation
of the great myths.” Also included in the Legends series will be Odyssey,
Casanova, and Tales of Chivalry. First of all, can someone at Cryo
please explain why a game that so freely borrows the title of this classic, that
so proudly boasts of using the author as the main character in his own story,
then changes the spelling of his name from Wells to Wales? This goes beyond “loosely
based” into the realm of nonsensical. Secondly, the Legends series can only
get better as it has already hit rock bottom in its initial outing.

The
New Adventures of the Time Machine has a beautiful opening cinematic (a friend
informs me it also has a wonderful closing cinematic, but for reasons we will
go into later, this was never viewed). Cryo has decided to have Wales [sic]
himself embark on a journey in his own machine. As Wales [sic] arrives
in the future, his time machine disappears in a burst of energy, stranding him
in a world of immortality that is buffeted by temporal storms that erase the memories
of and randomly age everyone they envelop. Unless you are forewarned of the storm’s
arrival, in which case a taste of black salt crystals will preserve your memory
and stop the aging process. But wait … major plot twist revealed! Wales [sic],
by traveling through time, has caused a rift that is adversely affecting that
time period’s occupants! Bet you never saw that coming. Unless of course you’ve
ever read a Superman comic book or watched any Hollywood movie about time
travel or seen almost any episode of the Twilight Zone or …

H.G.
Wells’s original novel was part social critique, part science fiction. The human
race of the future has split into two distinct species, the weak surface-dwelling
Eloi and the large-eyed nocturnal Morlocks. Wells, who also penned War of the
Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Strange Island of Dr. Moreau, was
a visionary for his time, yet even he was restricted by the social mores and limited
knowledge of his era. Imagine the wonderful possibilities inherent in the retelling
of such a story. The ability to travel to any period of time. Search for the Holy
Grail in the Middle Ages, stalk dinosaurs in the Jurassic period, witness the
miracles of Christ, or even venture into an uncertain future. So were does Cryo
take us? Not one year into the future, not even ten years or a hundred years;
not even a thousand or ten thousand years–no, we are going 800,000 years into
the future. Yes, 800,000 years to an era in which man has attained eternal life
yet lives in the desert. No phone, no lights, no motor cars, not a single luxury.
Like Robinson Crusoe, they’re primitive as can be. Except for the weapons. Yes,
that’s right, this enlightened, eternal society can and will liquidate each other.
A chosen few, the Chronomancers, can use magic spells, yet strangely even these
role models occasionally sport iron. But wait–there’s another plot twist. For
the residents who are unfortunate enough to perish at the hand of a weapon are
… well, I won’t give it away, but let me say that if you’ve ever read a Superman
comic book or watched any Hollywood movie or …

So anyhow, you’ll be
walking down the street and this wave will come towards you. Now personally, I
would usually gulp a Prozac when this transpired as it would cause a wave of depression
within me. For every time one of these waves passes, you are physically changed.
If you are the middle-aged Wales [sic], you could be changed into a child
or an old man. If you are an old man, well … you get the point. Now this would
have been a really nifty idea if it had been used as a plot twist or as a means
to solve certain puzzles. But, with one exception, it never is. Instead, it just
happens, not just to your character but to everyone in the city (with a few exceptions).
Due to some technical mumbo jumbo, Wales [sic] is immune to this memory
loss. It just wouldn’t do to have the main character wandering aimlessly during
his search for Khronos, the god of time. Enough of ridiculing the plot, though,
let’s instead transfer our derision to the play mechanics.

The entire game
is keyboard controlled. This is where Time Machine eventually collapses.
The game itself is played from a third-person viewpoint similar to that used in
LucasArts’s Phantom Menace. It did not work in that game and, guess what, it works
even worse in this one. Too often, shots are fired from a foe that you cannot
see due to confusing camera placement and angles. To make matters worse, there
is no option to control these viewpoints, so you are at the mercy of the programmers,
and they seem to have been visually challenged. Never have I played a game with
so many confusing, shifting, and just plain odd perspectives. Some situations
that could have been solved in minutes if the player could change the camera angle
instead occupied frustrated hours. If you are not a fan of pixel-hunting, then
fear not, for there is none in this game. There are no hot spots, no cursor that
flashes near an inventory object. Wales’s [sic] head does not turn towards
the direction of an item. There are no visual clues at all. Instead you must approach
every single object in the game, every desk, every table, every nook, every cranny,
and press the space bar in hopes that an inventory item will appear. And then
you do not even know what the item is until you enter your inventory to read the
description. Also, if you are not positioned exactly in front of an object, Wales
[sic] will not pick it up. Which only adds to the frustration since many
times you don’t even know if there is something there to pick up. Now imagine
trying to run from a foe, both hands on the keyboard controlling your character.
You want to fire your weapon, but you have a spell activated. Your only option
is to press the enter key to change from spell to weapon, but to do so you must
stop in mid-run only to have your opponent zap you to smithereens. Now imagine
pounding your keyboard with your fist.

There was an immense feeling of satisfaction
when I did slay my first Chronomancer–after all, it had only taken 28 shots and
10 attempts. This is, of course, an adventure game, so finally it occurred to
me to use my brains over brawn. First, let’s activate that invisible man spell.
Good. Now let’s go into our inventory and find our Chronomancer gun. Now let’s
run towards the enemy while using the keyboard up arrow to control our path. He
can’t see us coming, so we should be able to get in a few shots. And we do get
in the first shot, but oops, now my invisibility spell has worn off because it
took me so long to reach my enemy using the keyboard and he had ample time to
fire back. I attempt to get in a second shot, but my character spun around when
he was shot and is now facing the wrong way. Attempts to spin him back around
using the keyboard arrows are clumsy at best, and he is quickly dead. Yes, you
can die in this game, and die you will, a lot. You will suffer more deaths in
this game than you have in every adventure game you have ever played combined.
But in a strange sense of judgment, your character can never die from falling
off a cliff or taking one step too many off the top ledge of a building. Actually,
this is a hidden blessing because with the prevalence of horrendous camera angles,
your character’s death rate would surely triple.

Of course, every adventure
gamer lives for the puzzles, and The New Adventures of the Time Machine is
chock-full of them. Early on, there is a puzzle based on sounds. You must pass
through portals on a floating bridge based on the sound emitting from the portal.
Normally this would not be difficult, but why would you play background music
that interferes with the sounds you are supposed to hear? A jailbreak turns into
a comedy of errors as timed sequences force you to advance a little at a time
as you grudgingly save your progression. Worst of all, though, is a puzzle that
involves pushing a crate across a courtyard. To do so not only must you turn yourself
invisible, but you must keep recasting the spell while pushing the crate, because
if you turn visible for just a second, the guards pounce like lions on a lamb.
This section will seem like a romp in clover, though, once you confront the next
puzzle, which should be a simple stack-a-box and scale-the-wall mission. But the
game’s insistence on positioning your character in exactly the right spot, compounded
by the difficulty of doing so by using your keyboard made this a miserable exercise
in ineffectiveness. Not only are many of the puzzles unfair, but their difficulty
is needlessly compounded by poor design. Need more examples? Sorry, but I’m attempting
to keep this review under 5,000 words in length.

One point where the game
does not entirely collapse is the voice acting. While not of award-winning quality,
still it is not the cheesy overacting we have become so immune to in computer
games. Is there music in this game? I am sure there is, but to be honest I could
not hear it over the sound of my cursing. I swore so much that I think I invented
an entire new lexicon of four-letter words. Hey, you know, I never used to blaspheme
until I picked up those cuss words from The Longest Journey. Damn! Now
adventure games cause swearing. What next?

Lemurs. That is what is next.
Yes, the cute, furry national animal of Madagascar. This vegetarian primate that
attains a top weight of 15 pounds has evolved into a bloodthirsty, slavering creature
that walks like a man. Now living in caves, instead of trees and bushes, they
dispense spell crystals when they are not busy attempting to slice and dice their
visitors (about those spells, there are a total of 18 of them in the game, but
at least 13 of them have no discernible purpose). Of all the creatures on earth,
this is the most frightening idea the developers could imagine–killer lemurs.

I
never did finish The New Adventures of the Time Machine. Not by choice,
though. I did manage to work my way through at least 98% of the game and then,
right before the climatic sequence, it froze. Working from six different saves,
it still froze in the same scene every time. Frantic pleas to Cryo went unanswered.
After it, it was Cryo who had supplied me with a final gold master, meaning the
game was ready to go to duplication for the retail stores. Somehow I have a feeling
that I will never see the beautiful closing cinematic (especially since I have
used an invisible spell to permanently erase this game from my hard drive). In
fact, the next time a temporal wave comes my way, I’ll be sure to neglect to swallow
my black salt crystals.

Open Letter to Cindy Yans

Cindy, though
I still disagree with your decision to call games not yet played “afterbirth,”
I do humbly bow to your sense of precognitive foreshadowing as regards The
New Adventures of the Time Machine. I only hope you have not inadvertently
cast a jinx upon the remaining upcoming Cryo titles.

Final Grade: D

If
you liked The New Adventure of The Time Machine:
Watch: The
Time Machine (1960)
Read: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Play: Chronomaster

System Requirements:
Windows 95/98
Pentium 200 MHz (PII 266 MHz recommended)
32 MB free system
RAM (64 MB recommended)
DirectX-supported graphic card with 2 MB onboard memory
(640×480) (4 MB recommended)
Windows-compatible sound card
8X CD-ROM
drive
Windows-compatible mouse
Windows-compatible keyboard