In an effort to capitalize on the brouhaha over the impending doom
that was to be the Y2K bug, Interplay released this game late in December 1999
to little or no fanfare. I had heard of it only because of Harriet’s Schedule
of Upcoming Releases, and so when I saw it in CompUSA, I bought it. It didn’t
hurt that it was only $20, either. Well, the Y2K bug didn’t really amount to much.
Does the game?

In this third-person game, you play as Buster, Super-Nerdman,
who hits the lottery and buys a state-of-the-art, completely electronically controlled
mansion. He is all set to celebrate the new year with his Super-Nerdwoman girlfriend,
Candace, and drinks a little too much champagne. He falls asleep and wakes up
shortly before midnight only to find that the computer that controls the mansion
has taken on a life of its own and has truly become (drum roll, please) Artificial
Intelligence. The computer and the various robots it controls have become malevolent,
and it is up to you to shut them down and restore tranquillity and usefulness
to the machinery.

The graphics are surprisingly nice. I warn you up front,
though, that you should have a 3D card. You can play the game in software
rendering mode, but the picture is wavy enough to make you seasick, and yet it
looks marvy in hardware mode. The game takes place in various rooms of the mansion,
about 10 of them, and each has a different look and atmosphere. Attention was
paid to detail; the hardwood floors look almost photographic.

The puzzles
are for the most part fairly easy. There are a lot of inventory items, and mostly
you find the item you need in the room that you need it. Gameplay largely consists
of entering a room, getting trapped in the room by a (excuse me, but I’ve always
wanted to say this) lean mean fighting machine, and having to figure out how to
disable the machine. However, it is easy to miss some of the inventory items because
they are in a sea of extraneous items that you can’t use or interact with.

The
music and voice acting are also surprisingly not bad. There is an elevator ride,
and always in a game with an elevator ride, there is elevator music. (Strange
… I don’t think I’ve ever heard music in an elevator in real life.) The music
in this elevator for some reason acted as a child repellent–both of my sons just
hated it and would run away from my computer until the elevator ride was over.
I took a couple of extra elevator rides just to punish them in advance for little
sins not yet committed.

Sounds pretty good so far, right? Well, now for
the drawbacks. The first and foremost is that there is only one saved game–yep,
you heard right, only one saved game in this era of 30- and 40-gigabyte hard drives.
That is inexcusable in my opinion and will certainly affect my final grade. The
second is that you can’t skip through any cutscenes, even if you’ve seen them
before, and while they are charming, if strange, once, they are purely annoying
the second time through.

And now to the reason why there was a second
time through–I hit a gigantic bug about three-quarters of the way through the
game. Without giving anything away, suffice it to say that I needed an inventory
item from another room to retrieve an inventory item in the room that I was in;
I did not have said inventory item from the other room; I went back to get it;
and when I returned with it to retrieve the other inventory item, the other inventory
item was gone. Completely. As if it had never existed. And yet another inventory
item that I had used to trigger the part where I needed to retrieve the inventory
item that I needed to retrieve was also gone. (Huh?) Never to be seen again. And
guess what? I had unwittingly saved it that way in my one lone saved game. (I
suspect my neighbors wondered what all the cursing was about … and I bet they
guessed wrong.)

So … I had to start all over from the beginning. And then
to add insult to injury, the l-e-n-g-t-h-y c-r-e-d-i-t-s that I was forced to
sit through at the end of game listed about 50 or 100 play testers. (Hyperbole,
certainly, but it makes my point nicely, you must agree.) How ever did they miss
this? Overall, I had the impression that the game was rushed to market because
of the date-sensitive nature of the title, and it could have really stood a little
bit more polishing.

Having said that, I think the good outweighs the bad.
Y2K is a fun little game and cheap to boot, plus it has a surreal aspect
that appeals to me. I still see it in plentiful supply in my local CompUSA and
Software Etc., and like I said, it’s only $20, so I would recommend it on that
basis alone. I felt like I got $20 worth of entertainment–had I not hit the “Y2K
bug” (hee hee) and just played the game all the way through on my first try,
it would have lasted me about five or six hours.

Final grade is a B-.

System
Requirements: Pentium 166
Windows 95/98 with
DirectX 6.1 or later (included)
16 MB RAM
100 MB minimum available hard
drive space
DirectX certified sound and video card
8X or faster CD-ROM
drive
100% Microsoft-compatible mouse