You are a weary traveler whose flight has been delayed, so you decide
to kill some time by touring New York City by cab. Only the cab driver
turns out to be a minion of the devil, and until you can pay his
steep fare, you’re in for one
hell of a ride…

Hell Cab was created
by the legendary Pepe Moreno known for his beautifully drawn and
written comics and graphic novels with a very
striking style that is easily recognizable to his fans. It is a bit
of a stretch to call this an adventure game but it does have some
adventure elements. The game is point and click in the slideshow
format. The cursor changes to indicate change of direction or options
for interaction. There is an inventory and in one case you don’t
just click the item to use it but rather drag it to its required.
Accessing the inventory while activity is happening in the game is
not a good idea-a number of times the game froze or became “stuck” and
I either had to Ctrl-Alt-Del to get out of it or Alt-Tab on the occasions
where I was somewhat luckier.

Hell Cab has some striking
backgrounds and must have been a visual feast in 1993-very similar
in appearance to The Journeyman Project
Turbo. It was one of the very first games to take advantage of the
then-new CD-ROM technology. Some backgrounds are digitized from photographs
of actual places. The few characters you interact with feature moving
mouths similar to those in Dust or Titanic:
Adventure out of Time.
For those adventure game historians and trivia buffs, some of the
QuickTime movies are from The Residents’ Freak
Show (which
is more eye candy than game). This is probably because the late Jim
Ludtke of The Residents had a hand in some of the graphics in the
game.

Music is crystal clear and helps sets the scene quite well, but
if I never hear the elevator music again, I will be a happy man.
Acting is generally poor, especially the voiceover at the beginning.
The cab driver, Raul, was an exception, and suited the game adequately.

This game is impossible
to get working right, in my opinion because of the problems with
compatibility of old QuickTime with modern systems.
Even in Windows 98, I could never get this game to work right. Anyhow,
I bit the bullet and decided to play it disregarding the “cannot
find GDI” errors. These errors are commented upon in the Readme
file:

“A common message if there is a compatibility problem is a “General
Protection Fault Error in GDI.EXE” when Hell Cab is loaded.
If you encounter problems and are not certain whether or not your
graphics driver is at fault (please check below for known problems),
you can switch to 16-color mode and run Hell Cab. You will encounter
a few error messages when in 16-color mode which you can bypass and
the graphics will not display correctly, but you will still be able
to play the game.”

Other warnings in the Readme include:

“Be VERY careful
when clicking repeatedly, as Windows will store your mouse clicks.
Windows will execute them one by one, often
causing unwanted results. When watching a video sequence, such as
the ones in the Empire State Building lobby or in Hell’s reception
area, you should let it play through without interrupting it by clicking
the mouse. If it is stopped before it completes, the video sequence
may cause the bag, Soul-O-Meter and inventory window to not respond
until the player allows a video to play through completely or moves
to another part of the game (such as another hallway).”

And now for a special feature:

“As an added feature there is a quick way to quit Hell
Cab without saving your current position. This can be done by pressing
the “ESC” key. Warning! You will not be prompted to save
your current game if you exit the program this way.”

What a great idea-a way to quit without saving your game! Good thinking,
Pepe!

These issues suggest a
very buggy game to me…

I also had color palette errors-most were overcome in Windows XP
by playing in Windows 95 compatibility mode with 256 colors and 640×480
resolution. When the color became distorted, I just pressed the Windows
key and then clicked on the Hell Cab window on the taskbar-this tended
to fix the errors.

All in all, the game can
be completed in about thirty minutes once you know what you are
doing-it will take you much longer with the
freezing and trial and errors to lengthen your gameplay. I don’t
blame you if you give up. It has taken me more than ten years of
intermittent attempts to get to the end sort of like Mortalus but
for different reasons. The adventuring elements are far outweighed
by the mad clicking to a point that I felt I was playing a primitive
action game. This too made me very frustrated. The backgrounds certainly
aspire to being an adventure game, but at best, it has adventure
game elements. Still, better than none at all…? If I had to
give this a grade, I couldn’t go higher than a D+.

Final Grade: D+
(find out more about our
grading system)

System Requirements:

PC

• MS-DOS 5.0 or higher
• 386DX-25 or higher
  processor
• Windows 3.1 or
  higher
• Mouse
• 8 MB RAM
• 1X (150kb/sec)
  CD-ROM drive
• SVGA graphics card
• Sound card

MAC

• MAC II with a 13″ or
  larger monitor
• 3 MB available RAM
• CD-ROM drive
• System 6.07 or later