We’ve all seen them, those
Top Ten lists or Top Twenty lists that are going along great, we’re
nodding our head as we head down, or usually up, the list — until
we come to that one jaw dropper: Ten Best Movies . . Citizen
Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Casablanca,
Modern Times and, at number five, Plan 9
From Outer Space . . . now let me, the author immediately
protests, explain why I’ve placed this somewhat questionable . . .
Please. Don’t bother. We know. It’s human nature. We all have our
quirky likes and dislikes. Something that struck us a certain way,
usually when we were quite young and impressionable, that we can’t
let go. We drag it around like Linus’s blanket. Which is why when
I saw the Sierra mid-90’s adventure game Peppers Adventures
in Time on one otherwise impressive Best Adventure Games
list, I simply rolled my eyes and moved on to the next entry. I mean,
come on. This not only is a game designed for kids, it’s educational.
The dreaded edutainment strain that runs through American culture,
usually striking media moguls after they’ve paid a visit to an orphanage,
or their six kids living with their first wife in Tuscaloosa. So they
pop out one edutainment product to make the CEO and everyone else
at the company feel virtuous; the game tanks and they return to manufacturing
morally borderline schlock.

And
then, incredibly, I saw Pepper’s Adventures in Time
listed on someone else’s ‘Best Of’ list. Wow. Was this
thing contagious? Maybe it was like Reaganism, a goofy fad that scarred
an entire generation. Finally, I ran across a “freeware”
download of Pepper on the website of
Mark Seibert, the longtime music director at Sierra On-Line during
its salad days in the 90s. This was too much temptation. I had to
give this thing a go, digital lectures or not. I mean, was it really
possible that a kid’s edutainment game could actually be fun to play?

Mr. Seibert graciously
offers a trove of other great old Sierra material on his website,
especially the mp3s of old Sierra song titles. I confess, I love this
stuff. This is what Apple remade SoundJam into iTunes for in the first
place. Not so you could rip your old CD collection, although I guess
fewer and fewer of you even have CD collections to rip of late, but
so you could play stuff you’d never in a million years have thought
of listening to in the 80s. Movie soundtracks were the wildest and
craziest that the audio biz got back then. Now, I have a great time
listening to all sorts of stuff. You know, like whale songs and old
TV ads and you name it.

Mr. Seibert’s game download
is not for the technological faint of heart, however. The files are
basically disc images of the floppies (hey, kids, remember floppies?)
that the game originally came out on. So you have to pour all these
into one folder the way your IBM XT would’ve done a decade and a half
ago and . . . well, Seibert explains it much better than me on the
download webpage. I’m just saying don’t start counting your gaming
chickens yet. This download is free but you’re going to have to spend
a little sweat getting it up and running.

What? A pure DOS game from
the mid 90s? You expect me to run that on Windows XP? On Vista? Are
you nuts? Okay, okay, hold on a sec. I feel your pain. I still consider
myself a Mac guy. That I get anything to run on Vista astounds me.
I mean, you click on native Windows apps in Vista, the applications
that came with the computer, and a warning dialog box pops up and
announces that running this software could potentially be harmful
. . . But, Bill, this is part of the damn operating system, for Pete’s
sake! Come on!

I
only just the other day stumbled over the fact that Vista has a command
line. Wow. I thought Windows 98 was the last system to have that.
So, of course, I immediately type in cd.. to launch one of my ancient
MS-DOS adventure games and I get . . . a dialog box. Quel surprise!
At least this one isn’t warning me of imminent fatal consequences
to my every digital file, but rather simply informing me that this
command line doesn’t run programs full screen. Uh. Okay. So how many
DOS programs ran natively in a window, Bill? Like, uh, none? Okay,
okay. I know. The Vista command line is not for running software from
the 80s and 90s. I get the “message,” Redmond.

Which still leaves the
question of just how you do run old DOS adventure games like Pepper
in a recent operating system. Mr. Seibert’s instructions on getting
the game to run in XP sound rational, but I didn’t even try. I’ve
been down that dusty, dead-end road before. Might work, might not.
And then there’s my widescreen monitor, which throws a monkey wrench
into every bit of computer code written anytime before about a week
ago.

Until only a few years
ago I would have recommended you do what I did, which is go online
and buy a cheap used Windows 98 PC. However, thanks to modern technology
there is nowadays an even better and much cheaper alternative. I am
speaking of perhaps the greatest piece of freeware ever created —
DOSBox. If you are unfamiliar with this astounding application, and
especially if you like to play old games, this is something you should
download (www.dosbox.com) right this second. Stop reading this and
go download it. I swear, the latest build of DOSBox (0.72 as of this
writing) runs DOS games better than a real Windows 98 or 95 or 3.1,
or even MS-DOS 5.0, machine. Here’s the miraculous part about DOSBox
— it lets you adjust the clock speed on the fly! Game’s running too
fast? Slow ‘er down. Too slow? Speed ‘er up. Until recently, DOSBox
did a great job but still had its shortcomings, particularly in the
audio department. SoundBlaster and all those other options were at
times stumbling blocks. But now, I have yet to find something I can’t
run.

Phew,
now that we’ve got all the techno-bobble out of the way, and we’ve
got old Pepper up and running, we can at last turn to the game itself.
The first thing you notice, as you scan the credits, is that this
game has considerable pedigree. Names like Lorelei Shannon (of Phantasmagoria
fame, or infamy, depending) and Jane Jensen pop out at you. That,
as Al Lowe once explained to me, was one of the things that made Sierra
so great back when. Everybody seemed to chip in on everything. Al
would help out on a King’s Quest game. Jane would lend a hand with
something else while she was making Gabriel Knight. Gosh, with such
a great creative, collegial atmosphere it’s no wonder the company
ran into severe financial trouble and died.

Pepper’s
Adventures in Time declares itself to be an entry
in the Sierra Discovery Series, the nicest way they could rephrase
the term edutainment without scaring away half the class. Apparently,
from what I read elsewhere on the web, this was one of the more (perhaps
that should be “only”?) successful educational game projects.

The Castle of Dr. Brain, for instance,
was part of this series. Brain is a puzzle
game that plays like an adventure and is a terrific (honest) “educational”
game, with oddball math problems and other classic puzzles scattered
about a crazy old castle.

Pepper, on the other hand,
is really a rather traditional adventure game. All of your favorite
King’s Quest controls are here — the use,
look, etc. icons; the inventory; the 3rd person 2d-sprite navigation.
Really, the secret to Pepper is that it plays exactly like King’s
or Space Quest
except for a well-written and clever overlay of educational material,
mostly in the form of a “Truth” icon, which you can click
on anything to “discover” whether it’s historical or fictional.
Ben Franklin lounging in a hot tub, for instance is the latter, while
18th century contact lenses are the former. You’re supposed to be
sopping up historical facts as you wander around playing the game
and then at the end of each act, Ben Franklin pops up to give you
a pop quiz. You don’t even have to get the questions right to progress
to the next level, though your answers do contribute to your overall
score. The questions are more amusing than the ones on your ninth
grade American history final, too. They even reminded me a bit of
the much-appreciated copy protection Q&A’s that Al Lowe wrote
for most of the early Leisure Suit Larry
games. Learning really can be fun, you know. It just usually isn’t.

In
case you were wondering, Pepper, our hero, is a modern young American
carrot-top who falls into a whirl of trouble when she tries to stop
her crazy uncle in the attic from transforming the whole world with
his homemade time machine. Pepper and her somewhat singular dog Lockjaw
go whizzing back to pre-revolutionary Philly where the uncle’s time
machine has scrambled everybody’s brains. Ben Franklin and all the
other Colonials have been turned into groovy Age of Aquarius-ers.
Ergo, Ben in the hot tub. It’s up to Pepper and her dog (and you)
to unscramble everything and save America from the same ghastly fate
that the far right has been all het up about since Woodstock. Them
younguns’re tie-dyeing their clothes! What’s to become of us, mother!
Strangely, the British administrators and soldiers have not been affected
by the time warping.

At certain times, you switch
to playing Lockjaw, who has his own set of dog-specific icons. This
may be more fun than playing as Pepper, who to my mind has a fairly
strong resemblance to Charles Schulz’s Peppermint Patty. A brash,
resourceful, redheaded tomboy. In fact, the game has a lot of strong
associations. It’s clearly been smitten by LucasArts’ Day
of the Tentacle, the ne plus ultra of time-traveling
adventures. In DOTT, of course, you can
switch to any one of three main characters, pretty much at will. Here,
the game switches you. But it’s basically still a solid game convention.
One that perhaps game designers should have made even greater use
of. It not only adds variety to the game, but a whole other tier of
puzzle-solving.

My apologies to my seventh
grade history teacher, Sister Josephine, but I played Pepper’s
Adventures in Time pretty much as a standard adventure.
That is, I infrequently made use of the Truth icon. It’s not that
the resulting information wasn’t interesting, I just kept forgetting.
You do need some of this material for the quiz at the end of each
act, but I found I was getting most of the answers right anyway. Come
to think of it, that is almost exactly how I progressed through the
real seventh grade. Apparently, if you get a perfect score on all
the quizzes, at the end of the game Ben Franklin does something spectacular.
I didn’t have the heart, though, to go back and play through the last
act to get my perfect score because of a rather irksome maze. It’s
one of those mazes where it’s hard to tell which direction you’re
facing after you’ve turned, making it problematic even to map out.

There’s
also a slider puzzle in the game. I mention this not to lament the
usual list of adventure game bête noirs but because there seems
to me to be something very curious about this particular slider puzzle.
Of course I could be wrong, but I believe that this puzzle is impossible
to solve. Don’t worry, folks. There’s a convenient Help button right
below it. All you have to do is click and the puzzle is solved for
you. However, I’m wondering now if this is how, ultimately, everyone
ends up getting past this screen. Oddly enough, I have something of
a semi-professional reputation at stake here as I have written
at length about the slider puzzle and its history. To be brief,
it’s supposedly impossible to transpose two adjoining tiles if all
the other tiles are in their correct position. But every time I loaded
this particular slider puzzle I always got an “impossible”
configuration. Did everyone who ever played this game reach the same
impasse and simply click the Help button? Has, in other words, anyone
ever solved this slider without the Help button? Perhaps in the 90s
when the game came out the puzzle had a different configuration? I
wrote to Mark Seibert about this and he sent me a nice reply saying
everything was okay as far as he knew, and probably thought I was
some sort of quack. Which may or may not be true, but I still maintain
that this puzzle is, as laid out, unsolvable.

By the by, Mark, the music
in Pepper is excellent. A charming mix of period pieces and more modern
stuff. Really, the game as a whole is quite excellent. As you might
expect in a game designed for the younger set, the gameplay is not
overly challenging, although it’s no stroll across Independence National
Historical Park, either. Act III in particular is at times a head-scratcher.
Aside from the Truth icon, you might even find yourself reaching for
a walkthrough on a couple of occasions. The game is also, broken up
into six acts, a decent length. Rarely in this world is anything truly
“fun for all ages,” but Pepper would appear to be that exception.
I don’t know if I’d be placing it on any Ten Best or even Twenty Best
list of my own, but I will no longer scoff if I run across it on anyone
else’s. Really, how they managed to make a game that is a clear knockoff
of Day
of the Tentacle, that is educational, that has a
maze and a slider puzzle, so much fun is truly remarkable. I have
no idea how Sister Josephine would grade Pepper’s Adventures
in Time, but I’m going to stick a big gold star at the
top of the paper and give it an A-. Yes, that’s right. A-.

Class dismissed.