A warning: there isn’t a lot of Hollywood Hijinx in this Hollywood Hijinx post. That’s because my usual methods don’t work very well. I could force some reading about “the dark side of Hollywood” or some such thing, but I don’t actually believe that. For a game with so many cultural references, I don’t think there’s a lot for a cultural lens to shine light on.
I almost never say this, but I think the story of HH’s production is more interesting than the text itself. Nevertheless, there are 13 games remaining and we will talk about them all.
My short assessment is that this is an agreeable puzzle game. Perfectly fine. I think it would have fared well as an early Infocom game (commercially, if not in terms of legacy) as a humorous puzzle game in an unusual setting. By 1986, things were very different.
Anyway, we’ll get to feelies and the like next time.
Nice! I do agree that Hollywood Hijinks, while a little late for the style of things at the time, was a fairly solid game that is underappreciated by Infocom standards. Look forward to the rest of the series!
I really enjoyed Hollywood Hijinx, and look forward to your further analysis.HH was the last game I played on C64 before my computer disc drive bit the dust. I didn’t finish it until I replaced the C64 with a Macintosh and bought the lost treasures package.
I thought it was joyously silly, the thing I always liked about Infocom, even though by other metrics “Trinity” (released the same year) was a better game.
One of the puzzles I remember enjoying particularly was the Tokyo model in the game room. The hedge maze, on the other hand, was tedious without being difficult, a puzzle design feature which later developers have tried to avoid. Almost all other Infocom maze puzzles had some extra “twist”. That one did not. It was just a hedge maze.
I remember playing this, and I got a sense it was sort of a “Universal Studios Attraction” version of Hollywood for a puzzlebox treasure hunt with whacky Hollywood trappings justifying the reason for the mansion having weird puzzle stuff happening.
This one was memorable, too. I am glad that I did not try to map it, assuming there was some gimmick. We at least had the map to work from. But it was still tedious, and I feel bad for the players that set to work drawing their own maps. I don’t think there was any hint that player’s should wait beyond “wow, this is kind of awful.”
Yeah, I think it’s simple as that. The term “amusement park” is used in game writing and discussion (even beyond IF) and it definitely applies here.