Wayne's World

The Good

Now, before I go any further, let me just say that I'm not a die-hard Wayne's World fan. In fact, I don't think I've seen either movie all the way through. Although this is far from the best adventure game I've ever played, it does have a few redeeming qualities. The graphics are very nice and the interface is wonderful. It's one of the nicest looking interfaces I've seen on an adventure game. The music is average (I've heard a lot worse), and the setup for traveling is awesome.

When you leave a certain area, a map shows up and shows all the districts in the city of Aurora. When you click a district, it shows you the locations within it that you can travel to. It's a nice addition, instead of just listing everywhere you can travel to at the moment.

The Bad

With wonderful graphics, an awesome interface, and a great concept, how could this game fail? Capstone has their ways.

<p> Right from the intro, this game bugged me. Capstone decided to take a weird approach by making a semi-talkie dialogue. They simply ripped audio of Wayne and Garth's catchphrases from the movie, and all the rest is text. Be prepared to hear the exact same recordings of Pshaw! and Not! about forty times while you play. It can become very annoying (so can the total of two songs that loop endlessly).</p>

The text dialogue itself is poorly written; in the very beginning of the game, you control Garth and have to tell Wayne the options after you find out that the show is about to get cancelled. If you click a correct option, Wayne will say "That's a great idea, Garth!", with no variation during the entire sequence. The text reads very slow, and I never discovered a way to skip it or speed it up.

The game also allows you to play as Wayne and Garth, but it's almost pointless because they just follow each other around everywhere. Neither has any "special abilities", that really require you to switch between the two, with the exception of one or two puzzles.

The biggest problem I had with this game was how the creators just hand you a shopping list of things to do and no hints on how to do them. The entire county is available from the start, which just makes things a whole lot more confusing. "Where do I go?" and "What do I do here?" are just two of the many frustrating questions you'll be asking yourself. It starts slow-paced and stays that way the entire time.

The icing on the cake is a nice blend of illogical puzzles and an erroneous timer. There are plenty of puzzles that are near-impossible to figure out without a walkthrough. Now, add in a timer that allows you only three days to figure out what you need to do, and Voila! one crappy adventure game. (Of course, if you're running it in DosBox, the timer is void.)

The Bottom Line

To sum things up, this game had potential, but all was lost through it's major flaws. I'll probably never pick this game up again, and I'm okay with that. It wasn't very funny, it was quite boring, and never once did I say, "I'm glad I bought this!" The amateur and experienced adventure gamer alike will struggle to solve such impossible puzzles. Now don't get me wrong, this game is far superior to it's action game counterpart. However, as far as adventure games go, Wayne's World is not worthy.

The Good
Wayne's World (DOS 1993) does not attempt to follow the storyline of either film and this is a good thing. Let us face facts; the television skits and feature films are not ripe source material for a traditional arcade action based game, although this is exactly what the home console versions of Wayne World attempted to do. Instead, the computer game takes the characters and their humor and puts them squarely into the genre of a point n' click, graphic adventure game. The adventure gaming genre gives the player a greater sense, compared to an action based platformer, of actually being Wayne or Garth on a new and wacky adventure.

The Bad
Most of the game's dialogue exists in the form of on-screen text, when it would have been nice, to have had the original actors reading the script. The dialogue is funny, although not up to par with say, LucasArts adventure games. While you are given choices as to what you want to say, the reply does not very too greatly. In terms of the music and sounds effects, the game offers audio catchphrases that are fun; until you hear them over and over again. Despite the cool music aired on Saturday Night Live and heard in the Wayne's World films, this game has only one or two average sound tracks. Last, but not least, is a pretty harsh time limit coupled with a storyline that encourages exploration with too few clues as to how to proceed.

The Bottom Line
Wayne's World (DOS 1993) is a fun, point n' click graphic adventure game that pulls you into the wacky world of Wayne and his best buddy Garth. A few tweaks to the storyline and some better music and sound effects would have made this a classic, but fans of the franchise will be hard pressed to find a better Wayne's World game.