Summary
Mr Stauf and company.
The Good
This is the first CD-Rom game I ever played. It was a mind blowing experience. The spooky narrator told the story of Stauf, complete with video and foley sounds. As you wandered around the house, you would stumble across puzzles that would unlock doors and show videos of the seven guests.
As you would solve puzzles, Stauf's disembodied voice would taunt you when you lost. Normally I would find that feature annoying, but the actor performing the voice of Stauf was so hammy that you couldn't help but enjoy it.
The very best part of this game was the soundtrack. The Fatman and Team Fat managed the impossible. They created a brilliant, immersive set of themes that translated very well through the imfamous FM midi chips that were ubiquitious at the time.
Gramme Devine designed a video compression that worked pretty well for a 486. The video was the best at the time.
The Bad
This game was pretty difficult to get running. The Dos limitations required a lot of work to free up enough conventional ram. (Bill Gates fault more than anything.) The game was also very picky about the video configuration. If you didn't have enough ram on the video, the game wouldn't run.
And there's this one puzzle, the puzzle that just can't be solved.
The Bottom Line
Blast from the early days of Multimedia. I doubt kids would like this game, but its great for nostalgia minded folks like me.
