Free D.C!

The Good
The basic idea is actually pretty sound: You're a "specimen" in the "Human Zoo", where all the remaining humans reside are after a robot takeover in the future. You have to talk to several different people to find out who is killing the remaining specimens, and how to stop them.

Gameplay is non-linear, and you never encounter a puzzle to solve.

The Bad
There are two main faults with the game:

The first is the teaming with Will Vinton's Claymation to create creatures for the game. Claymation may look cool for true animation, but most of the time in Free D.C! it's used for still shots, and it looks real cheezy.
The second problem is the use of "multimedia". After Mean Streets, everybody thought that they could do "multimedia" in a title to make it sell well. But when floppy disks are your transport medium, it just isn't possible. There are less than 30 snippets of digitized speech in the game, which hardly qualifies as multimedia; worst of all, the voice acting is not particularly good, especially the robots. Programmers, don't quit your day job--stop attempting to star in your own productions. (Just because it worked for Chris Jones doesn't mean it will work for you.)

There are other niggling problems that detract from the enjoyment of the game, like poor heap management (the game occaisionally forces you to save and then reload the game when the memory heap gets too fragmented) and sprite priorities getting swapped (see screenshots for an example).

Winning the award for most annoying aspect is the control mechanisms. There is no way (at least, not listed in the manual) to dismiss a text box with the keyboard, so you're forced to sit there until it goes away if you don't play the game with a mouse. And fighting robots is too simplistic to be fun--it's annoying. Confrontations using weapons should've been taken out of the game completely.

There is needless reliance on a true Sound Blaster (or 100% compatible) for speech output. This is because they decided to use the ADPCM "compression" built into the original Sound Blaster to compress the speech by a factor of 2:1. If they had done a cursory search for a generic ADPCM algorithm and used it, they could have supported the output of speech on many different sound cards--even the PC speaker!

Finally, the "inside jokes" about humanity start to get real old, real quick.

The Bottom Line
A disappointing finish to the Cinemaware legacy.