Sneak 'n Peek

The Good
The smoke coming out of the chimney in the exterior screen looks pretty cool.

The Bad
This game is the electronic equivalent of Hide and Seek. You'll need a friend to be the other player, but you'll have to take turns looking away from the screen so you can hide in one of a handful of locations that are extremely counter-intuitive (like, go outside and walk off the screen at exactly the Xth pixel from the top). The game will be frustrating to first-timers and the replay value is non-existent because once you figure out where all the hiding spots are, the challenge is gone. Why would anyone want to play this game when if you already have two people anyway, you can just play Hide and Seek in your own house and have more fun doing it?

Aside from that, the control is awkward and sometimes you accidentally get stuck with a hiding spot you didn't want and there's no way to change it. Aside from a cool smoke effect, the graphics are horrible even by Atari 2600 standards. The music's rhythm is off, and the tones are painfully wrong. These are what takes an already pointless and inane game and make it painful to play.

The Bottom Line
I'd say it's an absolute waste of time and quite possibly the worst game I've ever played.

The Good
It's an interesting concept, and certainly not one (even today) that's often replicated: One player hides, the other player finds them. The old children's game brought to the digital age.

But that's where the "good idea" ends, really, as the actual game is easier to play without as much effort.

To its credit, it also plays a few chipper tunes, and there's some little animations in the game as you search inside and outside the house. But it's not much.

The Bad
The biggest problem is that the game is asking too much from the player. To make the game work, you would need the seeker to actually close their eyes or physically leave the room while the other player is hiding, which is really pushing it. To actually look renders the point of the whole game unplayable, and even then, one begins to wonder if there's actually enough interest to go through with it.

There was a one-player version of this game, but that was even more boring due to the lack of a friend being around.

The second most outstanding problem is the places where a person can actually hide. Okay, so in closets, under beds, behind couches, behind the house, all make sense. But UNDER the driveway? UNDER a couch? UNDER floors? This is only a smattering of the physically impossible places the characters characters can hide. Abstract thinking is a must in order to succeed in this game, and the physics already feel broken in this title.

The graphics are also a low point. The house itself is sparse. There's a couch in one room. A bed in another. There are college dorms that have more going on with them than this entire house. And then there's the subject of the characters in this game. Someone did not study anatomy clearly as one of the arms is positioned so low that it looks like... something else instead. The players look like their character designs were taken from those pornographic "Swedish Erotica" games, but less inspired. At least those were intentional.

That "chipper" music mentioned earlier? It's fine for a minute of two, and then it begins to grate.

And as try as you might, the character can't run away from the house, no matter how far down the driveway they go.

The Bottom Line
It's an interesting idea of a game, but a totally flawed execution.

Bad graphics, bad sound, bad collision, bad idea. These are the types of games that wiped out the Atari, and its easy to figure out why. This wouldn't even pass as a free Flash game today.

Outside of the novelty value, this is a painful experiment of a game, and even the laughs are short-lived, what little there are.

If ever asked to play this game, do your own hiding from it.

The Good
There's a ton of places to hide... some more obvious than others.

The Bad
Some of the hiding places are just way to hard to find. And then when you find them it takes another minute to hide, as the collision detection (or 'hiding place detection') has a hard time realizing that you are trying to hide. And some of these hiding places are crazy... under the stone walkway to the house; and isn't there even one up against a wall?

The Bottom Line
All in all it was a pretty fun game to play when you're only 8 yrs old. The hardest part was getting by brother(s) to look away while I was hiding. :-)