Superhero League of Hoboken

The Good
I first played SLoH years after its original release, but found it very entertaining anyway. Steve Meretzky has another great comic adventure here. The role-playing parts are more interesting than the average game for one simple reason: lots of nifty polish added on to the sound basic elements. The game gives you experience bonuses in many places other than fights, and clearing a map of all enemies (by fighting often enough there) awards you an extra-special bonus, besides meaning that you can pass through there safely afterwards! The combat segments allow you to click-click-click through every round (it's turn-based) easily when you want to, with a little bit of strategy in superpowers sometimes warranted in tougher fights, and a variety of entertaining descriptions of each combat action are given in every round. One memorable example of this attention to detail: When you cross over into Quebec late in the game, the shop menus will show item names in French, not English! And not only that, but if you buy or sell items, their names will change depending on whose inventory they're in, meaning every sellable item in the game was translated!

The adventure parts are handled with less flair than the role-playing. Each adventure scene is shown in the first-person, with a mostly static point-and-click screen, and puzzle results are generally handled through a text description and the instantaneous change of the affected hotspot.

The game is fairly minimalist on graphical touches for 1994 - the 320x200 VGA has a style that sways somewhere in between cartoon and gritty realism, with animation limited to a few touches in the adventure scenes and simple loops for the monsters in battles. Sometimes the effect is good, as the scenes of ruined cities and moody music give the impression of a battered world. But the fact that you're a bunch of superheroes solving puzzles usually having something to do with food items or caricatured people counteracts it, to the point where it's almost like there were two games - a serious one and a humorous one.

The Bad
While the role-playing aspects work OK, since getting beaten usually only occurs when you go Somewhere You're Not Supposed To Go Yet(and you can tell in most cases), the adventure segments can, at times, be maddeningly frustrating. One of the puzzles at the end of the game requires you to go back to a previous area, wander around until you find(in an unmarked spot on the map - fortunately the maps aren't too big) the item you need, then take it back so that you can finish, without any indication that the item ever existed.

Fortunately, if you have trouble with that, you can go get a walkthrough. I know I did.

Also, the overall staticness of the graphics makes it feel a bit sterile at times; there's a scene in Times Square where Dick Clark and New Year's revellers are around, and none of them move! Quite eery.

Some of the music was on the catchy side, some of it was just okay. It's typical midi quality - there are a few digital sound effects for battles but it's usually fairly sparse.

The Bottom Line
This is an adventure/RPG that casts you as the leader of a band of superheroes with some very pitiful powers(eating spicy food, making motivational charts and graphs...) trying to save the remains of near-future New York and surrounding states(which already got turned into wasteland a while ago) from the evil Dr. Entropy(a jack-in-a-box).

It's a strange game, sometimes being highly comedic and then at other times dubiously serious in its descriptions of how the destruction of the particular area you're in came about. Many real locations from the game's setting are used - it's especially creepy when you go inside the Empire State Building and see the exact picture that's in the real building, dimly lit, and find out that the elevators are broken.

It's also already somewhat outdated - Times Square, in this game, is still a strip of X-rated stores, and it predicts Al Gore as one of the next US Presidents(still possible, but now highly unlikely). But these small quibbles don't detract from the many great aspects of what is actually a pretty richly detailed setting, considering its subject matter.

Play occurs on an overhead map and in two first-person settings, one for fights and another for adventure puzzles. The control is primarily point-and-click, and the transitions are actually fairly smooth - the map is at an abstract level, while the other two add more detail. Travel times are generally very small, fortunately, and random battles are only somewhat of a difficulty.