Fenimore Fillmore: The Westerner

A refreshingly clean adventure with enough interest to make it compelling to want to solve everything all by yourself. Great graphics and Voice Acting. A bit corny in places but genuinely amusing in others. A decent length and a game to go back over and try to improve your progress percentage. Try and reach 100% . I finally did and it was it is very satisfying.

This game came out when 3D adventures were taking their first steps and all failed when it came to controlling the character. While Escape from Monkey Island and Grim Fandango had something like gamepad controls, Gabriel Knight Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned tried a mouse approach in a full 3d environment - let's just say it was a PITA. This game was one of the first with a fixed camera that would only slightly move to the side and mouse controls as if it was a 2D game and ... it worked. I enjoyed playing it, the script was good, riddles ok, even if both in my opinion could not keep up with the great adventure games of the past. But for some reason I came to finish it. I guess that puts it on top of my list of games to play next.

I bought this after playing the 3 Skulls of the Toltec, and I was looking forward to a similar challenging adventure. While I have only been playing for an hour or so, I am finding the controls very clunky - the mouse pointer jumps and slides all over the place making it very frustrating and time-consuming trying to select or use any object. Because of this progress is very slow. Another thing I am finding annoying is that sometimes you can't use or interact with an object until you've done something else. For example, I tried to water the carrots with a bucket of water but it wouldn't let me do this until I'd had dialogue with another character who advised me to water the carrots. At the moment, I can very clearly see a tree house I'm supposed to be looking for, but apparently can't do anything with it until I get a tracker dog to help me "find" it. This was a flaw in the 3 Skulls too, but combined with the clumsy and difficult controls, it is much more annoying in this game. So far I haven't come across any challenging puzzles, it has just been a matter of finding and using things in obvious ways. I can see the game has promise, and when I am feeling more patient, I will give it another go but right now I am fed up with it.

The concept and style is very much like Monkey Island, but with western theme. It has nice 3D graphic and fun gameplay. It took me 10 hours to complete and costed less than $1 buck on discount. At that price, Buy It! ---- TIPS / KEEP IN MIND ---- 1. Grow plenty of carrots to feed your horse. Take 15 mins to make 50 so that you don't have to deal with that all the time. 2. This game is a smaller production than Monkey Island. It has limited locations, so it's like being on Melee Island all the time. To put the location size in perspective. 3. The background music get to be pretty repeating to listen to after some hours. 4. SOME FUN SCEENS ARE AWAITING FOR YOU, ONCE YOU COMPLETE THE GAME! ... HAVE FUN! I DID!