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Nossir!
'Tis not! For this tale of Bimbo the Boggit and his
valiant encounter with Daug, his wanderings with Grandalf
and Thorny, is full of wit, invention, and sheer rudery.
I can recommend it to anyone who is fed up to the teeth
with all things Tolkien. Even better, I can recommend
it to everyone who still think that there's nothing
better than having hair between the toes.
The
Boggit is an entirely irreverent look at Muddle
Earth. Like any good satire, the game sticks closely
enough to the original (with occasional derivations
from its successor, Lord of the Rings, as well)
to get in some cruelly funny jabs at it. Furthermore,
I was not only impressed by the humour but also the
quality of the game itself. The puzzles are clever and
logical -- but by no means easy. For the most part they
are of the best kind -- the sort that, when you crack
them, you shout 'OF COURSE!' instead of 'WELL SO BL**DY
WHAT!?'. And, as with Bored of the Rings and
Robin of Sherlock, the programmers have squeezed
the very best out of the Quill and the Illustrator,
so that you can, for example, TALK TO other characters
-- though their responses are pretty limited. But then
the responses were pretty limited in The Hobbit
as well.
The
funny thing is that The Hobbit was an enormously
complex piece of programming in its day, whereas The
Boggit is quite the opposite. But then someone pointed
out to me today an interesting fact about so-called
'intelligence' in computer software. 'Imagine', they
said, 'a robot that goes right through a maze without
making a single mistake. Looks quite clever, but when
another robot goes through the same maze, makes mistakes,
and then carefully corrects them before reaching the
end, that second robot seems even more intelligent than
the first, though in reality it may well not be.' The
same principle applies with The Boggit -- the
characters may not be as 'intelligent' as those in The
Hobbit, but when they open their mouths the hysterical
things they say make them seem a lot more so! And certainly
a lot more 'human'.
The
Boggit is in the now familiar Delta 4 three-load
format -- you can move between sections of the game
without necessarily cracking all the puzzles as you
confront them. It's a great game, and even if Delta
4's development system had cost them a thousand times
less than Ocean's, their game ends up being better value
at only a couple of pounds cheaper.
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