<!--
	Title: (SOFTWARE GALLERY) Hollywood Hijinx
	Author: Tim Walsh, RUN Staff
	Source: Run, v4(10)
	Date: October 1987
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

<div style="color: #004488; font-weight: bold; padding: 0.25em; float: right; font-size: 2em;">C+</div>

<blockquote style="margin: 1em inherit; font-size: 1.25em; font-style: italic;">It's Like, You Know,<br>
Totally, Like,<br>
Hollywoodish!</blockquote>

Hollywood Hijinx is all text and adventure. No graphics, no synthesized voices,
nothing fancy. The world of Hollywood Hijinx consists of white letters on a gray
screen. It could just as easily have been written for the V1C-20 as the C-64. Like a
book without photos or illustrations, your imagination musi create the sights and
sounds in this program.

As its name implies, Hollywood Hijinx is one crazy; fast-paced text adventure,
where you move from floundering in an ocean to leaping down broken
patio steps to getting stuck in a maze of hedges.

Life in Hollywood Hijinx starts at 9 pm when the chauffeured limo you're
riding in pulls up to the curb and you hop out. From the back seat, your Uncle
Buddy's attorney tells you to meet him in the living room of the house at 9 AM.
You must have all ten treasures if you want to inherit Unclc Buddy's vast Hollywood
estate. The limo pulls away and leaves you, armed with only a flashlight
and a note from your recently deceased Aunt Hildy. Off you go on your not-so-merry
journey. Burning questions like "where is the house?" or "how are treasures
identified?" or "where am I right now?" will keep you on the run. If you're
looking for an easy way out, forget it.

Foremost on my list of complaints about Hollywood Hijinx is that it's extremely
disk-intensive. Moving from a location or moving an object invariably
causes the program to read from disk. In a typical session of 300 moves, the
program accesses the drive an equal number of times. I like programs that
pamper the disk drive by accessing it only when absolutely necessary.

Despite its rather primitive design, Hollywood Hijinx is one of the toughest
text adventures you're likely to find. So tough that you could find yourself
spending hours in fruitless pursuit of the ten treasures and consequently losing
interest in it altogether. I spent a few evenings a week playing Hijinx and
stopped using it mainly because of the way it was wreaking havoc with the disk
drive.

To its credit. Hollywood Hijinx lets you save your current position to a data
disk. It also possesses clever packaging that reads like a typical Hollywood gossip
sheet for "inquiring minds." Unfortunately, sharp packaging can't compensale
for a mediocre program.

The text adventure market for Commodore computers has evolved to the
point where mediocrity should be unacceptable. Many excellent text adventures
exist, and nearly all of the most recent programs employ animated
graphics. Many use music, some use synthesized voices, and others dazzle
with a combination of such features. Hollywood Hijinx does not.

Despite its weaknesses and deficiencies, I predict that this program will be
a commercial success. Why? Because Hollywood is undeniably exciting and
many people love anything that lets them participate in that excitement *(Infocom,
Inc., 125 Cambridge Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140. C64/S34.95.)*

<p class="bold right" style="font-variant: small-caps;">Tim Walsh<br>RUN Staff</p>
