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	Title: (Adventure) Hollywood Hijinx
	Source: Zzap!64, #25
	Date: May 1987
	Transcription by Steve Derby
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*Infocom/Activision, £24.95 disk only*

Well I have to admit that this is NOT what I would have expected from
Infocom at this stage of their illustrious career. Don't get
me wrong -- it's not a bad game ... easily up to their usual
praisworthy standards -- but the scenario came as something of a
surprise.

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*Hollywood Hijinx* is basically a treasure hunt -- at least it is as far
as I've progressed with it. A good, ol' fashioned grab-the-artifact
number. Forget the Underground Empire, however, as this little ditty
takes place in a luxurious Hollywood mansion, left to you by
your recently-deceased, fabulously wealthy Aunt Hildegarde.

Well, not quite left to you, actually. In order to inherit limitless
wealth, Auntie's will stipulates that you must spend the night in
her house, and locate ten treasures within it or around it before morning.
That gives you 12 hours of game time, or 720 real life moves.
Each treasure is a keepsake from one of Uncle Buddy's movies,
which together grossed enough at the box office to keep widowed
Auntie in clover until her dying day.

Apart form the usual high standard of programming, parsing, and
general gamesmanship, the real merits of *Hollywood Hijinx* lie first
in the simplicity of its storyline, and secondly in the way in which
the atmosphere so vividly conjures up all the trivia of Tinsel Town. If
you have to stay tone in Tone Town, you need to be on first
name terms with Sonny Tofts and Douglas Fairbanks -- not that
you're likely to meet them, it's just that the whole aura of the locations
shimmers with reflections from the silver screen.

So there are vast patios for garden parties, doorbells that play
movie theme music, statues of Rambo's relatives in the garden,
and numerous gadgets and props from assorted B Movies. And of
course, amongst all this dross there are ten treasures.

Now we come to the nitty gritty. At least half of these treasures are
fairly easy to locate. One of them is even visible without even needing
to search for it, but in a style reminiscent of the infuriatingly
devious Scott Adams, seeing it is one thing but actually getting your
mitts on it is quite another.

However, for the first time ever with an Infocom game, I found
myself wondering whether this adventure was not perhaps a little
too easy. There's no doubt that getting everything inside 720
moves is pretty nigh impossible on the first attempt, or even on the
fifth -- but I reckon you might do it on the tenth. And since it doesn't
take too long to notch up 720 moves, that leaves me wondering
whether there's as much meat here as there is in, say, *Hitch Hikers*.

For example there is a positively ENORMOUS maze, which I
reckon must have over 150 locations, and which would normally
keep even the most experienced adventurer busy for hours on end.
I say normally, because even here the spectre of simple solutions
hangs over us -- there is actually a map of the maze hidden in the
game. The Wiz found it within about ten minutes of starting play
(Whether from luck or from sheer outrageous genius, only comparison
with others' attempts will show) but ten minutes to solve a
puzzle of that dimension just ain't enough for Ol' Whitey.

Maps apart, however, the size of that maze really puts this game on
the... er... map, especially when taken with a host of other
appealing puzzles involving cannons, computers, mechanical
closets, spinning statues and no end of other gimmickry. You also
get those wonderful long text descriptions that Infocom excel at,
and that make you wonder why other adventure software houses
seem unable to string more than a couple of sentences together without
sending half the population to sleep.

So, it's a change from the more recent fashion for lots of communication
with other characters and a return to the old sport of
inventory-boosting. There are only ten things to get, which sharpens
the mind wonderfully, and despite the slight qualms about the
ease of the game -- at least in the first half -- Ol' Whitey reckons that
you can't go far wrong with this one at £1.99. Ooops... Silly me,
this isn't one of those BUDGET games, is it? That comes next. In
the meantime, buy *Hollywood Hijinx* anyway.

<p class="larger" style="font-weight: bold;">Atmosphere 93%<br>
Interaction 93%<br>
Lasting Interest 87%<br>
Value For Money 85%<br>
Overall 90%</p>
