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Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures | |
| Developer: Telltale Games Publisher: Telltale Games/Xbox Live Arcade Release Date: Out Now Players: 1 |
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Well here’s a grand idea; make Wallace & Gromit’s latest series of games everyone-friendly puzzle-based point & click adventures, and make them episodic downloads so you don’t pay a fortune for them or get fed up before the end! Yep that’s right, I said “Point & Click”. Yes, I know you can’t really point & click with a joypad but that’s how the game plays, in the same vein as Monkey Island, Broken Sword and all the other classic pointy-clicky puzzle adventures. Things are obviously a little different in a Wallace and Gromit game though, because Wallace designed the interface himself: Interact-O-Vision™ (which works about as well as all Wallace’s other inventions by the way). It works like this; the camera always stays at a fixed point or points within an area, and as you move the right stick around the screen, if an object or person can be interacted with, then they’ll be surrounded by a white cursor. The right stick selection mode seems a bit umm… random so fortunately you can also scroll through any usable inventory items or people and objects in range with the D-pad or LB and RB. You can then select items from your inventory and try and combine them, give them to someone et cetera in order to solve the puzzles and problems that the game throws at you. Simple eh? This may sound like a bit of a backward step after Frontier’s excellent 3D platform adventures with W&G (Project Zoo and Curse of the Were Rabbit), but the game style actually suits W&G perfectly. )
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Episode 1: Fright of the Bumblebees )
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Wallace’s holiday plans are ruined by a monsoon  and so he has a brilliant idea; bring the beach to 62 West Wallaby Street! Yep, Wallace’s plan means creating the perfect weatherproof resort — in their house. Keeping the customers satisfied isn’t easy though, and when Duncan McBiscuit gets knocked on the head and abducted by assailants unknown, Wallace And Gromit set off on a whodunnit with a little help from Wallace's latest useless invention, the Deduct-o-matic!)
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The suave and rather sickly Monty Muzzle is  a new face in town and is holding a grand fundraising funfair, supposedly to help rebuild the local dog shelter. Our hero Gromit discovers that the shifty-looking Monty's intentions are sinister and sets out to foil conman’s devious plan and rescue his canine friends along the way. Puzzles include trying to beat a chicken at noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) and guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar.
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Through the previous episodes it’s become  clear that Wallace’s neighbour Felicity Flitt has a “thing” for him, and Gromit sets out to make sure that there aren’t any wedding bells on the horizon. Miss Flitt hates golfers and so Gromit engineers Wallace a membership to ‘Prickly Thicket’ Golf and country club. Wallace sets about becoming the club’s best player and saving his home from demolition, while naturally Gromit, yet again, saves the day as he figures out how to save everyone from a horrible death while outwitting a devilish security system...
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- It’s Wallace and Gromit - Fun puzzles - Some “laugh out loud” humour |
- Woolly controls - Some of the music made me want to self-harm |
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their last movie A Matter of Loaf And Death, in Fright of the Bumblebees, Wallace's cracking idea for accelerating his honey business' (called From Bee To You) growth with supersized flowers has unintended side effects… The inventor and his loyal pooch are faced with a big problem. They need 50 gallons of honey by tonight – far more than their single beehive can produce! When Wallace’s plan to step up production goes horribly wrong, naturally it falls to Gromit to fight off the angry swarm and sort things out.
