Reviews: Bone: Out From Boneville & The Great Cow Race

Bone: Out From Boneville & The Great Cow Race

I'm not much for playing games any more – something to do with spending an eternity benchmarking graphics cards ruined that for me. But since I've been off the bike for the past two months, I've found I need some alternative methods for chillaxing (I'm so fly...).

I've always been a big fan of adventure games, such as Monkey Island, Day Of The Tentacle, Indiana Jones, Grimm Fandango and Beneath a Steel Sky. I really enjoyed the recently released Sam & Max series too, which were every bit as good as the original.

One asset I came away from Trusted Reviews with, was an upgrade to my personal Steam account, which gives me access to every game as and when it is released on Steam. As such, I tend to dip in and out trying games occasionally to see if there is anything I like. I quite enjoyed playing the Runaway series of adventure games recently too, but was less than blown away by Mea Culpa.

Gaming on Linux is still a little on the sketchy side – from my experience it either works, or it doesn't. I don't want to spend hours patching WINE to get it working, when I want to be relaxing, so I find myself using Karl's Wii more often than not.

But with the use Wine-Doors, with the click of a few buttons, you can have WINE completely setup with DirectX 9 and Steam within a matter of minutes. The next step is to make sure you adjust your WINE settings and specify a desktop size (I usually make it 1024x768 because I like to play games windowed). This makes it considerably more compatible with WINE, but that may well be due to my dual monitor setup.

Via Steam, I installed the two Bone games and they worked flawlessly without any need to adjust. I'm still using an aging 7600 GS here and it runs quite smoothly. The same can be said for Sam & Max, which I also played on Linux. There is no surprise then, that both games came out of the same Telltale Games studio, using the same engine. It works so well, I sometimes wonder if they even tested it in WINE.

Graphically, it's perfect – it's the ideal engine for the adventure game developer with crisp cartoon-esque graphics and a single click interface that works so well. Adventure games have long since evolved from the “push this” and “open this” approach that left you trying combinations for hours trying to get anywhere, so the single click approach is appreciated. I still remember the frustration of Maniac Mansion, where it was so easy to screw something up that would make it impossible to complete the game without starting over.

The Bone series, much like many computer games started life as a comic – in this case by Jeff Smith. I'm not one for comics, so I haven't seen it. But I can understand why they felt it would be an interesting idea for an adventure game.

You take control of three characters who have been exiled from their home town of Boneville after an accident that is explained at various stages throughout the game. However, this is where my primary gripe with the game lies – in the characters themselves. For an adventure game to work, you have to really empathise with the characters. That is one reason Monkey Island worked so well – he was a geeky pirate with an over active creative mind that lead to combinations of objects that still make me smile every time I see a rubber chicken without a pully in its head.

Fone Bone is the lead character, and is a weak, sap of a “man” that I would prefer to punch, than be. He is hopelessly in love with someone he has just met and needs a good slap in the face. Not a great start.

Next we have Phoney Bone, who is rich, greedy and manipulative. He is equally as frustrating as all dialogue options are aggressive and pointless as you know full well that no self-respecting person would respond to them. He needs to learn that you catch more bees with honey and that gets frustrating when these options don't come up. He is however, the most tolerable of the three.

Finally, we have Smiley Bone, who is, hmm, “simple”. He has his own amusing moments, but I couldn't help but be irritated by him too – especially because his dialogue is slow and drawn out.

Characters aside, I still felt compelled to actually play the games – but that might be largely drawn by the fact there were no other games I particularly liked the sound of at the time, after BioShock had sent me to sleep successfully. The first game is really very short, taking about an hour to complete and the second game is more complex, taking 3-4 hours. I couldn't help but wonder if these should have just been put together into one larger game. Despite this they cost the same price, at $8.95 each. I guess this balances out as fairly good value - $16.95 in total.

The puzzles are obvious, not overly amusing and not incredibly rewarding in general. Mini games like playing hide and seek with 3 chipmunks really make you wonder if this game is aimed at adults at all, but rather an 11 year old with an over-active imagination to fill in the gaps and find the games exciting. I'll go back to waiting for the Strongbad games to start working on WINE...