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7.0 sorta fun
Annie Bright came home to her apartment one afternoon after a long day of shopping to find her uncle's lawyer waiting for her. Uncle Dave has offered a challenge to Annie and her cousins, Carl and Milly: Whichever one of the three manages to spend one million dollars the fastest and the most wisely... will win Uncle Dave's entire fortune. At first Annie is a bit hesitant of such a contest, because she's been bitten before. (Radio station contests always make you think you won a prize but when you go to pick it up nobody knows what you're talking about.) However as a shopaholic Annie can't resist buying things.
Annie's Millions, from PoBros, Inc., is a simple hidden object game that follows Annie in her quest to spend one million dollars as quickly as possible. No doubt based on the novel (or films based on the novel) Brewster's Millions, your task is to accompany Annie to each of twenty stores in the game and find the objects on her shopping list and spend, spend, spend. Annie starts the contest tentatively purchasing nearly worthless knick-knacks, while her cousins spend both extravagantly and not at all. All the while she wears more eye makeup than a community theatre Juliet, her uncle's motives remain unclear, and her cousins are bumping into her in various boutiques. Will she win the inheritance?
Each hidden object scene has a simple shopping list of twelve to sixteen items. Finding and clicking on them in the store purchases them, with dollar values rising to let you know how much Annie just subtracted from her one million dollar goal. (She uses a special credit card that her uncle's lawyer Roger prepared. If I had that card I'd click straight onto Amazon.com and fill up my cart with all sorts of loot. Including Torchlight, which is an awesome casual RPG.) Once she has bought everything on the list, it's on to the next store. Or perhaps a cutscene.
Random clicking is penalized, but only with a painless slap on the wrist. Your mouse pointer swirls around for just a second and you can get away with a healthy amount of random clicking before even that happens.
If you can't find an object, hints are available to pinpoint an item's exact location. But you'll have to earn them because Annie's Millions doesn't have a slowly-recharging hint button. Finding two objects in quick back-to-back succession earns a third of a hint. In other words, find four objects quickly with no pause between clicks and you win a new hint.
Or, you can play one of four The Price is Right-inspired (cough cough cough) minigames, available at any time by clicking on a red square panic button at the bottom right of the screen. In "Price Builder," you're given the scrambled price of an item and have three tries to rearrange the numerals and make the correct price. In "Price Match," three items must be matched with three different prices, also within three tries. "Price Guess" is by far the hardest... (Until you've played the game through a few times.) You have four guesses to input one item's exact price. And finally in "Sort Items" you have three tries to sort four items from least expensive to most expensive. Win any one of these games and you'll receive a free hint. In practice, these games aren't much more fun than shoveling snow off of your neighbor's stretch of sidewalk. It doesn't take long before you start seeing the same items repeatedly and begin memorizing their prices.
Annie's story and both her and her cousins' quests to spend one million dollars play out in comic book-styled cutscenes and character dialogues that pop up within the hidden object scenes. It's very fluffy stuff, but well-presented with professional voiceovers.
Annie's Millions is one of those rare games that makes 800x600 low resolution hidden object screens work. The few times I couldn't find an object it was because it was a little cheekily hidden, not because it was fuzzy or blurry. Ordinarily I shake my head sadly at low resolution hidden object games, but I couldn't do that with this one. I did notice that approximately half of the hidden objects on Annie's list in each scene were immediately easy to find, just because they didn't quite blend in with their surroundings. Either they were a bit more "pixelly" or "anti-anti-aliased" than their surroundings or something, but just glancing about the store I could pick them out before even looking at the shopping list.