Here's a link to Azada: Azada
8.8 ultra recommended
San Francisco is gearing up for a city-wide scavenger hunt extravaganza and your family was chosen as one of the teams! The city has emptied pawn shops, used eminent domain laws to grab up knick-knack collectors' collections, and picked the San Francisco Dump clean... all in order to fill various city locales with clutter, clutter, and more clutter.
You guessed correctly. Big City Adventure: San Francisco, by Jolly Bear Games, is a "find the item" game. (Presumably Big City Adventure: Columbus is already in development. I can't wait for that one!) You're shown a scene made up of a hodge podge of varied objects, and asked to find twelve (or more!) specific ones. We sure have seen a lot of this genre lately. After Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst topped the charts as best-selling casual game for weeks on end, game developers started to get mighty tempted by "find the item" games. So we can expect many more in the coming months, which is great if you like them. Personally I like any game where a ghost jumps out at me.
There are no ghosts in Big City Adventure: San Francisco, but you do get to choose which of the six country bumpkins you play as. Your choices are Mom, Dad, Brother, Sister, crazy Grandpa, or Grandma. Actually, your avatar doesn't really affect the game, but being able to choose is nevertheless a nice touch.
No sooner have your feet touched the ground than you're off to infamous island prison Alcatraz for round one of the hunt. Before each round, a postcard written by your character to friends back home is displayed, with useful facts about the upcoming location. "The prison was deemed escape proof. 36 prisoners tried in 14 separate escape attempts, although 5 were never found. I hope I don't get eaten by a grizzly bear." etc. (That's from memory so I may have gotten that last part wrong.) If you're the kind of spiteful person who buys edutainment titles just to microwave them, relax, because Big City Adventure doesn't quite qualify as edutainment. It isn't a painful learning experience. You can click past the postcards as fast as you like and you won't be tested on them anytime later in the game.
Search the clutter of each location for the listed items. If you find one, click on it and it will disappear in a flashy circle of stars and that item will be crossed off your list. Many of the items will be specific to the location in question, but you'll see the usual assortment of hamburgers, umbrellas, and spiders. (It's impossible to make a "find the item" game without spiders.) As usual, the creators give you a time penalty for overzealous clicking. They aren't strict, however; you really have to be clicking like a wild-eyed maniac to incur the penalty.
If you get stuck, you can use a hint coin. These look like Qarakhanid Dynasty coins (very rare in Shaky Town) with question marks on them. Each one will show you the location of one hidden item. There are also coins which give you more time, coins which just give you points, and a special fast forward coin that shows you where lots of objects are at once (but only for a few seconds). This is a great coin if you have a photographic memory. Every scene has a few hint coins hidden somewhere, just like every tree has at least one squirrel in it. Just look for any round object resembling minted Qarakhanid Dynasty pieces - they're not hard to miss.
Before you can move on to the next location in the hunt, you have to figure out what that location is. You'll uncover its identity in one of four different minigames. (The San Francisco county/city board of supervisors really put some thought into this scavenger hunt.) The minigames are: a jigsaw puzzle, a match-two game, a symbol search, and a memory game. I'll be honest... these minigames are nothing but semi-amusing diversions. The jigsaw puzzle and the match-two game are the most fun. The symbol search game isn't very pleasant at all.
I'm happy to say that Big City Adventure: San Francisco is graphically superb. Some recent "find the item" games have a wide variation in the style of the different objects. (I'm thinking in particular of a game that rhymes with "Pide and Pecret.") These games look like the authors just searched their clipart collections for objects and shoved them into scenes, with little or no concern about matching style, shading, color, or perspective. Big City Adventure does not have that problem. It's as beautiful as, or maybe even slightly more beautiful than, Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst. Most scenes even have simple animations in the background. Jolly Bear Games has done an excellent job with the artwork, and as a bonus, the scavenger hunt theme means that the game's story actually makes sense! So this game is win-win if, like me, you esteem games and logic. However I must subtract points for the misspelling of "lizard" ... which in this day and age we should all be able to spell.
The music is light and perfectly charming, and the background sounds at each location make a nice touch.
If you're holding a grudge against San Francisco because a trolley ran you down, or some prankster used your address to order dozens of cases of Rice-A-Roni from the internet (true story), give the city a second chance.