Here's a link to The Clockwork Man: The Clockwork Man
6.7 sorta fun
I can't remember an election where as much emphasis was placed on polls as this current U.S. presidential election. (Actually, I can't remember many elections at all.) Both sides, the press, and everyone in the middle wants to know who's going to be the next president. Imagine how they'd love to sneak into voters' homes, rifle through their belongings, and find out directly for whom the homeowner was going to cast a ballot.
That's just what happens in Miss Teri Tale: Vote 4 Me, from OUAT Entertainment. In this hidden object game, you play mystery author Teri Tale (whom we first met in Miss Teri Tale: Where's Jason?), a glamorous thriller author who has given up on New York City to settle in the small village of Peeking Town. (No, not Beijing.) When the local paper (delivered via email) announces the start of a special election to choose the next mayor, you decide to sneak into your neighbor's houses and look for campaign paraphernalia so you can compile a list of who's voting for who and thus predict the outcome of the Peeking Town mayoral election! Wait, isn't that illegal? It sure is!
Let's skip the breaking and entering... and trespassing... in America the private ballot is a cornerstone of our democracy. That's why no one sees you vote, because if they did know who you voted for they could try to influence your vote. Why Teri Tale wants to know who will win the election in her town is the biggest mystery in Vote 4 Me. And her snooping just gets her into trouble, for it isn't long before an inept and deranged blackmailer has tossed Teri's hat into the ring. (You get to choose which hat she wears, by the way. I chose a slick and hip black baseball cap.) Will Teri end up as mayor? You'll have to play further in the game than I did to find out!
As this is another hidden object game, you're no doubt familiar with the basics of the gameplay. You're shown a cluttered room and given a list of objects to find. Click on them and they're scratched off your list and removed from the scene. Find enough objects in the scene and it's on to the next one. You have a limited amount of time to find everything before you're discovered and hauled off to jail. (Just kidding, all that happens is that you have to repeat the scene.) I'm a big fan of random clicking, and Vote 4 Me allows you to do a fair amount before warning you to stop "making too much noice."
In each scene are hidden three shamrocks. For each one you find, you get a hint/clue. These really come in handy when you can't find that fifth and final slug in one of the candidate's basements. Hints carry over to the following scenes (like rollover minutes), so unless you're absolutely the worst hidden object game player in the world Miss Teri Tale will probably have enough hints on hand to complete the area. Even if you do run out of shamrocks, you can request a hint, but five minutes will be subtracted from the area time limit.
There are a few basic puzzles involving moving things around - for example, replacing wrenches in the correct spot on a workbench. There are also quite a few minigames. Two that stand out are a surprisingly tricky time management dog grooming game and the most ham-handed tower defense game I've ever played. And I've played a lot, including most of the bad Flash web ones and one I wrote myself called Robot Mice Invaders (you have to stop the mice from getting to your cheese) that I never released because it somehow corrupted the drive in my old Japanese laptop and now Internet Explorer 7 crashes randomly.
I have to say that Vote 4 Me does a good job with the hidden object scenes. Items are generally well-hidden but not impossible, and the game displays at a refreshingly high resolution wide screen that doesn't result in a muddy, blurry exercise in frustration. Bizarre but not quite off-putting music snippets in some scenes will keep you on your toes. However the game completely and totally drops the ball when it comes to the poor English translation that its text obviously went through at some point in development. From descriptions of NASA "Cosmonauts" ... to misspellings... to lines like "I have found every objects of this room!" ... it's clear that OUAT Entertainment (and Big Fish Games, which at the time of this writing have an exclusive on Vote 4 Me) couldn't be bothered to spend a measly twenty bucks to pay a native speaker to give the game a once-over. Pretty disappointing and the main reason Vote 4 Me receives such a low score from Casual Explosion.
Now that the U.S. general election is so close, I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about the people I hate most in this world. No, not the dreaded mole people. I'm talking about those that try to win an argument (or in this case, an election) by misleading others. My hate for this type of person - who knowingly spreads misinformation - knows no bounds. If you have the misfortune to turn on a TV in a battleground state like Ohio or Florida, you'll see all kinds of misleading attack ads from both sides. McCain claims Obama will raise taxes on the middle class, Obama claims McCain will cut social security. It's even worse if you bother to read those ridiculous chain emails or listen to your idiot friends (everyone has at least one idiot friend, so try to make sure yours is a dog because dogs cannot lie). Claims like Obama doesn't have a real American birth certificate (false: he has been proven to be a real American with a valid Hawaii birth certificate) or McCain crashed five airplanes (wrong: he crashed one plane by accident but was praised by the U.S. Navy for "skillful airmanship"). It's all baloney. And it's all designed to trick you!
Don't trust anyone with an agenda! Get the facts from a site like factcheck.org and not only vote, but make sure your vote is an informed one!
Download Miss Teri Tale: Vote 4 Me