Casual Explosion's My Game Space page: Explosionville!!!
7.3 excellent
Did you ever read that story about the guy who used a VCR to memorize all possible patterns and grid positions of the whammies in the game show Press Your Luck? He knew exactly when to yell "Stop!" and press the button so a caped cartoon devil wouldn't take away his money. That was a good story. Another good story I read was about a guy on a revenge mission to kill the 5 arch-criminals known as the "Demon Princes" that murdered his family.
The Hidden Object Show, from Gogii Games, is a game show themed hidden object game. If you've played all the other hidden object games released in the past year (I think maybe a billion have come out since last May, but I haven't made an exact count) then you'll probably excel at this game and win lots and lots of virtual cash and prizes. As usual, gameplay involves searching through rooms cluttered with all manner of junk for specific items. Find an object, click on it, and you'll scratch it off your list. Find them all and you move on to the next scene, which is just as cluttered. Or more!
The show is hosted by a black and white vampire, a cross between Gomez Addams and Corny Collins. But don't worry, the actual scenes you hunt through are not black and white or vampires.
The Hidden Object Show gives you, as a contestant, a chance to win 5 million dollars. That's enough money to buy 1.4 millon boxes of instant breakfast oatmeal. Each round, the vampire shows you the silhouette of a prize you'll win if you can complete the round. (It's often cash.) You start out with a normal hidden object scene. Find all the objects and you'll move on to one of two special bonus games. Complete each of these bonus games and the prize is yours! From toasters to cars to big haystack-sized piles of cash, the prizes keep coming and keep getting bigger.
There are ten bonus games in total. Which two you end up playing in each round depends on which get selected when you "spin" the bonus game wheel. (Every game show has to have a wheel to spin so I commend Gogii Games on their research.) If you get sick of playing the same bonus games again and again, you can select certain games to skip by using skip chips. These chips are extremely hard to get. You can either find them in the hidden object game scenes, stop the fluxuating bonus game wheel spin power strength indicator in exactly the right spot, or find an Aladdin's lamp and wish for more. The bonus games allow you to revisit scenes and repeat them with a different dynamic. For example, in "Find 10" you'll have to find ten objects of the same kind, or in "Spot the Differences" you spot ten differences between two versions of the same room.
I feel like my campaign to put a positive spin on random clicking is really working. The Hidden Object Show is just one of two or three recent hidden object games that don't penalize you for random clicking. Excellent. You will hear the audience start to boo you however if you persist in too many erroneous clicks.
I'm sad to report that this game suffers from problems that I've seen in other hidden object games... faults that basically just add up to lazy programming or design. If you click on the "clear" middle section of an object, the game doesn't recognize that you found it. So if you weren't sure if that was the object or not, now you think it wasn't. That can really mess you up. Another problem I ran into was when the game asked me to find ten dominoes. I kept clicking on one, but the audience (full of morons during this taping, I guess) kept booing me. It turned out there were eleven dominoes in the room, and I was supposed to find all but the one I chose. That's just sloppy programming. And yes, you will run into grammatically incorrect English in this game, too.
Overall, The Hidden Object Show is just another hidden object game with nothing really compelling to keep you playing. The gameshow theme isn't as interesting as more story-based games. The music that plays as you hunt for items is cool, and the audience sounds are kind of fun. But revisiting the same scene three times then moving on gets a bit monotonous. Imagine how much fun this game would be if you played a secret agent posing as a contestant and your secret mission was to destroy the vampire.
Download The Hidden Object Show