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5.7 mid-normal
Hey you, yes you, do you like games written in the second person, where the game tells you the action rather than showing you? And puts thoughts in your head? You know the kind of writing I'm talking about. If second person adventures are for you, Youda Legend: The Golden Bird of Paradise is right up your alley.
After a lot of trouble in Amsterdam, in underground libraries and organ repair shops, your unnamed adventurer has decided to take a vacation on an unnamed tropical island. Who wouldn't? Since the island seems to be brimming with Mayan statues and artifacts, let's assume it an island somewhere off the coast of Mexico. If you haven't been to Mexico on a vacation, you don't know what you're missing.
Youda Games have thrown together another oddball hidden object adventure game. Your adventurer discovers a fake conch shell in a cluttered tourist shop and just has to have it. One very unfun and pedestrian board game later, she's back at her beachfront room with a brand new pearl-coated artifact. One which shatters during the night, leading her on an adventure deep into the heart of paradise.
Each location is a hidden object scene, with a grocery list of objects at the left of the screen for you to find. Clicking on their pictures within the scene crosses them off the list and removes them from the room; miscellaneous objects glow then disolve top-to-bottom into pixie dust, while useful objects fly into the steamer trunk your adventurer lugs around the island. Most scenes have multiples of the same type of object to find, like ten flowers, or seven map pieces, etc. Some objects are presented in blue typeface - these require some sort of puzzle to be solved in the current hidden object location before they can be found. For example, repairing a fan and then switching it on to create a breeze that moves aside a curtain. Portions of the hidden object scene that can be interacted with sparkle; most solutions involve dragging items from your inventory trunk onto the sparkling portion of the screen.
A Mayan statue with glowing blue eyes acts as your hint button, and takes less than a minute to recharge between uses. Clicking on the fellow causes blue sparkles to emanate from his eyes, creating a ring around the location of one of the objects on your list. The current trend in hidden object games is to swirl the mouse pointer of players who resort to random clicking... and this game is no exception.
There are handfuls of turquoise rocks to collect in each hidden object scene. These collectibles are added to the border around the game screen as you find them, which is a rather nifty nice touch.
Sadly, The Golden Bird of Paradise is stuck back in 2005 with 800x600 resolution screens that make discerning smaller objects almost impossible. It takes greater skill to assemble a crowded collection of junk for a small resolution screen, and Youda Games was apparently not up to the challenge. The game is particularly vexing to play on a flat panel display with upsampled graphics, as the result is muddy, blurry backgrounds. This isn't a hidden object game where the developers took great care in making sure all hidden objects fit well into their backgrounds, either, with proper sizes, perspective, shading, etc. This is a game where a bullet can be the size of a truck tire. Early in the game there's a screw that's so difficult to see that I couldn't even make it out after using a hint to find it - I had to just click in the center of the hint's circle of sparkles and hope for the best. Making matters worse, the sparkle/particle effects slowed the game to a crawl, at least on my system. Clicking on two or more objects in back-to-back succession sent the game into molasses mode until the graphics engine could catch up... so something somewhere wasn't working right. It looked like software rendering slowdown to my untrained eye.
Where the graphics do shine, however, are in the game's many minigames and logic puzzles. These pop up between most hidden object game scenes. Graphically, the screens encompassing these puzzles are much less busy than the hidden object scenes, with tiles and switches larger and well-animated. Some puzzles are more clever than others, however. A few are actually hard to describe as "puzzles" with a straight face.
All in all, I was rather disappointed with Youda Legend: The Golden Bird of Paradise. There are grammar mistakes, and the story presented in mostly text dialogues and a few comics isn't at all interesting. The interface leaves a lot to be desired, especially when it comes to polish. Selecting items from the inventory to use covers up a portion of the screen, and sometimes you need to use an item on the screen behind the sliding inventory window. It's not always clear that some inventory items need "fixed" before they can be used in puzzles. (One silly example: using a hammer to "repair" a chunk of large glass blackbird statue by apparently hammering it into two pieces - in preparation for a puzzle involving reassembling the many broken pieces of the statue you've already collected!)
Download Youda Legend: The Golden Bird of Paradise
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