Sunday, December 4, 2011

Nostalgia Sunday: Toonstruck

Here is something I recently came up with: Nostalgia Sunday!
It's basically a short Review of Video Games I played as a child or I just remember really well. I'll post a Review every Sunday, till I run out of Games I guess :D.
So here's the first game I want to talk about:
Toonstruck

I got this game with a few others in a game collection when I was 10 or so. It really stood out to me, because it had a cool story, crazy characters and really good animation.

Story:
The main character is Drew Blanc (played and voiced by Christopher Lloyd) who is the creator of the Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun Show. After an artist's block he gets sucked into the world of his own TV Show by his TV. He discovers, that this paradise is getting ravaged by a ruthless new character with a devastating weapon of evil, a flying machine equipped with a ray beam that mutates the pleasant, childish landscape and its inhabitants into dark, twisted and mean versions of themselves. His mission is to return all people and the world into its old state and defeat the evil Count Nefarious.
The Game:
The game itself is a classic point and click adventure with sometimes really tricky puzzles. The locations vary from each other and are all unique. Your mission is, to find several parts for a "reverse" ray beam, that turns all evil to good; the counterpart to Count Nefarious ray beam. While collecting those parts, you'll see several locations turn evil after time, just like the above picture shows. What once was a normal farm with innocent animals becomes...well...I guess you can see for yourself haha. The end has a nice twist also, which I won't tell you of course. The music is also one thing that really stood out. I remember it so well, that when I finally found one of the tracks on Youtube, a huge nostalgia wave came over me. I haven't heard the song for 10 years or so, but it immediatly reminded me of the game. If you want to know what the songs are, you propably already heard them. They were almost exclusively used in the Ren and Stimpy Show and often in Spongebob Squarepants. Take this song as an example: 

Toonstruck 2:

Because of productioncosts, the game was split into two halfs. The second one should be released, if the first game was a success. Unfortunatly it did very poor in sales, although it got good critic reviews. There's still a community that collects all material there is from the second game and tries to recreate it: http://toonstruck2.games4um.de/
Even one of the old game creators acknowledges their work and says, that they would make the second game, if they got enough support.

I'd still like to play this game again and see, if it aged well. Unfortunatly the game cd got lost. Maybe there's a download out there somewhere on the Internet haha.

I hope you enjoyed this post and please give me feedback.

6 comments:

  1. Never played the game, I will check out more information on it later. Ren and Stimpy was cool though =D

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  2. I've never really looked at it either, i'll check it out later :p

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  3. Love those old games! Brings memeories up

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  4. Very interesting take on vvidya

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  5. Interesting

    by: electroman

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