Postby Fairygdmther » Wed Oct 27, 2004 6:47 am
Alida - finished!!!
Major Spoilers!!!!!
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I had a few problems with the plot holes here:
1. If this was meant to be an amusement park, how could you handle the people? No refreshment stands, no restrooms, transportation for one at a time only, no way José.
2. Where were the docks to handle boat traffic? Entrances, exits, etc.?
3. Having a set of identical twins in my family, and growing up with two other sets as friends, you could always tell them apart. Leval shouldn't have been fooled.
And the good twin/evil twin - how trite!
4. How was Arin imprisoned? Up how many ladders did he have to go to get to his vault? Riiiiiiight!
5. What happened to Leval when he was freed? How did he get out of the dungeon when we took the tramcar?
6. These multimillionare guys stayed in those tiny shacks over the water on the circular pathway? Sure they did...wink, wink.
7. Where did they find trees to grow in salt water? Cypress will grow at water's edge, in brackish water, but these weren't cypress.
All that being said, I did enjoy Alida. I chose not to use the rocket mode of getting around, and traipsed back and forth a zillion times. On my old Win98SE, the graphics suffered somewhat, especially where water was shown, but never enough to spoil the effect. Occasionally I had bleed-through of a previous scene when a cut scene was shown, but given that my PC didn't even meet minimum specs, I can't really complain. Overall I found the puzzles to be fair, but hard, with basically the same complaints that BJ had. Never in a million years would I have taken that lamp blinking as a code. Perhaps if it were a simple one like long-short-short, the repetition would have been recognized, but as is? No way!
I liked the crypto decoder by the water house. (And why couldn't we entice Kivas into the water house whirlwind - now that would have been a just fate, wouldn't it?) I liked the moontone puzzle, though it did have that tricky part. I liked the peg and potentiometer puzzles, but got stuck on the switch puzzle for a while, till I figured it out. Yes, I used a w/t, but it wasn't able to explain how to get me unstuck, but I was able to do that after a while. There were a few red herrings - ie, the sundial and table in the conservatory. In summary, I would give it the same score as BJ - 7/10. Very good game, but with flaws.
FGM