Bad Mojo
Price: $50
Genre: graphic animated adventure
Release:
Developer: Pulse Entertainment
Art:
Music:
Programmer:
Producer:
Publisher: Pulse Entertainment
Phone: 310/264-5579
Website: http://www.badmojo.com
Requirements: PC: 486/66, 8MB RAM, mouse, Sound Blaster-compatible sound cards supported, 2X CD-ROM drive, 20MB disk space, Windows 3.1, Mac: 68040, 8MB RAM, 2X CD-ROM drive, System 7.0

History: Have you ever wondered what it would like to be a bug on the wall, and have everyone try to kill you. Or have you read Kafka’s book on waking up an insect. Well this game may help you to get some idea of what you are not missing. Or did you enjoy Joe’s Apartment so much that you cannot get enough of cockroach animation?

Plot: Roger has had to endure childhood as an orphan, and has stolen some money. When he goes to escape with the loot, and enchanted locket turns Roger into a cockroach. Roger wakes up on the floor of a San Francisco waterfront bar. You play the Protagonist, Roger, who is turned into a roach and doomed to live as a roach until he can decipher the mystery of his condition and return yourself to human form.

Game play: You walk around and look at all the items in absolute photo realistic detail, similar to Myst. The clues to your past are hidden in the garbage on the floor in the six rooms that make up the bar. The more puzzles you solve in the shortest period of time the better you will fare in achieving one of the many possible outcomes of the game.

You must use the cigarette buts, medicine bottles, matches, and other debris scattered about the bar. The puzzles are treasure hunt type, which involve where and how to use the items you find during the exploration phases of the game.

Combat: You get to fight cats, rats, spiders, roach traps, thirst, starvation, spoiled food, spilled paint, and a particularly nasty vacuum cleaner. The roach is not a very good fighter and must think his way through his many combats or he will surely die when confronted.

Graphics: Some of the most startling and shocking graphics in a computer game. The backgrounds and objects the roach has to deal with are gross, take the dead rat complete with blood pool as an example. Check out the fish and blood scene for a real gut wrencher.

There are more than 700 areas to explore. Some objects are photos and some are rendered. I challenge you to figure out which. This is a really good graphic art.

Animations: The insects pitch, and roll and scale up and down in size as they move. The insect animation is similar to that seen in Joe’s Apartment.

Music: A scary and dismal sound track compliments the graphic feast of unmentionable gunk.

Sound effects: adequate

Multi-player: No multi-player features.

Reviews:
Selby Bateman, http://www.cnet.com/Gamecenter/Reviews/Assault/
Steve Klett, http://www.pcentertaiment.com/games/Jan96/mojo196.html
PC Games 5/5 (100%)
Forbes,
Rolling Stone
, The Discovery Channel
PC Magazine 4/4 (100%)