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| | April 15, 2009
Blue books and yellow books
There are a lot of things you look forward to as a kid: your birthday, dessert, allowance day, Saturday morning, summer vacation… every kid has a list, and it’s usually pretty long. For about three years of my young life, one of the items near the top of my own list was the blue books and the yellow books. I never knew when my dad might bring one of these hardback treasures home from the store next to his office, but it was always a treat. | |
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The blue books were Hardy Boys adventures; the yellow ones were Nancy Drew mysteries. There seemed to be an endless number of each, and I seem to recall thinking at the time that the main characters were either the luckiest or unluckiest people in the world, since everywhere they went, they seemed to find trouble. Of course, that’s what made the stories so good: no matter whether Nancy, Frank, and Joe were in exotic locales or the most mundane of places, there was always something exciting lurking around the corner. It was the perfect thing to make a young girl with a far more ordinary life peer around far more ordinary corners and dream elaborate capers of her own.
To this day, I still remember most of my favorite stories from these books, although I’ll admit I often have trouble recalling which adventures were had by the Hardy Boys and which featured Nancy Drew. The only real difference, honestly, is that Nancy Drew never got knocked out, whereas the unluckier Frank and Joe seemed to court head trauma in nearly every case. But no matter who the characters might have been, the mysteries were always baffling and the sleuths were young and self-sufficient and wonderful role models to any imaginative kid.
Thirty years later, I still have all those blue and yellow books. And as soon as my nephews get a little bit older, I hope they’ll be looking around corners and learning to love adventure the same way I did!
Nancy goes high-tech
So why am I reminiscing about favorite childhood novels today? Because MSN Games is now home to a slew of sleuths, which is to say a half-dozen fabulous adventure games starring Nancy Drew. This is Nancy for the new generation, as clever and free-spirited as ever, but living in current times amidst the technology and hazards of today. The stories are all new, and from what I’ve seen so far, they manage to successfully blend modern mysteries with the feel of the classic books.
Better still, these are big games: full-length adventures with plenty of gorgeously rendered, atmospheric locations. This isn’t the sort of thing you’ll sit down and finish in an afternoon. Like a good novel, each of these titles is something you can linger over, shuffling the clues around in your mind and trying different approaches to the overall puzzle.
Not that you’re out of luck if you only have a few minutes at a time to play: there’s also a Nancy Drew Dossier game to tempt you into being a desktop detective. This first installment in the Dossier series is a hidden-picture mystery with clues and conundrums a-plenty, and you can easily enjoy it in 15-minute increments.
Both the adventure and Dossier games are remarkably true to the spirit of Nancy Drew, and this old mystery fan at least is both excited and grateful to have the chance to solve a few more cases with her favorite girl detective.
If you’d like to know more about the Nancy Drew games and the team that made them, check out our exclusive interview with Her Interactive!
Mental calisthenics for the win!
I recently raved about a game called Wild Word Garden, which is basically TextTwist with bonus words and a floral theme. A month later, I still play a round or two nearly every day, so this game gets my “test of time” stamp of approval. Now, the same developers have offered up two more brain-bending titles – Busy Bistro and Street of Dreams – and I’m starting to realize just how out-of-shape my mind really is.
In Street of Dreams, your task is to sort words into the correct category. This seems pretty simple at first: when the only two categories, for example, are Hollywood celebrities and types of cheese, there’s little difficulty in choosing. Ohhh, but later, when you’re trying to figure out whether a word you’ve never seen before is more likely to be a language, a beverage, or an exotic fruit, things get a little trickier. And then, just when you think you’ve got everything in hand, and you’re feeling all smart, that’s when the game starts throwing in hidden categories. Not only do you have to figure out which words go in there (and remember, the timer is always running!), but then you need to identify what the category is.
On the upside, the better you do in each round, the more visual goodies you can purchase for your virtual house. Ace a level, and you might be able to afford that new swimming pool. Mess it up… well, there’s always the cheap pet rock.
Busy Bistro is a memory challenge game, and I will make no bones about saying that it is my current nemesis. I have always considered myself to have a fairly good memory, but wow, apparently I’ve been giving myself too much credit. In the very first round, this game shattered my illusion of recollection aptitude and left me feeling embarrassed and just a bit dizzy.
Think you have a way with memorization? Try this: look at a list of ingredients and cooking instructions. Then (with the timer running… why is there always a timer?) try to remember and type in every single ingredient on the list. Then play a mini-game linking cooking words to the appropriate utensil. Then recall and select all the right instructions to prepare your dish. You may discover that you are quite correct about your magnificent memory. Or you may end up like me, feeling foolish and determined to improve your concentration skills.
Either way, though, you’ll probably want to print out a few of the recipes. They look awwwwfully tasty…
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