Blast Annual


Moon's Fandom Festival

Categories: Review: Software
Author: John Davies
Publisher: iadvd
Machine: Spectrum 48K/128K/+2/+3

 
Published in Blast Annual 2020 Volume 2

Moon's Fandom Festival

Moon's Fandom Festival is a graphical adventure game developed by IADVD using his own Mini Graphical Adventure engine (MGA) and The Mojon Twins MK1 engine (La Churrera).

Developer: IADVD

ADVD had a busy 2019! In addition to this game, he also created Birdy Cantabile, Rade Blunner and Rade Blunner Episode 2: Cannibal Wheh's Little Shop.

Gameplay

You play Moon, the Queen of ZX Spectrum homebrew games, who has been invited to a retro festival to show off her brand new game. Unfortunately the Queen of games is a bit lacking in the memory department, 16k max, and has forgotten the digital password to get into her locker where her Spectrum and new game are stashed.

Moon's Fandom Festival

Luckily the other stand owners will help if she can gain their trust. You need to walk around the festival, in which there are six other stands, a burger restaurant and a restroom. Your objective is to complete various tasks by interacting with the other people and objects you find. The owners of the other six stands have their own personalities and favourite things. Bob is a 'Pwin Teaks' fan and unsurprisingly a bit of a weirdo. Germione is a 'Parry Hotter' fan who wears a cat as a hat and wants to become a sorcerer. Koji Bakuto is a 'Zazinger-M' fan who loves Japanese style mech robots. Dick Reckard is a 'RadeBlunner' fan who won't be your friend until he knows you are truly human. Zork is an X-Files fan who is green and hates plastic. John Doe is a 'Nuck Chorris' fan who knows all the facts about the martial arts legend and even looks like him.

Once all the necessary tasks for an owner have been completed they will allow you to take the icon object from their stall which you must give to another owner.

Once an icon object is with its correct owner, his face will replace one of the question marks that appear when you move over the lockers where your stuff is kept. After the icon objects are all in the right place you can recover your Spectrum and game from the lockers, set it up on your stand and start showing off your software to your fans. Graphics are quite detailed and have some nice little touchessuch as the opening and closing mouths during conversation.

Moon's Fandom Festival

Audio is limited to spot effects for walking, selecting and the typewriter-style clicking noise when text appears letter by letter.

Likes

At first the game is quite intriguing, amusing and nostalgic.

Dislikes

The initial fun slowly shifts over to being laborious. There's no sense of urgency, it's very difficult to die and there's too many random elements, so things become reliant on luck rather than puzzle-solving skills.

Verdict

I really wanted to like this game more as it's a bit different to most games and the concept is entertaining, on paper at least, with its use of pop culture references. But after a while it's not as fun as it might have been. I hope the developer uses his engine again to make a sequel which addresses these issues.

John Davies

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