Toonstruck

[Akril]

I thought I'd post a thread about one of my latest favorite adventure games (one of the many that I played while I was doing "research" for Adventure: The Inside Job).

The sadly underrated Toonstruck stars Christopher Lloyd of Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? fame. He plays a down-on-his-luck cartoonist named Drew Blanc (pun intended) who is sucked into a cartoon world where he meets his own animated creation: a three-foot-tall purple thing named Flux Wildly (reference to BTTF possibly intended). This game can be defined as an FMV only in the losest of terms, since (with the exception of the intro and the outro) Drew is the only "real" person in a completely animated world, almost the inverse of WFRR?. There are many impressive animated cutscenes, many of which involve Drew interacting with other characters and objects in a remarkably convincing fashion.

Toonstruck is probably one of the most expensive adventure games ever created, mostly because of the technological requirements of compositing live action actors with 2D backgrounds and animations. Sadly, the game made so little money that not only did its company go bankrupt, but the scheduled sequel was cancelled.

I'm not that crazy about the Warner Brothers cartoon style that this game seems influenced by, but I enjoyed the game nonetheless. The puzzles (which I thought were relatively straightforward) require a somewhat warped sense of humor and a knowledge of classic cartoon cliches to solve, and despite the cartoony appearance, this is not a game for kids. It's somewhat reminiscent of the Gobliiins series and the Sam and Max games (some puzzles involve you using Flux to do something that Drew can't do himself). There are a couple points in the game where you risk getting captured by the villian's henchmen, but if you are captured, you're not out of luck: if you can solve a few additional puzzles, you can free yourself (this alone was enough to make me replay the game multiple times). The game is also pretty good at letting you know why a certain item won't work with something, and even if you're unsuccessful with solving a puzzle, you'll almost certainly be treated with an amusing animation or a quip from Flux or Drew.

One thing I particularly found interesting about Toonstruck is the dialogue system. If you strike up a conversation with a character, chose one or two of the avilable topics and then chose the "Goodbye" option, Drew will say something like "That's all I wanted to know. Thanks for the chat." However, if you back out of the conversation without chosing any of the topics, Drew will say "On second thought, never mind. I just thought I'd say hello."

I haven't encountered this feature in any other adventure games that use dialogue trees -- your character's "Goodbye" dialogue will be the same, regardless of whether you've actually talked about anything with the other character or not. For such a cartoony game, this seems like a surprisingly realistic touch -- I mean, if you start a conversation with someone, then suddenly decide that you don't want to talk to them anymore, would you say "That's all I wanted to know. Thanks for the chat."?

[misslilo]

I absolutely loved this game and played it not long ago.

I believe I played it in DOSBox and didnt encounter any crashes or bugs - except for one place, where I had to use a slowdown utility.
I did however also get a few savegames from Mr. Bill - just in case

I agree this is an underrated game - it has been bashed more times, than I care to remember.
Some says it's not funny - all I can say is, that they don't have any humor then, lol
Either that, or they look at the game with too large intellectual glasses.

[AndreaDraco]

Either that, or they look at the game with too large intellectual glasses.

Striking image, my dear Misslilo!

[DeadPoolX]

I seem to recall a magazine ad for this game in which a female sheep dresses up as a dominatrix.

[Collector]

I believe I played it in DOSBox and didnt encounter any crashes or bugs - except for one place, where I had to use a slowdown utility.

If you play a game in DOSBox there is no need for a slowdown utility. Just lower the cycles.

[Fender_178]

I just bought this game but I never played it yet but I will after Gk3 and Freddy Farkas. Also You can play this game with CD-less play if you copy the data from both Cds in the directory that the game is installed in and edit the .cfg file to set the Cd rom drive to your hard drive letter. When you run the game it will give you an error saying that this drive isnt a cd-rom drive just ignore it and say yes to the game's question and the game will run normally.

[Akril]

Regarding running the game, running it from the CD drive put too much strain on DOSBox, so I made some CD images of the game and ran them from the hard drive. This caused a few problems when I had to swap disks, but otherwise it worked pretty well.

I seem to recall a magazine ad for this game in which a female sheep dresses up as a dominatrix.

Oh, yes. One of the more memorably disturbing characters. An equally memorable piece of dialogue on the subject:

Drew: It's just your everyday story of cow meets sheep, cow and sheep become malevolated, cow develops sado-masochistic tendencies, sheep is drawn into a sordid world of bondage, whips, body piercing and nipple propellers...
Flux: I must have seen it happen a million times.

[AndreaDraco]

Drew: It's just your everyday story of cow meets sheep, cow and sheep become malevolated, cow develops sado-masochistic tendencies, sheep is drawn into a sordid world of bondage, whips, body piercing and nipple propellers...
Flux: I must have seen it happen a million times.

Awesome! Now I must play the game!