Lemony Snickett's A Series of Unfortunate Events

So this is a bit outside my usual point and click adventures. This one's a platformer. I'm not really all that into platformers, mostly because I'm so bad at playing them, but I wanted to play this one because Tim Curry did the narration, and I am a major fan of Tim Curry. I'm not doing a series of posts on this one, just this entry.

I bought this game on disc many years ago, and the disc appeared to have a flaw. I got halfway through it three times (twice on my Dad's Vista PC, and twice on my Mac's Virtual PC running XP) and hit a spot where the game just froze. It had to be a flaw in the disc. I tried it a fourth time on the Mac virtual XP and managed, with a hiccup in the gameplay, to get through the flawed spot. But I'm a really bad player, and I couldn't get beyond one of the fight sequences, so I quit playing.

Yes, the game not only has you jumping onto things, often moving things, but every now and then you have to have a fight with one of Count Olaf's minions. I got better and better at the jumping, but I remained absolutely terrible at the fighting. So I stopped.

That was several years ago, and I never really tried to finish the game, although I knew I was closing in on the endgame. 

But I went ahead and loaded the game onto the new Win 10 laptop, and decided just to try it. Not only did I get through the glitch this time, there wasn't even any kind of hiccup at all. It seems that I must have bumped off whatever was obstructing the disc because the game played perfectly.

The Orphans

A Tragedy?

So, I did the entire game in one day. A child would have taken about half the time I took, but I finished it. I finally figured out that I had to pick up a lot of ammunition to have any chance of winning the fights. If you have lots of ammunition it turns out the fights are easy. Really easy.

So now I'm a better platformer. And I've finally finished the game! In fact, I made sure that I got all the letters this time. You pick up letters throughout the game and Tim Curry reads the definitions.

At the end of the game you can access your saved games and replay all the audio--so I can listen to Tim Curry's fun definitions whenever I want. Yay! 

The collected letters

I also picked up "eyeballs," every ten of which get you a poster about Count Olaf. I didn't find all of these, but Tim Curry provides commentary for the posters as well. I really tried to get all the eyeballs, but didn't, so I'm not going to go back for them. Maybe someday.

An Eyeball. Ten get you an Olaf poster.

First Olaf Poster

This game didn't get very good reviews when it was released, but I enjoyed it. It's really for kids, who are better platformers than elderly ladies like me. But you've got not only Tim Curry, who is worth playing the game for just on his own, but you've also got Jim Carrey voicing Count Olaf in an excellent performance. The rest of the voice acting is average to bad. Sadly, the kids really aren't very good at all. 

Jim Carrey as Count Olaf

But Curry and Carrey are worth the time!

So finally I finished it! It was fun! And now I suck slightly less as a platformer!

Yay!