by Justin Peeples

Created on: June 25, 2009   Last Updated: June 26, 2009

You know something? There just aren't enough good cartoon adventure games out there. Don't get me wrong, I like a good serious story as much as the next guy, but sometimes you just need to sit down and immerse yourself in rampant silliness. But where, I hear you ask, where can I go for some good old-fashioned point-and-clicking cartoony goodness? Well fret no longer, dear reader, for there is Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths.

Recently, Got Game Entertainment has appeared on the adventure gaming scene seeming almost hell-bent on producing quality adventure games, and who are we to stop them? Tony Tough is their second adventure game, and the level of quality is clear. You can tell the production team is a fan of the classics, Lucasarts in particular. The whole game seems at times to be an homage to Lucasarts classics (in-jokes about three-headed monkeys and purple tentacles abound), and it does borrow heavily from many of the elements that have made their games so successful, such as interface, screw-ball humor, bizarre characters, and pirates.

STORY

The City. Halloween night. For ten years, private investigator Tony Tough has been pursuing the nefarious Jack O'L, a swollen-headed maniac who steals candy from the hands of children while they trick and treat the night away. Through numerous eyewitness accounts and exhaustive research, Tony as concluded that the culprit is an alien from another planet, who is collecting the candy for some nefarious cause, and surely he must be close to the truth, or else they would not have kidnapped Pantagruel, his purple pet tapir. Tony now knows that he must explore the horrifying Halloween Park in order to get to the bottom of this, and to rescue his companion, but is he up to it?

At times the story does seem a little forcedly silly, as though they're trying too hard to be zany, but overall it is serviceable and amusing. The dialogue too seems to be trying too hard to make every line funny. For every laugh-out-loud joke, there's another that just falls flat. But hey, maybe that's just my sense of humor. At any rate, it's constant fun, even if it's inconsistently funny.

GAMEPLAY

Interaction with the environment occurs through a verb coin, similar to Curse of Monkey Island, with the four key actions being Examine, Use, Take and Talk. Later in the game a fifth verb appears on the coin, but it isn't really for solving any puzzles. A small problem I had with the coin is that most of the verbs are

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