Toonstruck (1996)

Have played through the first bit (just about to access Zanydu), and it's still great! Christopher Lloyd pitches his performance perfectly, the relationship between him and Flux is great, and there's an incredibly impressive voice cast here with a bunch of seasoned cartoon VO artists that anyone who watched The Simpsons, Animaniacs etc every week would recognise the names of (Jeff Bennett, Corey Burton, Jim Cummings, Tress MacNeille, Rob Paulsen, April Winchell, Frank Welker) as well as some celeb actors (Tim Curry, David Ogden Stiers, Dom DeLuise, Ben Stein). It looks great - obviously there's some overlap with DOTT, but it has its own take on the aesthetic and the art is gorgeous, clean and consistent, definitely the best use of the 640x480 resolution so far. The sound is fairly good - lots of classical music, an impressive amount of voice recording and the expected cartoon sfx. Plus there's a fairly big budget - lots of nice FMV (live-action and animated) cutscenes, and even the company logo vid at the start is impressive. (As with pretty much all 640x480 games now, though, it really does make you itch for a remastered version wth all the original HD master materials!)

Some mild criticism - though it's generally well-written, some of the dialogue can go on too long, the mostly pun and innuendo based humour isn't exactly highbrow, and the puzzles aren't particularly imaginative (the game almost immediately says 'here are the 16 items you need, here's a big world full of rooms, go get 'em', and so far it's all been very simple item shuffling) though it is still the start of the game and at least it's a nice simple thread to hang all the cartoon lunacy on. One particularly clever move on their part was to give the toon world three different zones (Cutopia, Zanydu, Malevoland) so they can switch tone from Care Bears and Merry Melodies through Looney Tunes and Text Avery to Ralph Bakshi, and have pushing them up against each other.

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Finished Toonstruck, and it's still awesome. The second half of the game, where you're in Nefarious' castle, is really tightly constructed and has so much clever stuff going on. It's just such a damn shame that the publishers made them split the game in half in the hopes of turning the second half into a sequel then went bankrupt. There was so much good material there, and you can feel the gap in this game where it should have gone.

Rating: Green.