Peter Hewitt and his
Mulawa enterprise have been around for several years now. Xiama,
his first “game”, dates from 2000 and Cooroora is his fourth. That
is, if you don’t count the electronic jigsaws.
Cooroora
isn’t really a game, but more an electronic book of word games. However,
if you like a wordy challenge you will likely find lots to keep you
occupied here.
Peter hails from parts
down under, and he uses locations from our Great Southern Land as
backdrops to his productions. Not the glitzy tourist places, but the
relatively peaceful bush and smaller towns that fill up the areas between
our capital cities. This time it’s the hinterland in southern Queensland
around Noosa, known as the Sunshine Coast (okay, Noosa is a little
glitzy). Twenty-four locations are visited in all.
A swarthy widow
It works like this:
find the relevant location on the map and a 360 degree panoramic postcard
of that location loads. Scroll through the scene (and occasionally go for
a short wander) until you find the notebook computer. Click on that and
the word game available at that particular location loads. A new location
and puzzle will then be available, once you revisit the map.
There are all manner of
puzzles: crosswords, how many words can you make from a group of letters,
three letter words for body parts and quotable quotes to name just a few.
Many are variants on traditional puzzles, others are brand new, at least
in terms of word games. All of them have multiple puzzles available. If,
for instance, you can’t find enough words from one set of letters, simply
move on to the next set of letters. The puzzle -- and the location you are
at -- remain the same, but the letters are different.
This increases
playability, and also enables you to focus on a particular type of puzzle
if you want. If you particularly like cryptic crosswords, you can do all
of those that are available.
Which might be a lot.
One puzzle I recall said I was doing number 724 out of 1735. That’s a lot
of puzzling.
You can come and go
between the locations and the puzzles as often as you like. You can half
finish one, go somewhere else and do something different, come back later
and have another go. Just don’t hit the “give-up” button -- it
automatically solves that puzzle for you. Another one of the same type
will likely be available, but that is the end for that one. You could
restart the game as a different player. But having had the puzzle solved,
there would likely not be a whole lot of point.
Award showy wit
Points are awarded as
you go. Gold, silver and bronze medals pop up when you achieve a certain
portion of the solution. The complexity of the puzzle will determine how
well you have to do to get a medal. You can stop altogether, having
obtained a bronze medal, or keep working on it to get either a silver or
gold and more points towards your accumulating total.
100 points is the
maximum available for any puzzle, and you only get that if you completely
solve it at your first attempt. Fireworks and an appropriate fanfare are
an added reward. You can get gold medals for less than a complete
solution, but not the 100 points.
The way some puzzles
work you may not be able to get a medal, or a certain level of medal,
depending upon how you go with the solution. For instance, I could keep
working on finding the whole list of possible words from a set of letters
and wrong words did not count against me. However, if I had too many
unsuccessful attempts at the pair matching game, it affected the maximum
score I could achieve. So too with a variant of Scrabble -- how you
complete the Scrabble board may limit your total point score.
One additional screen
has a pictorial representation of each puzzle you have access to. Visit
that screen and go straight to any puzzle you like, and just pick up where
you left off.
Withdraw – say ow!
The rules and
objectives for each puzzle are explained by moving the mouse over the
picture of Peter at the bottom of the screen; the map is accessed in the
same way. So too the point scoring. Most of the puzzles can be completed
using either the keyboard or mouse – it’s up to you.
Some of the puzzle
explanations could have been a little more detailed, and with a few I had
to experiment with the puzzle itself to be completely sure I understood
the mechanics. The vast majority, though, are straightforward.
You can play
Cooroora directly from the CD or load it on your hard drive. There is
a very slight lag in loading some images if you play directly from the CD.
Apart from the little
fanfares when you achieve a medal, this is a silent pursuit. Ambient sound
does not exist, making the images, lush though they are, a little sterile.
But as I said, this is a puzzle book of word games, albeit in electronic
form. So don’t expect a plot, or any of the other trappings of an
adventure game.
The game saves your
progress as you go, and with the way it is built you can revisit your
progress over and over again in order to try and get that point total up.
Or you can start again as an entirely different player. In keeping with
the medal theme, you represent a country as you play. No prizes for
guessing which country I chose to represent, and as no one else is playing
the game in my house, that puts Australia on top!
Although I have visited
every location to get access to all the puzzles, I am far from completing
all of them or exhausting their potential. I suspect the game will sit on
the hard drive for a while, being dabbled in now and then, when the mood
takes me. Whilst I didn’t think it was as strong as Peter’s earlier games,
it is what it is – a collection of word games. As such, Cooroora
will appeal to all word game fans, and I am rating it on that basis.
