Has anyone ever played this and if so, how do you save? It's a 1995 game on puzzles about art. You are stuck in an old mansion and move from room to room by solving the puzzles. I love it but I'm getting tired of having to start the game over everytime I quit. Diane

I bought this as a gift for someone years ago, and later wished that I had kept it for myself!

Here's a review of the game that mentions that there is no way to save your game.

If you like art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has a cute adventure/puzzle game called The Mystery Museum which has paintings from their collection. The idea is to find the culprit who has been messing up the paintings. It's made for both Mac and Windows and can be found at the museum site.

Thank you Becky and Lady Kestrel. The review told me exactly what I needed to know. I will have to marathon the game. It really is fun. LadyKestrel. I'm on my way to find the Museum site. Thanks Diane

When you do find the site please post the url for us.

The museum home page is
http://www.philamuseum.org/

Use the side menu to get to Museum Stores---> Online Store---> Books and Multimedia.

Direct Link to The Mystery Museum

For ages 4-12, and $39.95

Another game of interest, for those who like adventures with art, is Night Cafe . Unfortunately, Night Cafe goes for over $30 every time it is auctioned on eBay.


Gamehound

Yes Night Cafe was a great game. I played it once when Gameboomers use to float the games. Any other art games out there that are afordible and attainable? Diane

The only other that comes to mind might be Alice: An Interactive Museum. It is anything but affordable. Conversely, there are quite a few art-related CD-Roms out that are affordable. These are mostly tours, but some have gaming elements to them. You can click here and scan through the Art list of games.

Coincidentally, Night Cafe was made by Pantheon Productions and EMME Interactive. Some of the titles are published by EMME Interactive as well. And another Pantheon release that comes to mind (in conjunction with EMME Interactive) was Hamlet: A Murder Mystery, but this game is pricey and difficult to locate.


Gamehound

Thank you so much Gamehound. I would love to get my hands on Alice: An interactive Museum but you are so right too expensive for me. Diane

I found a place to order Masterpiece Mansion on the net and just finished placing the order over the phone. It was $14.95 + $6.00 for shipping. If anyone else is interested, the site is here .
You can order over the Internet or phone them up, using the 800 number on their "Contact Us" page.

OHHHH!!!!!!! Jenny100, I think you will love this one. I get started playing and can't stop. I think I've played it through 4 times already and getting better at it every time. It's well worth the money. Diane

Masterpiece Mansion sounds like fun. Has anyone played it on a newer computer with XP?

The specs are for a 386-Win95 and it's 640x480, 256 colors, circa 1995. I wonder if it would play on either of my computers (ME & XP)?

Melanie

I could not get it to run on my xp so I play it on my old 133 win 95 and it runs fine. Diane

Thanks for the link Jenny. I'm on it!

Thanks, Sami.

I emailed the Library Video Co. and they were good enough to have one of their techs try it out on new machines.

He did & said that it won't play on a video card that is greater than a 16 bit, so it seems that this game can only be played on old computers. I think one might have trouble with the video card or with the pentium processer even on win 95.

Too bad. It really sounded great. I'm going to have to pass.

Melanie

Why not just set your desktop resolution to 16-bits?

You can do that, Jenny, but some of these games need patches to deal with pentium & processor speed increases also. (Pandora's Box is a good example of that.)

The tech said that the video card was more of a problem than the xp, so I don't know if it would even install without serious tweaking or going through dos. It might work but the tech tried it and said it didn't on his. I don't know how much tweaking he tried.

Riven wouldn't even install on my xp computer because it was a 16 bit program and that's a more recent game. I may try installing it through explorer and see if that works out of curiosity. (I installed it on the ME puter instead.) I've gotten some others to install that way.

Please let me know if you get it to work once you get it.

Melanie

I'm not running XP so my experience may not be directly applicable. That said, here's what I've learned.

My system specs:

Athlon XP 3000+
512MB
GeForce 5200 FX (128MB)
Win98SE
SB Live! Value

The only spec Masterpiece Mansion insists on is a color depth of 256 colors. It should probably ask for a resolution of 640x480 also, but it appears too polite to be that pushy.

(It also wants QuickTime 2.0.3. Since that was already present on my system, it did not have to be installed from the CD.)

I dropped the CD in the tray, clicked on MANSION.EXE and things started right up. No problems. Looks like a hoot!

Mine came today and I noticed it was a hybrid CD - both Windows and Mac.
I tried it with OS 9.2 and it seemed to work fine with whatever QuickTime comes with OS 9.2 (I think it's version 5).
It seems more a puzzle game than an adventure.
I got up to the room with the mobile in it before I messed up because I couldn't tell one end of a Jackson Pollack painting from the other and got the message "You're trapped in the mansion."

Couldn't agree more. It seems to belong to the steel ruler across the knuckles school of edutainment. One slip, one wrong answer and WHAP! No second chances! Period!

Basic game structure: Earn enough points to escape the Mansion or you are TRAPPED!

I did notice that there is a way to start somewhere other than the Foyer. Passwords appear now and then which, if entered, allow one to start at a point deeper in the Mansion, complete with a generous helping of points.

Masterpiece Mansion feels like the mutant child of Night Cafe and Shivers.

I did get one of the passwords, but didn't know how to make it work and it was late at night so I wasn't really interested in continuing at that time.

The "puzzles" aren't all puzzles. Some of them are answering questions about artists or their paintings. The game allows you to "cheat" to some extent, because there is an icon you can click on to get information about the artist and get the answer to the "puzzle." So if you don't know where a certain painting was painted, you can look it up using the icon and get the answer.

Then there are puzzles where the game tells you to study some paintings, then hides them. Then it shows you one of the hidden paintings and you have to guess which one it is. It gives you a hint by allowing you to place a teeny weeny little window over a very small section of the painting.

There was another puzzle that was a sort of jigsaw puzzle of the painting.

There are some puzzles where you are shown a representative painting, then have to identify which of a group of other paintings (or sculptures) were created by the same artist.

I thought it was kind of fun, but not the sort of thing I wanted to continue late at night. There may be more types of puzzles than what I saw because I only got to about the 4th room before I got a game over.

The "save" system seems to be the passwords you get (which I didn't know how to use). Gobliiins used a similar "save" system where you type in the password to get to where you were before when you restart the game.

The passwords work like this:

On the main menu, there is a gold key.

Click on the gold key.

A box appears under the key and you can type in the password.

Click on the gold key and you are taken to the password's room.

The first password takes you to Room 4 and gives you 200 points.

There are, as far as I know, two other passwords.

Because this is a MacroMedia Director game, it is possible to type in a password, go immediately to the last room, open a safe which contains the vital key and then leave the Mansion without having solved a single art-based puzzle.

Not that there would be much point in doing that....

Thanks for the info Mr. Lipid & Jenny.

I did manage to get Riven installed & playing fine on my xp, btw.

Melanie