Shadoan DVD
Score: 40% ESRB: Teen Publisher: Data Becker Developer: Digital Versatile Disc Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Adventure
Graphics & Sound: The graphics in Shadoan are cel animation, but they are of the low-quality that you get on the low-budget Saturday morning cartoons. The characters are blurry and indistinct, and the effects are the typical “light-show” flash and bang. Pretty poor, actually. The voice-acting is passable, and of the same quality -- you get the good ones and the whiny ones. The in-game sound effects are similarly low-quality.
Gameplay: Shadoan DVD is a failed attempt to make a “point-and-click” adventure that’s playable on any DVD drive. You control Lathan, a young boy under the tutelage of the wise sage Daelon, questing to restore peace to the kingdom. You know the drill. The problem is the game, at times, is nonsensical and illogical. When Lathan remarked that he was where he just saw some trolls, yet I had yet to see a cut-scene with uglies of any sort, I knew that there were some serious continuity errors. The movement interface is almost unusable with its map-based and screen-based clickies. In fact, the fact that everything usable in a map has to be highlighted (DVD hardware is not that advanced when it comes to gaming, considering that’s not what it was designed to do) takes a lot of the mystery out of the game. The constant re-use of cel animation with different voiceovers grows old quickly, and the lack of a coherent plot makes the game a head-scratching mess. Oh, and let’s not forget the deaths for no apparent reason required in every game of this type. Gameplay? What gameplay?
Difficulty: If you can bear to play the game, the difficulty ranges from absurdly easy to stupidly difficult. Most of your difficulty will come from fighting the controls of the game to make the right moves. And since the characters have a tendency to refer to people and places the game assumes you’ve visited when in fact you haven’t, be prepared for a “wander aimlessly and hope you end up somewhere important” experience.
Game Mechanics: The engine for Shadoan DVD is, in a word, awful. Half of the time, the cursor doesn’t go where you want it to go or where it would logically go, the inventory is slow and unintuitive, the interface shows you every interactable device in any scene simply because you have to cursor your way there, and the blurry graphics don’t help to discern things. It plays slowly, poorly, and without coherency. Unless you must have every game created by Rick Dyer, who made the Dragon’s Lair games and similar pretty-but-no-skill affairs, avoid this “game.”
-Sunfall to-Ennien, GameVortex Communications AKA Phil Bordelon
Minimum System Requirements: DVD drive (works equally “well” in a TV DVD player as a computer DVD player)   Test System: AMD K6-III 450 running Windows 98, 256MB RAM, Creative Sound Blaster Live! Sound Card, Creative TNT2 Ultra w/32MB RAM, 6X/24X DVD-ROM
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