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Pepper's Adventures in Time   Manufacturer: Sierra Developer: Sierra In Brief: Funny, entertaining game designed for kids is fun for grownups too.
"Pepper's Adventures in Time" had adorable credits. It might not seem like a lot, but name one other computer game where the credits are as much fun as the game. Can't think of any? Neither can I. But as Pepper wanders her neighborhood, cheerily telling her uninterested neighbors who made "Pepper's Adventures in Time", you've just got to have high hopes for the game.
Those high hopes are justified. Pepper, designed as a game for kids, is one of Sierra's best games of all time, a consistently amusing, imaginative and informative game that is not only an ideal choice as a starter game for the adventure novice but is also a charming little morsel for the adventure game habitué.
It all begins when Pepper's mad-scientist uncle creates a machine to infuse Ben Franklin's time with the "Spirit of 1968," and Pepper has to go there and set things right. I don't actually know how she gets there -- the game kept crashing at a certain point in chapter one -- but one of the wonderful things about Pepper is that you can skip ahead, so I went to chapter two and dealt with Pepper in colonial New England.. There are six chapters and you can choose to play any of them, so if you get stuck somewhere you can still move to the next chapter and continue the game. It's a shame all of Sierra's games didn't have this feature.
However she gets there, Pepper finds Ben Franklin has become a hippy guru, spreading the word of beaded curtains and do-your-own-thingism to the townspeople, who start eating tofu and playing Frisbee and lose all interest in fighting for their rights. That's not really the spirit of 1968, it's more like the spirit of 1974. If there was one thing people were into in 1968 it was fighting for their rights. Abbie Hoffman wouldn't approve.
While "Pepper's Adventures in Time"'s sense of recent history is iffy, the game seems to know a lot about pre-revolutionary America. Pepper provides a wealth of information about Ben Franklin and his times. There is a truth icon you can use to find out whether stuff in the game is accurate to the period or is just for fun (like the book "Child Rearing For the Single Tyrant"). You learn that Franklin invented a weird instrument and started public libraries. You also learn that, while there was a real Ben Franklin h "never turned into a hippie," a useful thing to know. The text is even footnoted to give you dictionary definitions for less common words like "musty" and "gout," (by the way, one of the main reasons there was so much gout back then is because people drank wine instead of water, the water being often substandard).
For the most part the puzzles are quite easy, taking just a little brain power. For some reason chapter 3 gave me trouble; I felt two puzzles were poorly designed and I had to get a walkthrough, and a third puzzle wouldn't work properly; I did what the walkthrough said and it just didn't work. So I had to skip to chapter 4, and from there on it was clear sailing.
The game did have my two least favorite things; a sliding block puzzle and a maze. The sliding block puzzle was no problem because if you click on the "help" button a few times the game will solve it for you. The maze seems to be there just so children can learn as early as possible how annoying they are. I tried to map it but it didn't seem to even map properly. Strangely enough, while I had to find my way in by pure trial and error, there is a solution to get out easily. I guess they thought they would have aggravated the player enough by the half-way point.
In a way, Pepper is Day of the Tentacle Jr. It involves time travel, you play as multiple characters (Pepper or her dog), it's funny and it's got a mad scientist in it. It's also a lot easier to get through.
If you screw up the United States stays a British Colony, at which point you are given a hint and can try again from where you screwed up. This is another thing I think all games should have; there's nothing that pisses me off more than having to restore a game and play through to the point I'd gotten to when I'd lost.
Written very wittily by Lorelei Shannon and designed by Lorelei and others, including Jane Jensen, who judging from games like King's Quest VI and Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was probably responsible for the two puzzles I got stuck on), Pepper is fairly short but loads of fun. And you'll learn more about Ben Franklin than you ever did in high school. -- Charles Herold -2000 Glitches:Running this old DOS game on Windows 98 I got an "out of heap" error message during the first chapter and had to skip ahead to the second chapter.
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