The Hardy Boys: The Hidden Theft
Pending
The Hardy Boys: The Hidden Theft Accessories
 Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy
Nancy Drew: The Phantom of Venice
Agatha Christie: Death On The Nile
Art of Murder: FBI Confidential
Murder in the Abbey
Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis
Microids: Sinking Island
Dead Mountaineer's Hotel
Chronicles of Mystery: The Scorpio Ritual
Rhiannon: Curse Of The Four Branches
The Hardy Boys: The Hidden Theft Reviews
I wouldn't be surprised if the downside was enough to scare plenty of consumers away from this title in the future. You can click on nothing else. It's idiotic. Yeah, whenever I lose $200 million in bearer bonds, I immediately think, "Quick. Bad things:. Bring in the 11th graders.". However, it's surprising that The Adventure Company put so little effort into a game that could be the start of a successful franchise. Seeing poor Joe Hardy shuffling clumsily after his brother for the whole game was painful.
- Fun puzzles. It makes knowing where to go and what to do easier, though. We're talking at least five years old - and even then, they wouldn't have been good. Solving the puzzles was often easier than figuring out how to exit a room. - An interesting mystery with lots of twists. An interesting storyline, also.
This gives the game a closed off feeling. - The whole thing with the Hardy Boys being agents for ATAC is just stupid. It had some very fun puzzles, and wasn't so difficult that I had to play with a walkthrough in my hand the whole time. Think the early Nancy Drew games. Overall: I really did have fun playing this mystery, in spite of all the problems mentioned. - This game is short - about the same as the Nancy Drew games. - Different locations to visit and a variety of characters to interact with. Good things:.
- The game engine is bad. - The graphics are VERY dated. I'm not familiar with the Hardy Boys the way I am with Nancy Drew, but apparently they work with an agency called ATAC which is some kind of junior FBI for high school students. - The comic book scenes bookending the mystery are poorly done and extremely cheap-looking. - Everything that you can click on is something you need.
I can't imagine what playing the rest of this would be like. I'm trading it in. Now, I can play the most state-of-the-art online games with no trouble, but I can't even get the boys out of the house because it takes too long just to move the mouse up to the menu to change characters much less get down the stairs, wait several seconds for Frank to grab the keys, wait several seconds for Frank to talk about the keys, and get back upstairs before he gets caught. The mouse wanders quite a lot, so selecting something is about like steering a boat. Even though my computer exceeds the minimum requirements, the animations in this game are slow and glitchy like it needs more memory.
This is NOT a companion to the HerInteractive Nancy Drew games. It did run on my brand new computer, and I almost wish it hadn't. Save your money for their next release, it will be well worth it I am sure. Having played all the Nancy Drew games together, my daughter and I were really looking forward to this game and loaded it onto her computer immediately after Christmas. It would not run on her 3 year old computer and consistantly caused the whole computer to freeze. This game is AWFUL. The user interface stinks, it is really difficult to even move the characters where you want them to go, and the graphics look like a game from years ago.
This game is NOT the same computer series. First, it takes more than double disk space than even the biggest Nancy Drew game or even the Harry Potter series (EA Games). We also purchased the newest Nancy Drew game at the same time and we've been playing it without any problems. I reinstalled three times to no avail. We purchased this game after playing nearly all of the Nancy Drew (Her Interactive) series. It continuously crashes my 4GB hard drive with 1GB Ram each time we tried to access the program. We have never been able to play it. The company which makes Hardy Boys games (The Adventure Company) doesn't seem to know what they are doing.
TECHNICAL: I had no problems with running the game, and did not need the video patch. Being a big fan of the Nancy Drew game series (I have all of them), The Hardy Boys game was much like ND's Game #1, not quite "there" and let's hope the next game comes out with some quality, if there IS another one in the works. The dialogues were sometimes mundane. I found myself having to adjust the volume quite a bit, both up and down.
REVIEW: Very disappointing.The ending was entirely corny. The voices had problems though, fading in places, as if they cut out the original dialogue and did a voice-over at the wrong sound level. Parts of it were fun (looking for stuff) and the graphics were fairly nice. Am running XP SP2.
There were too many sketched comic book scenes that made this game seem less of an actual adventure game and more like a cartoon.
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