Alright, just messed with it a bit. By a bit, I mean almost all of it. The only thing I didn't do was the bug squashing, because I'm in the middle of a restaurant, and I thought that would be too...sick. Beating corpses with a shovel, feeding dogs to piranhas, that was fine. Go figure.
Well, I see why it was maligned, I guess. It brought back a bit of nostalgia for me, the old days when people were really into desktop customization and there were some novel but kind of weak software products. Things that were bundles of minigames and multimedia. One I used was X-Files Unrestricted Access, which was a combination encyclopedia, desktop theme manager, and means of spying on Agent Scully's apartment. Perhaps that last part itself was creepier than most things of the time. They always included themes, and F13 does as well. In fact, that's the most it does. Adds a few backgrounds and sound clips. Although I'm not sure I want to know who is using the sound of a woman being choked to death in their Windows sound scheme.
The atmosphere of the menu was right, some disembodied talking and screaming. You couldn't tell what was going on, but it sounded bad. Really made it feel the right kind of creepy.
The story part was done alright. I actually thought the reader was well done, it was easy to navigate. The bookmark feature works well. But the buttons might have been better labeled with text, I think. In any case, I ended up using the keyboard to navigate instead. The font wasn't so good for reading, ebooks have come a long way. Now there's eerie music for the story, but it was disabled by default. I was halfway through before I even saw it. The story choice is also a little odd, it's not really a scary story, just a strange one. A good one, of course. Probably not what people expected.
That leaves the minigames. One is Feed The Fish. I thought of it at first as Insaniquarium from Hell. When I found I was feeding live creatures to a tank of piranhas, I thought it was going to be darkly amusing. It's all digitized graphics, meant to look real, but it has the framerate of flipbook made of two-by-fours. I don't mean it runs slow on a modern computer, it was running great. It was just a slow animation. Any kind of pacing was lost when after feeding the fish, the game waited until all animations finished before allowing you to do anything else. Considering all you could do was feed the fish, and there was no variety at all, it was very boring.
Whack-a-zombie is a bit misleading. It's skeletons and ghosts, not zombies. I thought it was a nice take on an old game, and with the market for casual games and the increased popularity of zombies and horror themes right now, I could see something like this taking off as an iphone app. Like Evil Popcap games. But this suffered the same slow animation, and it wasn't that compelling of a game. Just a quick time waster. And as I said, I didn't try bug splatting. Maybe later.
So, it was worth checking out, and I'm glad to have this for my SK collection. Don't think there's much I will be doing with it, though. Unless Bug Splat is really the best game ever made and I don't know it. What are the chances?
Edit: For my install issue, I installed a second time and found out the problem. You have to alt-tab after it sticks and find the window that is supposed to pop up. It doesn't pop-up in WIndows 7 for some reason.
