Antiques Roadshow(TM)

For most of the people antiques are something that you have from before or bought them sometimes and use them only so they can collect dust on some wall, or in boxes or an attic. But there are some really precious antiques which not only do they worth from a small to a large fortune, but they significance as a historical object is great too. The best way to inform yourself about this kind of thing is watching the well-known television show Antiques Roadshow, which is the base for the same named game. In the show a lot of relics are shown that the people didn’t even know they had and our heroine Julia was so fascinated by the show she decides to start working in a local antiquity shop. She probably though she would get an job dusting the items or something like that, but lucky her she got straightaway as her first task to travel across USA and to discover new antique items but also to explore some old ones too. Julia's on a special mission from her boss, Mr. Hinton, to discover the significance of an old decoder ring that's been in his family for generations, but besides that she must bring all the worthy items back when she finds them to the shop. The gameplay itself will be pretty familiar to all of the fans that played HOGs in general, as when she arrives at her first location she gets her ticket stamped and then off to searching for items. Then you start searching at barns, crowded shop rooms, train stations, and other areas completely packed with pretty much worthless stuff, but it is for you to decide what to pick up and what to leave behind. You don’t have to worry too much of about the items you need to find as there is a list of items in every level and you search using it. One of these items will be the special one that her boss is looking for, and when the items are finished you can take them for appraising at the end of every level to the shop, where you get a small chunk of paper from the machine of Mr. Hinton that tells you where to search next. To break the game at least for a little bit, there are mini-games in between levels in which Julia has the task to clean, polish, glue or fix the items that she has found so they have greater value on the appraising in the shop. The Antiques Roadshow interludes are brief dialogue scenes that play out exactly like they do on TV: Julia presents the antique to the expert, the expert talks about its history and points out interesting features, and then reveals how much the item is worth. When you search for the items in the game you will notice that that’s probably the best thing about this game. Many developers use oversizing to abnormal size or camouflage it in such a way a man who watches the same item every day wouldn’t recognize it, well without a hint anyway. There are no problems like those here, as the items are hidden but within the scene in which you are searching for and very cleverly I might add. There is an unlimited hint system you can use, and you will use it for sure as some items are just hidden too well. If you try the old recipe for finding items clicking around the screen like a maniac, then there is a proper punishment for you. A cloud of dust appears covering your screen and to get rid of it you must wipe it away using your mouse, so it can take a couple of seconds to do that. If the mini-games start to bother you or you simply won’t play them anymore, there is a skip button for you to use anytime, for any mini-game. You will also come across a couple of items in the game which are interactive with others but nothing that requires thinking about it more than a couple of seconds. There will be some backtracking in the game on previous levels to search for items, but different from ones you already found there, so there won’t be ‘the same’ items again. The premise of the game and the story might not be the most intriguing, but they are enough to make you interested especially if you saw the show on TV and the bits and pieces might just fit in together making it all very familiar. You probably won’t love it, but you like it especially if you like to sniff around things with a challenge.