I Spy Series and Mystery Case Files Series Review

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I Spy Mystery Case Files

Review by MrLipidFebruary 2007

Looking for Stuff in All Sorts of Places

This may be a Four Fat Chicks first: an en masse review of two different franchises that offer very similar gameplay. The franchises are the I Spy series from Scholastic and the Mystery Case Files series from Big Fish Games. The goal in each series is to find objects cleverly concealed in plain sight. The I Spy series targets kids ages 6–10, while Mystery Case Files is aimed at those 10–adult.

I Spy

Opening with Scholastic’s I Spy games, let’s walk through the series starting with 1999’s I Spy Spooky Mansion and ending with 2004’s I Spy Spooky Mansion Deluxe. Unfortunately, Spooky Mansion Deluxe appears to be the last completely new entry in the series.

Both of the Spooky Mansion entries require players to find objects hidden in rooms, in cabinets, and behind mirrors in (what else?) a spooky mansion. A talkative skeleton acts as guide. 2001’s Treasure Hunt centers on a small seaside village that has been host to three pirates. Completing the first round of the game leads players to the treasure of one of the pirates, and then the fun begins again with a round of new clues for the next pirate and then another round for the next. 2003’s Fantasy allows players to explore a fairy tale of knights and maidens, an escape from an alien planet, and a deep sea quest for a mermaid’s treasure. Again, solve all of the puzzles and the adventure begins again with different clues.

The appeal of the series, much like the appeal of the Nancy Drew games, is that players know exactly what they are in for when they load up I Spy. There will be a rhyme under a complex image, and the mission is to identify the objects named in the rhyme with the objects scattered through the image. A typical rhyme is:

I spy my name, a tiny whale, A carrot, a crab, an eye on a tail; A connect-the-dots star, a snake, a skate, Three butterflies, an egg and an eight.

It’s tougher than it sounds, and even though the I Spy series is designed for kids ages 6 to 10, I, an old coot, have spent more than a few hours looking for the elusive last item remaining in a rhyme. And then, upon finding it and checking my watch, deciding that there is time for finding the hidden items in just one more screen.

Once a rhyme is solved, it yields an item that, when combined with other items acquired by solving other rhymes, enables players to solve a final puzzle. The item can be a piece of a paper from a torn-up rebus, a piece of a treasure map, or even a jewel. Once all of the pieces have been found in a round of play in Treasure Hunt, Fantasy, or Spooky Mansion Deluxe, a new level is opened with new rhymes, and the fun begins again. And the fun moves a bit faster because the new rhymes return players to the images they pondered earlier. After a few rounds, most of the items can be found fairly quickly.

My grandchildren have gone quite mad for the I Spy games and insist on playing them every time they come over. The games are challenging but fair. Items are hidden in plain sight. The trick is knowing which plane of focus the item is hiding in. A velvet-lined museum display box may have an item, or the silhouette of an item, hiding in the velvet background rather than in the item-strewn foreground.  A item may be represented by its shadow, its outline, itself, or its name. It might even be represented by a homonym. And it is not uncommon to have all possibilities show up in one clue.

I Spy does not have a time limit per rhyme. Young detectives can pore over a given image as long as they please. And, at least in this house, they can wander over and ask the old coot where to find the last of the three smiling faces or where the final bee or the other bat is hiding.

In terms of richness of gameplay, Spooky Mansion Deluxe and Treasure Hunt take top honors, with Fantasy and Spooky Mansion trailing just slightly behind. For those wondering if this sort of diversion might be of interest, there are some browser-based samples at the I Spy website.

Mystery Case Files

Following the apprenticeship of the I Spy games, players can graduate to the more serious challenge of the Mystery Case Files offerings from Big Fish Games. There are now three entries in this hugely successful series, as well as three additional spin-off wannabe franchises: Hidden Expedition, Travelogue 360, and Paparazzi.

MCF: Huntsville pulled in over 2.4 million dollars in its first four months of release, making it one of the most successful games ever offered by Big Fish Games. Nor did Big Fish Games rest on its laurels. The difference between the first entry in the series and the second is substantial, and the refinements in the third entry make it the best yet.

Not Fair, and Old to Boot

Mystery Case Files games differ from I Spy games in two critical respects: the first two Mystery Case Files games (Huntsville and Prime Suspects) pit the player against the clock (Ravenhearst has a “relaxed” option that gives players twice as long with each level), and the Mystery Case Files games aren’t as concerned with playing fair in terms of hiding things in plain sight. A bowling ball, for example, may be hidden behind something so completely that only one of its holes is visible. Mystery Case Files is also not above making objects tiny, hiding them in shadows, concealing big chunks of them beyond the edge of the screen, manipulating their scale so as to make them nearly unrecognizable, or making them the same color as something they are sitting upon or in front of.

There is another element to the MCF games that may—may—put off younger players, at least at first. The objects one is asked to find frequently come from a time that was old when I was young, and I was young when Eisenhower was serving his first term. 16mm film reels, candlestick phones, crank-operated coffee grinders, manual typewriters, toys from the 1930s: all find a comfortable home in the MCF game world. I suspect the folks at Big Fish Games are aiming squarely at older casual gamers, to whom all these objects will be both familiar and nostalgic.

While the pressure of playing against the clock can be unnerving the first few times through, players will soon realize that the Mystery Case Files games recycle their puzzle images the same way the I Spy games do. The more one plays, the easier it becomes to find most of the items in the first few minutes, leaving ample time to find the rest. Plus the Mystery Case Files games give players hint buttons that can be used to reveal those items that have remained stubbornly hidden. And if you don’t find everything in time, no problem. MCF games save automatically at your last completed mission.

Welcome Improvements

Mystery Case Files: Huntsville, the first entry in the series, ends each mission with a jumbled image of the guilty party against the backdrop of one of the puzzle images. Players solve the puzzle with the clock still running. Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects offers one of three different minigames at the end of each mission, adding some welcome variety to the gameplay. The photo jumble is joined by a “find ten words” puzzle and a slick variation of Concentration. Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst locks some of its rooms with bizarre and intriguing puzzles that feel like mini adventure games and finishes each chapter with a torn-up diary page that must be reassembled to reveal the story. Huntsville and Prime Suspects focus on apprehending criminals, while Ravenhearst offers a classic gothic tale of madness and haunting.

Where Huntsville presents a series of puzzle images where the player is required to “just find things,” Prime Suspects mixes it up by offering three different ways to explore a puzzle image. In addition to the usual “just find things” mode, there is also a “find things in the dark with a flashlight” mode and a “find things behind doors or walls with x-ray glasses” mode. Working against the clock while dragging a small pool of light across a complex image can be deliciously stressful. Oh, and did I mention you have to find the battery in one of the other puzzle images during the mission before you can use either the flashlight or the x-ray glasses?

While Ravenhearst does not have the variety of search modes found in Prime Suspects, it does offer a number of clever puzzle locks that must be cracked before certain areas can be accessed.  (While one can skip those locks that require quick reflexes, skipping a lock shaves five minutes off one’s allotted time and removes any available hints. Rather than risk the loss of both time and hints, I recommend going here for a walkthrough of the puzzle locks.) Players are encouraged to click everything on a puzzle lock screen to see what happens. Then the solving begins. Perhaps items need to be clicked in a certain order or dials set to number hiding elsewhere on the screen. The puzzle locks can be so engaging that it’s a shame Ravenhearst only allows one to play them in the course of the game. It would have been great if each solved puzzle lock could have been placed in a gallery where they could be enjoyed aside from the main game.

Huntsville offers players more than 15 crimes to solve in more than 20 locations. Prime Suspects offers players more than 22 levels to explore in 29 locations. Ravenhearst offers players 21 levels in 32 locations. And, since the clues are randomized, there is a lot of replay value in all three titles.

Wannabes Hidden Expedition, Travelogue 360, and Paparazzi

As much as I enjoy the I Spy and Mystery Case Files games, I have not been able to work up any enthusiasm for the Hidden Expedition, Travelogue 360, or Paparazzi franchises from Big Fish Games. Hidden Expedition: Titanic offers so much less than any of the MCF games that it feels more like a sketch than a fully realized title: same play mechanics, no charm.  Travelogue 360 Paris is simply tacky. The Travelogue 360 gimmick is that the locations are all incredibly sharp nodal photographs from famous sites … sites that have been obscured with hidden objects. I lost interest when I found myself in Saint-Sulpice, a church second only to Notre Dame in terms of grandeur, which had been despoiled with superimposed images of alarm clocks, parking meters, chocolate cakes, barber chairs, and yo-yos. Ack! And then there’s Paparazzi, a title that combines three distinct game modes (find the hidden objects, find the differences between two images, take pictures of an elusive celebrity) in a dog’s breakfast of cartoony primary color awfulness. Fortunately, for the curious, there are demos of all three available.

Verdict

An enthusiastic Thumb Up for the I Spy and Mystery Case Files games. No rating for Hidden Expedition, Travelogue 360, or Paparazzi.

More Hidden Stuff

Scholastic has released a sort of “Greatest Hides” version of the I Spy series entitled I Spy Mystery. I Spy Mystery recycles screens from the previous I Spy games to support a “solve 13 cases” format.

CD or Download?

Big Fish Games, which began as a download-only operation, is now offering the Mystery Case Files titles in boxed retail form.  And Scholastic, which started with retail boxes, is offering the I Spy games as downloads. Anyone else feel a blur in here?

Technical Note

Big Fish Games made some refinements in Prime Suspects. Players are advised to make sure they have the most recent version (1.3b) in order to play the final puzzle.

Bonus Hint

Find a certain hidden mascot in Ravenhearst, send an email to Big Fish Games at the address the mascot reveals, and you may win the chance to have your face in the next MCF game. No, I can’t tell you which screen conceals the mascot or who the mascot is, but considering that Ravenhearst is a Big Fish Games title, which mascot seems most likely to be hiding out in one of the overstuffed screens? The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

I Spy Developer: Black Hammer Publisher: Scholastic Games Release Dates: I Spy Spooky Mansion—1999; I Spy Treasure Hunt—2001; I Spy Fantasy—2003; I Spy Spooky Mansion Deluxe—2004

Mystery Case Files/Hidden Expedition Developer: Big Fish Games Publisher: Big Fish Games Release Dates: Mystery Case Files: Huntsville—November 16, 2005; Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects—April 10, 2006; Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst—December 15, 2006; Hidden Expedition: Titanic (aka Titanic: Hunt for Lost Treasure)—July 21, 2006; Travelogue 360 Paris—November 3, 2006; Paparazzi—January 19, 2007

Available for: Windows

Four Fat Chicks Links

Player Feedback—I SpyPlayer Feedback—Mystery Case Files

Screenshots

I Spy

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge

Mystery Case Files

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge

System Requirements

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP Pentium III 500 MHz 64 MB RAM

Where to Find It

 Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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