Hugo Classic 2 Game
The game is noted for having several puzzles that can only be solved by restarting (for example, if a matchbox gets wet, the only way to complete the game is to start over, but the only way to know that is to reach the point where you cannot proceed).
Hugo Classic 2 game
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In the sequel to Hugo's House of Horrors, Hugo and Penelope take a vacation in France, but Hugo disappears, and his great uncle Horace is murdered! This time you play as Penelope, trying to rescue Hugo and solve the murder. The graphics and gameplay are similar to the first Hugo game, but the game is much longer than the original. You'll need to make a map to complete one stage, but mapping is part of the fun. Some areas may be too difficult for children, such as the venus flytraps and crossing the bridge without getting the matches wet. Some commands have to be phrased very specifically, often in a more verbose way than necessary, so you can have the right idea, and phrase a sensible and obvious command, but fail and think that you're on the wrong track. Challenge and frustration aside, the game is appropriate for gamers of all ages.
If every great director gets at least one commercially doomed vanity project, 2011's Hugo was Martin Scorcese's. A 2 hour plus love letter to classic cinema shot in luxurious 3D, the movie struggled to find a commercial audience on release, but it racked up 11 Oscar nominations and ultimately won five.
On this week's episode, we discuss the movie magic on display, the 3D effects we wish we could have seen in the cinemas, the post Love Guru redemption of Ben Kingsley and much more, plus drinking games, listener submissions and sequel pitches!
Hugo the TV troll (skærmtrolden Hugo in Danish) is an international media franchise. The franchise was created by the Danish company Interactive Television Entertainment (ITE) in 1990 with an interactive-by-telephone game show, in which the players could control from their homes the title character Hugo, a friendly, small Scandinavian folklore troll fighting against evil, often to save his family.
Hugo was first aired on Danish national television TV2 in the program Eleva2ren in 1990, featuring a video game that was played by the audience via telephone connection (achieved by having a computer that could translate said phone signals into game input). A player would call the show, then be prompted by a human host to control Hugo on the TV screen in several scenarios by pressing digit keys on the phone, assigned to the character controls. The show proved to be a hit and aired continuously for five years.
Since its premiere in 1990, the Hugo game show has been aired in more than 40 countries, spawning dozens of video games and home ports for various platforms. Hugo also spawned other merchandise, including dedicated magazines. ITE was bought in 2002 by a company known as Olicom who proceeded to gut ITE by firing most of its staff and have Hugo in the center of a huge international marketing push. This resulted in a lot of mediocre games being released and ITE never recovered. It finally closed for good in 2010 but not before the rights to Hugo himself was sold to Krea Media, who together with Hugo Games handles it until today.
Outside of the show, many commercial games has also been made featuring the character. These initially mostly consisted of collections of minigames from the TV show, releasing on the Amiga, Commodore 64, PC as well as several consoles throughout the 90s. Several original games (mostly 3d platformers and educational) has also been made. Most notably the European exclusive "Kikurian" trilogy on the original Playstation released between 2000 and 2003. Since 2011, Krea Media/Hugo Games has also published a series of mobile remakes for Android. An online slot machine adaptation was also released in 2016 and an animated feature film was announced to be in production by the same guys that did Ronal the Barbarian, but seems to have slipped into Development Hell as nothing has been heard about it since 2012.
In almost all of the classic tv games, the player guides the titular protagonist to save his wife and children from the evil witch Scylla. To rescue his family, Hugo must navigate safely through dangerous environments in various minigame scenarios. The series later received an "expansion" known as Hugo: Jungle Island. Where Scylla returned and moved to the titular jungle island, teamed up with the local tyrant Don Croco and once again kidnapped Hugo's wife Hugolina and the children. Keeping them captive in a cage in her new lair, located at a top of volcano in the center of the island. The players control Hugo, aided by the monkey Jean Paul and the toucan Ferdinand, as he needs to complete a new series minigames to reach and defeat the witch and free his family again.
From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett (opens in new tab) wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random obscure games back into the light. Today, adventuring can be murder. Sometimes it can have murder in it too. This one... is mostly about the former. To the shareware compilation CDs!
Long before the internet gave the world access to every game ever created, most of us had to get the majority of our gaming fixes from two sources: demos and shareware. Shareware was usually the better option, being mostly full games that could be played, enjoyed, and stuffed onto cover-disks and CD compilations.
This would later be re-used for a shooter based remake called Nitemare 3D. If you're curious, the action looked like this. Yes, Doom was still a new game at this point. No, I'm not sure why the part of Hugo is now being being played by a ventriloquist's dummy.
Speaking of which, with no way to open the secret passageway again, and this door actually locked, Penelope's only way out is down the dumb waiter. The kitchen door is locked for exactly no good reason, unless you count that a better name for this game would have been Hugo 2: The Garden Of Death. About 80% of the game is spent simply trying to get back into the house, its weird design making it impossible to do the sensible thing and just walk to the front door. Instead, the way is blocked by venus flytraps and killer bees and even, yes, a poisonous snake. Adventure games!
The obvious solution, to kick him or perhaps go get his employer to invite him to seek employment elsewhere, is obviously not the correct one. No, that's to meet him halfway, only chewing a clove of garlic so that he doesn't feel like it any more and runs off. The twist of this game is not that he is a vampire. That would be much better. Anyway, magic buttons!
Luckily, having played this before, I know exactly what they do. Unfortunately, the first thing they have to do is open the path to a garden maze. Mazes are the lazy designer's friend, and this one appears about (checks watch) five minutes in. Not the greatest start. Still, it does feature possibly the game's best clash between edited imagery and hand-drawn scenery.
What's that? Just a bridge? Oh, no. No, no, no. It's true that it poses no physical danger to Penelope, unlike everything else in the garden. It's also the hardest part of the game. You see, in the office earlier on, you pick up a book of matches, and the use for them is on the other side. For some reason though, touching the edge of the bridge... an edge requiring pixel perfect precision to avoid... makes Penelope drop them in the water, soaking them too much to use. Can she throw them across? Put them in her bra or something? Nope. The only way is painstaking manoeuvres, with the emphasis firmly on pain.
What makes it worse is that this is only a puzzle because of the perspective and bad art. In reality, Penelope could dance across the damn bridge without risking losing anything but her dignity. Here though, every step leaves her a potential dead woman walking. Even saving the game doesn't help that much.
There's something else that needs to be done here though, and I mean actually needs to be. It's not an Easter Egg, it's not a cute little aside. It's an actual puzzle that you can't win the game without doing. You phone a number that's written down in some nearby graffiti and...
This is where the gun from the maze comes in. A bullet takes out the Dalek, and in gratitude the Doctor gives you his sonic screwdriver. Wait. Does that mean that Penelope is one of River Song's regenerations? That casts whole new light on this game. It all makes total sense now, except for the bit about the giant Weeping Angel casually wandering around New York. Also, that we're two-thirds of the way through this game now, and still haven't even managed to get back into the house to begin investigating that whole 'murder' thing.
Ignoring that you could easily jump over that chasm, since that's not how this game works, guess how to get that banana that you need for some reason. If you type "Look", you get the message "You are in an underground cavern. There is a chasm over to the right. It appears to be impassable." Any ideas? Probably not, because the answer is that there's a ledge obscured by those rocks in the foreground that Penelope would be able to see, but the game can't be bothered to mention. You also have to be precisely far enough down, or it's an instant death. Adventure gaming! And remember, all of this was to collect a mouldy banana with absolutely no reason to be sitting in a cave, behind a freaking rockslide.
Christ. There's phoning in your game design, and then there's this. Roberta Williams, I apologise for at least four of the mean things I've said about your work in the past. Nothing involving Cedric though. I still want that owl's face carved onto your gravestone. And Phantasmagoria really sucked.