Excerpt from “Video Games — Don’t Be So Difficult”
So you’re pointing and clicking your way through a hot new adventure game, if such a thing still exists. You’re stuck at a point where a mighty evildoer has rigged the entrance to the next area with all manner of preposterous boobie traps. What do you do?
Do you go to the local arms dealer and trade him some items so he’ll explain how to disarm the explosives? Do you search around for a secret door that’ll allow you to bypass the traps all together? Of course not. That’d be too easy. Too sensible.
No, what you have to do is take a rubber chicken to the local grave-robber, who’ll give you a skeleton in exchange. Then you’ll have to break off Mr. Boney’s arms and legs, grind them down into a powder to give to a voodoo sorceress, who’ll make you a potion as long as you bring her three sprigs of thyme in exchange. After that, you can feed the potion to a cat, who’ll immediately vomit up a map of the island on which you reside, marked with an X.
Go to the X and dig - with a magical trowel, naturally, not the ordinary one you’ve had in your inventory for ages - to uncover a piece of paper with detailed instruction in how to sneak by the traps undetected. Oh - as long as you dress up as a woman.
Of course.
