[keyboard typing noises] [whimsical pizzicato strings]
[whimsical pizzicato strings]
[VO] After five years of Edutainment Month on LGR, I've put this one off long enough.
I.M. Meen, developed by Animation Magic and published by Simon & Schuster Interactive in 1995 for MS-DOS.
And if you're ANY kind of familiar with the concept of YouTube Poops,
then I probably don't have to tell you the kind of absurdity we're diving into here.
This cover alone clues you in on the idea that something isn't quite right,
along with the back of the box seemingly questioning its very existence.
[chuckles] I like this message to parents, too.
"With I.M. Meen, kids get the action they love, but with humor instead of bloodshed."
I dunno, man, I can think of plenty of kids that find action-y bloodshed pretty hilarious.
[whoosh]
Inside the box, you get a CD-ROM that's surprisingly bland for a game with this level of strange,
a handy reference card, so you don't forget how to pull off all that educational humorous action,
and a manual that's packed with far more information than required.
I appreciate the effort, but did we really need twenty-something pages to explain THIS?
"♪ Oh look, what clever children! See them study, watch them learn! ♫"
"♪ How I HATE those goody-goodies! How they make my stomach turn! ♫"
...I take that back; we need a World Book Encyclopedia worth of pages to explain this one.
Although a good number of those pages could be summed up in just two words:
"Animation Magic".
The same surreal production company behind those bizarre off-branded Nintendo games for the Phillips CD-i,
like Link: The Faces of Evil, and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon,
as well as a fair chunk of animation for King's Quest VII,
and they even worked on the infamously cancelled Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans.
We dodged a bullet with that one!
There is something undeniably OFF about their trademark animation style,
and it permeated everything they had a hand in.
But it's not just trippy 2D animation on offer here,
because THIS was 1995, and Doom had taken over the world.
Once you start a game, choose a character and difficulty,
and you're dropped into a first-person perspective inside a dungeon that would not look out-of-place in a fantasy RPG.
...which kind of fits with the playstyle, bringing to mind games like Ultima Underworld and Eye of the Beholder.
At least, it does bring it to mind in the most base mechanical and aesthetic senses,
because otherwise I.M. Meen is as far from those as can be.
So, here's the setup: you've been trapped in this labyrinth by Ignatius Mortimer Meen,
an evil librarian who hates children and learning.
Why he became a freakin' librarian if he hates THOSE things so much, I have no clue.
Anyway, he's made a magical book that, when read, sucks children into this dark dungeon of hatred,
and locks them up for all eternity.
Alright.
Thankfully, one of Meen's minions, Gnorris the gnome, is risking his life to help you out
by way of hideous animations, and the occasional grammar problem.
It's your job to free the other children from their cells,
and correct the horrible spelling and punctuation on any scrolls you find.
Yep. This is what happens when grammar Nazis with delusions of grandeur become game designers.
Aaaaand, it's... boring.
The problem with I.M. Meen isn't its bizarre artwork or strange animation style;
in fact, that's PROBABLY the best part of the whole experience!
I kinda like that stuff! It's ugly, but it's great!
The problem is that the gameplay is downright flaccid.
There are 36 levels in the game, and each one of them is comprised of an AWFUL maze.
And I don't mean to say that mazes are awful by default; just that THESE mazes are from the DEVIL.
This commits pretty much ALL of the cardinal sins of first-person maze games for me:
there's hardly anything to distinguish one hallway from the next,
everything is constructed using blocks at 90° angles,
there are no changes in height - at ALL,
and the passageways are chock full of dead-ends with nothing inside them.
Now I'm assuming that several of these are probably just results of limitations of the game engine being used,
and not necessarily design decisions...
...a LOT like Wolfenstein 3D - in fact, it may remind you of that.
I've seen many gamers speculate that it uses some version of the Wolf 3D engine, but no.
As far as I can tell, it's not related at all.
It's just another ray-casting engine hopping on the first-person action game bandwagon of the early-to-mid '90s,
THIS time with a token amount of educational moments,
to set itself apart from those mindless shooters that rot children's brains!
No! This is EDUTAINMENT!
...and it's edutainment, done WRONG.
Giving a kid a pop quiz every ten minutes is not an effective method of teaching much of anything!
And for all its claims of being educational and full of humor instead of bloodshed,
there sure is a lot of mindless violence.
Seriously, the kid you play is BADASS! You just beat the dickens out of anything that moves.
With your fists!
Seems to me that the true educational message here is "Hey, if someone gets in your way, slap the snot out of 'em!"
"Or just grab a hammer and bash them over the head!"
Oh, and those grammar quizzes?
If you fail them, no problem! Just come back later, and go back to beating things up!
Not that beating things up is much fun beyond the first few minutes either,
because it's one of those where the controls are sluggish, aiming is a crapshoot,
and you have to drag weapons and potions out of your inventory in real-time whenever you want to equip them.
Which is ALL the time, before long, since most enemies exclusively use projectile attacks around level nine.
So yeah, this is sounding pretty bad - and it is - but there is a little bit of good, too.
I admit that I had some fun seeing what the next bizarre enemy was that I could kill,
and the death animations are pretty sweet. There's some creative stuff here.
Plus there's Mr. Meen, always popping up and saying something enjoyably maniacal!
"Frightened? Confuuuused?"
"GOOD! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
But while that stuff is a welcome break from the monotony of the rest of the game,
there's... still... the monotony of the rest of the game.
Those 36 levels are divided up into chunks of four, meaning that for every four levels in a row,
you get the exact same looking walls, and the exact same enemies, and the exact... same...
[angry growl]
...aaand with each level taking up to fifteen minutes to explore,
it's a dull, tedious grind to play, and I cannot recommend it at all.
I'm sure that I would have more fun with it in 1995, when I was nine-years-old, and any 3D game was a novelty,
but... man, these days? It's not even worth it for the educational value.
And it's CERTAINLY not worth it for the action and gameplay.
Plus, every one of those CRAZY cutscenes has been on YouTube for ages,
so just go watch those instead, and forget that there's a game that goes along with them.
Yeah, that kid's got the right idea.
That face sums it up perfectly.
[energetic acoustic guitar]
And if you enjoyed this video, the first one of Edutainment Month 2016,
perhaps you would like some of my previous ones, and there's more coming in the future, this April, here on LGR.
Subscribe if you would like to, or just check out more videos every Monday and Friday.
And as always, thank you very much for watching LGR.
(...yaaaayyy...)