[intro music]
[typing]
You know what never gets old?
Sean Connery.
Holy crap, that Holy Grail actually worked.
Know what else never gets old?
Puzzles.
Man, puzzles.
Man, they're so puzzling...
and manly.
Nothing like solving a good puzzle to put you in the mood to...
solve more puzzles.
And not many games puzzle me more than The Incredible Machine,
developed by Jeff Tunnell Productions and Dynamix
and published by Sierra in 1993 for MS-DOS PCs.
"Incredible!"
No crap. That's the name of the game, so I'd hope so.
"Put cat on see-saw. Bowling ball falls on see-saw.
Monkey sees banana. Cat makes light go on. Bang."
Not too far off from the typical young human male strategy of picking up dates, to be honest.
Inside the box, you get a non-floppy floppy,
an all-manually manual,
covering the game and its ins and outs in the form of sweet line drawings,
and an ad for the Incredible Machine add-on disk.
This was later packed in with the original game and released as The Even More Incredible Machine,
which is actually what we'll be looking at for this review,
since it's the same game, just better.
And I like better. Because it's not worse.
Once your incredible machine has started...
The Incredible Machine,
you're greeted with an animated title screen
and appropriately whimsical music playing in the background.
[whimsical MIDI music]
Honestly, this screen tells you all you need to know about the game.
It's all about creating machines of an incredible nature,
much like the famed Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson contraptions.
The menu screen is pretty self-explanatory, too,
since it lets you control some basic options, select levels
and describes the current level's objectives.
There are 87 levels in the original game,
but The Even More Incredible Machine expands that to 160.
While the first 21 levels are tutorials,
don't be fooled into thinking you should just skip them.
On the contrary, the tutorial levels are challenging but very fair,
since they focus on one or two objects at a time
and really help you get a grip on the game's breed of logic.
So, each level starts the same:
you're given a very simple objective
and it's up to you to figure out what that entails.
Something like: ignite this dynamite,
pop these balloons, break this fish bowl,
smack these balls until they fall off the screen, etc.
The items you see placed already on the screen cannot be moved, though,
but they can be interacted with using the items in your inventory.
So it's your job to pick up and place these items
in such a way that the objective is met.
While there are dozens of parts to choose from, like bowling balls,
scissors, guns, explosives, cats,
monkeys on stationary bikes and even miniature people,
usually you only have a handful at your disposal to meet your current goal.
There is no time limit, but you do have incentive to think fast
via a bonus score,
which is determined by how quickly you solve the puzzle.
You probably get the idea just by looking at this gameplay, to be honest.
I mean, you place items with a specific function
close to other items with a specific function
to achieve a specific outcome.
But there are some finer details of what's going on
that aren't quite so apparent at first glance,
so... let's talk about 'em.
For one thing, there is a grid that things are placed on, even though it's not visible,
so you have to take this into account when you're planning out your contraptions.
You can't just place anything anywhere.
Adding to this is the fact that the game does not use a random number generator for its physics model.
This means that every time you place the exact same items on the exact same place on the grid,
you'll get the exact same results each and every time.
It's actually quite helpful to know these facts
because otherwise you'd end up with way more trial and error.
Not to say there isn't trial and error at all, though,
because there most certainly is,
and that's what you'll spend most of the time figuring out.
Determining where pieces should logically fit
and the timing of them is the crux of the gameplay.
And for the most part, it's simple to wrap your head around it, if you enjoy logic puzzles.
But then you have some puzzles that are deceptively complex,
like this one here where you have to separate the tennis balls from the baseballs
before they fall to the ground,
an you can only use bullets to do so.
Yeah, it's not long into the game at all that the difficulty spikes massively
and that can be good or a bad thing, depending on how puzzling you like your puzzles.
And if you get tired of the endless barrage of tedious crap,
you can always just enter the Freeform Machine mode
which is a sandbox allowing you to make absolutely anything you can think of,
within the confines of the simulation.
You can even adjust things like gravity and air pressure to your heart's content.
And... that's about it for The Incredible Machine
and Even More Incredible Machine.
There were several sequels and spin-offs that iterated on the formula,
but for the most part, the base idea of solving physics puzzles stayed the same.
They just got it right the first time.
Not only that, but it's inspired a whole slew of knock-offs and imitations throughout the years,
especially as touch-screen smartphones and tablets began to take off.
But there's still something about the mixture of simple execution and controlled complexity
in the originals that really keeps me coming back.
Much like Tetris and Lemmings,
I find the concept to be absolutely timeless
regardless of how much technology has moved on since.
So, if you like Rube Goldberg machines, logic puzzles,
or just farting around with shooting cannons at goldfish,
I'd definitely give The Incredible Machine a try.
[harried music plays]
[game] Phew!
[funky MIDI music plays to the end]