A cry for help on a desperate nostalgia trip...

[JulienJaden]

... which is, essentially, my name for a search request.

It's true, though, that I am desperate and that Google has, in fact, betrayed my continued friendship and would rather shove much younger, prettier games in my face than help me find this old flame of mine.

 

So, my problem is this: I remember a lot of details about this game but

a) what I remember isn't tangible enough for me to feed it to a search engine (which means that, if nobody recognizes what I describe, I'll probably never find it) and

b) it's a fairly old game and probably wasn't one of the most successful ones, either - at least going through several video game lists and archives has resulted in fuck all.

 

 

 

Okay, so here's what I know:

This game is a (more or less) educational point-and-click adventure that came out for either Windows 95 or 98 (which means it probably came out between 1995 and 1999, although it could also be a little later or earlier). It's about a environment protection agency (which you only just joined) and your efforts to, essentially, fix nature and save it from some crazy son of a bitch that, for some reason, hates clean air, water, forests (and probably America, Jews and puppies, too).

There is an off chance that it only came out in Germany but I highly doubt that - The cast for the video cutscenes in ingame dialogue sequences was fairly diverse and it oozed German lipsync even back then. But in case you're German (or can understand German) and you want to take a look at a search thread I put up on another site (in case I forgot some details here), feel free to click this link.

 

Anyway, yeah, cutscenes. The overall design mostly consisted of real pictures or at least fairly realistic drawings with picture elements in it (making it look quite nice for the time with this pseudo 3D effect), interrupted by cutscenes and dialogue sequences with real footage and rendered 3D sequences. I can't remember any music to speak of but the sound editing was fairly good, too, as far as I remember.

 

 

Now, to the game itself.

It starts with an intro where the bad guy, wearing a lab coat and boasting the craziest hairstyle and evil laugh you could find back in the day, pledges revenge against this group for foiling his plans at least once already (suggesting that it could be part of a series or at least have a prequel) and seems rather proud of himself for taking a guy named "Stratos" prisoner (or doing God knows what to him, but I'm pretty sure that what he said suggested that he was still alive).

By the end of the intro, CrazyMcHairson is wearing a suit and tie, got his hair in order and turns out to be a corporate big shot which (plot twist right at the start) seems to be the parent organization (or at least a strong supporter) of the environment protection agency/task force the player works for.

And apparently, nobody in this agency has any clue that he could be their adversary because when he "calls" via video transmission, everybody who talks to him seems to be very grateful for his support.

 

ANYWAY: You start off in the environment task force's HQ out in the middle of nature (with trees, green and a small river all around) and have to fix a wind turbine (with the help of a garbage bag you find lying around) and migrate some salt water fish from a broken fish tank into one that is still intact, but not without removing the sweet water fish from it, throwing them into the aforementioned river and turning that sweet water into salt water.

I found it quite memorable that the guy giving you this "quest" to migrate the fish is running around (or skateboarding from left to right) in front of the fish tanks, doing jack shit himself.

Does anybody else find it odd that somebody would entrust matters of importance concerning the environment to a group of young adults living in a building that you have to fix right away (on your own) because nobody else could figure it out or lifted a finger?

 

So, once you're done doing everybody's job, Corporate Crazy calls and suggests that you guys (which means: YOU) take care of an oilspill, armed with nothing but magical bacteria that get rid of the oilspill in a matter of seconds. You get there (and everywhere else) by means of a VTOL aircraft called something along the lines of "ecofighter" ("Ökofighter" in German, as far as I recall).

 

Next up is a trip to the Amazonian rainforest where, apparently, one of the rainforest-destruction-machines-of-doom your parent organisation produces (its logo is very prominently placed) misunderstood its directive to protect the rainforest and help it grow and, instead, opted to cut everything down (including you, if you're not careful, resulting in one of the earliest game over screens I could find in that game).

To convince it to stop cutting everything down, you have to bring it to a halt (with the help of some stones or tree trunks or something, I think) and find several soil and water samples aswell as at least one specimen of the local fauna (a butterfly) to put into the automated woodchuck's conveniently jar-sized sensor bay for it to shut down.

 

After that, it's off to Greenland, Antarctica or some other place where you tend to freeze to death in a matter of minutes if you're dressed for temperate climates. There, I think you are supposed to gain access to a research facility, but you freeze to death really, really fast and I don't think I ever made it past this point.

 

That said, through some sort of exploit, I could load a later level which is set on the beach of a tropical island. I never really explored that, though.

 

 

 

That's about it, I guess. Like I said, lots of details but very little to work with. I hope that somebody can help me out.

If I can take a look at it after all these years, I might just give it a renewed endorsement.

[Ross Scott]

I can check this later, but I could swear I saw screenshot for something like this on mobygames.com when I was researching a game from the 90s I played in a computer lab that had a similar theme. All I remember was that it had good graphics (so VGA), took place in a suburban area, and you were testing the salinity of the local stream.

 

I could maybe find out which game that looks like yours, but Mobygames.com has more or less ruined their navigation for me as it take FOREVER to load screenshots, so I can't really preview it. In the meantime Abandonia.com has a section for people trying to identify old games, you may want to post this there too.

[Otto]

Yeah, I don't know what game this could be. It does kind of remind me of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8zXL1ZWPw0, in terms of the story.

Only in that you start in a forest as an eco fighter and have to battle against an evil corporation who's destroying the planet.

It was also developed by the same team from two Mega Man arcade titles, The Power Battles and The Power Fighters, which

probably explains why the Einstein scientist character from Mega Man, Dr. Wily, so much resembles Dr. Moly from this game.

 

Otherwise I can't think of any point-and-click adventure games that match your description.

Do you have any ideas or guesses at who developed or published the title?