Just when we thought the whole MCF thing was in danger of getting stale, here comes Travelogue 360 Paris. Yep – you are still finding candy canes and toasters in the upholstery, but now you are doing it in a foreign language – and that makes all of the difference.

The game is pretty much the same as you have come to expect from the Big Fish I-Spy games. There is a big list of stuff, and your job is to hunt and peck around a massive screen of odds and ends until you find everything. The big difference is that instead of looking in a single screen, you have a whole 360 degree sphere to look into by scrolling around the screen, from your feet to straight up in the sky. It’s a huge change, disconcerting at first, but then a lot of fun.

And to be honest, the theme made a lot more difference than we thought it would. The game shows a real appreciation of the subject. From one level to the next, it really was like a cheap tour of Paris, without pickpockets, annoying violin players and pee in the streets. All of the major sites were there, and because the 360 angle allowed them to lower the overall density of stuff pasted on to the environment, the scenes were very Parisian. IN fact, a lot of the objects in the scenes were natural objects that actually belong in the environments, like garbage cans or hot dog stands. It made the overall view a lot prettier for the player, and really allowed Paris to come to life in the game.

There were some issues. For one thing, the realism is simply not as visually interesting as the MCF “cartoon” style graphics. A lot of the game had a sort of “pasted on Photoshop” look to them, and the characters frozen in place all around the scene were disconcerting. The MCF games rarely used so many real people or characters in the actual levels, and that made it less obvious that the screens were entirely static. While the overall feel of the game is solid, it felt a little rushed in places, like they were trying so hard to capitalize on their success and get some more of these out that they were willing to cut a few corners.

Also, we should mention that while the 360 degree movement was cool, it also made us kind of dizzy. Furthermore, this really suffered from the fact that I couldn’t play with my wife because the screen is mobile and someone has to control the mouse. We really enjoyed going through the MCF games together, pointing out objects to each other. But here, we started to get into a lot of “hey – look over there” – “No, I’m looking for the pineapple” arguments. It was like the video game version of fighting for the remote control, and was not a welcome addition to our gaming evenings. And, by the way, I think I have found that exact pineapple like 400 times, Big Fish. Please, get us a new pineapple.

We should also mention the groovy subgames. While the puzzle was a just a puzzle, it was well done. The luggage packing subgame was even cooler – forcing you to place a bunch of odd shaped objects in your bag without them touching. The postcard matching game was a little bit easy, but it was really in the spirit of the overall game, and made a nice quick diversion.

Overall, we liked the game a lot, and are really excited to see what we are sure will be a long series of vacation spot-themed games in the future. If you are one of the 10 people on this site who hasn’t already played the game, go check it out.

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