I Didn't Know You Could Yodel
    (1998 Interactive Competition) - on SynTax Disk ????
   Written by Michael R. Eisenman and Andrew J. Indovina

        Review by Dorothy Millard (PC Basic Version)

I Didn't Know You Could Yodel commences with you in the kitchen
where if you eat the cereal you will find the prize - a balsa wood
airplane, which features throughout the game.  There is no milk
for the cereal so you put prune juice on it.  Yes, you've guessed,
a toilet features rather prominently in this game.  The first part
of the game is spent looking and finding the key to the toilet,
and then you are sucked down into another world.  In this world
very weird things happen and by just moving in a compass direction
your find yourself in locations such as the entrance to a sandy
land, rocky ridge, entrance to Injun land, entrance to land of the
boring.  Throughout the game you will be regularly stopped and
required to answer a puzzle or riddle.  These aren't too hard and
if you get stuck you can always resort to the walk through
included in the accompanying readme file.

After a while you will finish up at farmer Fran's place where you
must find a way to persuade a pig to open its mouth (I cheated)
in order to get the tomato to throw at a man in the auditorium.
Guess what?  You get a bag of prunes, which of course you eat.
I'm sure you can guess the consequences.  Anyway, moving along,
you discover a man watching paint dry and visit Jed's house.
Knocking on his door you need to find a toilet again, but first
Jed insists that you play Parcheesi.  Eventually you find the
toilet and this time it is even worse, as the darn thing won't
flush properly!  I'll leave the rest to your imagination, or to
find out when (if!) you play the game.  Somehow you manage to kill
Jed's pa, but get away with it and Jed is arrested.  From here you
visit the dogs and must play dead, roll over, beg, etc. in order
to obtain a dog whistle.

My next stop was the el cheapo pyramid where you meet a comedian
who sits on your shoulder.  Yes, you did read that right, he sits
on your shoulder, all the while telling corny jokes.  By this time
I wasn't really enjoying this weird game too much and resorted to
cheating in order to get through the next bit.  There is a coffin
and every time you blow the whistle an irresistible force drags
you into the coffin which then spins.  Following the pyramid I
visited an Indian battle ground where a crazed Indian throws a
hatchet at you.  If you smoke their pipe and help them to make
smoke signals you will obtain a feather so that you can tickle the
rock later.  No, that isn't a typo!  Entering a cave you blow
pepper to be blown up high in the sky (I cheated on this one too)
and meet a scorpion who gives you some poison which you need to
drink in order to get the metronome.  While we are on the subject
of the metronome be careful as the word is spelt incorrectly and
if you copy it nothing works.  At least the scorpion laughs at the
comedian's jokes and breaks the curse, freeing you from those
awful jokes.

After all this I found the dock and could see the island, which
was my destination.  I played hangman but couldn't complete the
game to find the wonderful ending hinted at in the documentation -
maybe this is it!  If anyone does any better could they please let
me know how?  The mechanics of this game played really well and it
understood most of my input.  The writing is reasonable and I only
noticed a couple of slips in the spelling (metronome mentioned
above is one).  But, as you have probably deduced from the above,
I didn't really like this game.  It didn't suit my taste.  It was
somewhat weird and some of the actions didn't seem logical to me.
I would never have completed it without the use of the walk
through.  I could have done without the toilet humour and all the
riddles/puzzles.











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