McKenzie & Co: a girl x boy game forgotten by time?

[gekiganwing]

Alternate title #1: "What I learned about just this morning from the Wikipedia this morning."

Alternate title #2: "Yes, you flaming n00bz, it exists LOL ^_^" ('cuz I'm mean)

The article I'm referencing is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKenzie_%26_Co. Apparently McKenzie & Co is a girl-looking-for-guys game that was made originally in English for Win95 ten years ago, way back when I was thoroughly obsessed with Chrono Trigger. It later had an expansion pack, which is even tougher to find. And I just heard about it now.

A Google search turned up only three reviews, and not much else. So that article above may be one of the few sites that gives information about the game.

Anyone played it out there? Think it might be worth finding?

Interestingly, the one person who put this title in his/her Livejournal interests is also interested in Angelique. I might have an easier time locating a title from that series.

Thanks for listening. So says the Taiyaki Fan.

Don't be a lamer -- fill out the Hirameki Survey - http://community.hirameki-int.com/modul ... x.php?id=1 - in an intelligent way!

[GLACIER]

Now that you mention the title, I recall reading a review (some local computer magazine distributed for free. This was reviewed as a multimedia CD-ROM rather than a game) aeons ago, maybe around 1996.

They touted it as a set of mini-games (I think), held together by a lot of FMV. There was something else about exceedingly stereotypical and dumb caricatures (for the male characters). However, the reviewer mentioned that if she fell within the target demographic (teenage girls. The product sounded completely geared to that crowd, with little appeal to anyone else), she might've enjoyed the product a lot.

Can't remember anything else. I didn't give much thought to the article, but the concept did stand out.

[mikey]

Alternate title #2: "Yes, you flaming n00bz, it exists LOL ^_^" ('cuz I'm mean)

I don't know whether anyone knows this, but the Czech gamedev scene has a tradition in making dating sims. They are called Playboy and several versions have been developed by different makers as well as there being other playboy-clones, such as Erotic Life, Sandy series, and several other projects which are not yet complete (Mr.Lover ^_^). Actually, no one really calls them dating sims officially, but the tradition is there and more or less every gamer knows about the Playboy games.

There is a nice summary in this article:
http://plnehry.idnes.cz/magazin/playboytema.html

The games are actually, for most of the time pretty much easily translatable, because the text is in plain text format, and for an anime adaptation all one would need to do is translate the text and replace the pictures.

The title I like the most is Playboy 2003. It has a huge scale of options and numerous minigames, plus, it's got humor and funny writeoffs, and you can play it for hours.

Don't be a lamer -- fill out the Hirameki Survey - http://community.hirameki-int.com/modul ... x.php?id=1 - in an intelligent way!

If I am to be honest, my answers would go like this:


1. Have you heard Visual Novel YES
1.1 Are there certain titles you would like to play? NO
1.2 Buying deciding factors?(there were none that fit me, so I specified OTHERS): The setting of the title

2. Which sex would you prefer that the main character be? MALE

3. Which game genres do you like? 3 Max
RACING
SIMULATION (racing sim preferred)
ACTION (not necessarily shooting)

4. What kind of stories do you prefer? 3 Max
OTHER: Contemporary
ACTION
ROMANCE

5. Ideal time required to clear a Date-sim game? 120 MINS

6. If you could purchase an easy to play Date-sim game that took only 30 to 60 minutes to download from a website, would you use such a service? NO

7.This is a question only for females. ...

8. What should HIRAMEKI do offer in the future.
More Phantom-like games

I don't know if that would help the community. Guess it's smarter to leave it be.

[papillon]

Odd coincidence - I just happened to be looking at a certain game company's website today while researching publishers, and funny thing, their first product ever was MacKenzie&Co. Of course, they seem to have now settled quite comfortably on Nancy Drew and don't seem likely to do anything outside of that vein any time soon...

[PyTom]

I should point out in reply to mikey's post that there is another survey on Hirameki's site, asking people to rate Ai Yori Aoshi. The prize for filling this one out is a substantial (25%) discount on Ever17.

[gekiganwing]

I found a photo of the McKenzie game at Amazon.com... where no one even had it for auction. And after looking through eBay, I found only one person who'd sold it recently. Incidentally, that person was from Australia...

Thanks for looking over the survey, Mikey. And I noticed your comment on Czech games. Interesting... so now I'm going to keep working on my third article: "CYOAs, ebooks, and other ways to avoid the g-word [game]."

So says the Taiyaki Fan, who can't resist Chrono Trigger references.