Features

In Mystery P.I.: The Lottery Ticket, players aren’t the lucky lottery winner. In fact, the lottery winner runs into a little bad luck. Grandma Rose, owner of the winning lottery ticket, lost her ticket. I put on my P.I. fedora and take the case to help find the missing ticket. As an incentive, Grandma will pay $20 million if I find it within 12 hours. Of course, that won’t be real money, and you’ll have to settle for feeling proud if you find the ticket.

With a new hidden object game practically coming out every week, it’s hard for such games to surprise long-time players. Mystery P.I.: The Lottery Ticket contains a beefy storyline along with a few unforeseen turns. Its mini-game is yet another memory card game and its game-within-a-game involves finding 20 keys to unlock the bonus game mode. In the bonus game, known as Unlimited Seek and Find, you hunt for all the items and locations that appear in the original game mode. It also contains a bonus location.

The game starts easy with a list of 18 to 20 objects to find within two or three places in the city. As your eyes and detective skills sharpen, the game adds more objects and locales. With every completed level, the list of objects to find grows working its way up to almost 100 objects in the late levels! It sounds tedious to look for so many things in a level, but really the game draws you in and motivates you to stay on the case.

This game will test expert hidden object game players with underwater scenes where objects don’t appear in their normal colors. You also have to find multiples of the same items and figure out clever items such as “5 spots.” The more challenging levels consist of many objects to make your eyes work harder to find the ones you need.

Mystery P.I.: The Lottery Ticket doesn’t overdo the reusing of objects like hidden object games tend to do. It also comprises of many scenes, so you won’t feel like you’ve seen the same scene 20 times or by the time you return to a scene — you will have forgotten the location of specific objects.

Though the memory often appears in hidden object games, you don’t just look for identical objects. You may need to find items of the same color, items that are similar but not the same, or items that go together like glove and ball. After completing the memory game, you earn a clue to help you find the lottery ticket. There are 20 levels in the game, and thus 20 clues.

One of the biggest annoyances about the game is that spiders appear too often. Not a good thing for someone with arachnophobia (me!). Also, clicking the correct object doesn’t always work and the game works too hard in trying to trick the player by using quirky names for objects. In another instance, you could click on an object that matches an item on the list, but it wouldn’t be the right one.

The game lasts a long time, so you get your money’s worth. Mystery P.I.: The Lottery Ticket does a superb job in providing a sound storyline, a nice range of scenes, a variety of objects, good quality graphics and an endless number of hints (providing you pay thousands of fake dollars for them).

Download and try Mystery P.I.: The Lottery Ticket

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/98SE/2000/XP/Vista
• 350MHz or faster processor
• 128 MB RAM
• 16 MB graphics and sound card
• 75 MB available disk space
• DirectX 7.0 or later