Ludomedia, 1996
Tequila & Boom-Boom is a classic point and click cartoon adventure game, a reminiscent of Walt Disney cartoons in a western setting with stunning graphics, superb character animations, excellent speech and voice-acting and western style country music. The game was released in the Christmas holidays of 1996 by Dynabyte, the Italy based gaming company, which previously provided us two excellent adventure games, Nippon Safes, Inc. and its sequel, Big Red Adventure. After the release the game was then handed over to Sacis S.p.A. (an integral part of renowned RAI international group of companies) for international distribution (I doubt they did their job well because very few adventure gamers know about its existence.)
The games in set in a typical border town known as "Stinky Town" where our main hero, Tequila (lynx) has just arrived and immediately fallen in love on first sight with Melissa (squirrel,) a beautiful maiden who is suffering due to huge financially problems caused by a wicked and evil squire, Mr. Vyle (coyote.) The fact is that Mr. Vyle has full control of the town because all the town residents are badly in his debt. Your quest is to join hands with your buddy, Boom-Boom (brown bear) to raise money and finally rescue Melissa from the clutches of Mr. Vyle who is forcing her against her will into marring him.
The CD-ROM was released in two languages, Italian and English, which the player selects while installing the game. The game flaunts vibrant graphics and animations created using a 256 colors palette in 800x600 screen resolution, which was a remarkable and innovative achievement back then. The digital music and sound effects are totally in wave format while they are quite enjoying. Puzzles and riddles are of good quality and mostly inventory based, but these are not the only challenges to tackle for there are many mild arcade sequences to overcome too. Interface is mouse-driven and quite smart because there are no action icons to select, unlike Sierra and LucasArt adventure games of that time, and the pointer automatically displays the action sentence when your hover over an object or a game character. On the whole, Tequila & Boom-Boom is a nice cartoon adventure game with bright story-line and enjoyable characters.
