February 3, 2015

The Space Bar

Boffo Games, Inc., 1997


The Space Bar, an excellent and unique science-fiction concoction of themes, casts you as Alias Node, a security cop and the only human on an intergalactic planet named Armpit VI. While on duty and cruising an area in your patrol car along with your alien partner, Maksh, you witness a female alien police officer being shot down and before dying she gives you a stolen Datacard, which holds half of the highly confidential secrets of a giant company. The other half of the secrets are on another Datacard, which is still with her attacker, who as per her statement is a very dangerous shape-shifter and can be tracked down in a local bar named "The Thirsty Tentacle." On reaching the bar, Maksh enters it and mysteriously disappears leaving you on your own. Now, your goal is to enter this bar full of strange looking aliens undercover to find Maksh and that mysterious shape-shifter and finally, retrieve the Datacard from him. The best feature in this game is your ability to merge your mind with someone else's. This ability of yours turns your quest into six quests, where you play the game with six different aliens. I enjoyed the part when I played as an alien with three sexes.

The Space Bar has one of the best looking graphics completely rendered in 3D, including the characters, the environment and all the objects, backed up with a point-and-click interface that allows you to view them in a 360-Degrees panned view. Sound and music are added very professionally and meshes well with the atmosphere of this intergalactic bar. Voice acting is excellent with subtitles, good quality lip-syncing and not to mention, the funniest dialogues. Overall, I find this game very entertaining and I would highly recommend it to all those fans of science-fiction adventure games that can stand ugly looking aliens.