Flight of the Amazon Queen [GAMES]

I recently finished another free classic computer game downloaded from Good Old Games.  Flight of the Amazon Queen hails from 1995 but was great fun to play.  It's a standard point-and-click adventure game that requires the player to find a wide variety of items and combine some of them together to accomplish particular tasks.  Two things really made the game work for me.

First, there was the perfect difficulty level for my tastes: the solutions needed to overcome problems were not so obvious that they were dumb or boring, but not so hard that I had to spend hours wandering around in frustration trying to figure out what to do next. In short, the puzzles are quite fair.  I only had to resort to a walkthrough once, and it told me to do something I swear I had already tried.

Second, the storyline hits the goofy/charming sweet spot.  The main character, Joe King, is the pilot of a charter plane called the Amazon Queen.  While transporting an actress over the jungle, his plane crashes and he finds himself in a bit of an Indiana Jones role, forced to evade a nefarious band of Nazis operating a lederhosen factory named Floda, negotiate with a hidden tribe of Amazons, and trek through a mysterious temple in search of the Crystal Skull.  There are no nuclear blasts or hiding in refrigerators, but there are dinosaurs, dinosaur-men, death rays, and a giant robot from an extraterrestrial civilization!  The jokey script supports the plot well, and the voice acting is quite good.

The only negative I can think of is that when you want Joe to go from place to place, you literally have to watch him walk across each screen.  I had the patience for it even though it got annoying when you had to backtrack, but it was enough to turn The Wife off the game.

All in all, a really fun game for the only price my budget will allow!