{"id":2365,"date":"2012-06-25T21:19:51","date_gmt":"2012-06-26T04:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=2365"},"modified":"2017-03-15T15:37:17","modified_gmt":"2017-03-15T22:37:17","slug":"80-days-the-song-of-scheherezade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/2365","title":{"rendered":"80 Days: The Song of Scheherezade"},"content":{"rendered":"

What kind of game is 80 Days<\/em>? I’ll tell you what kind of game it is. It is the kind of game that contains song-and-dance routines.<\/p>\n

Most of the game’s Cairo chapter is spent on a quest chain to locate Uncle Mathew’s lost patent papers. I imagine the other chapters will be similar; the patent-hunt gives the game the excuse it needs to make you stick around in each city for a while rather than immediately dashing off to the next spot on the itinerary in an effort to meet the 80-day deadline. The first patent turns out to be encased, for some reason, in a bauble of smash-proof glass. The only way to break in to retrieve it is through the resonating screeches of a cantankerous local diva, stage-named Scheherezade. Once you have the document, you have no more reason to stick around Cairo, but just before you leave, Scheherezade puts on a production number, singing a summary of what’s happened so far to a pop tune used previously in the background music, with a chorus line of random NPCs doing a campy walk-like-an-Egyptian dance in CGI unison.<\/p>\n

At this point, I suspect that each chapter — there seem to be four — will end in a similar musical number. And I’m warming to the notion as I write this, but it was honestly a little painful to sit through the first time. I’m reminded a little of the banal doggerel scattered through The Bard’s Tale (2004)<\/em> and a little of the bizarre little French music video that turns up without warning at the end of MDK<\/em><\/a>. The former is cheese, the latter is camp, and 80 Days<\/em> lies somewhere between them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What kind of game is 80 Days? I’ll tell you what kind of game it is. It is the kind of game that contains song-and-dance routines. Most of the game’s Cairo chapter is spent on a quest chain to locate Uncle Mathew’s lost patent papers. I imagine the other chapters will be similar; the patent-hunt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[538,235],"class_list":["post-2365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","tag-80-days","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2365"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5051,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2365\/revisions\/5051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}