Gary Gadget: Building Cars

Details: Category: Computer; By ccgr; 29.Dec; Hits: 10891

System Requirements 233MHz CPU 32MB RAM 16MB Disk Space 24X CD-ROM Windows Me, XP Mac OS X 10.1 Gary Gadget and his dog Bouncer collect all sorts of gadgets, thingamabobs, and whatchamacallits (AKA junk). You can piece together cars with this stuff; your imagination is the limit. Gary’s friends have tasks and quests for him and they usually offer a nice reward item to assist in solving another quest. There are various medals you can win too. Some of his friends are in challenging places so you’ll need to build cars that are lightweight, able to get across mud, and have powerful engines. You’ll also encounter cows and goats in the road too so keep a horn and a megaphone handy. Your gas mileage will vary depending on how you build your cars, so keep an eye on your fuel gauge!

Building Cars

Although you can use whatever you want there are some requirements for your car to run. It will need an engine(s), a battery, fuel tank(s), wheels, chair/seat, brakes, steering wheel, and gearbox. The horn is optional but highly recommended; it can go on top of the car or near the motor.

How creative can I be?

There’s lots of room for creativity in this game. For tires you can use tank wheels, roller skates, lampshades, bicycle wheels, regular wheels or anything round. You’ll have body parts from trucks, taxis, planes, racecars etc to work with. You can also use a big barrel, a gazebo, bathtubs etc for a car body too. Just when you run out of ideas your friend Freddy Ferrick will drop off more parts to work with. You can also download parts online to add more variety.

I built a car now what?

Once you build a car you can snap a picture of it to save it on your computer, that way if you start from scratch you can load it up again. Not only can you drive your cars around town, but you can take them to an Auto Show and get it rated, you may even win a medal! Other medals you can win include the lightweight medal (for driving across the bridge without breaking it), mud-driver medal, hill-climber medal, speedster medal, long distance medal and creative medal. Make sure you stop by and visit your friends. They’ll call and mail you to invite you over. This game\'s focus is mainly on collecting stuff and building cars out of it. You\'ll also have to figure out how to get to your friend\'s houses with the various environment conditions (hills, distance, mud, animals, old bridges). There\'s a racing area if you want to compete. If you do well, you\'ll win the speedster medal.

Graphics

This game runs at 800x600 and there is no customizing the resolution to fit your screen. You’ll either have to manually adjust your resolution or play with a black border like me. The graphics are 2D and cartoony. The world has a hand drawn appearance to it. It’s perfectly functional for this type of game and it has a unique feel to it. It’s definitely colorful and geared towards kids.

Sound

The voice acting is decent but a bit repetitive. I like how the car sounds differ as you change out the engines and wheels etc.

Stability

This game crashed on me frequently. Often when I came back to the game I lost the progress I made and I got duplicate parts. I hope it gets patched to avoid further frustration.

Appropriateness

This game is perfectly clean since there’s nothing bad about building cars.

Final Thoughts

This is a cute game and the concept is good. The quests are fun and I like how you have to overcome environmental hurdles to complete them. The downloadable parts online is a great way to extend the game play. My biggest complaint is the stability. No one likes losing their progress but to have duplicate parts on top of it is really annoying.