SpaceKids

## Description

_The Grandpa of Zeet and Deedle is a great explorer, but he hasn’t returned
to the Moon from his latest destination: the Earth! His grand-children take it
upon themselves to follow his trail and rescue him from whatever terrestrial
menace has detained him, after interacting with an extensive array of
whimsical, surreal characters._

SpaceKids is a good look at what interactive movies looked like just before
the CD-ROM format became the new standard for extensive multimedia-rich
content storage — instead of meg-heavy digitized actors we get byte-thrifty
pre-rendered sprites in front of 3D backdrops, twirling around the screen and
stretching or skewing in realtime with every possible bump or jostle. To
please the kids, pretty much everything in this game that isn’t made of candy
has got a human face with big, pleading eyes on it somewhere.

Gameplay loosely follows the model set by Dragon’s Lair: non-interactive
animated segments (sometimes prolonged ones) are punctuated by episodes of
player input, consisting of moving the actor of the moment — sometimes our
protagonists, sometimes their opponent — in the right direction at the right
moment to pass some timed obstacle or choose a fork in the plot. _Unlike_
Dragon’s Lair, death does not lurk around every corner; failing to
successfully traverse the obstacle (or, uh, interact vaguely with the new
strange situation in the arbitrarily appropriate fashion) generally yields
only another opportunity to do so.

SpaceKids