Stay Tooned! (video game)

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Stay Tooned!
Stay Tooned CD Cover.jpg
CD cover art
Developer(s) Funnybone Interactive [1]
Publisher(s) Sierra On-Line [1]
Designer(s)
  • Susan Decker [2]
  • Ben Howard [2]
  • Kevin O'Neill [2]
  • Chris Lewis [2]
Engine Macromedia Director
Platform(s)
ReleaseOctober 1996 [4]
Genre(s) Action-adventure
Mode(s) Single-player

Stay Tooned! (subtitled "Unsweetened Multi-Game Experience!") [5] is a 1996 action-adventure video game developed by Funnybone Interactive and published by Sierra On-Line for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh. [1] In the game, the player must navigate through the apartment complex to find the TV remote to zap rogue cartoon characters back into TV Land. [6]

Contents

Gameplay

Stay Tooned! is an action-adventure game where the player must retrieve several keys in an apartment complex to find a remote to zap rogue cartoon characters back into TV Land after they have been let out of the television and stolen the remote. The apartment complex has five floors to navigate, including the roof, the basement and several hidden rooms. Numerous tasks must be completed to retrieve the keys, such as building a Rube Goldberg machine; some of the tasks are abnormal, such as shaving Fiddle to the bone.

To retrieve the remote, the player must find an oven mitt for the oven in Apartment 5D, which houses the remote. Once the player gets the remote, the toons must be zapped into the television to beat the game.

Running the game on modern systems

Running the game on a version of Microsoft Windows from Windows 2000 onwards is nearly impossible due to the highly different structures of earlier operating systems. The game will run, however, on Microsoft Virtual PCs with earlier versions of Windows. Macintosh users will likely find similar problems trying to run the game on the most recent versions of macOS, as the Classic function has been discontinued.

Plot

The game begins in a large apartment building in the middle of an unnamed city. The player takes the place of an ordinary patron living in an apartment. The player starts off simply channel-surfing with a TV remote and watching short cartoons and commercials that parody real-life shows; [7] said shows include Whinefeld, a parody of Seinfeld . [8] One channel has the game's chief programmer providing hints on how to play the upcoming game.

Several cartoon characters either forbid or encourage the player to push the red button on their remote as the player surfs the channels. When the player pushes the button, the cartoons break out of the television set, steal the remote, and cause the entire apartment complex to go into animated form. The player must retrieve the television remote, which is the only thing that can zap the escaped toons and send them back to TV Land, the fictional toon world found within the depths of the television. The player searches the other apartments for the remote while playing about thirty games contained within them and avoiding the destructive trickery committed by the escaped toons.

At the end of the game, once the remote is retrieved, the player must zap all of the toons back into the television (and that includes extras such as the Überbugs and the penguins). Once all of the toons are captured, as a plot of revenge, Pixel demands Chisel that they can not let the player get away with this. Chisel grabs the player and warps them into the television. Once they make it into TV Land, the player gets flattened, and has the disturbing realization that, in the process, the player has been turned into a toon as well.

Characters

The first five characters mentioned are the five toons that must be captured. The others serve as background characters. Most of the toons are against the player, but some will provide help.

Reception

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Lewis & Johnson (1996), p. 17.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Lewis & Johnson (1996), p. 16.
  3. 1 2 Lewis & Johnson (1996), p. 2.
  4. "The new fall CD-ROM line-up Explodes with the season premiere of "Stay Tooned! from Sierra On-Line". education.com. October 7, 1996. Archived from the original on January 20, 1998. Retrieved March 27, 2024.
  5. Lewis & Johnson (1996), p. front cover.
  6. Lewis & Johnson (1996), p. 1.
  7. Lewis & Johnson (1996), p. 5.
  8. Pescovitz, David (July 5, 2019). "Whinefeld: the bizarre Seinfeld parody clip from the Stay Tooned! videogame (1996)". Boing Boing . Retrieved September 3, 2022.
  9. James, Bonnie (December 5, 1996). "Stay Tooned! - Electric Playground". Greedy Productions. Archived from the original on August 4, 1997. Retrieved April 6, 2017. If you find yourself getting up Saturday mornings to watch cartoons in your pajamas and eat sugar cereal on the couch, then I think you'll like Stay Tooned.

Bibliography