Gilbert Goodmate by Z-Logics, Price: $24.95
Reviewed January 2004 by Tony Peak

Much like when the original PC title ‘Gilbert Goodmate and the Mushroom of Phungoria' was released back in 2001, the Pocket PC port has captured the attention of adventure fans, many of which are hungry for a new adventure to undertake. The Pocket PC platform only makes its features seem all the more impressive, and it has as of yet virtually no commercial competition, but does it really live up to the hype?

Gilbert plays as a very traditional point and click adventure. Fans of this genre will remember playing games such as Shadowgate or Deja Vu where you must follow the story line, solving puzzles, finding items and if you are quick enough, you will figure out where to use what items. There are interactions with NPCs in these games as well. So, the heart and soul of every adventure often is adventure itself. How tricky and / or frustrating are the puzzles? Are the people interesting? Does the story hold up? Where do you explore? Gilbert has a good try at this and offers a good run in this slim-picking genre, though it isn't an exceptional one.

Gilbert's story takes place in a fantasyland and the basic premise is that Gilbert's grandfather will be executed unless Gilbert can find the mushroom that his Grandfather was in charge of guarding, and the thief who stole it. The story starts with a dramatic tension, however the town's folks you run into in the game don't seem to realize the seriousness of the situation. The cut scenes that had helped the PC version to keep the tension tight have been removed; likely due to the file size they might add to the Pocket PC version. What didn't get cut seems to be the dialog. There are many brilliant and witty lines in the game, however they were buried in large quantity of dialog that has stuffed the audio file into an insane size. The puzzles in Gilbert are a mixed bag. You will find some very interesting mysteries and some sub-quests that don't follow the game logic.

Graphical adventure games often thrive on graphics. Gilbert shows how good this could be. The backgrounds are truly stunning. Gilbert has a wonderful array of scenery and each one is filled with beautiful colors and art. Any artist would be proud. The characters however are a very different story. It's hard to believe they're even in the same game. Gilbert looks passable, but most of the cast looks mediocre against the beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds. Each character is drawn with uniformly solid lines and absolutely no shading what so ever. Some might call it style; others might call it in need of polish.

Sound fares very well in Gilbert, suffering only from the amount of unnecessary dialog. The music is quaint and enjoyable, nothing too annoying but there to accompany the graphics. The dialog is very well read and very professional, no matter the subject. You really get a sense of true professional work from Gilbert's voice actor, and the rest of the cast does a good enough job to follow through. The game runs on both 2002 and 2003 devices. If you want the full version with all them music and sound, you will need to shell out 55.8MB of memory to store the game. The bare-bone minimum however is 23MB.