Video games - At the Carnival

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	Video games - At the Carnival

At The Carnival is a 1989 computer puzzle game by Cliff Johnson.

It was intended to be the first of a series of games called Puzzle Gallery; however, publisher Miles Computing went out of business before any further games could be made.

At The Carnival is a collection of games similar to some in The Fool's Errand, but with enhanced user interfaces. (For example, the word search puzzles have tools to highlight individual lines in all directions.) The endgame puzzle is simpler compared to Fool's Errand and 3 in Three, and consists merely of a crossword puzzle filled by key words found in other solved puzzles.

Story

The game has no overarching story as such; each puzzle shows a small section of Hazard Park, an amusement park with woeful disdain for its customers. Completing the puzzles in a particular section displays the fate of the unfortunate guests who rode a particular ride.

Release Information

The original version of the game was for Apple Macintosh; a port to MS-DOS was made, but it is not as visually appealing due to the lower resolution available to IBM PC-class machines at the time (320x200 VGA vs. 512x342 minimum on Macintoshes). Cliff Johnson strongly recommends playing the Macintosh version instead of the MS-DOS version, using an emulator such as Executor or Basilisk II if necessary.

Puzzles

Some of the major puzzle types in the games include:

Jumbles - mixed-up words to be reordered.
Word searches - find words hidden in a grid of letters
Cryptograms - decipher encrypted phrases
Crosswords - fill answers into boxes based on specified clues. (Not full-sized crossword puzzles.)
Word grids - rearrange 9 letters into a grid to make words in all horizontal, vertical, and diagonal directions.
Polygons - fit pentomino-like polygons into a grid; letters on the polygons spell out words.
Jigsaw puzzles - rearrange cut-up pictures to remake the original
Concatenations - several buttons concatenate letters to the current phrase; find the correct order to build a complete phrase
Mazes - various types of mazes that must be navigated
XOR displays - a set of buttons XORs various shapes together; the right combination of buttons will produce a word

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