Released the same year as Chop Suey, Kyoto is another interactive storybook designed to make good on the early-'90s' promise of CD-based "multimedia." But Kyoto is technically limited by Macromedia: the game itself feels strangely static, and while there's lots to explore, there's little to do.Ĭhop Suey suffers these failings and worse. ![]() Alternatively, we might go along with Entertainment Weekly's description: "a little like Alice in Wonderland as performed by the B-52s for NPR." (The magazine went on to name Chop Suey 1995's CD-ROM of the Year.)Ĭhop Suey's nearest analog, though, is a very different edutainment title, Cosmology of Kyoto. Were Chop Suey a literal, physical picturebook, it might resemble Richard Scarry's Busytown as revised by Bratmobile. And if our player puts on a pair of X-Ray Spex, Aunt Vera and boyfriend Ned are both reduced, tastefully, to their undergarments. ![]() Wry flourishes give Chop Suey its teeth: Dooner, an unemployed Gen-X slob, hides his girly mag in the dresser's top drawer. "'A broken heart for every light,' she said, and sighed, rearranging her pink flowered bathrobe." (Tragically, it is impossible to visit Bob #1, except through occasional flashbacks.) Perhaps she might visit Aunt Vera's second husband, Bob, or else she could visit Vera's third husband, also Bob. The player might go to the carnival to have her fortune read she might play Bingo. Lily and June's own imaginations illustrate those stories in happier, more magical idioms She might play dress-up with Aunt Vera - whom, we suspect, is something of a lush and a man-eater. She might revisit lunch at the Ping Ping Palace, where the food is so exotic, it's often tinted cyan or hot pink. From here she can survey Cortland's landmarks in any order she chooses, repeating anything she likes. When Sedaris concludes his opening narration, our player immediately regains control of her cursor. "They didn't know the names of the flowers in which they lay - pollen dusty daisies, wild violets, cornflowers - so June Bugg named them herself, touching a finger to the soft center of each." The narrator - a yet-unknown David Sedaris - sets the scene in nasally twee, occasionally grating reeds. Lily and June Bugg, we are informed, have spent the afternoon with Aunt Vera. As the game opens, the Bugg sisters are idling on a grassy knoll, counting clouds and recalling the day's events.
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