Nancy Drew 4 Pack: Secret of Shadow Ranch + Secret of the Old Clock + Curse of Blackmoor Manor + Last Train to Blue Moon Canyo

I only wish they would release all the earlier Nancy Drew games like this for Windows Vista. You get four games for the price of one. All of these games are good. If you are a ND fan and have not played these games yet, this is definitely worth the money. Even if you've already purchased one or two of them, it's still a good buy. This bundle is also Vista friendly. I had ordered The Haunted Carousel directly from Herinteractive because their website claimed you could use it with Vista. No, you can't. I've tried. Evidently, you need to be a computer whiz to load it. Thank goodness I have another computer with XP on it or it would have been a total waste of money. Watch out for the older Nancy Drew games Vista users!
The newer, less costly ND The Haunted Carousel runs fine on Vista computers.

This was an Xmas gift for my 10 year old daughter. This was our first foray into the Nancy Drew games. A niece enjoyed them so I thought we'd give them a try. We started with the 'The Secret of Shadow Ranch'. I was pleasantly surprised at how much was involved in solving the mystery. This took us longer than I expected to solve and we had a lot of fun along the way. I'll be looking for other bundles in this series to have on hand for those "boring, nothing to do" days.

It was a great choice for the price: $20.00. And I will universally praise how HER has integrated the modern technology of the cellphone (with its web connections and camera options) into the game. Well done.

#10 Shadow Ranch kicks off with a lot of doing basic chores more than solving mysteries. Learning to identify fresh vegetables and care for horses was was useful, but wasn't the most entertaining of pastimes. And the set up for the puzzles becomes unbelievable as the story progresses. No real woman would put up with that many obstacles put in her path by her supposed boyfriend; it shifts from entertaining and cute to if he hadn't have been killed she probably would have strangled him herself. On the positive side, you have 4 potential suspects and spend a lot of time interacting with them, so the actual modern mystery part was fulfilling. Rating: ***

#11 Curse of Blackmoor Manor initially looked to be the most interesting of the bunch as far as my tastes are concerned. It has astronomy, Greek muses, fairy changelings, and a friendly pet parrot. Yet it turned out to be my least favorite of the four games in this bundle. I think my irritation stems from having an obvious villain (the graphics for her face just scream villain before you ever get to a mystery), an unrealistic, annoyingly uncommunicative "friend" (Linda/her mother call for your help, but then will barely speak to you once you're there to help her with the mystery), issues with lighting in secret passages (I'm not a fan of small beams of light), moving rooms (poorly lit moving rooms just to amp up my irritation), puzzles that require too much back and forth between the rooms and the cellphone/inventory screens, too many side "games," and a mystery you can't actually take pro-active steps to solve (instead you are stuck in pointless puzzle land with things that have nothing to do with your actual case). Rating: *

#12 Secret of the Old Clock is a nice tribute to the original Nancy Drew story. It doesn't follow it precisely, but it does provide several good suspects, reasonably story-related puzzles for the first 3/4 of the game, and a kind of fun ending. Or maybe I just like the 30s. On the not so great side, the last 1/4 of the puzzles were ridiculous and solved by coincidentally having the correct information salted around the inn, it suffers from another unhelpful "friend" who makes herself an obstacle to you solving the case when she asked you for help in the first place, and the controls for the mini golf game were difficult to use. I do hope that HER will consider adapting some of the other original books. Rating: ****

#13 Last Train to Blue Moon is my favorite out of this set. It actually offers three mysteries to solve: two modern ones and one historical one. It gives you five/six suspects to interact with plus the Hardy Boys are along to talk with in person -- it's nice to have someone really on your side for once. Oh, and one of the characters is Charleena Purcell (in person rather than on the phone) from the Shadow Ranch game. It was a nice bit of consistancy to have a character you've met before show up again. The historical puzzles are pretty good, with only one relying on convenient coincidence. My only irritation was in trying to find a simple piece of paper. This should not have been an irritating task since paper is a readily available item, and the paper you actually end up using would not actually work well for the purpose you have in mind. Oh, and the reappearance of "villain face." The character designer should be a bit less obvious about things. It felt odd to have Nancy so easily outpace the Hardy Boys, there's two of them, yet they're content to both sit around and read while you run all over the place solving three mysteries before they can solve one, but it was useful for the sake of the game. Rating: *****