Paparazzi! Tales of Tinseltown (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
85A playthrough of Activision and Museworthy's 1995 FMV paparazzi simulation game, Paparazzi! Tales of Tinseltown, for Windows 3.1 on IBM PC compatibles.
Paparazzi! was a game that got critically savaged when it was first released, and many of the criticisms were completely valid. However, it never tries to be a full-fledged "game" in the traditional sense - at its heart, it's very much an old-school interactive movie. You watch the TV news, listen to your informants, note strings of clues, and if you've put all the available information together correctly, you'll learn where and when to show up to snap a photo of a celebrity in a compromising situation. Then, you can sell the photo to the highest tabloid bidder, and if you succeed with all fourteen celebrities in the game, you win. The gameplay is almost entirely cloned from Night Trap - look at videos, listen to clues, hit your "action" button at the right time, and continue (or not) based on the results. If you enjoyed Night Trap and other games of its ilk, this is a no-brainer. If not, well, don't bother.
The real centerpiece of this experience is obviously not its mechanics, but writing is great, and takes every opportunity to slam fictionalized caricatures of real life celebrities circa 1995. The majority of them are pretty dead-on and hilarious. Jucia Rogers and Emilio Estesheen (Julia Roberts and Emilio Estevez) star in a film called 'Pure Heat', "Billary" (Hillary Clinton) shows up on the television with some regularity, and is often running in tandem with political commentator Rusk Limberger (duh, Rush Limbaugh). There's a flamboyant king-of-pop star, Flash Rock Man (read: Michael Jackson) with long, curly black hair running around in a red lace-up shirt and black hat that spies on children and steals their shoes in the park, and his slim best friend Liz Naylor (Elizabeth Taylor) advertising a miracle weight loss product, only to be caught days later getting out of her limo resembling a fully-mature sperm whale. We even have Ms. Lahsa Apso (Zsa Zsa Gabor) being creepy with her dogs on TV before getting arrested for throwing a pile of dog-shit at a police officer in the local park.
The list goes on-and-on, and even though the representations are hilariously out-of-date, anyone that was media aware in 1995 will laugh themselves silly watching the antics unfold. Whether or not you enjoy the game will be entirely dependent on both your affinity for FMV games and your age. I, for one, thought that this double-CD set was an absolute gem... even if it uses Quicktime to drive its grainy, 8-bit color video clips.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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