Victor Loomes

Other Titles:
VL – Das Spiel
Makers:
Promotion Software / LBS
Year:
1993
System:
Amiga (OCS)
Genre:
Adventure
Tags:
Humour / Mystery / Promotional / Science Fiction
Language:
German
Median Rating:
3/5

Thoughts by Mr Creosote (24 Jan 2003) – Amiga (OCS)

Victor Loomes is a private eye in the Chicago of the 1920s. And his sponsor is….. the LBS (a German “Bausparkasse” – if you don’t know what that is, visit their homepage  for a good laugh)! If you’re asking where the temporal (at that time, the LBS didn’t exist) and local (the LBS doesn’t exist anywhere outside Germany) link is, you’ve already understood the whole problem of the game.

It is of course one of the many promotional games of the early and mid 90s. I can hardly think of anything more typically German and more bourgeois than the LBS and their “Bauspar” system. How could one possibly interest the youth about that? The marketing managers apparently thought it would be best to avoid the actual topic as much as possible. Instead, they’re using sneaky manipulation: everybody should have noticed by now that the initials of Victor Loomes are the same as the first letters of “Vermögenswirksame Leistungen” (please don’t ask)!

The player is seemingly working on the case of diamond theft, about which he has read in a paper which he has found on the street – who said you need someone to pay you? “Coincidentally”, one of the singers of the bar the gangster resides in asks him to invest her money for her. That is where the LBS comes in! Just that it doesn’t exist at that place and at that time.

To make the whole story look even less believable and more ridiculous, your neighbour “coincidentally” is just working on a time machine (which looks exactly like the one from the first movie adaption (made in 1960) of H.G. Well’s “The Time Machine”) and he asks you to help him test it. “Coincidentally”, the professor chose 1993 as a suitable first test. “Coincidentally”, the machine cannot only travel through time, but can also appear everywhere around the world – and “coincidentally”, Frankfurt has been chosen on the controls!

And now, what could you (being a time traveller) possibly have to do in present Germany if not investing money? What way of investment does come to your mind? The LBS, of course! Now I’ll skip some details (this isn’t a walkthrough after all), but only tell the observations which really made me think about the nature of this game.

First of all, you don’t really earn the money you get with the LBS, but at the stock market – in spite of the pessimist broker who would love to send you to the LBS immediately. The (as the introduction says) “nice LBS advisor” (who is there only for you personally) isn’t exactly a source for trust, either, because she immediately starts talking about how she admires Erich von Däniken (the “UFO-scientist”), she believes in time machines without the slightest bit of doubt and she is convinced to have seen aliens. Is that supposed to be ‘cool’? I’d think twice about handing over my hard-earned money to a ‘trustworthy’ person like this who’d probably ‘invest’ it into some “enlightenment” sect!

What have we learned from this game? In the year 2000 (where you go later to get your money from the contract with the LBS), subways are full of trash, there is an “environmental police” which has nothing better to do than taking away Walkman batteries from small children all day and everybody has to wear a gas mask. Pupils are looking forward to going to school because of the filtered air – the ultimate proof pollution has a lot of positive effects! Furthermore, in this “future”, the LBS building is the only clean place of the whole town. Ah yes, and the LBS also pays you in pure gold if you want to and they even give out rusty pipes for free. Cool, man, huh?

Play

Screenshots

Amiga (OCS)

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