Customer Reviews

Puppet Motel (PC / Mac CD-Rom)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

At first I was a bit perplexed by a CDROM that's more an interactive objet-d'art than a game; and in the first night I played with this for like eight hours, until I thought I'd played it to death and would never touch it again. But I found its strange imagery coming back to me, and I tinker with it more and more now, sometimes just to hear the interesting background music, of which there is a LOT.

The packaging for this CD says it contains over two hours of instrumental music or spoken word performance, and it's true. Some of the music I recognize from "Ugly One With The Jewels", and some of it was even background music that Laurie Anderson did for Spalding Grey's movie "Swimming to Cambodia" (and as far as I know, no soundtrack CD was ever released of that).

If you find yourself wanting to hear the music on its own, it's straightforward to sift thru the CDROM's directories, find the AIFC files (*.AIF), decompress them (easy on a Mac with SoundApp -- I don't know what you'd use for handling AIFCs on other platforms), and burn them to audio CD for your personal listening fun. Now, there's not many CDROMs where the music is so good that you'd want to do that! But this is sure one of them.

When I bought this I was a little worried it would be out of date because it is a few years old, but WOW! Incredible, awesome, always surprising, entertaining. I love it more than her CDs!

I would love to be able to review this CD-ROM, but 2 1/2 months
after placing my order, Amazon wrote that they could not supply
it.

So why does Amazon still have it for sale?

Clicking the "used and new" link, I find some used versions for
more than the "new" price". It seems there was originally a
Macintosh only version, and then a Windows/Mac version.
A "new" Mac/Windows version is available from Amazon seller
"amana2" for USD$225.

Googling indicates that the Voyager company which produced
"Puppet Motel" no longer exists. I can't find a mention of it at
Laurie Anderson's site, though apparently in the past there was
a reference, pointing to Amazon as the place to purchase the
CD-ROM.

"Puppet Motel" is highly regarded, so I gave it five stars in
absentia. But Amazon deserves a negative number of stars for
pretending to be able to supply it.