Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo

In his third outing, Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo (spoiler alert!). He also gets caught up in some truly bizarre developer in-jokes and throws up from eating too much cotton candy. This game has a whole lot of weird hidden stuff, possibly due to the corrupting influence of its composer, George "The Fat Man" Sanger.

The demo version is also no stranger to the weird.

Debug Mode
Like most Humongous games, this one has a debug mode, activated by adding the line SuperCool=71595 to the hegames.ini configuration file. This adds two buttons to the front of Baldini's Grocery Store: "CLICK HERE TO PICK UP EVERYTHING!", which will put all plot-necessary items in the inventory, and "CLICK FOR ENDGAME", which starts the ending sequence.

Hidden Scenes
Or, "The Dangers of Letting Your Devteam Have Too Much Fun".

HolyMoley
P9BB6xDKbBY Add the line HolyMoley=71595 to hegames.ini and click on the gopher hole in the Grasslands (it's the tuft of grass in front of the lions).

IAmTheMoose
WLJ5zuOJet4 Add the line IAmTheMoose=71595 to hegames.ini and click on either of the joke-telling toucans in Jungle Land.

MoveInHerds
BeAHiSr5834 Add the line MoveInHerds=71595 to hegames.ini and click on the observation point in the grasslands. Note that this is a reference to a line from Jurassic Park. The second half of the line is present, but unused.

UpChuck
DAoFYGBgXA8 Add the line UpChuck=71595 to hegames.ini and get cotton candy from Chuck Wagon ten times. (Better idea: don't)

Unused Graphics
This game has a large number of unused graphics, mostly uncolored lineart and pencil sketches.

Demo Leftovers
These graphics are left over from the demo version, which is mostly present in the game data.

Room 6 (Zoo Entrance)


This room's background has a copy of two of the dancing flowers hidden behind the dashboard.

Rough sketches for the "Welcome to the Zoo" animation.



Rough animation of the topiary creatures gyratin'.

Room 9 (Outback Al)


A sketch of Outback Al. The graphic is sized to the full play area, so this was probably used to test his on-screen position.



Rough animation of Outback Al reaching for the list of missing animals.





Sketches of Outback Al's antenna.

Various bits and pieces meant to be assembled with the images above.

Room 11 (Chuck Wagon)


Pencil sketches of Putt-Putt's Cheese Squigglies-eating animation.

Room 14 (Little Skeeter)


Pencil sketch of Little Skeeter.



Sketch of Putt-Putt talking to Little Skeeter.

Pencil sketch of the polar bear snowball fight clickpoint.

Room 16 (Penguins)


Here's an interesting one: the penguins were originally supposed to have their own fact-blabbering info kiosk! It's present in the room background, as shown, but the game covers it up by placing another graphic on top of the associated object. Only the kiosk itself is hidden, leaving behind an out-of-place shadow.



It has a complete animation set and a generic soundbyte for Putt-Putt to say when it's clicked (see Unused Sounds), but sadly no actual facts about penguins.



The kiosk is even visible in the room's save/load pictures!

Room 26 (Baby Jambo)
Full-size pencil sketches of the Baby Jambo close-ups.



Uncolored graphic of a very discerning-looking Putt-Putt.

Room 28 (Alligator)
Pencil sketches of...something. Seems to involve the monkey that sits on a vine in this room getting knocked off his perch by another monkey, then narrowly escaping from the alligator below. Doesn't happen in the final game.

Room 31 (Raft)


A sketch of Putt-Putt. Yep.

Room 32 (Mr. Hippo)


Very rough pencil sketches of Putt-Putt.

Room 35 (Toucans)


A couple of work-in-progress versions of the "SCENIC VIEW" sign are hidden behind the dashboard. Note that the text is slightly rougher than what's actually on the sign.



A sketch of Thwack...or Quack...maybe. Several more sketches from this scene are left over in the demo version.

Room 37 (Scenic View)




Partially-colored sketch of Putt-Putt tossing the rope to Kenya (note the incomplete shading on the middle image)...





...and Kenya catching it.



Leftover telescope pictures from the demo, which kept the dashboard visible at all times. The used images lack the placeholder at the bottom of the screen.



An...interesting animation, obviously meant to be shown through the telescope. Not only is it in a different format from the real telescope pictures, none of the others are animated.



A stand-alone frame from the above.

Miscellaneous


Placeholder save/load image for unknown rooms. Similar images exist in most Humongous games.



Although all the necessary graphics and sounds are present, it's impossible to take a picture of Mr. Baldini in the initial release of the game; he's always in his store unless being talked to, and using the camera on the store door does nothing. The 1999 re-release fixes this.



Putt-Putt's primary animations (moving, talking, etc.) from Putt-Putt Joins the Parade and Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon are also present in this game, probably for testing purposes. The color remap chunks used to color them correctly in the older games are no longer present, so their palette is broken. The basic logic for assembling and displaying the animations is still present, and the game will default to them if the Putt-Putt actor is spawned in a room with no costumes defined for it (for example, by forcing a warp to room 21, the Animal Tag room).



Adding the line ICanDrive=71595 to hegames.ini causes this image of Putt-Putt's "driver's license" to appear as the second-to-last picture in the credits.

The Rhymin' Gibbons
The gibbons in Jungle Land normally pick from a selection of twenty-seven rhymes, but five more (somehow even sillier than the rest) can be enabled by adding the line Gibbon=71595 to hegames.ini.

Subtitles
From this game onwards, all Humongous titles have no in-game option to enable subtitles. The subtitles themselves are still present, though, and can be enabled by adding the entry TextOn=1 to hegames.ini.

Error Handlers
AAAAAAAAAA! Help! No Room! Displayed when the game doesn't have a way to handle a particular room transition. Specifically, many rooms figure out how to configure their graphics based on the last room the player was in. If the old room isn't internally "connected" to the new room, the game doesn't know what to do and gives this error.

Help File
The PUTTZOO.HLP help file contains several unlisted pages containing information on the secret hegames.ini entries. The pages are unindexed and unreferenced, meaning the only way to see them is to specifically look them up with the "Find" function.

"Cool INI entries"
Try adding the following entries to HEGAMES.INI for some fun!

IAmTheMoose Set this to 71595, then go see the Joke Birds in Jungleland.

ICanDrive Set this to 71595, then check out the scrapbook at the end of the game.

Gibbon Set this to 71595, then go see the Rhymin' Monkeys.

MoveInHerds Set this to 71595, then go to the Observation Point for an inside joke.

"Cool INI Entries Part 2"
UpChuck Set this to 71595, then have Putt-Putt eat more cotton candy than he should.

HolyMoley Set this to 71595, then go see the mole?

AutoPlay= the number is the number of frames to wait before activating autoplay, in tenths of seconds (600 = 1 minute... I have mine set to 6000, ten minutes)

AutoPlayTouchDoors= This is the percentage chance that Putt will touch a door... 0 will keep him in the room forever, 100 will move him around quite a bit. 25 may be a realistic real-user average.

Other
Blah, blah, blah... Placeholder text for the penguin info kiosk. No recorded equivalent exists.

Demo Version
FEvrE6Fo2wo The demo version of the game is present almost in its entirety in the initial CD release, and can be played by force-running script 54 (scr 54 run in ScummVM's debugger). Aside from constant "No Room" errors due to the difference in room numbering between the demo and final versions, everything is fully functional.

The 1999 re-release lacks the demo title graphics, so the game crashes at the point when they should appear.

1999 Version
The 1999 reissue of this game is actually a rather sloppy re-conversion of the Dutch dub, which upgraded the game to a newer revision of the SPUTM/SCUMM engine. Though this brought a few improvements, it also introduced some nasty bugs.

Graphics
The original releases uses an older Humongous logo. The 1999 version updates it to the then-current logo and adds the trademark drum roll found in most other games.

The 1999 version retroactively adds the game to the "Junior Adventurer" product line. Peculiarly, the logo used is a red-on-yellow variant not seen in any previous Humongous game. It also puts the recommended age group on the exclamation mark, which wouldn't happen again until Pajama Sam 3.

The copyright dates on the title screen were updated.

The 1995 version uses a Windows 3.1-style pause menu, while the 1999 version uses a Windows 95-style pause menu.

All the item cursors were colorized for the 1999 version, though the monochrome versions are still used in the Windows 3.1 interpreter.

Music
Several tracks containing English lyrics were changed in the Dutch release and carried over to the 1999 version.

Played when Sammy is rescued. The newer version cuts off strangely.

Played when Little Skeeter is rescued. The 1999 version recycles the music used when talking to Mrs. Boa.

Played when talking to Masai or her mother for the first time.

Other

 * It's possible to take Mr. Baldini's picture. This can't be done in the original version, though the graphics and dialog for it are present.
 * The game runs in fullscreen instead of letterboxing at resolutions above 640&times;480.
 * The solid cursor graphic is completely out of alignment with the outlined cursor graphic, causing the pointer to jump down and to the right every time it's hovered over a clickable object.
 * When Putt-Putt reads the list of missing animals while talking to Outback Al, the animal names are supposed to be highlighted in red as they're spoken. For some reason, this only happens when Sammy's name is read, and the text actually changes color after it's supposed to be highlighted.
 * The most severe bug in the rerelease occurs when getting off the raft at the far end of the Jungle Land swamp for the first time. If Putt-Putt is moved onto land but not specifically to another screen, he'll comment about having made it to the other side. Skipping this dialog with ESC causes the raft to disappear, leaving no way to proceed.