Looking For Some Pun? Try `Muppets Inside'

Installing multimedia software in Windows is so often a white-knuckle experience, and "Muppets Inside" looked as though it was crashing just as it started up.

But then Fozzie Bear pushed aside our Windows desktop, announced that there were technical difficulties, and started telling bad jokes to pacify us while Dr. Bunsen Honeydew worked on the wiring.

We'd been had. And we've been hooked ever since on this rollicking, unabashedly silly CD-ROM from Jim Henson Productions and Bellevue-based Starwave Corp.

It has all you need to brighten up a rainy Saturday: furry creatures, gags and parodies, new Muppets songs, bad puns, healthy food and Miss Piggy, as indignant and resplendent as ever. The programming is state-of-the-art (apparently crash-free, despite the opening-scene joke), though it will only run on high-octane PCs running Windows 95 or Windows NT.

The $39 CD has the same gentle, self-mocking humor as the "The Muppet Show," the late '70s TV series whose clips have been mined to make this CD. It's kid entertainment, but there are plenty of jokes aimed at grown-ups as well.

You ride a "data bus" around a circuit board that leads you past an angry, mumbling "cursor" to seven games. Among them is a "Hollywood Squares"-style trivia game, a "Wheel of Fortune" game where Miss Piggy reluctantly spins the wheel and a scrambled-video game featuring Dr. Honeydew and his assistant, Beaker.

The Great Gonzo, another character familiar to Muppet fans, is the star of a circus-trick episode. You adjust the angle of a cannon and load it with the right amount of gunpowder so you can shoot Gonzo through a target. If you miss, a stretcher carrier loads him right back into the cannon for you to try again.

"Kitchens of Doom" is a wonderful, nonviolent spoof of the battle game "Doom." You're the chef, trying to get out of a labyrinthine virtual-reality kitchen as you're stalked by giant vegetables. Attack with your whisk, and that nasty, stubborn carrot becomes carrot cake.

Another game has you using anti-aircraft-style weapons to protect the hapless Fozzie Bear from an audience pelting him with eggs and bananas. It's a takeoff on the old arcade game "Missile Command."

The CD has the look of a labor of love with little jokes at every turn. When you restart the game, Kermit rebukes you for being gone so long: "Animal has been loose inside your computer for three whole days!"

There's little redeeming educational value, aside from teaching your kids the lost art of puns (watch out for falling flakes at the Cereal Port!). Though you can adjust the difficulty level, the games will probably get old after a month or two. Still, "Muppets Inside" is one of the best executed computer games I've seen.