It took about 7-10 hours of playing to finish MEL8 to all 102 events. As usual, CLVG has great graphics and rendering.
CLVG introduced a new trick. They still use their previous one, of having multiple repetitive progress steps for certain events, but for MEL8 they put in a complicated system for finishing multiple events at once, but only for the youngest FC (FC18). You cannot just bang away at one event to finish it and move it to the completed events list; instead you have to complete a collection of 3 to 7 events at one progress level, before you move to the next combined progress level for a similar but not identical collection of events, all with FC18. This disrupts normal playing order, but you can live with it, even though it makes the grinding worse. They have also added in a lot of empty rooms you must visit, not just the kitchen for laundry and cooking dinner like earlier MELn's, but also the pool for lawn mowing, and the bathroom and bedrooms for cleaning.
There is a lot of code related to how much money the FC's will accept for various activities, but it doesn't seem to be used very much, and is probably overkill. I'm somewhat unhappy that this fifth game in the 'Room for Rent' series has a lot less creative actions in it, and it is mostly the MC giving money to the FC's in return for favors. In the previous games there were all kinds of things happening, really lots and lots of them, which made the games much more interesting. But CLVG has gotten a more complicated engine done, improved on their graphics/rendering, and their releases are larger, so it's a tradeoff I accept.
