Larry Laffers final outing!

Its been a while since I last updated but I have been playing a few games the past few months, only problem is I never actually got round to finishing any of them. That was of course until I decided to pick up Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail!. "Love for Sail!" is the 7th and final (in most peoples opinion) of the traditional Larry adventure games for PC. This is the first time playing through lsl7 although I've had the game for a loooooong time and I have to say its a nice finish to the series! not quite as good as lsl 6 in my opinion but that was to be expected because i though Larry 6 was top drawer. For a Sierra adventure game its wasn't actually that hard either as I managed to finish it in 3 days resorting to a walkthrough only a handful of times as opposed to the proper old school games where a walkthrough was practically need throughout. Kings quest III anyone? Ack!

Graphically I'm divided on this game too as I can understand that the visuals and particularly the animations is miles ahead of the older games but for some reason I think I prefer the simple stylings seen in Larry 6 and even 5. Larry himself doesn't look quite as good as that portrait of him in Larry 6 which I think I consider the definitive depiction of the man himself (here's the pic if you don't know what I'm talking about).

Story wise the game is standard fare Larry for the later games in the series where you have a collection of lovely ladies and an overall goal, the overall goal is achieved by collecting a bunch of items that can only be collected by smoozing the woman. In this game you are trying to complete tasks to win a competition to spend a week with the female captain of the cruise ship you are on. As always the main draw of the game is the low brow humour and chances to see abit of cheap smut but why else would you play a Larry game. Shakespeare, this aint! :)

Old style film noir mixed with sci-fi conspiricy, what more could you want?

"Danger is like jello, there's always room for a little more" - Tex

The Pandora Directive was the last of the Tex Murphy games I needed to play the only other that I've not yet completed being Martian Memorandum because I keep getting stuck on dead ends halfway through >_<. If you ask most adventure gamers though Pandora Directive is generally considered the best game in the series and after completing it for my first time I'd probably have to agree. The game has loads of different ending (about 8 I think) and I got a fairly middle of the road ending on 'Lombard Street' so it wouldn't hurt to do another play through and see some of the alternative paths, maybe even set it on the 'Gaming difficulty' to try and get the extra points. While we're on the subject of point I think I need to mention that my final score was terrible :( I mean really bad... My problem is that Pandora Directive has a lot of Myst style puzzles and whilst I managed to figure most of them out I just didn't feel like I had the time to decipher them so once I noticed the pattern and realized what I needed to do I used the skip function so save me from having to do the donkey work. The negative side of this of course being that each time you do this you lose about 200 points so my final score was about 15 out of 800 or whatever, at times I was actually in minus score as low as -30.

The Exploration is what make the Tex Murphy games shine through for me as you can click on practically anything in any given room and Tex always puts his own humorous spin on things. It's quite a long game too spanning 6 disc's which isn't uncommon for an FMV game but this doesn't use the FMVs as often as some so it allows for a lot more gameplay. Yes before you run a mile this is an FMV game but its actually one of the few good ones that is worth playing.

I really enjoyed the story of Pandora Directive, if you've ever played a Tex Murphy game before you will be familiar with the setup, Tex gets a new case, seems small but soon snowballs into a global conspiracy that threatens life as we know it. In this case its all about the alien landing in Roswell and other popular conspiracy theories, I wont go into it too much as It's pointless spoiling it for people who haven't played it yet but there are a fair few twists and turns along the way that caught me off guard at least. Anyway, I'm assuming most of you wont have played this game and its now for sale on GoG I Believe, so you should really go try it out.

I thought things could only get better... And they did!

Well, after a particularly underwhelming play-through of Sherlock Holmes & The Case of the Silver Earring I was very much in the mood for some more of the great detective so I dived right in and started Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened [Remastered Edition] and I have to say after just completing it tonight, I was very impressed. Now before I go on I should mention that I'm a bit of a fan of H.P. Lovecraft's works so instantly for me there is an improvement over the pretty boring story of the silver earring as this game is all about uncovering and stopping a Cthulhu worshipping cult. The whole supernatural element is handle excellently for a Holmes game as throughout the game there is never anything explicitly supernatural happening. We never actually see anything that couldn't possibly happen in real life and anything strange that does happened could be passed off as coincidental (such as the tidal wave, the snakes in the corpse). So anyone who thinks they would be put off by these supernatural elements need not worry, its all good old fashioned sleuthing here. :-)

Now as I mentioned I played the remastered version of the game which I'm lead to believe includes a few minor graphical improvements and the ability to play in 3rd person perspective which, as a person who much prefers 3rd person adventures has to admit isn't that great, the game is infinitely better played in its intended 1st person view. This allows for much smoother controls and for a more absorbing experience, not to mention the 3rd person seems glaringly tacked on anyway. This game addresses a lot of my complaints about the previous game starting with the games interactivity, where as the last game had very few hotspots and not a lot of interesting dialogue this one is all about checking your surroundings speaking with people and just seems a lot more fun and less like a casual hidden item adventure game. The inclusion of the close up examination with the magnifying glass and tape-measure is really quite fun too.

If you remember my other gripe with Silver Earring was Holmes himself seemed very unlikeble and kinda aloof at times. He never seemed puzzled and always acted as though he was simply going through the motions for the benefit of the other characters. In The Awakened we really get the feeling of Holmes learning as we are (well OK, maybe he's a bit sharper than us but come on he is Sherlock Holmes!) and we are able to see him get excited as he solves a riddle or frustrated as he cant find a valuable clue. This really gives him some character which is also aided by his much improved interactions with Watson although I would still have like to see a bit more optional dialogue with Watson as he is by your side through most of the game with nothing but stoic phrases to say ("What do you make of this, Holmes?").

I think all in all It was a fun games to play and despite is flaws it really managed to suck me in and keep me playing till the end which a lot of games seem to fail these days. I think I'm all Sleuthed out for now though and might leave the next two games for a while so I can play something a bit different. I'm on a play-through of Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive which I may finish... Who knows guess we'll just have to see.

Sherlock Holmes & The Case of the Silver Earring

Well, here we go with a pretty disappointing first post. Sherlock Holmes & The Case of the Silver Earring, the second game in the Frogware series of Holmes games (don't even get me started on the first one ::Shudder::) I actually was trying to justify not talking about this game as a first post but as I just literally completed it last night its still pretty fresh in my mind so might as-well get it over with. Lets just say that i was less than impressed with this game particularly after my recent run through of the old EA Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes games which are both excellent games (will defiantly have to talk about them in more detail at some point) I was in a mood for a spot of detective work.

Now the first thing I noticed when I started the game was that Holmes is even more condescending and arrogant than ever before if that is even possible, not that this is necessarily a bad thing but I would have liked to see a bit more of the straight talking yet strangely charismatic and likeable Holmes I have grown used to in the other games rather than wanting to punch him in the face for blatantly flaunting his superiority over poor Watson.

The second and much more important thing I noticed was the distinct lack of hotspots (basically the things in an adventure game that you click on to examine or interact with)This is Sherlock Holmes for gods sake you should be able to examine anything and find something notable to say. Instead this game seems to go for a more minimalistic approach and has precisely zero hotspots other than the ones you absolutely have to interact with to progress through the game. Now I'm pretty forgiving with adventures when it comes to pixel hunting, I find it all part of the experience but the problem here is this is pixel hunting at its very worst. Apart from the few hotspots you need to find there is literally nothing else to click on so it doesn't feel at all rewarding mindlessly scrolling the curser across the screen hoping to find something to click on.

The last thing worth mentioning is that after each section there is a small quiz section in which you have to answer a few question yes/no and give justification using what clues you have gathered. Now this is a pretty nice idea and fits in with the Holmes style of play but to be honest I couldn't be bothered trawling through the pages of dialogue and letters I had amassed trying to find out whether "The killer could have used the side door". Not to mention the fact that In the end you most likely still have no idea what's going on at all but at faced with a 10 minute cut scene (it felt that long anyway) in which Holmes explains what all the clues meant and who the real killer is. Its quite interesting seeing how it all fit together but as I said I had no idea what was going on until Holmes laid it out for me so I didn't really feel like I'd achieved anything.

Although I didn't really enjoy this game its a million times better than the abomination that is Sherlock Holmes & the Mystery of the Mummy so at least Frogware seem to be going in the right direction and I am actually quite looking forward to playing the next instalments of the series. So until next time people... ;)

Introduction

Hello, Craig here. I’ve got myself a collection many, many games from Snes to Xbox 360 to Dos. This blog is going to be a place for me to try to work my way through them and hopefully posting some of my views of the games I’m playing and if its a game I’m re-playing saying why I find it so special.