The year is 2033. Your name is Tex Murphy, Private Investigator in San Francisco. You've been hired by the beautiful daughter of a university professor to uncover the facts about his death. Beginning your investigation you uncover the deaths of several prominent members of the scientific community. Are these deaths coincidental or is there something more sinister going on?
And when you'll end this case, you will have a chance to try yourself in the next one, this time on... Mars!
Experience an Interactive Mystery with Tex.
Pack includes Mean Streets and Martians Memorandum.
Minimum system requirements: Windows XP or Windows Vista, 1 GHz Processor (1.4 GHz recommended), 256MB RAM (512 recommended), 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended), Mouse, Keyboard.
This bundle includes the first and second Tex Murphy adventures. Mean Streets is a flight simulator, an action game and a classic adventure game all at once. It is definitely dated, but still retains a lot of charm. It's recommended for fans to see how it all started and how many elements from the best games of the series were already there, but casual players should be aware that... full review the story was later retold in "Tex Murphy: Overseer" in a more accessible fashion.
Martian Memorandum, the follow-up, thankfully lacks the shooting and flying sections and feels more focused. It looks very similar to other adventure games created by Access at that time (Countdown), with a mixture of digitized pictures and computer graphics. Like Mean Streets, it's worth noting that this game includes real speech when you talk to some characters. Very impressive for a game that came on floppy disks!
MM is an old-fashioned adventure game and includes staples of the genre like pixel-hunting and combining objects, but it also uses questioning as a way to progress through the adventure, allowing you to see the story unfolding as you interrogate different characters.
The best was yet to come, with the excellent FMV games that came a few years later, but Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum are still very good games that can hold their own. If you like classic point-and-click adventures, this compilation is a must-have!
I came across Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum about 6 or 7 years ago as a budding teenager in a CD compilation of some Access Software classics called "Private Eye Mysteries". It came with Mean Streets, Martian Memorandum, Countdown and Crime Wave, all classic games. Mean Streets is where we first encounter future adventure game icon Tex Murphy, a down-on-his-luck... full review private investigator from a futuristic San Francisco who's itching for a case.
He got more than he bargained for. A dead man and a blonde. Tex must look into the apparent suicide of Dr. Carl Linsky, a scientist involved with a secret project. He was seen jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge and the police are determined to stick it as a suicide. But after poking around, Tex sees what they're selling and he ain't buying. So it's up to him to uncover the real truth and to save the world.
Mean Streets was pretty groundbreaking for its time. It's split into three phases. The first phase you'll encounter is close to that of a flight simulator, where you have to guide Tex's hovercar to the proper destination. You can also get some leads by calling your secretary or your helpful informant (Lee Chin, I believe her name was..) which will lead you to more locations to land and look at.
Depending on where you go, you may or may not encounter the next phase and that is the shooting phase. You must go from one side of a scene to another, alive. There's baddies rushing you with guns and you got a limited amount of ammunition. Good luck! But if you succeed (or don't have to engage in combat at all), you'll reach an all too familiar phase. The adventure phase, where you ask questions, examine and grab objects, solve puzzles, and bypass obstacles. Sound was accomplished through a technology known as RealSound, which'd rear its head in other games. Basically, RealSound made close to realistic sounds and music through that scratchy 4.77 MHz PC speaker. Graphics depended on what mode you set. There's 16-color EGA, CGA, Hercules and I believe Monochrome as well.
Martian Memorandum on the other hand, is a bit easier on the eyes and the ears. So in Mean Streets, you saved the world and got the girl. Well, unfortunately for you, the girl ran off on you and..yep...you guessed it, the rent's due and you need a case. Well my friend, consider yourself lucky because the tycoon of a Martian terraforming corporation wants you to find out where his daughter ran off to. Jackpot! That is, until he winds up dead. Time to take a vacation to Mars, where you'll be on the trail of his daughter and the priceless artifact she possesses that a madman is burning to get. And if he gets ahold of it, the Red Planet is doomed, and the Blue one may be next. Martian Memorandum is a point and click adventure. No flight sim phases, no fighting scenes except for what you have to do to accomplish an objective, but there's still the good old adventure game formula of poking around, moving objects, conquering obstacles and talking to people.
Speaking of which...if you have the likes of a Sound Blaster, you'll get digitized speech, though unfortunately its not for every instance like in later Tex games like Under a Killing Moon, but it does a good job. All in all, I strongly suggest that you take a walk down Lombard Street (and Memory Lane) and pick up Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum from GOG. It's cheaper than what I paid for from that CD compilation (5.99 compared to close to $12 is always good). Now go on, grab your trenchcoat and pay the rent!
If there's one person you can count on, it might not be Tex Murphy, but he'll certainly try.
The original games in this package, while not the masterpieces later games would be, still include all of that fantastic Tex Murphy flavor. Explore, interrogate, gunfight, or even fly. It's Tex's world, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
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