Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon

I remember first playing this game when I was still in elementary school. It was my first Tex Murphy game (the friend who introduced me to it mentioned others, such as Martian Memorandum; he also introduced me to the likes of 7th Guest, Phantasmagoria, and King's Quest VI). Even as a young kid, I found this game extremely enthralling and charming. It's still a pretty singular experience, even if it's dated, and I've been trying to find a copy ever since I sold my old one back during middle school. If you haven't played this game, but you wouldn't mind enjoying an adventure game with off-color humor and a bit of pulp parody, give this one a whirl.

I have been looking for a game like this for a long time. I first played "Mean Streets," and then I fell in love with Tex Murphy. I quickly bought this game to complete my collection. This game has lots of things to see and do outside of the central story, which gives it more replayability than some adventure games of the era. All locations and rooms are represented in an explorable 3D environment, where it is VERY IMPORTANT TO PAY ATTENTION TO DETAIL. If you miss getting objects in some of the rooms, you will get very stuck later in the game. The cutscences and interragations are all shown in FMV movie format, and most of the acting is pretty descent. The game has got famous actors and actresses like James Earl Jones and Margot Kidder. Instead of reading and selecting a specific response to the people you talk to, you pick one of three "attitudes" with which you can respond. This makes it harder to know exactly what to say and do, so I suggest that you save before talking to somebody. The game has a hint system that you can use based on the points you accumulate during gameplay. You get points for getting important objects, solving puzzles, and for doing and seeing extra parts of the game that have nothing to do with beating the game. Each time you use a hint, you lose some points. I only used the hint system once during the game, and I got a final score of 970 on my first run through. Overall, this is a pretty good game that will probably keep you entertained for several hours during your first play through, and will probably become a game you will play again later.

As I've mentioned before, most FMV games where just utter garbage. You had phantasmagoria 2, Who shot johny rock, etc, which all where just gimick games trying to cash in on the FMV craze of the 90's. However, you would sometimes find a game where you could actually say, "I enjoy the acting in this one as well as the gameplay". Killing moon is one of these games that just pulls it off. It has great FMV acting, the gameplay is just grand, and the whole story line really puts you in the mood for a good mystery. Of course when I played this, you had to keep switching the discs and THAT was the only thing that really bugged me about Under a Killing Moon. Now however, you have no worries about disc swapping, so enjoy this game and be ready for a classic Detective style mystery. A hint for anyone knew to this type of game is to always have with you a pen and paper to jot down notes as you'll come across some portions of the game where you'll need to go back and read important clues to solve certain portions of the game.

Wonderful. Great Game. Good Story. Moonraker type plot. Tex is an everyman 007. Fun and great actors. Brian Keith, Russell Means, Margot Kidder and what better voice of God than James Earl Jones?

Excellent, fun, wonderful adventure game. A must have if you like FMV games!