Posted June 19, 2009
Tex Murphy 1-2 is a set of adventure games that share characters and a setting, but don't bear much resemblance to eachother otherwise. As such, this review will cover both games individually before declaring their value as a package.
STORY 1; (5/5): The story of Mean Streets is pretty simple and straightforward once you know all of it, but it's the process of finding it all out piece by piece that makes the tale interesting. The characters all have unique personalities and are interesting in their own way, and there are many jokes to be had at their expense. The story makes the world worth exploring, which is all an adventure game could ever hope for.
VISUALS 1; (4/5): For 1991, this looks pretty good. It's not pretty, but the thematic backgrounds are all nice and the talking heads are a nice touch even when they don't speak aloud. The only complaint I can realistically make is about the weird colors you see when flying about in your air-car. Why are the bridges purple? What are those funky pyramids? What's that big yellow spot on the ground?
SOUNDS 1; (3/5) For 1991, this is okay. There's a tiny bit of good voice acting, but other than that the sounds are mostly unimpressive. Come to that, there's not very much sound at all.
GAMEPLAY 1; (3/5): The story is good, but the gameplay is not, primarily for three reasons.
1st, there are a number of puzzles in the game that you have to complete within a time limit. It's never fun to be timed in any game, but it's especially bad in adventure games where you reap the most benefit from taking the time to explore everything, not to mention games in which your character's movement speed is comparable to that of a drunken snail.
2nd, the adventure-gaming and interrogation is broken up with side-scrolling shootout minigames. These minigames can be arbitrarily hard even on the lowest difficulty level, and there doesn't seem to be any way to avoid them.
3rd, flying the car is boring. You just float in the air until you reach your destination, and then land. There's nothing to add variety to it except the distance you travel, and the scenery below you isn't pretty enough to be enthralled with. My suggestion is that you just turn on the autopilot and bring a book.
That said, the game is fun when you're actually busy talking to people and tampering with your environment. This is one of the few adventure games I've played which I think can really be considered "free-roaming." The objectives you need to complete for the end of the game can be done in any order you like. Think of it like this; you are sitting at the edge of a spiderweb. Every person you talk to is a link in the web's weave. Because of this setup, the relationships between the different characters effectively allow you to get the same information from at least 2 different sources, always, and that gives you a fair amount of freedom in how to conduct your investigation. The only problem is the lack of money, but that can be resolved by hocking the miscellaneous objects that you "find" while adventuring and by being careful who you spend bribe-money on.
STORY 2; (4/5): The second game's story is about the same as the first in terms of complexity, but since the gameplay is arranged differently it doesn't have as much force. In the first game you can piece together the clues and figure out the truth on your own readily enough, but in the second game you don't discover the whole story until the last minute. Points off for that. There are also fewer quirky characters; more points off.
VISUALS 2; (3/5): Given that this is still an old game, I don't have any real complaints to offer. However, since the gameplay got rearranged, it's not as easy to find hidden objects any more; now you have to play "Hunt the Pixel." This problem is somewhat mitigated by the Help button, but it's still a serious problem that you can't really see your environment all that well.
SOUNDS 2; (4/5): Significant improvements over the first game. There's now some decent midi music for every area you enter, with a nice noir sound to it. There's also more voice acting. For the early '90's, this is great. I'm not giving it a 5, though, because sound effects are still generally negligible.
GAMEPLAY 2; (3/5): The development team took the time to remove the annoying shootout and flying minigames. That's good. Then they streamlined the game's command system and added mouse functionality to make it easier to use. That's good too. Then they designed the game to be almost completely linear, and included a number of different sections of the game where it's possible to screw up the game completely and make it impossible to progress without reloading an old save, and I'm not discussing situations where your character simply dies. That's very very bad.
Quite aside from the fact that the joy of exploring and social networks is now reduced by the smaller number of people and linear gameplay, it's always annoying when you screw up something vital and don't know it. For instance, at the beginning of the game, you run into this secretary character who you MUST take out on a date and who MUST have the time of her life with you, or you can't finish the game. If you fail, the game does not end and you don't recieve any message to the effect that you cannot continue. Plus, the second TM game has added a dialogue-tree system in which you can try to persuade people to talk to you by pursuing different dialogue options. Since there's generally only one "right" path in the dialogue tree (which may or may not include presenting an item at a specific time), you may have to run through the same conversation with someone several times in order to get them to talk to you. That gets old fast.
Mitigating some of these problems is the inclusion of a "help" button which tells you about all the different items in the area you can interact with and gives you hints on how to manipulate them. However, due to previously mentioned visual issues, you may find yourself becoming totally dependent on the help button to progress.
OVERALL VALUE FOR PRICE; (4/5): This is a novel sort of game package, and if you're into mysteries or adventure games I'd certainly recommend it. That said, you should beware of the risks you run when you play these games. Save early, save often, save in multiple slots.
STORY 1; (5/5): The story of Mean Streets is pretty simple and straightforward once you know all of it, but it's the process of finding it all out piece by piece that makes the tale interesting. The characters all have unique personalities and are interesting in their own way, and there are many jokes to be had at their expense. The story makes the world worth exploring, which is all an adventure game could ever hope for.
VISUALS 1; (4/5): For 1991, this looks pretty good. It's not pretty, but the thematic backgrounds are all nice and the talking heads are a nice touch even when they don't speak aloud. The only complaint I can realistically make is about the weird colors you see when flying about in your air-car. Why are the bridges purple? What are those funky pyramids? What's that big yellow spot on the ground?
SOUNDS 1; (3/5) For 1991, this is okay. There's a tiny bit of good voice acting, but other than that the sounds are mostly unimpressive. Come to that, there's not very much sound at all.
GAMEPLAY 1; (3/5): The story is good, but the gameplay is not, primarily for three reasons.
1st, there are a number of puzzles in the game that you have to complete within a time limit. It's never fun to be timed in any game, but it's especially bad in adventure games where you reap the most benefit from taking the time to explore everything, not to mention games in which your character's movement speed is comparable to that of a drunken snail.
2nd, the adventure-gaming and interrogation is broken up with side-scrolling shootout minigames. These minigames can be arbitrarily hard even on the lowest difficulty level, and there doesn't seem to be any way to avoid them.
3rd, flying the car is boring. You just float in the air until you reach your destination, and then land. There's nothing to add variety to it except the distance you travel, and the scenery below you isn't pretty enough to be enthralled with. My suggestion is that you just turn on the autopilot and bring a book.
That said, the game is fun when you're actually busy talking to people and tampering with your environment. This is one of the few adventure games I've played which I think can really be considered "free-roaming." The objectives you need to complete for the end of the game can be done in any order you like. Think of it like this; you are sitting at the edge of a spiderweb. Every person you talk to is a link in the web's weave. Because of this setup, the relationships between the different characters effectively allow you to get the same information from at least 2 different sources, always, and that gives you a fair amount of freedom in how to conduct your investigation. The only problem is the lack of money, but that can be resolved by hocking the miscellaneous objects that you "find" while adventuring and by being careful who you spend bribe-money on.
STORY 2; (4/5): The second game's story is about the same as the first in terms of complexity, but since the gameplay is arranged differently it doesn't have as much force. In the first game you can piece together the clues and figure out the truth on your own readily enough, but in the second game you don't discover the whole story until the last minute. Points off for that. There are also fewer quirky characters; more points off.
VISUALS 2; (3/5): Given that this is still an old game, I don't have any real complaints to offer. However, since the gameplay got rearranged, it's not as easy to find hidden objects any more; now you have to play "Hunt the Pixel." This problem is somewhat mitigated by the Help button, but it's still a serious problem that you can't really see your environment all that well.
SOUNDS 2; (4/5): Significant improvements over the first game. There's now some decent midi music for every area you enter, with a nice noir sound to it. There's also more voice acting. For the early '90's, this is great. I'm not giving it a 5, though, because sound effects are still generally negligible.
GAMEPLAY 2; (3/5): The development team took the time to remove the annoying shootout and flying minigames. That's good. Then they streamlined the game's command system and added mouse functionality to make it easier to use. That's good too. Then they designed the game to be almost completely linear, and included a number of different sections of the game where it's possible to screw up the game completely and make it impossible to progress without reloading an old save, and I'm not discussing situations where your character simply dies. That's very very bad.
Quite aside from the fact that the joy of exploring and social networks is now reduced by the smaller number of people and linear gameplay, it's always annoying when you screw up something vital and don't know it. For instance, at the beginning of the game, you run into this secretary character who you MUST take out on a date and who MUST have the time of her life with you, or you can't finish the game. If you fail, the game does not end and you don't recieve any message to the effect that you cannot continue. Plus, the second TM game has added a dialogue-tree system in which you can try to persuade people to talk to you by pursuing different dialogue options. Since there's generally only one "right" path in the dialogue tree (which may or may not include presenting an item at a specific time), you may have to run through the same conversation with someone several times in order to get them to talk to you. That gets old fast.
Mitigating some of these problems is the inclusion of a "help" button which tells you about all the different items in the area you can interact with and gives you hints on how to manipulate them. However, due to previously mentioned visual issues, you may find yourself becoming totally dependent on the help button to progress.
OVERALL VALUE FOR PRICE; (4/5): This is a novel sort of game package, and if you're into mysteries or adventure games I'd certainly recommend it. That said, you should beware of the risks you run when you play these games. Save early, save often, save in multiple slots.