I got this for a discount and remember with fondness all the version of Oregon Trail from the text based versions on an Apple II on up to the last version that I had was a Win3.1 version with Adlib music and more history. This version, you don't select your starting type: which was banker, farmer, or carpenter. Each one of those choices lead to different prices to start out with and different ending scores. Instead here you get your choice of Adventurer, Farmer, Missonary. Oh and they present you with 4 choices and all of them could be the same background with no way to reset it unless you back out and try the RNG again. There appears to be no net difference between the backgrounds except for some mini-game skills that these backgrounds bring to the game. With the fun of not knowing what these extra skills are worth until you bring them. Oh you have a female missionary, guess what she is your best hunter out of all three of the adventurers you brought. Want to know who is the best person to fix your wagon? That banker you were forced to chose out of 4 choices starting out. Some of these choices and the skill selections make no sense. They added things like click for animals along the trail for extra experience points. I guess its to stay under the edutainment side, but really feels like an attempt to pad this game out. The starting out you can select wagon size, and then have a mini-game of trying to pack things away in the wagon. For anyone who has played Diablo, the wagon inventory looks like Diablo inventory. A bunch of boxes for stuff and things like a wagon wheel may take up a 2x4 set up boxes while a harmonica will take up a 1x1 box. They do offer up starting out kits, but interestingly enough none of the kits include spare parts for the wagon like the OG made you make a choice of supplies. This is a waste of money, ahistorical junk.
I want to enjoy this game. It looks like everything that I want to get from a JRPG. Yet, the cut scenes, OMG the cut scenes are a PITA. They are long, annoying and cause my most modern laptop with a dedicated graphics card to crash like a lead zepplien. I am sorry, but this is a major faux pas in my book now a days for any game. If it crashes and I have to suffer through the 5-6 minute cut scenes including the intro video over and over and over again without an option to hit a button to skip. Well sorry, but you don't be installed on my computer again. Even worse though is that I heard plenty of good things about the whole series and this one game makes me leary of trying it out even one. Oh and localization, all the voices overs for me are in French???? The on screen text is in English, but is it really localized if the voices are one language and the written text is another. Last complaint is about trying to get my controls to work. It seems that the game doesn't like any of my mice. From a nice old wired version to the bluetooth enabled one. So trying to figure out the controls on a fly with no options in the game to change them says that this is not a game worth my time and I am sorry I spent money on it.
I used to have this for both my old PCjr and my C64. It was my all time favorite party game with some friends. So I saw this pop up and thought it would be awesome to pick up for my kids and I to play. Except, the keyboard controls suck, the graphics aren't anything like I remember with either the C64 or PCjr. Any modern joystick seem to not to bind with the right controls, remembering this was built for the old simple one button joysticks. Even looking up controls on the internet to see if I could figure something out lead to no joy. The included manual in this release tells you nothing and makes reference to a quick reference card for all key commands, which I haven't found. That said, the game use to bring me really awesome joy, this version I was hoping would be awesome, but it is just lacking and sad that we can't have a way to get the right keyboard or joystick bindings or displays to work to make it look decent.
I played this over the weekend after I bought it. I beat it in one marathon session playing in one night, in about 5 hours. I was able to pull off what I assume is the "bad" ending and the "good" ending in the game. However, the story in the game hand walks you thru the whole decision making process and short of a few ambiguous choices during each of the "chapters" in this story; there isn't much of a challenge and seems very similar to how other police procedural games (such as the classic Police Quest games). In that you have to get X items of evidence to open up Y items of new clues. At worst this game is like some of the older and harder Infocom games or like Dragon's Lair, where you have to play thru multiple times or restart a number of times to get some of the clues right to progress thru the game. The concept is interesting and the idea is supposed to challenge you about what a security state looks like using modern data collection tools. However, the weak execution of it and the two run-thrus I did from end to end in the 5 hours that I played the game doesn't make you think. There just isn't an "ethical" way to make some choices, and in some of the other choices you are presented with a lose-lose situation that doesn't really seem to advance themes behind the game at all. My biggest annoying feature of the game that others have already mentioned, is that investigator you interface with. Oh and the other second most annoying feature is when you have to parse phone and text conversations for clues. The data is recorded in real time and it takes so slow for the data to come in. Therefore, you spend forever (and I mean forever) waiting on the screen to roll. JRPG games have had faster text scrolling than this thing. Overall, it was interesting to start with, but I would wait till its for sale under USD$10 before buying it if you are interested in this.
