Broken Sword, the 1996 PC original was a great game back then. It built upon some already solid point-and-click adventure foundations established by the likes of LucasArts and Sierra, and offered a more mature story (and humour) for an increasingly mature gaming audience. It was also the first PC adventure game that I recall that also had adverts for it running in the cinemas here in the UK. I still have my original CD copy, though unfortunately thanks to modern advances in OSes, its 16-bit installer simply will not work on my 64-bit Windows 7 setup. It was also a game I never got to finish - for some reason, my copy of the game had a game-breaking glitch that made it impossible to leave Syria. Thankfully, GOG has thoughtfully included the original game with the somewhat-derided Director's Cut. thankfully, this version also appears to lack this annoying glitch. So, onto the Director's Cut it is then. Rather than running through the plot (and probably spoiling it), I'm going to focus on the technical issues and additions here instead. Chances are, many of you will have already played a version of Broken Sword at some point anyway. The first thing you notice when you start a new game, is a completely new opening scene, one that rather than placing George Stobbart under your control, actually gives you control over Nico Collard instead. the opening scene, part of Nico's somewhat-clumsily integrated backstory is pretty much a sign of what to expect from the Director's Cut edition of the game. In the original game, Nico was pretty much a bit-part character, basically remaining in the background whilst George did all the investigating. To be honest, it worked pretty well, considering that George was intended to be the main character. Here, however, in an attempt to add a little more substance to Nico's character, we are introduced to a series of extra segments which attempt to create a personal backstory for her. Without going giving away any spoilers, they have very little impact on the main story itself, and basically feel superfluous. In fact, scratch that - they had no impact on the story whatsoever (since Nico's side story ends pretty quickly) and feel completely superfluous. It was possible that Nico's side-story was intended to flesh out the game a bit so you got an extra one or two hours worth of gameplay out of it, but the reality of it was that some of the main dialogue in the game had been removed (especially some of the original dialogue at the café shortly after the bombing) to seeming add some pace to the flow of the story. The other problem with introducing these segments was having to change the overall relationship between George and Nico. In the original, they were little more than acquaintances and Nico pretty much kept her personal life to herself. She was also portrayed as a somewhat confident, yet aloof character who kept her secrets to herself. Yet in the Director's Cut, she's much more at ease with George and a lot more open about herself, which just felt odd, and still did not sit well with the main plot, especially the later scenes. Thankfully, the rest of the plot hadn't been tampered with too much. There are other issues. In order to give Nico some additional dialogue for her side-story, a new voice actor was brought in, who seemingly ended up re-voicing the rest of Nico's dialogue too. However, it appears not all of it was used. There are some jarring moments where the voice acting (and audio quality) changes mid-conversation, where the original voice actor can be heard and at a much lower volume level. Likewise, although both Nico's and George's dialogue had largely been re-recorded, the same can not always be said for the secondary characters where the original recordings often remain - fairly scratchy audio and muffled sound in some cases. In other cases, voiced dialogue can often be missing altogether and I found myself relying on subtitles to read the missing bits. Speaking of subtitles, they do not work in cutscenes which is annoying considering at least one cutscene failed to load any accompanying audio during my playthrough. Graphically, the original featured some amazing hand-drawn (and painted) characters and backdrops that looked great in their native 640x480 resolution at the time. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said now on a 1280x1024 display. The high-resolution portraits used for the dialogue segments sit uncomfortably on top of some very ropey-looking low resolution backdrops and characters. Although a blur filter had been used to mask the lack of pixels, surely someone at Revolution still had the original high-resolution masters? This brings me onto a second problem - background animations. The Parisian sewers appear to get some animated water while the Hotel Ubu loses its animated flags. Inconsistency appears to the the order of the day with this Director's Cut. Although some people complained about the puzzles, to be honest I didn't really view them as a bad thing as they broke up the story a bit. The automatically highlighted objects on the other had is something else. This is meant to be a point-and-click adventure game, and part of that involves exploration. Having everything that can be examined or manipulated highlighted in full view ruins that somewhat. As far as this game goes, it's not a travesty. It just feels unfinished in places, and to be honest, when we already had the excellent original, somewhat unnecessary. Some of the changes made to the original story to fit in Nico's awkward side-story feel completely unnecessary - they just feel forced in somehow. The voice acting for the most part is OK, but I did find myself preferring the original voice acting for both George and Nico, but really what lets this version down are the technical inconsistencies - the ropey audio, the broken cutscenes, the missing background animations and the awkward overlaying of high resolution graphics over low-resolution backdrops. The whole experience just feels rushed and by-the-numbers, like a lot of so-called "HD" remakes these days. The overall package still gets four stars however, thanks to the inclusion of the excellent original game.
I was one of those people who came into this game on the back of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. Dreamfall, released back in 2006 managed to combine oldschool point-and-click adventuring with some incredibly pointless fight scenes that were clearly designed to appeal to the XBox crowd, but the story itself was actually immersive, albeit short and more hole-ridden than Swiss cheese. After finishing it in a paltry couple of days on PC I started learning more about its predecessor, The Longest Journey, but couldn't track down a copy anywhere, until I was directed here. The premise didn't really seem that promising at first. You take on the role of April Ryan, an art student with a sense of humour drier than the Sahara desert, who's been experiencing strange nightmares and who quickly finds herself embroiled in a battle between two rival factions across two worlds - Stark (23rd century Earth) and Arcadia (erm... a different Earth with magic and talking birds), as well as finding the ability to "shift" between these two worlds. I'm not going to go much further into the story here because it's something you really need to experience for yourself. Suffice to say, the story is far more involved than Dreamfall's After putting up with Zoe Castillo's emo whinings in Dreamfall, I wasn't really keen on going through that all over again. Thankfully, April's persona is actually likeable and the scriptwriters did a great job here, successfully carrying her emotions through to a level that actually has you sympathising with her, rather than having you simply dismissing her as some spoilt, whiny rich kid, mainly because she's none of those things. Sadly, the other characters you interact with tend to border on the two-dimensional, even her close friends. You don't tend to learn much about them despite all the available dialogue options, and you quickly come to realise that they don't play that big a role in the main story anyway, especially after chapter 4. Where TLJ shines however is with its humour. Some commentators here and elsewhere have said that the game tries too hard to be funny, or that the game is sarcasm overkill. I disagree. The sarcasm is a product of the time - this game was released in 1999, and who wasn't sarcastic back then? While the first characters you meet have a mix of American/South American and British accents, the humour is firmly British, which is intriguing considering that the developers of this game are Norwegian. There are a lot of genuine laugh out loud moments, and I haven't found myself laughing this hard at an adventure game since Monkey Island 2. But then this is a genuine point-and-click adventure game. It's a proper old school game of pixel-hunting and solving puzzles, but this is one area where I do find myself agreeing with some of the other commentators: Some puzzles simply don't make any sense. Case in point: You have a police officer guaring a crashed hovership who's choking on dust. April has, in her possession a can of cola. Now, logic would dictate that you would give that can of cola to the police officer who would drink the stuff and then have the sudden urge run off to the toilet or something leaving the place unguarded, but no. Apparently, the correct approach is to take that can of cola, travel on the subway to the docks, use the paint mixing machine on it to shake it up, run back to the crash scene in record time before the can explodes and THEN offer it to the police officer who promptly soaks himself in the stuff. To quote the Angry Video Game Nerd: WHO WOULD KNOW THAT? Now I've been playing point-and-click adventures for years, right back to Maniac Mansion on Amiga, and even text adventures on hardware probably older than your mother (ever heard of the ZX Spectrum?), but I've never seen logic fail like this before, and I've never had to resort to walkthroughs (heh, try finding a walkthrough in 1987) either, but TLJ had me heading over to GameFAQs out of frustration. The graphics haven't aged particularly well. Whilst the 2D backdrops are gorgeous, the 3D models are ugly. You have to accept that in 1999, accelerated 3D graphics were still in their infancy, but I sort of wished that the developers had gone with full 2D graphics instead in this case. 3D graphics, especially low-poly ones never age well. Whilst April's character model is quite detailed, the other characters are not, being very low poly and badly-textured which is a shame. The supporting cast may have actually had more depth to them had they had been 2D hand-drawn sprites instead. On a related note, Dreamfall suffered from stiff character animation, especially during dialogue scenes where aside from facial movements, the characters bodies weren't animated at all. Here, with TLJ it's at the other end of the extreme, with a lot of uncordinated arm and hand movement during spoken sequences. Soundwise, there's not a lot to say here. The music's good and sets the atmosphere well, but there are a lot of annoying popping sounds everywhere, thanks to the archaic encoding of early MP3s that modern soundcards don't seem to like. Dialogue is well-spoken for the most part, but volume levels vary wildly with some dialogue being quiet whilst other parts being disproportionately loud. The Longest Journey is a game that deserves to be played, however. If you like old school point-and-click adventure games, you'll feel right at home here. If you've already played Dreamfall but never played TLJ before, then you should do so as it does a good job of filling in the backstory that Dreamfall ignored for the console generation. For the price of a couple of beers and a dodgy kebab, you really can't go wrong.
