![]() The FMV sequences, on the other hand, fit only in the context of their time. It feels kind of wonky - if you’re examining, you can’t move, and if you’re moving, you can’t examine - but the system is nonetheless ahead of its time. I’ll get into the FMV stuff later, but the 3D exploration is actually kind of interesting, even today.īasically, you can walk around the entire gameworld as if it were an FPS, which is something even modern adventure games rarely do (at the moment, the only one I can think of is Penumbra). Where the first two games involved 2D graphics, the last three combine fully 3D exploration and full-motion video. The last three, Under a Killing Moon, Pandora Detective, and Overseer, are the more frequently (and fondly) remembered amongst adventure game fans. It’s deceptively easy to essentially “lose” the game by angering a character to the point where they refuse to divulge clues vital to your progression in the game.īut that’s just the first two games. Whether intentionally or not, you can talk a witness into a corner from which they will never recover, and you’ll frequently not realize you did it. Martian Memorandum makes this easier on the player - Tex remembers the main clues of a case - but retains the “dead end” possibilities that existed in Mean Streets. It’s actually sort of cool that a game forces the player to truly play the part of the detective: most “detective” games (a la Blade Runner) remember too many facts for the player, essentially turning the game into a prolonged interactive movie. In Mean Streets, Tex never makes a note of anything he sees or hears - it’s up to the player to remember all the clues and make sense of them. The first two games are difficult, in an old-school kind of way. The first two games in the series, Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum, are typical point-and-click fare, with the occasional use of live actors. Detailing the plots of the individual games would more or less spoil them, but suffice it to say that they manage to inegrate archetypical film noir aspects with adventure-game humor and Blade Runner-esque sci-fi. In other words, a standard film noir plot. Thanks to Tex’s location in San Francisco, many of the characters in his neighborhood recur throughout the series.Įach case Tex gets usually involves a murder or a disappearance (something interesting, but altogether typical for film noir) that soon devolves into something far more complex and sinister than it would at first appear. ![]() ![]() Tex operates his own private detective agency out of his room in the Ritz Hotel, across the street from a mutated newspaper stand owner whom he happens to be in love with. His inner monologues are typically clever, humorous affairs as he congratulates himself on his admittedly sharp observational skills. Tex is your average hard-boiled detective: he’s generally honest, but he drinks a bit too much, he has back problems, and he’s constantly down on his luck. The protagonist of all four games, Tex Murphy, is one of the few citizens born without any genetic defects. The skies are red with radiation, and the San Franciscan populace consists largely of radiated mutants. That franchise is Tex Murphy, and these are his games.Īll four games in the Tex Murphy series (technically five, but the final game, Overseer, is just a fully 3D remake of the first one, Mean Streets) take place sometime in the 21st century, in Post-WWIII San Francisco. But there is one adventure franchise which consistently used FMV, and still managed not to suck one franchise that combined film noir, comedy, and dystopian sci-fi into five difficult, entertaining titles. ![]() Unless, of course, the game uses full motion video.įMV is usually synonymous with “crap,” as games like A Fork in the Tale and The Daedalus Encounter prove. Whether text-based or VGA, gamers have little to no trouble fondly remembering great old adventure games. These games are looked upon so favorably in the collective game unconscious because, in a way, they are timeless: their stories and puzzles are great, and their graphical or technological shortcomings often work in their favor. King’s Quest, Sam and Max, Zork, etcetera. In the pantheon of classic adventure game series, certain franchises come to mind.
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