[ATMachine]

I just finished a playthrough on my 3DO machine and here are some random comments:

-Voices and videos do indeed occur throughout the game. By my count there was only one line out of several thousand which was not voiced and video'd, and that probably due to a bug or to accidental lack of a recording.

-Dr. Watson's voice is much more mesmerizing than in Rose Tattoo.

-The text dialogue is not programmed to sync with the video. This means that, with dialogue that is over four lines long (as only 4 lines can fit on the bottom of the screen at once), just the first four lines show up while the video is playing. When the video clip ends, the rest of the text shows up, and stays on for a long time before removing itself, while the character's sprite comically flaps its mouth. Probably the most serious flaw in the port, and pretty much unsolvable without cutting up the videos mid-sentence.

-Most of the video actors match up quite well to their stylized sprites. The clothes and faces are often uncanny matches, considering the 2-year gap in production. (Inspector Gregson is a notable exception.)

-The actors seem to be a mix of real British talent and Americans putting on British accents. It works quite well though, as there's not really any bad acting. Certainly the dialogue displays a good balance of regional accents, which serves to keep it entertaining.

-You have to press a button on the controller to toggle between moving the cursor around the gameplay area (or "room") and selecting verbs or inventory objects. While this would be highly inconvenient on a PC, it works well with a 3DO gamepad.

-Sherlock Holmes has some long mutton chops. In Rose Tattoo they've disappeared, which is a good thing as there Holmes looks much more like he does in the work of the original illustrator, Sidney Paget, who never showed long sideburns on the great detective.

-As I noted earlier, the Journal is missing entirely, the dialogue font is blurrier than on the PC, and the original PC voices used in certain cutscenes have been rerecorded with the new actors.

-If you really want you can turn the voices off. But why would you want to?

-The Map screen actually uses the 320x240 pixels available on the 3DO, as opposed to the 320x200 resolution carried over from the PC everywhere else in the port.

-In the PC version, text windows scroll up from the bottom of the screen, rather quickly. But in the 3DO version they fold up, as a 3D object, in something similar to how, say, a car's hood opens.