Quote:
Originally Posted by inm8#2
The guy playing Jorge Valdez should have been nominated for the equivalent of a gaming Oscar.
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A Razzie award would be more like it.
(Spoilers for the Nexus lab, though not the big reveals.)
I enjoyed visiting Greg Call's lab. Answers aplenty! But I'll keep those for a later post. First, a few random comments. One thing that really struck me about the lab was how chock-full of Easter eggs it was: the Links LS mug, Intel merging with Frito to corner the chip market, Bill Gates's grandson, the guy facing 13
and a half counts of manslaughter (do we even want to know more about that?), the label on the Kamikaze implant warning that it has "only been tested on desperate college students seeking spending money"... and of course a cameo by writer and co-designer Aaron Conners as Greg Call. There are little jokes and Easter eggs everywhere in the game, but the concentration was particularly high here.
I had horrible memories of the "maze". But this time I just got it right in a couple of minutes, without running out of time or power. In my previous playthroughs, I tried to work out the way before going in, and ended up getting confused and running out of time. This time, I just dived in and moved at random until I stumbled upon the implant. I guess that "When in doubt, just move at random as fast as you can" should be my new motto!
Cracking Greg Call's password has always been one of my favourite puzzles in the game. It's not particularly difficult, or even clever, but I'm a sucker for coded messages.
Another thing that struck me is the final step in the long uncheesification of mutants in the Tex Murphy games. Contrast Larry Hammond in Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum:
with his new look in Overseer:
There's a lot of make-up, obviously, but it's not ridiculous; that last shot of him as he leaves the lab actually has a certain flair. Likewise, Greg Call looks like someone who could be in the X-Men movies and, despite all the bad acting, Jorge Valdez looks pretty snazzy, pustules and all.
That was really a strong trend in the evolution of the Tex Murphy games. In the first two games, the idea of having mutants was mostly an excuse to do all sorts of crazy, ridiculous stuff:
Under a Killing Moon mostly followed in the same vein. But as the games started taking themselves more seriously, it feels like the silly-looking mutants couldn't be accommodated anymore: it's one thing to have humour in your story, but reducing some of your key characters to complete jokes is probably not a good idea. And so The Pandora Directive has almost no mutants, and, in Overseer where they were an integral part of the story, they went through a complete make-over to appear weird and possibly disturbing, but not so ridiculous that one look would prevent you from taking those characters seriously.
Possibly this is also a reflection of the evolution of the general taste of our culture. We still have tonnes of, say, super-hero movies, but their looks have had to be completely re-invented, because the spandex suits of the 70s, and all the associated visual and narrative style, seem so cheesy to us now that we wouldn't even be able to take those stories and characters seriously. It's possible that the evolution of the looks of the mutants in the Tex Murphy games also reflects that evolution in taste.
