Secret Files: Tunguska
 

What did you think of Secret Files: Tunguska? How long did it take you to finish it? Without walkthroughs that is. Did you find it difficult, short or long?

I have finished it about a year ago and I found it to be hard and quite long. It took me 3 long years to finish it, without any help, not even hints.

Tunguska is one of my favourite titles. I've given it 4 stars. It took me a few days, maybe two weeks at maximum - to finnish. I found parts of it quite hard or far-fetched but not too difficult anyway. It's rather long game for today's standards. In any case, definitely not too short.

I think the game had a long list of positive notes: Lovely graphics (one of the best, i've seen), userfriendly interface, technically solid, quite lengthy and some good dialoque.

As for the cons-sectcion: Bland atmosphere, copycat-story and mean and rude characters. Also there were some issues with animations, that I thought might have been made better.

I never managed to get into them. Production values are high, garphics are good... but the story and characters were bland and boring, just not my kind of thing. There are many better adventure games around.

I have this game on the DS.

If I remember correctly, it took me about two weeks to finish it. Maybe about 12 hours of actual playtime? By comparison a bit more than Puritas Cordis, but a lot less than Lost Horizon (which is one of the longest I've played since Grim Fandango).

Tunguska had great production values. Cutscenes looked great on the DS, and the overall visuals were very detailed compared to most other DS-titles (and yes, I know it's a port).

Puzzles were good, but a bit uneven. Some puzzles were really fleshed out - the fixing of a flat bike tire was pure genius (the only thing missing was me not getting my own hands dirty on that one :)) - while some others were so easy that a caveman could solve them...

Same thing with the story and the characters. While none of it is really bad, it's also not that good either. It's all a bit bland, making for a good, but definitely not great, game.

And I think the same can be said about the sequel Puritas Cordis, too: great visuals, good production, mediocre story and characters.
Although it's kinda hard for me to compare the visuals between the two, because I have the PC-version of Puritas Cordis, and there's a big difference in screen size with the DS... :D

All in all, good game, but in need of improvement (and better writing). But hey, at least Tunguska got me interested enough to check out Puritas Cordis, so that ain't bad at all...

The Secret File games are some of the nicest looking and best presented out there and is the sort of AG I like most - where you jet-set all over the world to beautiful places! Unfortunately the first and second game are both damaged by atrocious voice acting. There is a wooden "reading off paper" feel to the voice acting that means even Max and Nina have no real chemistry. That was the major flaw as otherwise I have no complaints with either Secret Files game and look forward to the third.

I'm currently working on the first Secret Files game, but haven't really taken to it yet. An awkward English translation and a truly annoying voice actress for Nina are making it difficult for me to connect with or care about the characters so far. Puzzles, at least in the early going, are a mixed bag, and rather goofy for a game with a real world setting.

Spoiler:

I mean, taping a cell phone to a cat to record a conversation? Really? And why shouldn't I be able to simply lift the lid off of the fish tank and take the key?

Though I'm just getting to the globetrotting portion of the game; here's hoping things get better after the early areas.

There will be a few idiotic puzzles later as well. I'm sure you won't have any problem recognizing them. :crazy:

I played Tunguska in German and the voiceacting was better than the English version, but imo the game is mediocre or worse. Bad writing, uninteresting story, boring or idiotic puzzles. I wasn't interested in the sequel.

I don't understand this voice-acting issue...? Didn't bother me one bit... but then... my motherlanguage is not english, so what the heck do I know...

I played the sequel, Puritas Cordis and it began well and looked as if it were going to be a really good game with a serious theme. Then Nina showed up and from there on it got more and more ridiculous. Max was unbelievably juvenile and every time that nitwit archaeologist opened her mouth I wanted to stuff something in it. You didn't miss a thing by skipping the sequel. Sounds like I didn't miss a thing by skipping Secret Files.

I agree with MoonBird. I also had no major problems with the translation but voice acting was indeed mediocre. I am sure the German version was better, but I don't speak German unfortunately. I played Broken Sword 2.5 which is a German game in German with English subtitles and then played it a bit with English voices. The English voices sucked bad. German voices were great.

Yeah, but i'm still glad they did include the english acting for BS 2.5 even if it was pretty bad. I like playing the games so that I can hear and read at the same time. Don't ask me where has that come from, I don't know... would be interesting to know am I the only one doing this?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that english is not my motherlanguage. I mean, when I hear it, I easily hear it incorrectly. And on the other hand plain text does not bring any intonations along

@MoonBird

I have the same problem when hearing English. I hear incorrect just like you. And it isn't getting any better in time :frown: Most of the time I just read and listen to the character's expression. Also, I never buy games that don't support subtitles. I am currently playing Half-Life 2 (first time playthrough), which has some beautiful voice acting, along with Paradise which also has great voice acting. For some reason I tend to mishear a lot more words in Half-Life 2 than in Paradise. Good thing they both have subtitles.

Once I saw a Finnish social movie. I loved the sound of the language and the movie was great. Very civilized. I was always wondering, how does the average Finnish feel about Russian and Swedish people? What other languages is the Finnish language related to?

Well, this goes a bit off topic (i'm sure you'll excuse, since you started this thread and you asked this for yourself.) Now, I don't want to genreralize the thoughtworld of finnish people, because like where ever in the world, one nation does not mean one opinion. Also it depends greatly in which part of the country you live. But within the (quite) safe borders I dare to say that with Swedish we have a strong Love-Hate relationship. Russinans we mostly ignore or threat coldly because of World War 2 history. Finland has been part of both countries during its past, and we gained independence from Russia during the last waves of 1:st world war, in the year 1917.

Swedish aristrocrats despised the finnish people in the 1700's and 1800's, and thought they were in the lower cast, and it can still be seen today in the Swedish minority citizens. For example the Ahvenanmaa region and the Turku's archipelago are almost entirely Swedish parts of our country (Turku itself though, is quite straightly Finnish place). Ahvenanmaa's only official language is Swedish, even if it's part of Finland (and they hate you quite openly if you dare to go demand customer service in Finnish there!) And the Swedish is also the second official language in the whole country, even though less than 5% of citizens speak it as a fist language. (And that is against EU's recommendations)

As for the Finnish, we define it to be "Finnish-Ugric" language. It's very far from either Russian or Swedish. It's much more close to Estonian. We even have quite amount of same words, or at least close enough to understand them. It's like a strong dialect of Finnish :)

@MoonBird

I see. Very interesting. Greece also is full of neighboring enemies. Such as: Turkey (mainly), Albania, and FYROM. Everybody wants a part of our soil and it has been like this throughout Greek history.

The English also did some horrible crimes in Greece (e.g. Cyprus and Greek civil war after 1945). Winston Churchill, apart from being an alcoholic, was very selfish as a leader, conservative and very sly. He wanted to completely dominate Greece. Well, actually he didn't quite make it in the end. The Germans wanted the same thing with their Kings. They still hate Greece (as seen in their magazines) because of our great resistance during WW2.

The list goes on and on, but also there are some friends such as the French, the Russians, the Serbs, Bulgarians really like us and we like them. Some of our traditional dances also exist in Bulgaria (as part of their tradition). Of course, during the Balkan wars (1st and 2nd) we fought together with the Serbs against the Bulgarians but that's too old history now. We should forget this part of History.

It looks like Finland, as well, as a small nation had to deal with many fascists and domineering - big nations and this means we have a lot in common :)

It is very interesting that you can understand the Ugric language. Does your language have more vowels or consonants? Ours has a lot more vowels because it is a Mediterranean language.

I'd like to learn Spanish and Japanese because they are both languages with a lot of vowels, especially Japanese are full of vowels. I took some Spanish lessons but they changed the teaching methods from when I was a child learning English, and I couldn't really adapt to the new style of learning.

I have decided to learn Spanish by studying language learning books on my own. That will suit my needs better. Haven't bought them yet though (I don't have a lot of money right now).

That's it for now, take care.

I played both on my Dsi and enjoyed them. The bad is the plots are right off Broken Sword. The good was graphics and I thought some of Nina's comments to be quite humorous.

The third game is supposed to address the recycled plot problem and present a fresh storyline. We'll see when it gets released.

I did also play them on the PC as well and the voice acting was OK, not great but simply average for an adventure game in my opinion.

That's not true. The reason we hate Greece is because you're bringing down our economy and making us pay your debts :)

The result is the same. You are still haters and that's what matters. Besides, I know your thoughts behind your words so what you say is not the truth.

I want to see this thread back on topic about the game. If you have any further political discussions, you can take it to PM. I can already see this discussion is going to a bad place so it ends here.

@Melanie68

OK, will do.

Since we are now on topic - here's my opinion on Secret Files:

I played both on my Dsi and enjoyed them. The bad is the plots are right off Broken Sword. The good was graphics and I thought some of Nina's comments to be quite humorous.

The third game is supposed to address the recycled plot problem and present a fresh storyline. We'll see when it gets released.

I did also play them on the PC as well and the voice acting was OK, not great but simply average for an adventure game in my opinion.

So - I played both Dsi and PC versions, loved the humor but found the stories to be complete copies of Broken Sword. SF3 should fix this.