[ozzie]

I have to say that I enjoyed this review very much.
It has been 9 years since I played this game obsessively. It came with a computer games magazine which I got to my, ehm, tenth birthday, from another friend?
I can recollect that I played this game through this night. Also, I played it often with a good friend.
I loved this urban atmosphere. It was so lonesome, but you could also meet many lively places and talk to dozens of characters.

Since I'm german I played a version without such dreadful voice acting. It wasn't wonderful either, but okay. But I didn't think that the music was so great. Okay, it was better later on, but in the first part of the town it sounded like taken out of a cheap porn...

I must have played the original version. I can't remember a medieval dungeon. Oh and the inventory was at the top of the screen, like it stood in your manual!

It seems like they made the game even worse instead of better. It's hard to imagine why they didn't fix the gameplay for this edition. It shouldn't have been too hard (delete unnecessary items, remove dead ends, give hints what the characters actually want).
I think it could have been a somewhat entertaining game, then. Still not a classic, probably, because some dialog wasn't that great I think.
It must have been hard to mess up the gameplay in this dimension. Maybe it was the intension!?

Oh, and could you give more specific details about this mediaval dungeon thing? Sounds very interesting, and weird...

[Orange Brat]

Given the game takes place in the same period as the one I'm working on, I'm going to check this out. Could someone provide a few examples of the translation. Perhaps, there was heavy use of "tough guy" 30s/40s and/or Noir style jargon and the reviewer mistook this for bad dialogue? Or, perhaps it is just a bad translation. Think of the heavy use of metaphor and unusual phrasing in the MaX Payne games, and you'll know what I mean by Noir style disalogue/monologue. That's not something the writer of those games thought was just cool...there are plenty of Noir films where people speak like this throughout the entire movie. The recent Neo Noir (and set in modern times) Brick is a good example of a film where characters speak in a very unusual and not realistic way (it's not supposed to be realistic), althouigh the unusual speech is much more modern; thus of the times).

Not every Noir or gangster film (from the Golden AGe of the genre(s).....1930s to late 1950s) featured this highly stylized speaking style, but there are a lot of examples of it and its implementation varies greatly as does the quantity (from every once in a while to heavy duty....Dark Corner with Lucille Ball is a good heavy duty example and there's no better example of classic usage than the Coen Bros. Noir homage The Man Who Wasn't There).

[AFGNCAAP]

Very entertaining review and I agreed with almost every point made. I disagree about the plot, which I didn't find, even at its core, to "hold together in a functional manner", but maybe I just don't remember it well enough.

Spoiler:

For example, didn't the bad guy's identity make letting Jack out of jail look extremely stupid in retrospect?

Originally Posted by ozzie

Oh, and could you give more specific details about this mediaval dungeon thing? Sounds very interesting, and weird...

http://www.adventuregamers.com/forum...ad.php?t=18009

Originally Posted by Orange Brat

Given the game takes place in the same period as the one I'm working on, I'm going to check this out. Could someone provide a few examples of the translation. Perhaps, there was heavy use of "tough guy" 30s/40s and/or Noir style jargon and the reviewer mistook this for bad dialogue? Or, perhaps it is just a bad translation. Think of the heavy use of metaphor and unusual phrasing in the MaX Payne games, and you'll know what I mean by Noir style disalogue/monologue. That's not something the writer of those games thought was just cool...there are plenty of Noir films where people speak like this throughout the entire movie. The recent Neo Noir (and set in modern times) Brick is a good example of a film where characters speak in a very unusual and not realistic way (it's not supposed to be realistic), althouigh the unusual speech is much more modern; thus of the times).

I've played the Polish-language version so I don't know how the English translation was, but the problems with the dialogue were far beyond bad translation. You're right in guessing that the developers tried to emulate the "tough guy"/Noir way of speaking, and in that I admit they were moderately successful. But the atrocious design and scripting of the conversations undermines all that. As the review says, Jack can be aggresive for no reason towards complete strangers or make "wisecracks" which have nothing to do with what he replies to. The dialogue trees often start as if in the middle of the conversation or are about completely random topics. It's not about the writing of individual lines, but about (lack of) flow and (lack of) context.

[stuboy]

^^^ This answers those questions pretty fully.