[JoeX111]

Jack Orlando: The Director's Cut

The realm of the mystery is the perfect avenue for an adventure game. Players assume the role of a person, typically a detective but not necessarily, pulling at a string of strange circumstances, piecing together clues of a greater plot by questioning people and solving puzzles. Some of the greatest adventure games around follow this formula: Tex Murphy. Broken Sword. Gabriel Knight. And now we have Jack Orlando, a down on his luck gumshoe that will never, if I have anything to say about it, be lumped together with the aforementioned three.



Our game begins in a ritzy 1930’s bar, where detective Jack Orlando sits drinking away his night. Prohibition is over and life has not been kind to ol’ Jack, as his recent stint as Man of the Year was horribly taken from him by an incident so tragic that the developers never see fit to show us, probably to shelter our innocent souls. When the bar closes, Jack trudges home in a half drunken stupor, and finds himself witness to a back alley murder along the way. Before he can do anything to stop it, however, Jack is hit in the back of the head and left as a fall guy.

When he comes to, an old woman is screaming frantically for the police, who arrive shortly thereafter to arrest Jack and haul him uptown without even questioning witnesses or looking for annoying things like evidence. The head inspector, an old friend of Orlando’s, gives him forty-eight hours to clear his name, because apparently the police department is too busy to handle things like Crime and Justice. Thus we begin our plodding descent into a seedy, noir world that is more tedious than shocking and laugh out loud funny for all the wrong reasons.

But what makes this game so hilariously funny? Mostly, it is the way it sounds. Seven or eight years ago, the voice acting in this game might have been more acceptable. The push for bigger and better voice treatments in games have grown over the past decade, moving the industry from text only, past the disgruntled voices of the game programmers themselves, into the realm where only true actors need apply. Jack Orlando does not use true actors. Jack Orlando uses the funniest sounding group of misfits to ever crowd around a microphone and spew out such great one-liners as "This thermometer displays a total lack for taste." For a game that came out in 1998 and has since been re-released in 2001, this caliber of voice work is pathetic.

Don’t believe me that it is bad? Jack Orlando himself sounds like a bad impersonation of Moe from The Simpson’s, occasionally even emphasizing random sentences for no real discernable reason. The narrator to the introductory movie sounds as though he is trying to sing and rhyme every other word he reads, making it more akin to some kind of Shakespearean-Noir nightmare. Most of the cops that I assume are trying to sound Irish sound like they are from the Middle East, while other members of the cast sound like your high school football team trying to explain the principles of quantitative physics out of an encyclopedia. The saddest thing is, the best voice acting in this game comes from the characters that just sound bored and uninterested in the material. At least they don’t make us laugh out loud in a sorely depressing fashion. At least then we don’t start crying tears of pity and begin to wonder why on earth this game was even made.



Need more great quotes? Try some of these:

"The entrance to the Kingdom-of-the-raaaaaaaaaaaats."

“Leave off the s@#! and get on the job!”

“What d’you do with the tips?”
“There are some nice bars in town, sir.”

The dialog in this game sounds as though it was written in English, translated then into colloquial Spanish, converted into Latin, and then back into English again. I realize this game was probably ported over from a different language, but there is no reason why someone at least competent in Basic English couldn’t have done a little editing. Typos and misspelled words are a frequent occurrence on the screen whenever the voice actors read off their lines, most of which do not even try to correct the grammar errors. Like this one:

"Did your parents not teach you manners?"

Had enough yet? No! Have more!

"Nice neighborhood you got here.”
"I'm just gettin' some fresh air. No way do I want to talk to someone who's crazy."

To make things even more dreadful, there are several conversations in the game where it is obvious that no matter which dialog choice you use, you will still illicit the same response from the other character. This wouldn’t be quite so bad, except often times the response doesn’t seem to make sense given what you originally said. If you do say the wrong thing in a conversation, you always have the option of talking to the person again. Characters in the game will not remember your previous conversation unless you said the exact right things to them, allowing you to try every conversation choice over and over again until Elvis comes back if you so feel the need.

"Dirty shoes don't go with that nice coat, sir."
"I'll slap your face."
"Why, sir? What did I do?"
"Don't be so fresh, or you'll get it."

Or maybe let's just move on.

Where the voice work fails, the sound effects and music are at least an improvement. All of the effects used in the game, from walking on metal surfaces to the sound of your gun, sound realistic and do not come off like a series of stock sound effects pulled off an audio library. Most of the music tracks used in the game are very well done jazz numbers that slip you easily in the 1930’s noir mood, especially with the main theme that plays during the menu. However, there is the occasional piece that totally does not fit with the rest. My personal favorite has to be the music that plays while you are in, or near, the police station. This is the kind of music you expect to hear in a promotional video about the future expansions of some fortune five hundred pharmaceutical company. If you concentrate really hard, you can almost imagine someone chanting along “Science and Industry! Science and Industry!”

But while the sound is a mixed bag, there is always a mute button for that. What other superficial aspect is there, then? Looks! How does this game look?



It is obvious from the intro movie onward that the main focus of this game, above any and all else, was on making good visuals. Everything in the game has been hand drawn and animated and simply looks fantastic. While lacking some of the polish seen in the first two Broken Sword games and the more recent Curse of Monkey Island, Jack Orlando still manages to look great. In an ever-growing 3D market, hand-drawn games are a rarity and a true pleasure to behold, as their looks will never fade as better and better technology emerges. The environments in the game even feature cars driving past, people walking along on a morning stroll, and birds flapping around in the air. And no matter how many times I went through these scenes, I don’t think I ever saw an instance of repeated animations. However, all is not good and golden in the land of cartoons. While the game looks nice in screenshot mode, the animations themselves have a few kinks worth working out. The speed of different actions in the game seem to speed up and slow down a bit at odd moments, occasionally leading to your character speeding away off the screen like a moment from The Munsters. Other times Jack will slow down and strut around rather than move at a normal pace. The pain and misery that is pixel hunting will also be giving you headaches from the get-go in this little gem, a problem that never really lets up throughout the entire game. Neither of these are huge issues, but you will notice it when they come up.

[JoeX111]

But enough about the aesthetics: how does this beast play? If you've gotten this far and still have hope, you're definitely in for a world of hurt. Puzzles in this game range from decent to absolutely pointless. Let's take one from the very beginning of the game, just to illuminate my point.

Jack's Next Door Neighbor: I need to do some dusting. But I can't find my duster. I can't do my dusting without my duster. Can I borrow yours?

So, you bring her the duster.

Jack's Next Door Neighbor: Do you have a spoon?

So you hand her the spoon you just recently swiped from a jail cell.

Jack's Next Door Neighbor: Thank you.

And off she goes to dust.

Huh?

Why did she need the spoon? Who really knows? I certainly don’t and I have my doubts that anyone else does either. Jack Orlando is a game that will repeatedly block your progress by demanding that you pony up an object simply for the sake of blocking your progress. It is the absolute worst kind of inventory puzzles imaginable, where items are not used logically or even illogically in a logical sense within the illogical world. You need to pick up everything in this game simply because the game demands that you do, whether it makes sense or not. If you have not picked up Item X, the game will not let you pass, or will kill you and force you to restore. To make things even more fun, there are several red herrings sprinkled throughout the game, just to fuel the fire of annoyance. An even worse offense is the fact that the game will not let you examine an item once you have picked it up, offering no hints at all to the player. You can always try clicking the item on Jack, which will result in him saying something asinine like “A guy could do somethin' good with that” in yet another annoying voice that’ll have you searching for the volume control. To be fair, though, a lot of the puzzles are very logically thought out and easy to get around. But it is the frequent moments outside of this that will frustrate and confuse many. Also, as has already been hinted, you can die in the game, so be prepared to save every now and then, as ol’ Jack is almost utterly unable to defend himself in any given situation.



Shall we make things worse? This game is a point and click adventure, meaning that we, as gamers, should expect the pointing and the clicking to function properly. It is one of the simplest forms of game control since Pong utilized the bloody paddle, yet it still has problems here. Want to access the inventory or go to the main menu? You must hit F1, which will take you to the inside of Jack’s coat for a little poke around. Yeah, you heard me. Right Clicking in game will bring up a bullet menu with five different icons to choose from: the default arrow, a magnifying glass for examining, a pick-up command, a fist for roughing someone up, and a gun for shooting once you have obtained it. Talking to people requires that you click them with the default arrow, whereas manipulating objects in the environment sometimes requires that you use either the arrow or the pick-up hand. This seems to be randomized for no apparently reason at all.

What’s so wrong with that, then? Well, first of all, hot spots in the game only show you text to explain who or what they are when you are using a different cursor other than the default pointer, meaning that you will have to switch them often if you are hunting for those elusive items in the environment. The main cursor is made to look fancy and glistens when you move it around the screen, which is also what it is supposed to do over a hotspot, resulting in many moments where sweeping your mouse across the screen leads to a hunt for that secret little area that really isn’t there at all. Most of the icons have a little animation that plays when you are over a hot spot, with the exception of the gun, which does absolutely nothing. The most grievous offense comes from using these hotspots themselves, though. Many of these areas will set off your alert animations in the cursors when you have positioned the mouse in the generally right area on screen, but will not let you actually click until you have found the exact perfect spot. This means that in order to use the car, you have to click all over it until you actually find the specific area the game wants you to use, rather than the whole car itself like almost any other game to date would do. Sam & Max: Hit the Road came out in 1993 and it had more functionality than this.



So when it is all said and done, do the pros outweigh the cons? Absolutely not. Jack Orlando looks great, plays awful, and sounds worse. I really wanted to like this game, being a big fan of detective mysteries in general and 1930’s period pieces in particular. But this game simply fails on too many levels to be worthwhile. The plot is decent, but it is rather standard detective mystery affair, involving mobsters and the military and dames and betrayals and all that good stuff you’ve seen before. If you’ve beaten Tex Murphy or Gabriel Knight, you’ve solved crimes infinitely better written and more interesting than this one. Jack Orlando may have thrived if it had come out around the time of Day of the Tentacle, and I would probably overlook all of its faults if it was a free independent adventure off the internet, but it isn’t and I had to pay two whole dollars for this game. Which sadly enough, is about twenty dollars more than anyone should have to pay to play this. Only the most persistent need apply here.

Joe's Review Score: 4 out of 10.
(Or 2 out of 5 stars)

[samIamsad]

Amen. The soundtrack was composed by Harold Faltermeyer. Axel F!

[Marian]

This is without a doubt the best review of Jack Orlando I have ever read. I have read a couple of others on the internet and it left me wondering if we had even played the same game, as they didn't really make any mention of the many problems I had with it and that you outlined so well in your review. I was very disappointed with this game. Nice work.

[JoeX111]

Thank you very much Marian. I have to agree about the reviews for this game. It boggles my mind as to how many adventure gaming websites promote this game like it is a masterpiece of the genre, when really it has a whole lot of problems.

I guess it is just the Adventure Gaming Bias working both ways, unfortunately.

[Simo Sakari Aaltonen]

I agree on pretty much all the points made in this review. The game looks great and has terrific music, but that's about it. Amazing how many empty locations Jack Orlando has, and how few of the characters make any difference over the course of the game. On the other hand, I did derive some sick and twisted pleasure from just taking the piss out of everyone I came across and then trying to either mug or shoot 'em. Too bad I didn't have much luck with the latter.

The only thing I would disagree with is the quality of the narrator's voice at the beginning of the game. That was one of the very few successful voiceovers in the game. It was meant to sound like a newsreel reader from the 1930s and I think it worked fine.

[LauraMac]

On the other hand, I did derive some sick and twisted pleasure from just taking the piss out of everyone I came across and then trying to either mug or shoot 'em. Too bad I didn't have much luck with the latter.

I liked the voice over at the beginning too. Good review by the way, overall I liked the game. I have two versions even of the game. The Hungarian thanks to an old friend and the re-issued one.

[AFGNCAAP]

Enjoyable, lengthy, review to an enjo... to a lengthy game. Whenever I recall playing Jack Orlando, I understand that many people are justified to hate adventure games. I mean, I would have avoided the genre at all costs were I had one of this kind as my first game.

I agree with all your points, except voiceovers (but only because I've never heard the English ones ) and one really really minor factual error : the revolver does something when over a hotspot - its cylinder turns around (though admittedly this animation is almost invisible; I discovered it maybe halfway through the game).

That doesn't make me feel confident with my purchase. Oh well. At five dollars at a hardware store, who can argue?

[MDMaster]

1£ for me, so I won't complain that much either, I bought much worse stuff.
As an adventure game is quite far from working, the plot never gets off the ground, the characters are uninteresting and Orlando himself is just a gumshoe cliché. Graphics are nice, music is too and voice acting is decent (sorry but I've heard far worse in italian).
All in all it's a decent romp if you're not planning to finish but just to add it to your collection for future memory.
Which I understand is rather useless to some people