Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror

So after the first game I needed to play the sequel taking place roughly six months after the last game with an upcoming Total Eclipse of the Sun. So playing the intro it looked awfully familiar and then it hits me. I played this game as a kid when my family switched game consoles with our neighbor, we borrowed theirs Playstation 1 and they borrowed our N64. One of the game was this one. I didn't play much of it since right at the beginning it throws two things I didn't like as a kid, a rather big venomous spider and a timed event of the spider and a fire burning stressing me out. So I didn't get further than the very first screen before quiting. Nothing like that this time. And I believe that the timed event didn't exist, it gave you enough time walking around after dealing with the spider that the house would have burnt down twice. I don't know if it was due to me having a cold, but I found this game to be so damn funny at times. The mama's boy general that tries to impress Nico by putting on some softcore movie in the background and then his dictator mother shows up (no really, she is the dictator of the small south american country your in. Also the retconning that was a rather nice touch. In the original you had Inspector Moue who worked for chief Rosso that after a trip to Syria is told to you as being dead. Without telling you how. Apparently the story writers couldn't think of anything good about that so they made him go into hiding, presumably when he found out that Rosso was one of the Neo-Templars.

The story this time around is that Nico is looking into this South American drug smuggling ring, but she gets her hand on an ancient Mayan artifact instead. You decide to investigate by going to this professor in Mayan history and there Nico is promptly kidnapped so it's up to you to rescue her... after you rescued yourself that is. All this leads on a quest against time to collect three magic stones so that you can keep an ancient Mayan god of destruction trapped in the Smoking Mirror so that he wont end the world during the eclipse. This is also a better plot than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Another thing is that when i think back, damn, there dies people to the left and right in this series and in rather gruesome ways as well. In the first game this Indianan Jones look-alike dies of dehydration and starvation locked in a cave, people are blown up, thrown of trains and hit by cars and in this several gets shot, one Mayan Indian gets disintegrated, someone falls to their deaths and the bad guy gets stabbed by the evil god he tried to summon before you send him back into the Smoking Mirror and then the ending picture rest on the god looking out of the mirror as it wants to say "just you wait" (this game was released 15 years before the Mayan calender ended in 2012 so it could have tied in to that mythology).

Sunrise has gone, freezing up the fires.

Sunrise has gone numbing our desires.

                                      Total Eclipse by Iron Maiden

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars

So being on an Adventure game spree at the moment I just had to check out Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars and boy, I wasn't disappointed. First thing is that the game looks like an animated movie and feels like an Indiana Jones movie or the Tintin comic books (both also being referenced within the game). It begins in Paris, your avatar George Stobbart sits outside a cafe minding your own business, when an old man enters the cafe and after him a clown follows. The clown snatches the old mans briefcase, leaves his accordion while he runs away and the cafe blows up, killing the old man and throwing you into a murder mystery that will take you across Europe and the Middle East, looking for this assassin clown and avoiding conspirators while searching for the treasures of the templars. It sounds awfully familiar for some reason, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

It's a really good story and the graphics are fantastic... for the most time. I don't know why, but many games that used a more animated style in their games (like KQ 7 and LSL 7) had some problems with the character movements in close ups as it isn't very fluid, compared to say, Don Bluths Dragon's Lair. Then again, the price for making the games would be rather steep if that was the case. The voice acting for the most time works fine. Small nitpicking is that this game at times falls into the pixel hunt trap. Your stuck and begins searching the whole screen for any change in the pointer to indicate an important item or such. And George Stobbart isn't the brightest among amateur investigators. First of he shows the picture of the would be clown assassin to everyone and at every important mentions that this is a murderer. No surprise he got Georges name when he catches up with you in Syria. And if that wasn't enough, at a castle in Ireland there is this mean goat in the middle of the courtyard that head buts you if you try to enter an archeological dig or get past the goat. The thing is if Stobbart just could bother to walk over the sand bags that laid there he wouldn't have to make this timed puzzle where the goat knocks you down near the dig and you reacts by moving a discarded plow on the other side of the court-yard to trap the goat. At this moment Stobbart decides to sprint (also while reading up on the series I noticed the goat puzzle got its own wikipedia page, some of the complaints are not true I must say, especially the timed puzzle one, since there was several moments where you had to wait the right moment to do something to progress, waiting for the gendarme at the museum which I suppose came afterwards, picking up the towel from the drunkards elbow when he lift his hand for a drink and grab the wire at the Irish pub and so on).

Really, the worst moment was near the end. The treasure is located in Scotland so you and Nico (a french photographer that helped you across the adventure) take a train. In the same compartment is an old woman that seems to read a book, coincidentally written by an archeologist you searched earlier for and when you look closer the woman has the same build as the killer clown. And doesn't the voice sound a bit masculine? And the old lady doesn't have a senior citizen card? Nope, nothing suspicious at all and George decide to go to the loo without Nico. He figures out something was wrong anyway... that the conductor was another killer he had a run in with. Geez. And he survived 5 games with this clearly faulty observational skills?