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?

King's Quest V: Absence Makes The Heart Go Yonder!

The fifth game and the first true modern King's Quest game, with a good interface, decent graphics, good music and a.... good attempt at voice acting. This game is probably the one I got the furthest in and might have been able to finish since I can't recall an instance of copy protection. Being on a CD they might have skipped that for this entry. The reason I didn't finish it as a child was due to not daring to enter the desert after finish everything else I could do. I went into the spooky forest with the attacking witch, but not the desert. Really, some pen and paper and I would have finished that game in no time.

Story is that King Graham is walking about in the woods one day when the evil wizard Mordack appears and conjures his castle and family away. Graham meets the owl Cedric who takes him to this other wizard, Crispin and the adventure is on. Travel  trough, deserts, evil swamps, cross a tall snowy mountain, a dangerous ocean and a dark castle to save your family from Mordack, brother of Mannannan. First real appearance of Josh Mandel as King Graham. Good choice.

King's Quest IV: Perills of Rosella

The fourth game in the series and at the moment the one that really needs a remake. Don't need to be fancy as the AGD Interactive once (although it would be nice with the same care and tying together their vision of the King's Quest sage), but the interface and gameplay need an overhaul. This is the last game that still only works by typing in commands and it is obnoxious. Not only that, but this was the hardest of the original games to get working as a child (now with ScummVM that problem is at least solved) and if you got it working it hit you with the copy protection directly as you started. And not as interesting as the third games magic book was, no no no, here it is page X, paragraph y and word z. Someone save us from this... I want to remind everyone that my manual was in FRENCH.

Story follows directly from the third one, the whole family is reunited and King Graham throws his adventure cap toward them... and suffers a heart attack. The magic mirror calls for Rosella and a magic fairy tell her of a fruit that can heal Graham, but the fairy need help against the evil fairy Loloth and so it's off. All in a days work. If you dwadle to long Graham dies or Ganesta (the good fairy) dies and both means a bad ending for you, either trapped where you are or King Graham dead, unable to save you in the fifth game.

Not much else to say then that the graphics was a step up compared to the original games, but the interface still needed a rework until the glory days of Adventure games.

Jurassic World

So my dad wanted to go and watch this movie so I went with him.The little I seen from the trailers I guessed that it would be like Deep Blue Sea and boy, I was right on target with that prediction. Basically the story is set 20 years after the first Jurassic Park where they were able to open up the park and searched for new attractions by gene manipulating dinosaurs to get a shock value. Of course the latest meanest and most dangerous of them is to smart and manage to escape. Threatening all 21 000 tourists on the island. You also have the side story of InGen (the company behind the gene modified dinos wanting to test them as weapons) and the family thing between the two kids that are visiting their aunt that are one of the chiefs at the facility. 

It was a decent movie that was fun to watch. I really liked all the nods to the original film, like recreated set pieces, the statue of John Hammond, the musical themes that popped up at just the right moment, some lines here and there as well as the only recurring actor from the first movie, the doctor that shows them the lab is the same one that heads the research in this movie. That was pretty neat.  Another thing to mention was when watching is that this movie feels like Aliens toward the original Jurassic Parks Alien. The original had more horror/survival feel to it while this was much more of an action movie, which I quite like. The main guy this time isn't a professor or mathematician, but a security officer which looks buff as hell. Of course it feels rather stupid sometimes with the whole "communicating with the raptors". 

This movie might not beat the original movie, but it blows the other two sequels out of the water. The main hero characters you route for, they are competent and the story is logical enough so that it doesn't break the immersion. In Lost Worlds most of the problems are caused by the heroes which have serious trouble understanding basic animal instincts (I'm thinking of bringing the hurt T-rex kid back into your camp putting all of your lives at risk). We shouldn't speak about III, that one is just plain bad. Really, spoilers, but the big bad dino of this movie escapes by fooling everyone it has escaped at first with claw marks and then being able to camouflage it self and it's body temperature. While they try to find where it went it attacks the workers that checked the cage which stil contained the dino. The fat security guard opens the big gate and runs out and start closing the gate again, but the dino smashes through it this time. Another establishing scene is when the director has had enough, loads his helicopter with a machine gun and flies of to hunt it. It goes well until the dino runs for the place with the flying dinos and scares them into the air and they bring down the helicopter (think the Charlemagne scene from the Last Crusade). Really, at first glance it shows us how smart the dino is while human factor caused the problem (aka the security guard being stupid enough to believe he should open the main gate). Although thinking about it causes some problems. First, how did the guard miss the dino clawing the wall since he sat just there? Even so, how did the dino know it would work? They make a point in the movie that he has been sheltered in that cage all its life so how did it adapt that strategy? The helicopter scene causes the same problem, first how did it know it was there in the first place and secondly, while highly logical response to bring down a flying enemy, how did it know birds or flying would do that? I knew because I saw the Last Crusade, but the dino?

This of course is a matter of suspension of disbelief and it worked until I sat in the car on the way home, but the aviary you could explain by observing birds around its cage. That still leaves us with how it knew where it was. Also, what is it with Jurassic Park and killing of fat guys? The espionage hacker in the original and the dinosaur guy in Lost world (you might count the pudgy good guy as well) No fat guy in the III, but two characters in this one, the security guy and the bad guy security boss. Is it some statement about human evolution and weeding out those not fit in some sort of Social Darwinism commentary? At least the black guy survived in this movie. Still, movies watchable and well spent 2 hours.

King's Quest III:To Heir Is Human redux

Gaze Into My Crystal Ball!

See What Lies Behind the Wall!

The third game in the series and the third remake by AGD Interactive. The strongest point for this game is, beyond graphics, voices and music, that you get rid of the damn copy protection and need the damn manual to play. I had all the first 6 games in a collection box and with the manual, but in FRENCH (and I took German in elementary school). So if you were able to get it running you would run into the problem that you couldn't read the damn manual and thus not complete the game, especially when you had to mix spell ingredients and recite spells precisely as it was written in the book, or else it would fail.

Story wise you start as a slave at the wizard Mannannans household, Gwydion is your name, and every day you try to appease your master and cat's fickle minds. One day when he is away you venture down to town and finds a hidden book telling you of your predecessor. Realizing time is short before you are "switched out" you search the land after ingredients to release you of your shackles and find out who you are... *spoilers* he's Prince Alexander of Daventry, the son of King Graham and Valancie. After some complaints they also toned down their own overarching villain and such, but he still pops up. Bad parts of this game is also present in the original. The time constraints. You have a timer that goes up, and the gist is that you recorded every time Mannnannan was away or slept and planned out the best way to go around the area. I don't handle stress that well, and it also shows how short these kind of games really are, took me less than 2 hours to finish the game. No, the real play time is that you are supposed to play it over and over again as you learn how to avoid getting caught. I actually managed pretty well in the original, I even found the secret study, but since I couldn't make spells, I didn't get anywhere. On the other hand it took me far to long to find the magic map and realizing that your inventory hinted at what was allowed to have by Mannannan or not. Then again, I didn't realize you could hide your stuff under the bed, so I began avoiding the ingredients since they killed me. 

Still, this game was the first in the series, with an actual story and characters, although at release you didn't know why it starred Gwydion in this strange land of Lewdorr, it might have been setting up a new kingdom and such, but must have been real nice for players getting to the end and realizing that it looked awfully familiar and then seeing King Graham once again. Here we even get a tear-dripping power ballad and I love it. One bad thing though is that the voice of Alexander can be... a bit grating. It's not the one from KQ 6 (which would probably have broken their budget). It could also be as they play him more in character of his current situation, as he sounds submissive all the time compared to the self assured Prince Alexander of KQ 6. I don't know, a bit of a turn off for me. Also, first time I played it the voice of Mannannan was a bit irritating as well, but it grew on me, apparently the same guy who is the narrator. Sadly they didn't get the guy who played Mordack in King's Quest V like the other fan remake of King Quest III got, they also got Josh Mandel for some reason.

King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones

End me adoration, before I leave your eyes!

World in the mirror mirror, Water of amnesia comes!

Played the second game in the series and this was also by AGD Interactive, and like last time you can get the game for free on their website. If the first game was a 1:1 remake of the original this was almost an actual new game with King's Quest character retelling the second game. Basically the second game wasn't more than the first game, but with new puzzles and a little more pointed out story, find the girl in the tower and rescue her so she will be your queen. Fairy tale wife-finding 101. This is told to you at the beginning making it a bit easier to know the objective. In the original, if you didn't realize that you should enter the castle and talk to King Edward, you didn't get the story. Talking about story, i checked up on some of the story elements and to my surprise some other people felt that the changes they made to the very miniscule story in game changed the tone of the original creators all too much. At first I was kinda struck with how stupid that was, things just happened in the game and had very limited logic behind it, but then I noticed it sound like me and the lord of the ring movies, so maybe I shouldn't see too much into it. The changes they made was creating an overarching villain and tying in the other KQ games with this one more than the names Graham and Valanice. In  my opinions doing a rather good job.

So King Graham is feeling lonely, wants someone special in his life and the magic mirror he got last time shows him this strange land, Kolyima, and a portal to a strange world with a quartz tower which is inhabited by one of the fairest maidens. So at once he heads of telling his first minister to keep the peace. Meaniwhile the Shadow Cloak society, led by the mysterious Father, conspires to destroy him. Arrive just a day later you set off to find three gems of Nature to open this stone gate that will take you to your love. The journey will take to the depths of the ocean, above the clouds and into the fangs of death itself as true love will triumph. This game also show a much more stronger Graham who actually puts up a fight, even bringing the royal sword with him and with it he will fight were-wolfs and chase of evil wizards. Probably more action-oriented than many would have liked, but to me it felt more coherent that the older games allowed you to kill the monster in your way, and therefore allow it here, plus he is much more younger than in his appearance in the fifth game so it makes a bit more sense. he was a knight after all before ascending the throne. Although they put up some notice that he dislike violence while slaying a couple were-wolves.

Like the other the graphics are vastly improved, many puzzles have been recreated or streamlined, going for a more railroading approach since the story has to make more sense here. Musically I can't remember if they just translated it over from the original, but the music is rather nice and I can't help but like the cheesy love ballad they put in reminiscing of KQ 6.