Martian Memorandum is hardly one of the stand-out games of the era, although that’s mostly attributed to the terrible interface and low production values. The writing is overwrought, but not in a good way, and seems like it was done by a high schooler who had just read The Maltese Falcon and thought it was the most amazing thing ever. Some of the characters you interrogate are pretty silly, like the blond trophy wife who’s very clearly a hairy dude in drag. The comedy of the later games still isn’t quite apparent, apart from some of the ridiculous death scenes, which combine digitized actors with cartoon violence. Some of them have strange growths sticking out of them, while others just look like animals. Post apocalyptic San Francisco is an interesting place to set a mystery, especially when you stick in all of the mutants. Not all of the characters are voiced, though, and once you pass the initial series of responses, the rest of the interrogation is all text based.ĭespite all of its issues, at least Access managed to flesh out the setting. Of course, the acting and dialogue is awful, but that’s to be expected. There’s quite a bit more of it here, making it notable for a disk based game from 1991. Most of the characters speak through digitized video and speech, using the same RealSound technology as Mean Streets. If you screw up and they kick you out, no biggie – just re-enter the area and they’ll act as if nothing happened. Nearly everyone you meet is hostile at first, requiring that you navigate a series of multiple choice responses to get them to cooperate. Interrogating people still plays a large role, which has been a bit streamlined. The puzzles aren’t terribly difficult, other than a few annoying trial-and-error segments, and a maze set in a series of air ducts. There are tons of items that are maybe a pixel or two in size, making it easy to pass over them, but at least a built-in Hint function will advise you of all of the objects in the room and how to interact with them. Thankfully, there’s a quick “Travel” button that lets you teleport to most of the major locations. In order to go from room to room, you need to select the “Go To” command and then point at the exit. The only sounds for most of the game are Tex’s loud footsteps, since there’s no music. Tex is hard to control, since there’s no pathfinding, and he can only walk, slowly, in straight lines. The interface is now largely mouse driven but it’s remarkably clunky. The graphics, while 256 color VGA, are remarkably ugly, especially Tex’s murky digitized sprite. It was definitely the right move, because it’s a much more focused game, but it still feels pretty amateurish when compared to LucasArts or Sierra games. Dick novella called We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.Īll of the flight sim and action portions from Mean Streets have thankfully been cut out, leaving the developers to focus on the core adventure aspects. If some of this sounds familiar, you’d be right – a lot of it seems very reminiscent of the film Total Recall, which in turn was based off a Phillip K. Only by traveling to the red planet and investigating its seedy underground can Tex not only recover Alexis, but save Mars as well. Tex eventually discovers that Alexis has knowledge of a mystical object called The Oracle Stone, which is somehow related to a long lost Martian civilization. Alexander is the head of a company called Terraform, which is in the business of colonizing Mars. This time, he’s employed by Marshall Alexander, a billionaire mogul, to find his daughter Alexis. I never got past the main menu.A few years after the events of Mean Streets, Tex is once again contracted to find a missing person. Runs good, fast and with sound, but it require normal 2x scaler, and still it is very unstableĮmulation is way too slow to run this game. It either exits with Error Loading Data or appears to lock-up depending the type of race you choose. Runnable but not playable (0.74) ( 04:38)Ĭannnot get past the main menu and vehicle select screen. Some of the graphics and sounds refuse to load from the hard drive, thus the need for a cdrom also. Test Drive Off Road 1997 needs both a cdrom mount and a HD mount. Totally playable, just change cycles to fixed 399000
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