Inside Mac Games Volume 6 #3

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Text File | 1998-06-12 | 15KB | 230 lines

¬†¬† ¬† ¬† ¬† ¬† ¬† by Bill Jahnel Broderbund/Presto Studios/Red Orb Entertainmant, $39. Rquirements 80MHz PowerPC or better, 16 MB RAM, System 7.5 or later, 4x CD-ROM. Contact Broderbund at http://www.legacyoftime.com. Journeyman Project 3: The Legacy of Time is a winner. Much like the Third Installment of the Legend of Kyrandia, Journeyman 3 deals with the concept of the redemption of villains from earlier titles. We finally now understand more fully why Elliot Sinclair, the father of time travel, went crazy and tried to assassinate the Cyrollan alien ambassador in the first title, and Agent 3, Michelle Visard, shows the possibility of becoming a "good girl" (and who knows, maybe love interest?) for hero Gage Blackwell. However, none of this would be even remotely interesting without a rock- solid plot line and puzzles that integrate beautifully with the title. Jour- neyman 3 is quite frankly one of the best titles to come out of the gate for the Mac in a long time. Our story begins with the apparent shutting town of our beloved Temporal Security Agency. Of course, the timing for such a move could never be worse, for just as Gage is left in charge to oversee the shutdown process, an unknown alien race comes in and threatens to effectively wipe the walls with the human and Cyrollan Alliance. Just in time for this crisis, Agent 3 conveniently creates a temporal disturbance to leak information to our hero. She has discovered something so serious in the past that if she is willing to turn herself in to the TSA in order to show what has happened. This opening sequence, where we as Agent 5 visit three destroyed "fabled" civilizations (Atlantis, El Dorado, and Shangri-La) actually is a trainer for the interface cleverly posing as part of the game. Once back from these baby steps into the past, we are launched into a much more complex plot that forces us to use a new prototype "Chameleon Suit" to revisit each of these doomed cities the day before their destruction; there, we must rescue from them the three components of an alien artifact that may hold they key to Earth‚Äôs salvation. The Legacy of Time succeeds beautifully in making players feel immersed in an environment. Part of this comes from a Quicktime-VR type of tech- nology that allows the player to spin around, up, and down to examine their surroundings. The game is not as technically advanced in 3-D modeling as Under a Killing Moon; for example, you are not able to look under tables or chairs, or move through the environment to handle objects as if they had a three dimensional presence in the environment. You step to a location, can spin through a sphere of looking at things, then make a step to the next hotspot. What delivers this technology, however, is the fine and beautiful detail of the surroundings. Each environment has not only been beautifully rendered but it has a real sense of continuity; Atlantis does look and feel like its theoretical Minoan cultural roots, El Dorado feels very Meso- American, Shangri-La has the flavor of a Himalayan monastery. ¬† The use of the plot device of the chameleon suit triggers many of the puzzles naturally throughout the plot. The concept is that in order to appear more natural in your surroundings, you are able to capture the images of natives and then appear as any of those natives in holographic shrouding. Thus disguised, you may find yourself suddenly being involved in a family concern, a palace intrigue, or on the path to Enlightenment. Part of the fun is the discovery of the stories behind the characters you are impersonating while you search through the environment, and attempting to discern which guise will trigger the most useful response in your journey through each of the three main environments. Moving through the environment in Journeyman 3 is relatively simple, although make sure to actually read the manual on the use of shortcuts. I disregarded the zoom-like ability of holding down my mouse button when I saw a double arrow for the longest time. I could have shaved about half an hour off my playing time had I been paying attention. The save game is graceful, allowing you to save at any moment and the saves retain a picture of the environment where you saved. Another surprise was that the FMV (full-motion video) actors really did blend into their environments pretty well, and there were almost no hints of ghosting, auras, or other artifacts of perspective problems that often happen when you blue screen in actors into rendered environments. The plot construction serves a useful purpose as well. Most of the plot is typically linear as most titles of this type tend to have to be in order to maintain a stronger story line. The construction of three separate time zones whose quests mostly do not overlap conveniently allows the player three environments to choose from and explore so the sense of being bound or stuck in one place is somewhat lessened. However, to be perfectly honest, it would be very hard to get stuck in this game. Arthur, your artificial intelligence, has multilayered hints available for your use, and with the exception of flat-out missing that there was an object to interact with or pick up, it is unlikely you will ever be too terribly stuck for long in Journeyman 3. Another nice touch is that some of the quests do force you to hit the other time zones to get objects; however, these objects are all in early parts of the other time zones and as a result can be accessed pretty easily. What it does mean is that you are forced to jump a little and get a taste of each time zone relatively early in the game, again trying to make the player feel less like cattle being driven to an inevitable conclusion. Despite the ringing endorsement, and Journeyman 3 deserves all the praise it gets, there are some things that deserve note as needing a little polish. I mentioned above that flipping zones can give a person a feel as if they are not trapped into one unalterable path, but truth be told, Journeyman 3 is a story with only one ending. You either complete the game or you fail to complete the game, but the conclusion is foregone. This is not necessarily a bad thing. There are few opportunities in the game where anything you do or say will make it impossible to finish a quest and have to start over. There was only one salient time where there might have even been a poss- ibility for screwing up your mission, but I avoided it, so I do not know if the alternative answer would have caused a temporal boo-boo. There are absolutely no places that I found that lead to the death of your character. Again, none of these is bad in and of itself, but the sense of tension that the story line could have played out differently or that your actions were less scripted never really bears weight on the player‚Äôs actions. ¬† More of critical importance is of some of the FMV actors. Here I really mean the word critical not as the adjective form (as in "to be crucial") but in the verb ("deserving some form of criticism.") Our hero has the right hero face, in that he has "the chin" (for some reason I kept thinking he reminded me a lot of Power Pete.) But he also lisps through a quarter of his lines, for heaven‚Äôs sake. Your AI pal Arthur, who keeps a running dialogue with you during the game, always seems to evoke strong reactions from people. This strong reaction ranges from really liking him to feeling like his interaction will make you have a forcible bowel movement. I did not find him as unpleasant as some of my friends did, but even though the game allows you to silence Arthur, his presence and clues in the game ARE important and really are integral to the game‚Äôs functioning. ¬† This in no way means that all of the FMV actors are bad, but almost all of the "main characters" really seem to be passable actors at best. The more convincing people tend to be some of the more minor roles you discover in the past. The boatman and olive oil vendor in Atlantis, many of the monks and the head of the monastery in Shangri-La, and most of the inhabitants of El Dorado, especially the young boy and the Shaman, are noteworthy for really seeming to be who they claim to be. The only real embarrassments from the past were not rally the actors but the occasional odd bit of dialogue scripted for them and one particularly hideous costume choice. For ex- ample, if you have a friend of someone coming to a family farm, wouldn‚Äôt you think it odd if they suddenly grilled you on what you grow on the mountain (after all, it isn‚Äôt like they haven‚Äôt been here before and lived here all of their lives?) Worse yet, the designers gave the captured Egyptian boatman a dead mop for a hairpiece that has was about as his- orically convincing as the ones worn by that great thespian William Shatner. Even these complaints above may seem off from someone who started this article with calling Journeyman 3 "one of the best titles to come out of the gate for the Mac in a long time." This doesn‚Äôt mean that everything else has been so crappy this is the best only in a field of losers, but that the game had so much going for it that its smaller flaws feel more grating by comparison. Red Orb spent a tremendous amount of time on look and feel of the environments, on creating plausible histories and myths for each of the civilizations available. With this sort of investment, the small things tend to grate because you feel like so much else was so good in the title that these little things should have been taken care of. Journeyman 3 will give you probably nine to fifteen hours of solid, entertaining play. I can‚Äôt claim that most of the puzzles are particularly complex, but they are so extremely APPROPRIATE in that they integrate into the game‚Äôs story much better than most inventory / adventure games manage. Journeyman 3 is a good title at $50, and a real steal at $35, a price at which it may be found if you hunt hard enough. If you‚Äôve been missing old-style adventure games, Journeyman 3 is your ticket to past glory by way of a really solid, classy interface and slick storyline. ¬†