At last, finally, I have dug a hole into my time and can play the game we've all been waiting for from the great Jane Jensen: Gray Matter. Didn't know how much I'd missed her stuff! First though, the technical preliminaries.
Task Number One: getting the game to run at all.
I just managed to get all three of the Gabriel Knight games to run on my newly acquired vintage IBM Thinkpad running Win98SE, yet am having trouble running this brand new one on my Dad's Vista machine. It's supposed to run on XP, but it won't "initialize" in my Virtual PC (first time I've seen that problem and I don't know what to do about it). So, the Vista machine it is.
It does run, but this PC has the bare minimum requirements for the game. This is one power-hungry adventure. Main character Sam does everything so slowly it's like she's underwater. Also, Sam is a street magician, and her magic tricks are an essential part of the gameplay. I had trouble with them because I couldn't turn the page in the magic book, a necessary step. Went to a WT just for that and learned that perhaps I was leaving out a step (one not mentioned in the manual), but I also turned off some Vista stuff to free up more RAM. Whichever one worked, finally I'm able to just barely get through that magic book. (Update: it was the RAM, not leaving out a step. I've done plenty of tricks since without that step, and the pages turn, but with difficulty.)
So, all those frustrations aside, I'm now used to the glacial pace and am enjoying the game. So far the puzzles--except for those first magic tricks--aren't terribly tough. Actually the magic isn't all that difficult, you just have to get used to the procedures for doing the tricks. You can see all the hot spots in each scene by hitting the space bar, although I'm not sure that's good adventuring! Great for beginners though. The voice acting is quite good, although Sam could step it up just a notch. David is terrific so far, except that his voice sounds far too old for his avatar, who appears to be in his 30s.
But there's a good in-game tutorial, which is necessary because the controls are a bit more complicated than I'd like, although once you get used to them they're fine. The graphics are excellent, although I'm not sure I really like the comic-book cutscenes. Oddly, The Lost Crown's grayscale looks more realistic than these nicely rendered full-color pastel drawings.
My first impression of the game is that it seems to throw a bit of homage to Gabriel Knight 1: The Sins of the Fathers, from waaaay back in 1993. It has that comic book style, the character's talking heads appear in a dialogue box on the bottom of the screen, and the main character (Samantha, so far) has the same kind of rebelliousness as old Gabriel. No midi music though. Jensen's husband Robert Hughes did the music and as always, it's excellent. Other similarities to the GK games are playing two characters, a rogue and a scholarly type, and a point system. So, although this is a new game, it's a bit nostalgic for me.
At any rate, I've finished Day One and appear to have gathered in most of the points available. Think I'll do a bit more tonight.
On Tuesday, I may just drop into Best Buy and pick up a couple of gigs of RAM. Dad's 'puter needs it anyway, and I suspect it'll make the game run much better. Meanwhile, I'll slog on. Good thing adventures are slow games!
But golly, it feels good to play a new, top-of-the-line adventure again!
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