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Sequel to cult classic Mean Streets, the second of Access' Tex Murphy games
is an interesting point-and-click detective adventure set in 21st century San
Francisco. As with the first game, the highlight is the well-written premise and
interesting characters. You are Tex Murphy, a (cough) handsome PI who is down on his
luck. You are hired by Marshall Alexander, the owner of Terraform Corp. to find his
kidnapped daughter Alexis. You will soon be looking deep into Alexander's past,
dealing with thugs and conmen of all kinds in San Francisco. The case will take you
to the jungle, and eventually to Mars, where Terraform is terraforming the planet.
Here, you will discover what the game's title mean, and why it rests on your puny
shoulders to save the Earth again. It's an unadulterated, 100% pure point-and-click
adventure game with no inscrutable flight sim or action portions in sight. Some
puzzles do require you to solve them within a time limit, but usually it's quite
lenient (once you find WHERE all the items are, of course). The characters you meet,
as in Mean Streets are interesting, and advance the game as they would in a real
murder mystery novel. You can select several approaches in your conversation,
ranging from friendly to threatening, and different characters require different
approaches (as well as cash) to cough up the information you need. In contrast to
most other adventure games, you can get irrevocably stuck if you pick the wrong
approach for a character, who is so upset with you that he/she won't talk to you
again. Other annoyances include extreme pixel-hunting, which requires you to slowly
move the cursor all over the screen to find 1x1 objects, and there is a big MAZE in
this game. |