Playing Games

Of the computer variety, I mean.

I spent most of last weekend and spare time I can find at night playing a new Adventure game. I’ve become addicted to it and have shamefully neglected everything else to continue playing it.

Mostly I do not have the time or inclination to play computer games, other than card games and such, but I occasionally can’t resist buying a new Adventure game. It has been several years since I last bought, let alone played a long and involved computer game. This was Dream Fall – The Longest Journey 2, in June 2006. Though, I must admit that earlier this year, I installed Virtual PC with Windows 98SE loaded into it, onto my computer so I could play the original Longest Journey again, after the game refused to install on Windows XP. The game works extremely well in Virtual PC, but I lost interest in playing the game after a short while, but will probably take it up again sometime or other.

Anyway, last year I was delighted to hear the news that the creators of my all time favourite games, the Tex Murphy series, were developing a new game. It’s not a Tex Murphy game, alas, but a casual, puzzle driven adventure game called Three Cards To Midnight, which promised to have an interesting story and be well written and enjoyable to play. It was released for download last Friday at Big Finish Games – the new company of Aaron Connors and Chris Jones who were the creators of the Tex Murphy games when they traded under the name Access Software.

So I paid my $20.00 and downloaded Three Cards To Midnight and haven’t regretted it at all. It’s a good game, certainly not up to the sophisticated level of the Tex Murphy games, but I really like the way the plot is slowly being revealed and is building up to a very interesting story. The opening scenes set the picture. A young woman finds herself facing a man whom she has never seen before. He tells her that she has lost her memory and that he will help her to remember. He hands her a pack of Tarot cards and asks her to shuffle and draw the first three cards. The cards represent the keys to open her lost memories, by key word suggestions.

The game is puzzle driven and mostly involves finding objects through word association in rooms opened by the memories triggered by the cards, though at the end of each “chapter” there is a puzzle to solve. I’m now up to chapter three and so far it has been easy going. My only beef is that it is impossible to save the game when in the word association section of the game, so if you use up your tries, you have to start from the beginning of that section again.

Despite this irritation, I’m only too pleased to support Big Finish Games in the hope that they will get around to developing a new Tex Murphy game.

The Tex Murphy game Under A Killing Moon, was one the first games I played on my first PC way back in 1994. It totally captivated me and I subsequently bought and played The Pandora Directive and Tex Murphy Overseer. I haven’t played them for years so I really must try them out in Virtual PC as they certainly can’t be played in Windows XP.

Excuse me now…I’m going back to play Three Cards To Midnight…