The Dagger of Amon Ra, Part 1: Murder and mugging! Oh, New York. :)

[kjorteo]

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davidn did a highly entertaining screenshots-with-commentary play-through of Hugo 2 sometime ago. I decided I should follow it up with a game from my childhood. I find my selection fitting, for several reasons. First, it's by the same company, which should tell you that we're in for a treat.

Comments

[davidn]

This looks to be a very promising playthrough, Farthington J. Doorknobs :D Those two examples are exactly the kinds of names that I expect to see in my new work inbox. Getting through the introduction unscathed is pretty good going - I remember that I really did die in the first two seconds of the game afterwards by attempting to cross the road and being flattened by a passing taxi

[kjorteo]

I remember marveling at that when I heard it, because ... you can (try to) cross the street?? The last time I tried playing this game, I hailed the taxi to go everywhere, including the police station, because I didn't know it was, you know, right across the street.

I might just do that again anyway. It's a question of whether the having to look both ways or the long taxi ride is more insufferable, I guess. Though the latter at least keeps me slightly farther away from harm.

"Taxi!"
"Yes, ma'am?"
"Can you take me to the police station?"
"The ... the one that's right there?"
"Yes, sir."
"So you want me to ... what ... drive around the block and turn around, just so I can pull up in the same spot but against that curb instead of this one?"
"Please."
"... Why?"
"

[lupineangel]

I love these sort of Did Not Do The Research names; they remind me of watching Death Note for the first time, and wondering how anyone thought Raye (with the 'e') Penbar and Quillish Wammy were perfectly normal English names. At least with Death Note, they had the excuse that the writers were from a different culture - with Sierra, they... actually, the same excuse could apply; Sierra's pretty much a culture unto itself. :P

Also, what the hell is up with the Copy Protection Guard's face in the third screenshot? I'm not sure how mimicking the cyberzombie from the start of Space Quest IV is supposed to help us at all.

D.F.

[kjorteo]

Er, sorry about that. If you watch voice-acted CD version, you'll note that the portraits are animated when people are talking (and to a certain extent when they're not, at least as far as blinking and such.) The same is true in the text-box floppy version, too. It's how you know who's talking, since the text boxes don't have any manner of "Crodfoller: Okay, you win" type attribution. So, when gathering the screenshots for this, my choices were either to wait until they were done speaking and get shots where it's impossible to follow who said what, or catch them mid-speech so you at least know who it is, at the cost of catching them in ... rather awkward facial movements.

[crassadon]

[davidn]

Is that "Employee of the Month" sign indicating the skeleton hanging in the corner?!

[kjorteo]

I think it is! As I mentioned before, this game has an extremely schizophrenic presentation where it can't decide whether it's grim or goofy ... this instance of seeing a skeleton is kidding and having a good time, the others won't be (or shouldn't be but they may find a way to slip an inappropriate macabre gallows humor type bit in there somewhere anyway, I don't know.)

[premchaia]

Laura impresses her new employers with her extremely intelligent questions.

It makes sense if you imagine her as just telling him that her father wanted to know, as social talk, rather than as an implicit question in itself, though. The actual content is then that he's still interested and actually remembers Mr. Augustini's office rather than having forgotten all about him.