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Review
Martin
Mystère: Operation Dorian Gray (aka Crime Stories)
Review
by
July 25, 2005 |
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 Italy’s contribution to comics is – without a doubt
- more than considerable with one of their major comic characters
being Martin Mystère. Martin
- or Professor Mystère if you prefer - has been around since 1982 – long
before the similar Gabriel Knight was even a gleam in Jane Jensen’s mind.
He is an investigator of anything unusual or paranormal; UFOs, crop circles,
Atlantis, magic – you name it. If it’s out of the norm, Martin will
be involved and his first computer adventure, Operation Dorian Gray, is right
up his alley!
Martin and his wife Diana
reside in Manhattan along with his friend and helper Java, who
left the City of Diafan Shadows in the Mongolian
mountains of Hangaj to follow Martin on his adventures. Martin’s
newest case begins quite inauspiciously when a telephone call from
Inspector Travis wakes Martin from one of his nightmares.
M.I.T.’s famed professor Eulemberg has been found dead at his
villa and Martin has been asked to investigate. Although on the surface
it appears to be a ‘normal’ murder case, Martin will
soon unveil many dark secrets,
 Martin Mystère:
Operation Dorian Gray (MM) is a classic 3rd
person, point ’n’ click adventure. Martin walks around
with a single left-click of the mouse. His gait is somewhat slow,
and a double-click to run feature would have been welcome. Thankfully,
screens can be skipped by double-clicking on an exit, but that doesn’t
work every time. Right-clicking will shuffle among the 3 available
command cursors, which are: examine, action and talk. The “talk” cursor
is pretty much self-explanatory. The “action” cursor
will perform a certain action on an object – take an item,
operate an item, open a drawer etc. The “examine” cursor
will give a description of an item. And finally - in an era of totally
simplistic adventures, where there is no interaction with anything
rather than the absolutely needed things - MM offers the capability
to examine almost everything, regardless of its usefulness to the
story. At some point you can even take control of Diana and re-examine
everything from her perspective. Lots of brownie points to the game
for that, and hopefully others will follow in those steps! For those
who find it boring to examine everything, maybe they should start
looking into other, faster genres, cause adventures are about exploring
and investigating, not rushing through screens...
The core of MM is its
story. As the storyline progresses and the plot unfolds, Martin
will find himself involved in theories about
life and death, people seeking eternal life and he will even… What?
If you thought I would reveal everything you are mistaken! The only
thing I will say is some things may not be what they seem, and Martin
will find that out the hard way!
 MM is generally a short
and fairly easy game. While it’s not
as short as Return to Mysterious Island and not as easy as Syberia (can there be anything as easy as that?!), experienced adventurers
should not encounter any serious problems and will finish it in a
couple of days. Those who are new to adventures though might find
it a bit challenging. The puzzles are almost in their entirety inventory
based. Some of the solutions are very logical while others will trigger
your imagination – hmm, now how do we open this crate full
of vinyl records?! Overall, I liked them, but above all stands a
certain puzzle that literally blew me away! I can easily say it’s
one of the best puzzles I have encountered in my adventuring life,
and it reminded me a lot of the good old Sierra days – only
this puzzle took things even further! No, it’s not as complex
and deep as “Le Serpent Rouge” in Gabriel Knight
3, nor
is it inhumanly obscure and hard like the spider chair in Myst
IV,
but its conception, the way the clues are given (and how they perfectly
fit together after the puzzle is solved, making you go “Oh
Yeeeaaaah!”) and how it requires thinking outside the box,
made it one of a kind! I humbly bow before the mind that conceived
this puzzle! Hopefully it will not be mentioned or revealed in other
reviews or in posts in forums, cause it would be a shame for anyone
who plays MM to have this puzzle spoiled…
 Unfortunately, MM is
not all roses. I am not familiar with the comic, so I don’t
know about the level of the dialogs, but in the game they are presented
pretty poorly. Some lines feel just thrown-in;
characters seem to repeat themselves using different phrases, or
sometimes they say two different things in one dialog, and it sometimes
feels as though the characters talking are a bunch of 10 year olds.
Also, it seems like almost every sentence, including the descriptions,
is accompanied by “sound effects” like mmh, erm, hmm
etc! Although words like that can make a dialog more colorful and
present emotions of uncertainty, thought etc, when they are overused
like that, they lose their power and become annoying. Imagine talking
to someone in real life that does that all the time! To make things
worse, the English translation of the game is awful, which could
be part of the reason why the dialogs are so weak, and several times
you will find yourself thinking, “What?”. The voiceovers
are of the same level. Speech is only used in dialogs and descriptions
of inventory items, and although some voices, like for example Martin’s,
are pretty good, the majority sound like someone trying too hard
to do impressions, especially the characters that only appear briefly,
like the policeman who is guarding the professor’s bedroom.
A little more care could have been taken in that area.
 There are also some problems
that should have been eliminated during beta testing, and that
were big enough to take away from the full
enjoyment of the game. To start off with, the game had several bugs.
It crashes in two places, thankfully without hindering further progress.
One place is outside an Aztec temple, where there are four “carvings”.
Examining the one at the bottom (see screenshot next to this paragraph)
will make the cursor not reappear and the F1 button (that brings
up the save/load/exit menu) not work, forcing you to end the game
with Ctrl-Alt-Del. Same deal at a place with four boats (see screenshot
in paragraph below). Using the hand (action) cursor on the “destroyed
boat” will have the same result, but this time leaving the
cryptic word “FRASE” on the screen. Both crashes happened
on two different computers – one with an Athlon64 and an ATI
Radeon 9800pro and one with a P4 and an nVidia GeForce2 Ultra, and
both with a lot more RAM than recommended.
 Apart from the crashes,
there were several bugs that had to do with the hotspots. Some
hotspots were mislabeled (like Martin’s
and his neighbor’s houses switching hotspot names), some stayed
there after an item was gone and some had different names according
to the screen angle (e.g. a lemur was called “lemur” under
one angle, and “monkey” under another, while a “boat” and
a “broken boat” were called “crumbling column” and “hieroglyphics” when
viewed from a different angle!). To add insult to injury, some hotspots
were there only under a certain angle, even though the items were
still visible after changing angles. To avoid missing anything you
must find all of the hotspots in a screen before doing anything else.
This angle changing-hotspot disappearing problem only appeared in
two or three rooms, but it could make things confusing, especially
for inexperienced adventurers.
 Also, some of the dialogs/descriptions
were mixed-up. A few times, while playing as Diana, you could hear
Martin’s voice narrating,
while at some point when talking on the phone, the person on the
other side lost the “phone filter” and it was as though
he suddenly started talking while standing next to Martin! Finally,
the game has a couple of items that are red herrings. One of them
is a battery that Diana will get from Martin’s study. This
battery will disappear from the inventory if you load a game, but
don’t worry, since it’s not necessary anyway. All that,
along with horrible translations and spelling errors (where Aztec
is spelled with a “c”, a “k” and a “ck” in
different occasions!), in both the game and the manual, show nothing
but very poor, if any, beta testing – at least for the GMX
Media English version that is the one being reviewed. The game needs
to be beta tested again, properly this time, and re-released, along
with a patch for the people that already have this version. It’s
a pity that such a good adventure has been marred by sloppy beta
testing.
 In the visual department,
MM is simply brilliant. Running at 1024x768, all screens are perfectly
designed, with beautiful colors and high
details. Looking at the backgrounds was really a treat. The characters
are 3D, very nicely designed, casting real time shadows. All cut-scenes
and close-ups are presented in a comic strip-like fashion, which
works pretty good. The music follows in the same high standards,
or maybe even higher. There’s suitable music for every place,
from lounge music in Martin’s house, when he wakes up and is
still in his pajamas, to Latin rhythms when Martin flies to Mexico
and to ominous, foreboding music when things get, well, ominous and
foreboding! Too bad the voiceovers aren’t on the same level.
 After I played the demo
of MM, I was really excited and looking forward to playing the
full game and I did set my expectations a
bit too high. Now that I’ve played the full game, I wouldn’t
say I was disappointed, but my overall impression was not what I
was expecting. I did enjoy playing MM. Beautiful graphics and music,
pretty good puzzles, along with one of the best puzzles ever created,
interaction with almost everything and a good story with unexpected
twists make up for the poor dialogs and the bad voiceovers. Unfortunately,
all the problems that could have been eliminated, had there been
some serious beta testing, prevent total immersion and take away
from the overall image of the game. I hope that the NA version will
have those problems resolved, and that there will be a patch for
the European version – and this review will be revised when
and if that happens. Till then, MM is still a good game, especially
for 3rd person point ‘n’ click lovers who love a mystery,
to whom it will definitely appeal.
The Adventure Company
released the game in North America under the title Crime
Stories, making several major and minor changes. Read
the following article about those changes:
Comparing Crime
Stories to Martin Mystère:
Operation Dorian Gray
Final Grade: B-
(find out more about our
grading system)
System Requirements:
- Win ME/2000/XP
- P3 866 Mhz
- 32 Mb Video Card
- 128 Mb RAM
- 700 Mb Available HD
Space
- 32x CD-Rom
- Compatible Sound Card
- Keyboard & Mouse
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