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[Appreciation] Tex Murphy Adventures (NSF56K)
endlosnull
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
ITT We talk about how awesome the Tex Murphy adventure games for the PC were. Also to inform about an often overlooked adventure series that is as good as Monkey Island and old school Police Quest. I remembered how great this series was after looking at Hotel Dusk: Room 215 for the DS.
Tex Murphy
"All I've ever needed was a soft felt fedora, a well tailored overcoat and a comfy pair of sneakers. Some people know what they like and they stay with it."
"Ah Sylvia, my ex-wife. Whenever I think things can't get any worse I think about her and how she totally screwed up my life. She's a woman who loves a man, any man, any time. I'll never forget the day I came home early and caught her with the upholstery man."
A hard-boiled PI with sharp sarcastic wit and a knack for getting bludgeoned in the head. He has no genetic defects from radiation, which makes him a "Norm" among a large population of mutants.
Trivia: Tex Murphy was performed by Chris Jones, the designer of the games.
When: Post Apocalyptic 21st Century, after WWIII
Where: Under the red, radiated sky on the mean streets of San Francisco
Mean Streets (1989)
"They're in my head! They're in my head!"
Self-proclaimed first interactive movie, this game chronicled the first adventure with Tex Murphy. Mean Streets is a part side-scroller, part flight simulator, part traditional adventure game. Mean Streets is also notable to be the first PC game to use full voice acting as dialogue.
Synopsis:
Dr. Carl Linsky has jumped to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge. Suicide. Case closed. His daughter, Sylvia, doesn't think so, and she hires Tex to find out more about her father's death. During the investigation, he discovers the deaths of several prominent members of the scientific community.
Seems as though Dr. Linsky was doing research for the electronic surveillance company, the Gideon Corporation. Also, Dr. Linsky had a million dollar life insurance policy, with Sylvia being the beneficiary.
She can't touch once cent as long as her father's death is considered a suicide, however. Did she murder her own father to get the money, or is it the Gideon Corporation behind his death?
Along the way, Tex discovers various ties to the Nexus computer network, and to a highly secretive project named Overlord. Could this Overlord project have been what Carl Linsky was working on? If so, did it have anything to do with his death?
Martian Memorandum (1991)
"My daughter is missing. She may have been abducted. Something else was stolen from me, but no one must know that it's gone."
The immediate sequal to Mean Streets.
Synopsis:
Marshall Alexander, famed industralist and founder of the TerraForm Corporation, has lost something important. His daughter, Alexis. She's been kidnapped and it's up to Tex to find her, along with something else that Alexander has lost. Something nobody must know is missing. The search eventually leads to Mars, where TerraForm is, not surprisingly, terra-forming the planet.
Taking him to such locations as a Martian Aerobics Academy and Big Dick Castro's Martian Casino, Tex's search leads him through the seamy underbelly of the life here on Earth and on Mars.
During the case, Tex discovers more and more about a mysterious, ancient Martian artifact, known as the Oracle Stone. As it turns out, The Oracle Stone is the "something else" that was stolen from Marshall Alexander. The stone is said to possess its owner with unimaginable powers, and there are more than a few people who would go to any lengths to have the Oracle Stone as their own. Now Tex must stop deranged scientist Thomas Dangerfield from using the Oracle Stone for his own twisted purposes...and perhaps get a date with Alexis at Weenie World at the same time.
Under a Killing Moon (1994)
"Rook Garner runs this pawn shop, he's a crusty old World War III vet with a face like a raisin and a tongue like a butcher's cleaver."
Under a Killing Moon marked the series jump into 3D environments, first person and FMVs. Also choosing dialogue to have Tex say strayed away from traditional adventures and only provided a description of what Tex would say, not word for word quotes.
Synopsis:
A simple Burglary at Rook's Pawn Shop leads to something much, much bigger when one Countess Renier hires Tex to find a crystal statuette of a dove that was stolen from her bungalow. This "Countess" is not what she seems, however. And the statuette was stolen, yes, but not for anything as small as profit or luxury. This crystal bird could spell the end of the world.
When Tex's former mentor, The Colonel, is stabbed through the chest, Tex must pick up where the Colonel left off, keeping the statuette away from the Brotherhood of Purity, and putting a stop to their ancient and deadly prophecies by infiltrating their massive orbiting space station, the Moon Child. Tex will need every ounce of skill he can muster, and tons of luck, to pull through this case. Too bad he lost his gun.
The Pandora Directive (1996)
"The Government has covered up the greatest secret of the 20th century. Tex doesn't like secrets."
The follow up to Under a Killing Moon and currently the last game of the series' timeline. This game featured multiple paths and multiple endings depending on the score of the player.
Synopsis:
The Roswell UFO crash. A package. A serial killer. A government cover-up. A mysterious woman. A missing man. A terrible secret. And you need to shave. It can't get any worse.
Tex is hired by a man named Gordon Fitzpatrick to find a missing person, Dr. Thomas Malloy. The search takes on a more serious tone when Tex discovers that Dr. Malloy was involved in the military's dealings with a U.F.O. that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Soon everyone is looking for Dr. Malloy, including the N.S.A. and Malloy's daughter, Regan Madsen. Tex must discover what's hidden in the six puzzle boxes Malloy sent out, and get to them before the others. The secret they contain could be too much for the world to handle.
Overseer (1998)
"The reign of the Overseer has begun..."
The last installment of the series, however Overseer is actually a remake of Mean Streets.
Synopsis:
(After The Pandora Directive) Tex and Chelsee meet for a date, to celebrate their one-year "friendship anniversary." When Tex tries to put the moves on Chelsee, however, she stops him dead in his tracks, saying that they need to discuss his ex-wife, Sylvia, and the fact that Tex still wears his wedding ring. Tex reluctantly agrees to tell Chelsee the story of how he and Sylvia met. The story of his first big case.
Six years earlier, Tex has just been kicked out of The Colonel's detective agency, and has gone into business for himself, with no success. Until Sylvia shows up, that is. Her father, Dr. Carl Linsky, has recently jumped to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge. The police ruled it a suicide, but Sylvia doesn't buy it, and she hires Tex to find out the truth.
Tex describes his home sweet home.wav
Tex Murphy
"All I've ever needed was a soft felt fedora, a well tailored overcoat and a comfy pair of sneakers. Some people know what they like and they stay with it."
"Ah Sylvia, my ex-wife. Whenever I think things can't get any worse I think about her and how she totally screwed up my life. She's a woman who loves a man, any man, any time. I'll never forget the day I came home early and caught her with the upholstery man."
A hard-boiled PI with sharp sarcastic wit and a knack for getting bludgeoned in the head. He has no genetic defects from radiation, which makes him a "Norm" among a large population of mutants.
Trivia: Tex Murphy was performed by Chris Jones, the designer of the games.
When: Post Apocalyptic 21st Century, after WWIII
Where: Under the red, radiated sky on the mean streets of San Francisco
Mean Streets (1989)
"They're in my head! They're in my head!"
Self-proclaimed first interactive movie, this game chronicled the first adventure with Tex Murphy. Mean Streets is a part side-scroller, part flight simulator, part traditional adventure game. Mean Streets is also notable to be the first PC game to use full voice acting as dialogue.
Synopsis:
Dr. Carl Linsky has jumped to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge. Suicide. Case closed. His daughter, Sylvia, doesn't think so, and she hires Tex to find out more about her father's death. During the investigation, he discovers the deaths of several prominent members of the scientific community.
Seems as though Dr. Linsky was doing research for the electronic surveillance company, the Gideon Corporation. Also, Dr. Linsky had a million dollar life insurance policy, with Sylvia being the beneficiary.
She can't touch once cent as long as her father's death is considered a suicide, however. Did she murder her own father to get the money, or is it the Gideon Corporation behind his death?
Along the way, Tex discovers various ties to the Nexus computer network, and to a highly secretive project named Overlord. Could this Overlord project have been what Carl Linsky was working on? If so, did it have anything to do with his death?
Martian Memorandum (1991)
"My daughter is missing. She may have been abducted. Something else was stolen from me, but no one must know that it's gone."
The immediate sequal to Mean Streets.
Synopsis:
Marshall Alexander, famed industralist and founder of the TerraForm Corporation, has lost something important. His daughter, Alexis. She's been kidnapped and it's up to Tex to find her, along with something else that Alexander has lost. Something nobody must know is missing. The search eventually leads to Mars, where TerraForm is, not surprisingly, terra-forming the planet.
Taking him to such locations as a Martian Aerobics Academy and Big Dick Castro's Martian Casino, Tex's search leads him through the seamy underbelly of the life here on Earth and on Mars.
During the case, Tex discovers more and more about a mysterious, ancient Martian artifact, known as the Oracle Stone. As it turns out, The Oracle Stone is the "something else" that was stolen from Marshall Alexander. The stone is said to possess its owner with unimaginable powers, and there are more than a few people who would go to any lengths to have the Oracle Stone as their own. Now Tex must stop deranged scientist Thomas Dangerfield from using the Oracle Stone for his own twisted purposes...and perhaps get a date with Alexis at Weenie World at the same time.
Under a Killing Moon (1994)
"Rook Garner runs this pawn shop, he's a crusty old World War III vet with a face like a raisin and a tongue like a butcher's cleaver."
Under a Killing Moon marked the series jump into 3D environments, first person and FMVs. Also choosing dialogue to have Tex say strayed away from traditional adventures and only provided a description of what Tex would say, not word for word quotes.
Synopsis:
A simple Burglary at Rook's Pawn Shop leads to something much, much bigger when one Countess Renier hires Tex to find a crystal statuette of a dove that was stolen from her bungalow. This "Countess" is not what she seems, however. And the statuette was stolen, yes, but not for anything as small as profit or luxury. This crystal bird could spell the end of the world.
When Tex's former mentor, The Colonel, is stabbed through the chest, Tex must pick up where the Colonel left off, keeping the statuette away from the Brotherhood of Purity, and putting a stop to their ancient and deadly prophecies by infiltrating their massive orbiting space station, the Moon Child. Tex will need every ounce of skill he can muster, and tons of luck, to pull through this case. Too bad he lost his gun.
The Pandora Directive (1996)
"The Government has covered up the greatest secret of the 20th century. Tex doesn't like secrets."
The follow up to Under a Killing Moon and currently the last game of the series' timeline. This game featured multiple paths and multiple endings depending on the score of the player.
Synopsis:
The Roswell UFO crash. A package. A serial killer. A government cover-up. A mysterious woman. A missing man. A terrible secret. And you need to shave. It can't get any worse.
Tex is hired by a man named Gordon Fitzpatrick to find a missing person, Dr. Thomas Malloy. The search takes on a more serious tone when Tex discovers that Dr. Malloy was involved in the military's dealings with a U.F.O. that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Soon everyone is looking for Dr. Malloy, including the N.S.A. and Malloy's daughter, Regan Madsen. Tex must discover what's hidden in the six puzzle boxes Malloy sent out, and get to them before the others. The secret they contain could be too much for the world to handle.
Overseer (1998)
"The reign of the Overseer has begun..."
The last installment of the series, however Overseer is actually a remake of Mean Streets.
Synopsis:
(After The Pandora Directive) Tex and Chelsee meet for a date, to celebrate their one-year "friendship anniversary." When Tex tries to put the moves on Chelsee, however, she stops him dead in his tracks, saying that they need to discuss his ex-wife, Sylvia, and the fact that Tex still wears his wedding ring. Tex reluctantly agrees to tell Chelsee the story of how he and Sylvia met. The story of his first big case.
Six years earlier, Tex has just been kicked out of The Colonel's detective agency, and has gone into business for himself, with no success. Until Sylvia shows up, that is. Her father, Dr. Carl Linsky, has recently jumped to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge. The police ruled it a suicide, but Sylvia doesn't buy it, and she hires Tex to find out the truth.
Tex describes his home sweet home.wav
endlosnull on
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I love the first three.
I never did play through it. I picked it up long after it came out, and I'd found the controls in the game aged terribly
Also etoychest's review looks good.
http://www.etoychest.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5632
The absurdity and humor throughout this series blended wonderfully with the hard-edged detective themes.
PSN ID : Xander51 Steam ID : Xander51
猿も木から落ちる
Also, those 3 games are the cheapest to buy. Like really cheap, I think. May have some problems getting some to play but I'm not exactly sure.
I am a Tex Murphy nut job. I just reacquired Under a Killing Moon.
I replayed Martian Memorandum recently.
The graphics are dated. The voice-acting is appalling in a way that only early 1990s PC games can be (in both sound quality and acting quality). You die a lot. And it was a bitch to get up and running.
I still enjoyed it immensely. Although nostalgia probably helped quite a bit.
Really the stories and the humor still carry them, even though they haven't aged well.
Also, since I was pretty young when I played these, I abused the shit out of the hint system. I want to go back and try them now, sans hints. But as I mentioned in the Hotel Dusk thread, I was having weird sound problems with my copy of Pandora. I'm running it on a shitty laptop, though, so I don't know what I can fix or not.
You can find it here where I got most of my information.
Go to Case Files -> Radio Theater.
Pretty interesting but it sadly is no interactive movie game.
Wow I had no idea about those radio theater episodes, this is really cool. After the series ended, I didn't expect there to be anything else done.
A new Tex Murphy would be amazingly awesome. I'd better stop myself from getting too excited.
PSN ID : Xander51 Steam ID : Xander51
I definitely remember Mean Streets being the first time I'd ever heard synthesized human voice, and I remember they used a patented technology to do it.
Nobody said anything about being the first to sample a human voice.
Xbox Live Gamertag: Suplex86
I just saw it on Wikipedia and hell if I know the authenticity of the statement. :P
Unfortunately I only ever managed to buy Pandora Directive, I believe UAKM was also released over here but I have never saw it or Overseer for that mather. I have to say that Pandora was the best experience on an adventure game for me ever, and it is close to the top considering gaming in general.
The puzzles on the game are fantastic, I remember getting stuck on some of them (I was like 12 when I first played it) then waiting for my brother who was always a little behind, to get to the same point so we could solve it together. I have fond memories of the week it took us to open one of the boxes where you have to convert some dates between two different calendar systems. It took us a few days to figure everything out but we couldn´t open it, even tough we always got to the same numbers. Than one day it hit us, we were forgetting bissextile years, stupid February 29th...
I also have to say that this game had a sequence that made me so scared I had to actually stop playing because I just couldn´t keep going. Then after seeing my brother solve that part I finally managed to rush trough it, but the tension was still really high. In case anyone is interested the sequence involves [spoiler:9aab9bebeb]having to do some quick thinking in order to get some machines working on an abandoned Area 51 in order to get rid of an alien entity that started chasing you. The atmosphere on this part, with the music and cut scenes showing the entity starting to go after you. Simply terrific.[/spoiler:9aab9bebeb]
For people who want to try the games here you can find some info in order to get the last three to run under Win XP. This was the only way to run the games on modern machines and involves some to a lot of tweaking, but as of some time ago DOSBox also does the job of running UAKM and Pandora, tough it can be slower than running on windows so you need a good rig in order to do it. After about 5 years and trying to get Pandora to run on 3 different rigs I finally discovered that DOSBox was able to do the job and I can´t tell you how great it was, I almost cried. Unfortunately I haven´t been able to play it properly yet so I only put a couple of hours in. It is very playable, and yes the graphics haven´t really aged well but it still is a fantastic game that everyone that likes adventure games should give a shot...
Check the comments under the DOSBox pages and see if there's any recommendations on getting to run sufficiently.
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/comp_list.php?showID=2460&letter=U
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/comp_list.php?showID=2061&letter=U
if you are having the problem with dos4gw, there are substitutes you can use for those files. Try this, and just renaming it to dos4gw: http://dos32a.narechk.net/index_en.html
NintendoID: Nailbunny 3DS: 3909-8796-4685
http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=3767&highlight=killing+moon
http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=13468&highlight=killing+moon
http://www.unofficialtexmurphy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=663
NintendoID: Nailbunny 3DS: 3909-8796-4685
Also I loved how in Pandora Directive you had three paths through the game, one being a really good guy, the other being good to some people and bad to others and the final being bad and acting aggressively with everyone on your way. While the paths were generally the same they could change the outcome of some situations a lot. And then you had 7 different endings, 4 bad ones, 2 good ones and 1 that was the really good. It added a lot of replayability to a genre that is usually a case of play once and leave to replay a few years later...
-Terry Pratchett
I haven't read the whole thread, but I tracked down a very good quality of the rare novelization of The Pandora Directive, which was very well written. I should read it again. Paid like 30 bucks for it. Well worth it. Came out at the same time as the Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller novelization, another excellent read.
Also, Tex's Lament is a fucking awesome song, and Richie Havens is an awesome folk guy.
Alsoer, I still haven't beaten Overseer. I got stuck on the brick puzzle and refused to use hints. I was playing on the Hard difficulty.
Last, is it possible to get the Overseer DVD working? It only worked with a select few DVD drives and I never got it working here.
- Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within was excellent, despite Dean Erickson, who did a good job. I mean, it's not like Tim Curry could have actually been in an FMV version of the game...Gabe is supposed to be young, and in 1996, Tim Curry was roughly 190 years old.
- Phantasmagoria was a very fucked up and good game.
- Phantasmagoria II was even more fucked up, but in a much more bizarre way, and also very good. Also, it had a shadowy sex scene with Monique Parent, a really hot porn actress.
- Wing Commander III was decent.
I enjoyed most of the FMV games that came out during that very brief period of time. Too bad they tanked Access financially.