The Last Express

DouglasDanger

Thanks to Zsetrek in the Writer's Block, I now really want to play The Last Express. It sounds really great, and is even supposed to work on Windows XP:

A video game created by Jordan Mechner and Smoking Car Productions, published in 1997. It is an adventure game that takes place on the Orient Express, days before the start of World War I. It is noted as being one of the few video games that attempts to realistically simulate real-time, and also as one of the largest commercial failures in the history of video games (with a reported six million dollars in development costs) despite many rave reviews and an impressive pre-release response.

The Microsoft Windows version of the game runs well on PCs running Windows 95 or later, including Windows XP and Windows Vista.

I can't find any system requirements on anything, and the wiki is lacking a citation. I did find a review of it from a year or two ago, so I am guess it actually does work with Windows XP. Have any of you guys played it? I made this thread mostly to make sure it actually works with XP, but also to promote this really awesome sounding game.

Shooter Mcgavin

Last I heard, they put it on Gametap. But I don't have Gametap, so I don't know for sure. It got rave reviews back when it came out, but it had little-to-no marketing, so it sold like crap.

Yep, it's on Gametap. Just checked.

DouglasDanger

Smoking Car literally had the rug pulled right out from under them:

However, the game only remained in stores for a few months. Brøderbund's marketing department quit just weeks before the game was released, resulting in virtually no advertising for it. Softbank pulled out of the game market, dissolving its subsidiary GameBank and canceling several dozen titles in development, including the nearly finished PlayStation port of The Last Express. As a final blow, Brøderbund was acquired by The Learning Company, which was only interested in their educational and home productivity software. The Last Express was out of print long before its first Christmas season and nearly a million units shy of breaking even.

Shooter Mcgavin

In an interview with Jordan Mechner, he says

Jordan Mechner wrote:

The film shoot was actually only three weeks long. Which is not very much, when you consider that an ordinary feature film shoot takes at least four weeks, shooting an average of three screenplay pages a day. We had a few tricks that allowed us to move that fast: the fact that it was all blue-screen, the fact that we were shooting silent and had recorded the sound previously, and the fact that we were under-cranking, shooting seven and a half frames per second in some scenes, five frames per second in others. With the goal being to select key-frames and then reanimate them, as you see in the finished game. All that let us shoot a lot of material."

By the way, this is the guy who designed Karateka and the Prince of Persia games (2D and 3D).

Last Express was somewhat of a departure for him. But in his words, it wasn't really a departure. He was still trying to tackle the same problem of how to tell a story and create a sense of drama and involvement for the player.

Orogogus

For what it's worth, I got it to work in XP a few years ago, but XP is pretty finicky; some people have to mess around with compatibility mode to get a particular game to work, while for others they're fine as is.

I don't think that the game sold like crap because it didn't have enough marketing. 1997, when it came out, was too early for "marketing" to mean anything other than some ads, previews and reviews (which were, as noted, rave) in game magazines, which it had. I knew about as much about The Last Express before I bought it as I did about, say, Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. I don't really know what else they could have done, other than to call it Orient Train Quest or something. Didn't it get reviewed in Newsweek?

As far as the game itself goes, I'd say it was pretty good. I seem to remember that the real-time nature was kind of off-putting, as it sometimes wouldn't give you enough clues to know where and when you were supposed to be at a given place, so you'd have to follow people around basically for the hell of it, rewind and try again.

Also, I vaguely remember the ending being really good, but the rest of the game not being nearly up to the same level; I think I came away thinking the game could have used more historical references.

Shooter Mcgavin

Orogogus wrote: »

For what it's worth, I got it to work in XP a few years ago, but XP is pretty finicky; some people have to mess around with compatibility mode to get a particular game to work, while for others they're fine as is.

I don't think that the game sold like crap because it didn't have enough marketing. 1997, when it came out, was too early for "marketing" to mean anything other than some ads, previews and reviews (which were, as noted, rave) in game magazines, which it had. I knew about as much about The Last Express before I bought it as I did about, say, Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. I don't really know what else they could have done, other than to call it Orient Train Quest or something. Didn't it get reviewed in Newsweek?

As far as the game itself goes, I'd say it was pretty good. I seem to remember that the real-time nature was kind of off-putting, as it sometimes wouldn't give you enough clues to know where and when you were supposed to be at a given place, so you'd have to follow people around basically for the hell of it, rewind and try again.

Also, I vaguely remember the ending being really good, but the rest of the game not being nearly up to the same level; I think I came away thinking the game could have used more historical references.

Another quote from Jordan Mechner (I have a book with one of his interviews, if you're wondering )

Jordan Mechner wrote:

I have to say that I was caught by surprise when I woke up to find the adventure game market was dead, because I'd never really thought that much in terms of genres. Even doing Last Express, the fact that Prince of Persia was an action game while Last Express was an adventure game, I just wasn't thinking about it that way, right or wrong. As a game player, I'm not a big adventure game player myself, for a lot of reasons...I think I underestimated the degree to which the games market had been stratified by the different genres. You had people out there who saw themselves as action game players, as strategy game players, as role-playing game players, or as adventure game players. I never shopped for games that way, but I guess over a period of a few years there in the early '90's, even computer game publications started to stratify games according to genre. So did publishers, so did shops, and I guess I didn't see that coming

So would this be considered the point of the adventure game genre officially dying?

DarkPrimus

Shooter Mcgavin wrote: »

So would this be considered the point of the adventure game genre officially dying?

It certainly isn't as prevalent as it used to be, but that's partly due to PC games not being as prevalent as they used to be. The PC still gets a fair number of adventure games, and the Nintendo DS has one out practically every few months.

Orogogus

DarkPrimus wrote: »

Shooter Mcgavin wrote: »

So would this be considered the point of the adventure game genre officially dying?

It certainly isn't as prevalent as it used to be, but that's partly due to PC games not being as prevalent as they used to be. The PC still gets a fair number of adventure games, and the Nintendo DS has one out practically every few months.

I think when people talk about adventure games dying, they generally mean Sierra not making any more "Quest" games and LucasArts not making any more SCUMM games (Curse of Monkey Island). It's the same way space action sims died with the Wing Commander, TIE Fighter and Freespace series.

Once the two big names are factored out, I don't think the genre has really had a slump or heyday since text adventures went out of style.

PatboyX

DouglasDanger wrote: »

Smoking Car literally had the rug pulled right out from under them:

However, the game only remained in stores for a few months. Brøderbund's marketing department quit just weeks before the game was released, resulting in virtually no advertising for it. Softbank pulled out of the game market, dissolving its subsidiary GameBank and canceling several dozen titles in development, including the nearly finished PlayStation port of The Last Express. As a final blow, Brøderbund was acquired by The Learning Company, which was only interested in their educational and home productivity software. The Last Express was out of print long before its first Christmas season and nearly a million units shy of breaking even.

I literally see nothing in there about rugs.


I've heard great things about this game. Is it true that it is on Gametap? I may go that direction.

Thello

I played this way back when it came out, so my memory's fuzzy. It's decent, but the whole game is based on timed events and it's easy to miss them. Fortunately, the game let you rewind time whenever you wanted to.