Jack Orlando

I think this is Topware's first real adventure game. In spite of being just a first try, it has some pretty originial ideas (not necessarily good ones, but originals) and the game design is exceptionally good. In addition to that, it has probably the best ingame music I've heard in a while.

Story

Jack Orlando was once the best P.I. in town. Solving all the crimes the police couldn't solve and saving innocent lives. But as we know, times change. Unfortunately so did Jack. Nowadays he usually hits the bottle instead of bad guys. One night, after finishing a bottle of whisky, he stumbles on to a murder scene. He takes a blow to the head and wakes up in the morning to the sound of police sirens. Since he doesn't know what happened and there's no clue of the real killer, the police consider him the only suspect. Fortunately, Jack still has a couple of friends on the force, so he gets 48 hours to try to solve the case on his own and clear his name.

Opinion

As I said in the intro, this game has some ideas I haven't really seen in any other game before. First of all, the streets are full of junk (that in itself wouldn't be too exciting), but you can pick up almost every piece of trash you find out there. That gives the game an added feeling of reality (but it also means that out of 10 objects you pick up, you're only going to use 1).

The same goes for the scenes. There are some places (which, by the way, look great) where you really don't need to go at all. There are people you can talk to, but they don't have any effect on the story what-so-ever. So basically there are lots of things and places in the game which are in there just "for fun". I'm not saying this is necessarily a good idea, but it certainly is original. Well, no complaints this time, the graphics are gorgeous so the more the better.

The music is absolutely beautiful, my only problem with it was, that the songs are digitized in pretty low quality (there's a lot of noise), but I guess they had to pack everything into one CD so something had to be sacrificed. I think I've said all you need to know about the story, typical detective novel material. This is probably the only part of the game that slightly lacks a bit of originality.

Well worth the money.