Martian Memorandum

The second episode of the Tex Murphy saga is the first and also the last classic 2D adventure game of the series. Mean Streets was by no means traditional, and Under a Killing Moon took the series into a totally new 3D virtual world, so don't get too used to this interface.

Story

Things haven't changed much for Tex since we last saw him in Mean Streets, and whatever little change has happened, it's happened for the worse. His eternal fight with alcohol and the radiation still doesn't convince too many people about his abilities. Nobody's more surprised than Tex, when one day a billionaire by the name of Marshall Alexander hires him to find his - so he claims - kidnapped daughter, Alexis. Apparently an important artifact has vanished along with Alexis, so the case is really urgent. How could Tex refuse a billionaire? He just can't. Of course, as usual, a lot more is at stake than just one person's life, but that's for Tex to find out.

Opinion

Unfortunately, due to a pretty persistent lock-up, this time I couldn't tell you more about the story, even if I wanted to. I'm sure I completed more than half of the game, but I couldn't finish it, so the final picture is far from complete. I could tell you about the graphics and the music, but there's not much to tell. Both are pretty average. Not bad at all, but I've seen better. The controls are totally Lucas-style; 8 icons for 8 actions. A new and interesting feature is the ingame hint system. The Help button brings up the names and gives information about all of the objects on the current screen that you can interact with. It doesn't always give complete instructions on how to solve a puzzle, but it sure is a lot of help when you're looking for one specific object (a task so very aptly called pixel hunting).

It's part of the series, so why miss it?